Reading Oryx and Crake in the time of debt ceiling brinksmanship

I'm not quite sure when my long-held optimism about the human race took shape, but my read of history for some time has been that human life is steadily improving, that our progress, notwithstanding major setbacks, has been moral as well as material, and that we are adaptive enough to continue to increase wealth, freedom and peace. There's always been the caveat that global warming or some as-yet-unimagined disaster could undo all -- or that we would bioengineer or own evolution or replacement. But I've felt reasonably confident that the progress of the last few hundred years -- long lives, better health, less subjection to violence, more scope for more people to exercise their faculties -- would continue.

Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy, which I've read in the last couple of weeks, has dinged this optimism.  It's a double dystopia, with two narrative presents:  an anarchic world of balkanized corporate dominance and environmental degradation prior to the near-extinction of humanity by an engineered superbug, and a remnant community's life in the ruins - and interaction with a community of genetically engineered human mutants designed to be more pacific-- after the "waterless flood."

Political climate change

Damn, Henry Farrell beat me to it.  Some time today, I was going to expand on a note I posted on the Facebook page of a friend intent on denying any link between overheated political rhetoric and the Tucson shooting:

While Loughner seems to be a psychotic of no recognizable political persuasion, too crazy to have a coherent political grievance against Giffords, inflammatory rhetoric that demonizes the opposition , which has become endemic on the right, probably does increase the likelihood of political violence. Threats against politicians generally are up, and threats against Obama are off the charts. The relationship between the political climate and a given act of violence reminds me a little of the relationship between global warming and a given hurricane: you can't say that the warming caused the particular hurricane or made it worse, but you can infer that due to the warmer climate there will be more violent storms. For evidence of the effect of violent rhetoric, see http://bit.ly/hgCFSi.

That link is to a John Sides post at The Monkey Cage: