Hope is Bullshit. Ian Welsh. Nov. 18, 2019.
I am unintersted in “hope.”
Or as we called it in the Obama bullshit years, Hopium.
Hope is not a plan. Hope is bullshit.
Luck is real, but you don’t count on luck other than in the sense that the harder you work, and the more things you do, the more likely you are to “get lucky.” But luck is usually the odds coming in, and bad luck is as real as good.
In term of climate change there is no reason for hope. It’s going to be bad and in almost all cases, signature events are happening sooner than expected: we’re losing Greenland, Arctic and Antarctic ice sooner than expected. We’re getting artic methane releases 70 years ahead of schedule. Every time an even comes in, it’s sooner or worse than the models predicted.
Because of how systems work when they leave bounds: because they tend to accelerate, we can expect this sort of thing to continue. It’s going to be worse, sooner.
That’s the “luck” we’ve made. We’ve put half the greenhouse gases in human history into the atmosphere in the past 30 years, which is to say, after the time when we knew for a fact we were cutting our own throats.
Obama ran on hope in another sense, and created an economy which did nothing (and worse than nothing) for African Americans and which was shit for somewhere between 80% to 95% of the population. His signature health care plan was garbage and in his period the price of various drugs rose to historical heights. He tripled the rate of drone murders over Bush (Trump has ramped them up even further) and so on.
He was human garbage, a man who bailed out bankers and then helped them steal people’s houses with fraudulent paperwork, then had his attorney-general immunize them with fines worth less than what they stole.
But this man is worshiped by many Democrats, because hey, he was only human garbage, and Trump is a shambling mound of garbage (but has yet, note, to start any new wars, though he’s been happy to keep Obama and Bush’s wars going.)
Oh, and because he was black, and that mattered more, to many people, than the fact he was human garbage.
Obama’s done very well since he left office, making lots of speeches and millions of dollars. Bankers have been very grateful, and shown their gratitude, just as they did for Bill Clinton, another mound of garbage, who cut Welfare to hurt the weakest in America, killed Iraqis with his sanctions that hit medicine, and instituted justice “reforms” which swelled America’s prison population while ending financial regulations intended to avoid financial collapses.
None of these people ever intended to do the right thing, and if you listened carefully you knew that. The best you could hope is that they were the lesser evil: a smaller mound of garbage than their opponents.
In the Democratic primaries, there was always a better option and that option was never chosen, because most Democrats are bad people who want Reaganism with a side of “but we don’t really mean it.”
Nothing is going to get better until we, whichever we we belong to, start choosing better leaders, whether Presidential, or more local. Those leaders must want to actually do “good”. Yes, good. You know, taking care of the hungry and the sick, and not burying single payer and the public option like Obama did (yes, yes he did, and he wound up passing the OCA without Republicans. He made a choice, his choice was evil.)
Or perhaps taking care of poor people, including blacks. Or not allowing pirates in suits to gouge people on drug prices, or perhaps *gasp* not vastly expanding fracking, which is what Obama did and bragged about, even as he signed the Paris accords, knowing he had no intention of honoring them.
Nor did virtually anyone else who signed them, of course, and anyone who thought otherwise is a fool, or on the payroll.
Mounds of garbage. Merkel, Blair, Cameron, Trudeau, Harper, your country’s leader, odds are. People who have always wanted to do as much evil as they could, and as little good as they could get away with. (Remember nothing happened to Greece Angela Merkel was not OK with. All so German banks could be bailed out indirectly. It would have been embarassing to just bail them out obviously. So a lot of Greeks had to die and suffer.)
There is no “hope” as long as our leaders are people like this. None.
Don’t get hooked on hopium.
Elect leaders who want to do as much good as they can, and as little evil as possible. Sanders in the US, Corbyn in Britain.
But we don’t want those leaders, not as a whole, do we?
We’ve been offered them, we have a chance to elect them.
But will we?
Because they have plans, and those plans are to do good.
That’s the only hope you’ve got.
I am unintersted in “hope.”
Or as we called it in the Obama bullshit years, Hopium.
Hope is not a plan. Hope is bullshit.
Luck is real, but you don’t count on luck other than in the sense that the harder you work, and the more things you do, the more likely you are to “get lucky.” But luck is usually the odds coming in, and bad luck is as real as good.
In term of climate change there is no reason for hope. It’s going to be bad and in almost all cases, signature events are happening sooner than expected: we’re losing Greenland, Arctic and Antarctic ice sooner than expected. We’re getting artic methane releases 70 years ahead of schedule. Every time an even comes in, it’s sooner or worse than the models predicted.
Because of how systems work when they leave bounds: because they tend to accelerate, we can expect this sort of thing to continue. It’s going to be worse, sooner.
That’s the “luck” we’ve made. We’ve put half the greenhouse gases in human history into the atmosphere in the past 30 years, which is to say, after the time when we knew for a fact we were cutting our own throats.
Obama ran on hope in another sense, and created an economy which did nothing (and worse than nothing) for African Americans and which was shit for somewhere between 80% to 95% of the population. His signature health care plan was garbage and in his period the price of various drugs rose to historical heights. He tripled the rate of drone murders over Bush (Trump has ramped them up even further) and so on.
He was human garbage, a man who bailed out bankers and then helped them steal people’s houses with fraudulent paperwork, then had his attorney-general immunize them with fines worth less than what they stole.
But this man is worshiped by many Democrats, because hey, he was only human garbage, and Trump is a shambling mound of garbage (but has yet, note, to start any new wars, though he’s been happy to keep Obama and Bush’s wars going.)
Oh, and because he was black, and that mattered more, to many people, than the fact he was human garbage.
Obama’s done very well since he left office, making lots of speeches and millions of dollars. Bankers have been very grateful, and shown their gratitude, just as they did for Bill Clinton, another mound of garbage, who cut Welfare to hurt the weakest in America, killed Iraqis with his sanctions that hit medicine, and instituted justice “reforms” which swelled America’s prison population while ending financial regulations intended to avoid financial collapses.
None of these people ever intended to do the right thing, and if you listened carefully you knew that. The best you could hope is that they were the lesser evil: a smaller mound of garbage than their opponents.
In the Democratic primaries, there was always a better option and that option was never chosen, because most Democrats are bad people who want Reaganism with a side of “but we don’t really mean it.”
Nothing is going to get better until we, whichever we we belong to, start choosing better leaders, whether Presidential, or more local. Those leaders must want to actually do “good”. Yes, good. You know, taking care of the hungry and the sick, and not burying single payer and the public option like Obama did (yes, yes he did, and he wound up passing the OCA without Republicans. He made a choice, his choice was evil.)
Or perhaps taking care of poor people, including blacks. Or not allowing pirates in suits to gouge people on drug prices, or perhaps *gasp* not vastly expanding fracking, which is what Obama did and bragged about, even as he signed the Paris accords, knowing he had no intention of honoring them.
Nor did virtually anyone else who signed them, of course, and anyone who thought otherwise is a fool, or on the payroll.
Mounds of garbage. Merkel, Blair, Cameron, Trudeau, Harper, your country’s leader, odds are. People who have always wanted to do as much evil as they could, and as little good as they could get away with. (Remember nothing happened to Greece Angela Merkel was not OK with. All so German banks could be bailed out indirectly. It would have been embarassing to just bail them out obviously. So a lot of Greeks had to die and suffer.)
There is no “hope” as long as our leaders are people like this. None.
Don’t get hooked on hopium.
Elect leaders who want to do as much good as they can, and as little evil as possible. Sanders in the US, Corbyn in Britain.
But we don’t want those leaders, not as a whole, do we?
We’ve been offered them, we have a chance to elect them.
But will we?
Because they have plans, and those plans are to do good.
That’s the only hope you’ve got.
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