All Fall Down
If you care, this is the text of the latest in the Stay the Course speeches. This one is just another excuse to stick the next president with all of the Shrubbery’s problems.
Lately they have been dusting off the “domino theory,” which I have always considered absurd, basically because I have played dominoes. The Wikipedia entry has enough information to learn the basics, but the best way to learn is to go to a park on a nice day in a city that has a Caribbean population of any kind, because everybody in the Caribbean plays dominoes.
The first thing you will learn is that the tiles [bones, stones – depending on where the players are from] are very stable. Some games get loud and physical, but the tiles don’t “fall” because they are laying down on their faces or backs, not on their edges.
The Domino Day competition in the Netherlands has nothing to do with the game, it is an artificial construct. Falling dominoes isn’t normal, you have to rig them to fall.
Technical people tend to call the domino theory a cascading failure, like when power companies don’t do any maintenance and a small problem knocks out multiple states with no weather features to blame.
It can happen in the political sphere, if someone sets up a series of illegitimate governments in a region. Many people would say a government that only stays in power because of the presence of foreign troops is illegitimate, a domino on the edge. You saw a lot of cascading failures after World War II when European nations figured out they couldn’t afford empires any more and their surrogates were removed from power after the armies left.
7 comments
we’ve been snookered?
[yeah, i know, it’s not really snooker either]
Actually “snookered” is exactly what the Shrubbery is doing – positioning himself behind the troops and generals so the Dems can’t go after the policy directly.
Impressive, Hipparchia.
whig, i went looking for actual snooker videos after linking to this one. there were some nifty snooker tricks too, but that was still the best one i found.
bryan, i first read your comment as “posturing from behind the troops” but whichever, you’re right, that’s what he’s been doing. and we’ve been snookered from the moment he first started campaigning for president.
I was dealing with the base meaning of the term, which is to leave the cue ball in a position where your opponent has no direct shot in the next ball.
and i took it that way. the other was just in case you were going to be as much of a cue sports purist as you were about the dminos. not that i’d complain in either case.
In the US snooker is a friendlier game [when compared to 8-ball or 9-ball] than dominos in a Puerto Rican neighborhood. I’ve only played snooker in England, but I assume there are snooker clubs that I can’t afford in this country.