[ExI] Pew survey

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Keith Henson
Subject: [ExI] Pew survey

>...Pew survey finds sharp erosion of center as partisan animosity has ‘gotten more personal’

...

>..."Viewed broadly, the results of the Pew survey suggest that the two political parties are increasingly becoming two entirely different nations — ...


Well, perhaps three.  The TEA party is alive and well.
...

>...But what this shows is consistent with a population under stress...

Ja, but the US population isn't under all that much stress.  We are still well-fed, we still have our silly game shows, all the usual stuff.  

Regarding the current deep divide in the USA, I have some reasonable forecasts, mostly optimistic.  It will blow over, after the symbolic revolution this fall in the form of midterm elections.  The party currently out of power will pick up a pile of seats, but I don't think things will change all that much, even if the senate changes hands.

>...It's nothing as bad as the stress that tore Syria into waring camps, but it's the typical memetic response to a society getting ready to engage in fratricide...

I hold a more optimistic view Keith.  

All the sideshows will settle out, and it will come down to this burning IRS scandal.  Hours ago, the IRS announced that its director's computer crashed, and so (oh darn) they "lost" about two years of her emails and the dog ate her homework.  There is no way to recover those emails, you understand, even though tape backups of every server are stored all over the place, but that crashed computer lost critical emails after the IRS claims to have spent 10 million dollars trying to recover this director's email.

That the mighty IRS would even attempt such a flimsy excuse is plenty of indication to me of guilt, plenty.  They are hiding something really big here, and are resorting to utterly desperate measures to cover their asses.  But there are enough Americans with enough access to information technology to know that a crashed computer doesn't cause email to be lost.  We know that the NSA can recover all of it, and that even this measure is unnecessary: the IRS has all of it somewhere, and is desperately struggling to cover it.  But they cannot.  It will all come out this summer and fall, then we have our little symbolic revenge, but the other party has already demonstrated they do the same kinds of stuff.  Then, on we go, right up until the real trouble starts: not enough cheap energy.

spike