To Be An Authentic Person Is To Stare Deeply Into The Face Of Uncomfortable Truths. Caitlin Johnstone. Sep 22, 2024.
To be an authentic person is to stare deeply into the face of uncomfortable truths.
It’s to experience all the footage of shredded bodies in Gaza with a visceral understanding that these are real things happening to real people whose lives mattered just as much as your own.
To come to terms with the reality that the power structure you were raised to trust and the political party you were raised to side with are responsible for some of the worst things that have ever happened in our world, and that their depravity must be fought tooth and claw.
To stare unblinking into the very real possibility that the madness of our rulers could cause total human extinction by nuclear war or environmental destruction within your own lifetime.
To admit that your previous understanding of an issue was a misguided perception caused by propaganda, and to be fully open to the possibility that this is also true of your current understanding of other issues as well.
To deeply recognize the ways your own delusion and dysfunction have played a role in the delusion and dysfunction of humanity as a whole, and to cease viewing yourself as separate or separable from the self-destructive patterning of our species.
To be honest with yourself about the circumstances of your birth and the ways in which you have it better than other people in different circumstances and in other parts of the world — often at the expense of those very populations.
To be honest with yourself about the ways in which your actions harm others, and take any steps necessary to rectify this wherever you can.
To be honest with yourself about the ways in which you have been harmed — your traumas and wounded self-beliefs and your maladaptive coping mechanisms ensuing therefrom — and do the work necessary to heal them.
To be honest with yourself about how little you really know about this boundless mystery called life, and to be humble in your position as a clueless member of a young species in a universe that none of us understand.
To explore with sincere curiosity the possibility that all our assumptions about the reality we are experiencing have been wrong this whole time, right down to our beliefs about things as fundamental as thought, perception, and the existence of a self or a separate outer world.
To be an authentic person is to constantly plunge headlong into the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar, the unknown and the unpredictable, even when doing so feels like a kind of death, for no other reason than because that’s where the truth is.
It’s to always welcome the truth with open arms, even when it is unpleasant, embarrassing, inconvenient or downright terrifying, come what may.
Sunday, September 29, 2024
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
Western "Democracy"
The Bizarre State of Western Democracy. Prabhat Patnaik, People's Democracy. Sept 8, 2024.
DURING the entire post-war period when it has been in existence in the metropolitan countries, democracy has never been in as bizarre a state as it is today. Democracy is supposed to mean the pursuit of policies that are in conformity with the wishes of the electorate. True, it is not that the governments first ascertain popular wishes, and then decide on policy; the conformity between the two is typically ensured under bourgeois rule by the government deciding on policies in accordance with ruling class interests, and then having a propaganda machinery that persuades the people about the wisdom of these policies. The conformity between public opinion and what the ruling class wants is thus achieved in a complex manner whose essence lies in the manipulation of public opinion.
What is currently happening however is altogether different: public opinion, notwithstanding all the propaganda directed at it, wants policies that are altogether different from those being systematically pursued by the ruling class. The policies favoured by the ruling class in other words are being pursued despite public opinion being palpably and systematically opposed to them. This is made possible by having most political parties line up behind these policies; that is, by getting a very large spectrum of political formations or parties backing these policies against the wishes of the majority of the electorate. The current situation is thus characterised by two distinct features: first, a broad unanimity among the bulk of political formations (parties); and second, a total lack of congruence between what these parties agree on and what the people want. Such a situation is quite unprecedented in the history of bourgeois democracy. These policies moreover relate not to minor questions concerning this or that matter, but to fundamental issues of war and peace.
Take the United States. The majority of people in that country according to all available opinion polls are appalled by Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people; they would like the US to bring the war to an end and not keep supplying arms to Israel for prolonging it. But the US government is doing precisely the opposite, even at the risk of escalating the war into one that engulfs the entire middle east. Likewise, public opinion in the US does not want a continuation of the Ukraine war. It favours an end to that conflict through a negotiated peace; but the US government (together with that of the UK) has systematically torpedoed all possibilities of peaceful settlement. Its opposition to the Minsk agreements, an opposition conveyed to Ukraine through British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s trip to Kiev, is what started the war in the first place; and even now when Putin had made certain proposals for establishing peace, it egged Ukraine on to launch its Kursk offensive which ended all hopes of peace.
What is significant is that both the Republicans and the Democrats in the US are agreed on this policy of providing arms to Netanyahu and Zelensky, despite public opinion wanting peace and despite the fact that any adventurism by Ukraine runs the risk of unleashing a nuclear conflagration.
This contrast between what the people want, despite all the propaganda they have been subjected to, and what the pollical establishment ordains, afflicts all metropolitan countries; but nowhere is it as stark as in Germany. The Ukraine war directly impinges on Germany in a manner it does not on any other metropolitan country, since Germany was entirely dependent on Russian gas for its energy needs. The sanctions on Russia have caused a shortage of gas; and the import of more expensive substitutes from the US has pushed up gas prices to levels that strongly impinge on the living standards of German workers. An end to the Ukraine war is urgently demanded by German workers; but neither the ruling coalition consisting of the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats and the Greens, nor the main opposition consisting of the Christian Democrats and the Christian Socialists, is showing any interest in a peaceful resolution of the conflict. On the contrary the German political establishment is trying to whip up fears of Russian troops appearing on German borders, even though, ironically, it is German troops that are stationed at present in Lithuania on the borders of Russia!
In their desperation for an end to the Ukraine war the German working people are turning to the neo-fascist AfD which professes to be against the war (though one knows it will inevitably betray this promise once it comes anywhere near power) and the new Left party of Sahra Wagenknecht that broke away from the parent Left Party, Die Linke, on this very issue of war.
Exactly the same is true of German attitudes towards the genocide in Gaza. While the bulk of the German population opposes this genocide, the German government has actually criminalised all opposition to the Israeli genocide on the grounds that it constitutes “anti-semitism”. It even broke up a convention that was being organised to protest against the genocide, to which internationally-known speakers like Yanis Varoufakis had been invited. The use of the “anti-semitism” stick to beat all opposition to Israel’s aggression is pervasive in other metropolitan countries too. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party, was hounded out of that party, ostensibly on grounds of his so-called “anti-semitism” but actually because of his support for the Palestinian cause; and US campus authorities have invoked this charge against the widespread campus protests that have rocked that country.
Such riding roughshod over public opinion is typically sought to be achieved by keeping these burning issues of peace and war off political discussion altogether. In the coming US presidential elections, for instance, since both the contenders, Donald Trump and Kamla Harris, are agreed on supplying arms to Israel, this issue itself will not figure in any presidential debate or in the presidential campaign. While other topics where they differ will hold centre-stage, the crucial one that affects people and where they hold a different opinion from the contestants, will not be an issue for debate.
One reason for the support of the political establishment for Israeli actions, which is far from being a negligible one, is the generous funding that such support gets from pro-Israel donors. According to a report published in the Delphi Initiative (August 21), half the cabinet of Keir Starmer, the newly-elected Labour prime minister of Britain, had received money from pro-Israel sources to fight the elections that brought them to power. The same number of the same journal also reports that one-third of the Conservative members of the British parliament had received money from pro-Israel sources for elections. Pro-Israel money in other words is available to both the main parties of Britain; this makes support for Israeli actions a bipartisan affair.
On the other hand what happens to those who stand with Palestine is illustrated by two cases in the US Members of the Congress, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, both black progressive representatives, who were sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and strong critics of Israeli genocide, were defeated by the intervention of AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee), a powerful pro-Israel lobby, which poured millions of dollars into the effort. The Delphi Initiative of August 31 reports that 17 million dollars had been spent for Bowman’s defeat and 9 million dollars for the Ad campaign against Cori Bush. Interestingly, the campaign against Cori Bush did not mention Israel’s aggression against Gaza, as AIPAC knew that on that particular issue the public would have supported Cori Bush rather than her opponent, and hence frustrated its plans for her defeat. What all this means is that a fundamental decision on war and peace that affects everybody is being taken in the metropolitan countries against the wishes of the people by a political establishment that is financed by lobbies with vested interests.
In the metropolis there has thus been a transition from “manipulation of dissent” through propaganda, to the total ignoring of dissent, even dissent by a majority, that has proved to be immune to propaganda. This represents a new stage in the attenuation of democracy, a stage characterised by an unprecedented moral bankruptcy of the political establishment. Such moral bankruptcy of the traditional political establishment also constitutes the context for the growth of fascism; but whether or not fascism actually comes to power, the attenuation of democracy in metropolitan societies has already disempowered people to an extent that is quite unprecedented.
DURING the entire post-war period when it has been in existence in the metropolitan countries, democracy has never been in as bizarre a state as it is today. Democracy is supposed to mean the pursuit of policies that are in conformity with the wishes of the electorate. True, it is not that the governments first ascertain popular wishes, and then decide on policy; the conformity between the two is typically ensured under bourgeois rule by the government deciding on policies in accordance with ruling class interests, and then having a propaganda machinery that persuades the people about the wisdom of these policies. The conformity between public opinion and what the ruling class wants is thus achieved in a complex manner whose essence lies in the manipulation of public opinion.
What is currently happening however is altogether different: public opinion, notwithstanding all the propaganda directed at it, wants policies that are altogether different from those being systematically pursued by the ruling class. The policies favoured by the ruling class in other words are being pursued despite public opinion being palpably and systematically opposed to them. This is made possible by having most political parties line up behind these policies; that is, by getting a very large spectrum of political formations or parties backing these policies against the wishes of the majority of the electorate. The current situation is thus characterised by two distinct features: first, a broad unanimity among the bulk of political formations (parties); and second, a total lack of congruence between what these parties agree on and what the people want. Such a situation is quite unprecedented in the history of bourgeois democracy. These policies moreover relate not to minor questions concerning this or that matter, but to fundamental issues of war and peace.
Take the United States. The majority of people in that country according to all available opinion polls are appalled by Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people; they would like the US to bring the war to an end and not keep supplying arms to Israel for prolonging it. But the US government is doing precisely the opposite, even at the risk of escalating the war into one that engulfs the entire middle east. Likewise, public opinion in the US does not want a continuation of the Ukraine war. It favours an end to that conflict through a negotiated peace; but the US government (together with that of the UK) has systematically torpedoed all possibilities of peaceful settlement. Its opposition to the Minsk agreements, an opposition conveyed to Ukraine through British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s trip to Kiev, is what started the war in the first place; and even now when Putin had made certain proposals for establishing peace, it egged Ukraine on to launch its Kursk offensive which ended all hopes of peace.
What is significant is that both the Republicans and the Democrats in the US are agreed on this policy of providing arms to Netanyahu and Zelensky, despite public opinion wanting peace and despite the fact that any adventurism by Ukraine runs the risk of unleashing a nuclear conflagration.
This contrast between what the people want, despite all the propaganda they have been subjected to, and what the pollical establishment ordains, afflicts all metropolitan countries; but nowhere is it as stark as in Germany. The Ukraine war directly impinges on Germany in a manner it does not on any other metropolitan country, since Germany was entirely dependent on Russian gas for its energy needs. The sanctions on Russia have caused a shortage of gas; and the import of more expensive substitutes from the US has pushed up gas prices to levels that strongly impinge on the living standards of German workers. An end to the Ukraine war is urgently demanded by German workers; but neither the ruling coalition consisting of the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats and the Greens, nor the main opposition consisting of the Christian Democrats and the Christian Socialists, is showing any interest in a peaceful resolution of the conflict. On the contrary the German political establishment is trying to whip up fears of Russian troops appearing on German borders, even though, ironically, it is German troops that are stationed at present in Lithuania on the borders of Russia!
In their desperation for an end to the Ukraine war the German working people are turning to the neo-fascist AfD which professes to be against the war (though one knows it will inevitably betray this promise once it comes anywhere near power) and the new Left party of Sahra Wagenknecht that broke away from the parent Left Party, Die Linke, on this very issue of war.
Exactly the same is true of German attitudes towards the genocide in Gaza. While the bulk of the German population opposes this genocide, the German government has actually criminalised all opposition to the Israeli genocide on the grounds that it constitutes “anti-semitism”. It even broke up a convention that was being organised to protest against the genocide, to which internationally-known speakers like Yanis Varoufakis had been invited. The use of the “anti-semitism” stick to beat all opposition to Israel’s aggression is pervasive in other metropolitan countries too. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party, was hounded out of that party, ostensibly on grounds of his so-called “anti-semitism” but actually because of his support for the Palestinian cause; and US campus authorities have invoked this charge against the widespread campus protests that have rocked that country.
Such riding roughshod over public opinion is typically sought to be achieved by keeping these burning issues of peace and war off political discussion altogether. In the coming US presidential elections, for instance, since both the contenders, Donald Trump and Kamla Harris, are agreed on supplying arms to Israel, this issue itself will not figure in any presidential debate or in the presidential campaign. While other topics where they differ will hold centre-stage, the crucial one that affects people and where they hold a different opinion from the contestants, will not be an issue for debate.
One reason for the support of the political establishment for Israeli actions, which is far from being a negligible one, is the generous funding that such support gets from pro-Israel donors. According to a report published in the Delphi Initiative (August 21), half the cabinet of Keir Starmer, the newly-elected Labour prime minister of Britain, had received money from pro-Israel sources to fight the elections that brought them to power. The same number of the same journal also reports that one-third of the Conservative members of the British parliament had received money from pro-Israel sources for elections. Pro-Israel money in other words is available to both the main parties of Britain; this makes support for Israeli actions a bipartisan affair.
On the other hand what happens to those who stand with Palestine is illustrated by two cases in the US Members of the Congress, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, both black progressive representatives, who were sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and strong critics of Israeli genocide, were defeated by the intervention of AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee), a powerful pro-Israel lobby, which poured millions of dollars into the effort. The Delphi Initiative of August 31 reports that 17 million dollars had been spent for Bowman’s defeat and 9 million dollars for the Ad campaign against Cori Bush. Interestingly, the campaign against Cori Bush did not mention Israel’s aggression against Gaza, as AIPAC knew that on that particular issue the public would have supported Cori Bush rather than her opponent, and hence frustrated its plans for her defeat. What all this means is that a fundamental decision on war and peace that affects everybody is being taken in the metropolitan countries against the wishes of the people by a political establishment that is financed by lobbies with vested interests.
In the metropolis there has thus been a transition from “manipulation of dissent” through propaganda, to the total ignoring of dissent, even dissent by a majority, that has proved to be immune to propaganda. This represents a new stage in the attenuation of democracy, a stage characterised by an unprecedented moral bankruptcy of the political establishment. Such moral bankruptcy of the traditional political establishment also constitutes the context for the growth of fascism; but whether or not fascism actually comes to power, the attenuation of democracy in metropolitan societies has already disempowered people to an extent that is quite unprecedented.
Sunday, September 8, 2024
Johnstone on Gaza apathy and what it portends for our collective future: extinction
"Why Should I Care About Gaza?" Caitlin Johnstone. Sept. 8, 2024.
The other day someone on Twitter asked me why he should care about what’s happening in Gaza, saying, “Why should I care about anyone that isn’t in a 20 mile radius of where I live?”
I was a bit taken aback by this. I must confess I live in a bit of an echo chamber when it comes to caring about the world; most people I interact with from day to day either agree with me or disagree with me about the abusive nature of the empire and what our problems are and what should be done about them, but the one thing they all have in common is that they care. Outside my little bubble I suspect this “why should I care?” sentiment is probably pretty common, though.
There’s a 2017 Huffington Post article by Kayla Chadwick titled “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People” which expresses frustration at this type of attitude, because it is very difficult to argue against. If you’re not already the sort of person who would naturally care about the death and suffering in Gaza, it’s going to be hard to get you to see why you should. If you’re missing the part of yourself which hurts when it sees children ripped apart by Israeli bombs, you’re going to have a hard time understanding the value of that part.
But I like a challenge. So I’ve had a bit of a think about it, and I’ve come up with the most honest and complete answer to this question that I am able to produce right now. It might not convince anyone, but it is a well-reasoned answer.
Why should you care about Gaza? Because we can’t keep living like this. Our species cannot continue living on this planet as though what happens to other people and other organisms around the world has nothing to do with us. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore.
For better or for worse, we now live on a planet with eight billion humans who are no longer separated by distance in the way we used to be. This species which spent so much of its development relating to itself in units of small tribes is now an intimately networked global community whose behavior is literally altering the face of this planet, and we need to start acting like it. We need to start doing what Einstein called “widening our circle of compassion” beyond our small tribal units of people we personally know and like, or we simply won’t be able to survive and thrive on this planet.
The inability of ordinary people to think globally is directly affecting our lives in the here and now.
The ability of plutocrats to exploit cheap labor overseas directly affects how much you and your neighbors can earn to provide for yourselves and your families. If we had true international class solidarity, they wouldn’t be able to get away with that anymore.
The ability of corporations to feed our biosphere into the capitalism machine and offload costs of production onto the ecosystem to maximize profits directly affects the kind of environment we’ll all be living in in the coming years. Corporate suits can only get away with this because the citizenry who vastly outnumber them have been manipulated into accepting their cancerous behavior.
The ability of war profiteers and empire managers to push for more war and militarism around the world directly affects how much of our nation’s wealth and resources are allocated to supporting the needs of ordinary people at home, and threatens us all with the looming possibility of nuclear armageddon. The imperial propaganda machine works so hard to manufacture consent for this madness because otherwise nobody would consent to it.
The oligarchs and government agencies who run the US-centralized empire are able to exploit our tendency to only care about our immediate surroundings to construct global mechanisms which affect everything — including our immediate surroundings. All it takes is a little narrative manipulation coupled with our own nearsightedness to keep us from seeing what they’re doing.
They destabilize entire regions in the global south with war and imperialist extraction, and when people start fleeing those horrible conditions they use propaganda to manipulate those in the global north into hating immigrants instead of focusing on what’s driving the mass exoduses.
They deliberately maintain a level of unemployment to artificially depress wages, and then propagandize the working poor into thinking the unemployed are parasitic welfare moochers.
They create a controlled opposition false dichotomy between two mainstream political factions who both serve the capitalist empire in every meaningful way, and then manipulate both sides into blaming all the problems this causes on the other side instead of on the architects of this whole disaster.
These manipulations would not work if our circles of compassion were sufficiently wide. The same moral myopia which causes us to fail to see a Palestinian child as worthy of our care and attention also causes us to fail to recognize the underlying causes of all the major problems we see all around us.
It’s true that caring about that Palestinian child, in and of itself, will yield you no personal material gain. But being the sort of person who would care about that Palestinian child will help pave the way from hell on earth to paradise. Enough humans having a wide enough circle of compassion to care about the suffering of other humans who they will never meet is all it will take for us to create a healthy world.
Our species can no longer existentially afford small circles of compassion. We can no longer afford ignorance and apathy. We’ve got to start learning about what’s happening in the world, thinking in terms of global community, and caring about our fellow beings on this planet in the way we care for our friends and neighbors.
Sure that’s not our tendency right now, but every species eventually hits a point where it needs to adapt or go the way of the dinosaur. That’s where we’re at right now. The days where “rugged individualism” could be defended as a rational worldview are long over, if it was ever rational to begin with.
This isn’t the twelfth century. We’re not going from birth to death in tiny communities unconnected to the rest of the world. Whatever device you’re reading this on has parts from multiple foreign countries, which passed through countless foreign hands to come into yours. We all touch one another’s lives around the world from distances which used to have no relevance to the human experience of this planet.
We need to begin thinking, feeling, and living in accordance with this new reality. We cannot continue along the ecocidal, omnicidal trajectory that our small circles of compassion have made possible, or else we will go extinct.
That’s why you should care about Gaza. Because humanity’s collective failure to care about such things is driving our species further and further into misery and dystopia, and closer and closer to the precipice of eternal oblivion.
The other day someone on Twitter asked me why he should care about what’s happening in Gaza, saying, “Why should I care about anyone that isn’t in a 20 mile radius of where I live?”
I was a bit taken aback by this. I must confess I live in a bit of an echo chamber when it comes to caring about the world; most people I interact with from day to day either agree with me or disagree with me about the abusive nature of the empire and what our problems are and what should be done about them, but the one thing they all have in common is that they care. Outside my little bubble I suspect this “why should I care?” sentiment is probably pretty common, though.
There’s a 2017 Huffington Post article by Kayla Chadwick titled “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People” which expresses frustration at this type of attitude, because it is very difficult to argue against. If you’re not already the sort of person who would naturally care about the death and suffering in Gaza, it’s going to be hard to get you to see why you should. If you’re missing the part of yourself which hurts when it sees children ripped apart by Israeli bombs, you’re going to have a hard time understanding the value of that part.
But I like a challenge. So I’ve had a bit of a think about it, and I’ve come up with the most honest and complete answer to this question that I am able to produce right now. It might not convince anyone, but it is a well-reasoned answer.
Why should you care about Gaza? Because we can’t keep living like this. Our species cannot continue living on this planet as though what happens to other people and other organisms around the world has nothing to do with us. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore.
For better or for worse, we now live on a planet with eight billion humans who are no longer separated by distance in the way we used to be. This species which spent so much of its development relating to itself in units of small tribes is now an intimately networked global community whose behavior is literally altering the face of this planet, and we need to start acting like it. We need to start doing what Einstein called “widening our circle of compassion” beyond our small tribal units of people we personally know and like, or we simply won’t be able to survive and thrive on this planet.
The inability of ordinary people to think globally is directly affecting our lives in the here and now.
The ability of plutocrats to exploit cheap labor overseas directly affects how much you and your neighbors can earn to provide for yourselves and your families. If we had true international class solidarity, they wouldn’t be able to get away with that anymore.
The ability of corporations to feed our biosphere into the capitalism machine and offload costs of production onto the ecosystem to maximize profits directly affects the kind of environment we’ll all be living in in the coming years. Corporate suits can only get away with this because the citizenry who vastly outnumber them have been manipulated into accepting their cancerous behavior.
The ability of war profiteers and empire managers to push for more war and militarism around the world directly affects how much of our nation’s wealth and resources are allocated to supporting the needs of ordinary people at home, and threatens us all with the looming possibility of nuclear armageddon. The imperial propaganda machine works so hard to manufacture consent for this madness because otherwise nobody would consent to it.
The oligarchs and government agencies who run the US-centralized empire are able to exploit our tendency to only care about our immediate surroundings to construct global mechanisms which affect everything — including our immediate surroundings. All it takes is a little narrative manipulation coupled with our own nearsightedness to keep us from seeing what they’re doing.
They destabilize entire regions in the global south with war and imperialist extraction, and when people start fleeing those horrible conditions they use propaganda to manipulate those in the global north into hating immigrants instead of focusing on what’s driving the mass exoduses.
They deliberately maintain a level of unemployment to artificially depress wages, and then propagandize the working poor into thinking the unemployed are parasitic welfare moochers.
They create a controlled opposition false dichotomy between two mainstream political factions who both serve the capitalist empire in every meaningful way, and then manipulate both sides into blaming all the problems this causes on the other side instead of on the architects of this whole disaster.
These manipulations would not work if our circles of compassion were sufficiently wide. The same moral myopia which causes us to fail to see a Palestinian child as worthy of our care and attention also causes us to fail to recognize the underlying causes of all the major problems we see all around us.
It’s true that caring about that Palestinian child, in and of itself, will yield you no personal material gain. But being the sort of person who would care about that Palestinian child will help pave the way from hell on earth to paradise. Enough humans having a wide enough circle of compassion to care about the suffering of other humans who they will never meet is all it will take for us to create a healthy world.
Our species can no longer existentially afford small circles of compassion. We can no longer afford ignorance and apathy. We’ve got to start learning about what’s happening in the world, thinking in terms of global community, and caring about our fellow beings on this planet in the way we care for our friends and neighbors.
Sure that’s not our tendency right now, but every species eventually hits a point where it needs to adapt or go the way of the dinosaur. That’s where we’re at right now. The days where “rugged individualism” could be defended as a rational worldview are long over, if it was ever rational to begin with.
This isn’t the twelfth century. We’re not going from birth to death in tiny communities unconnected to the rest of the world. Whatever device you’re reading this on has parts from multiple foreign countries, which passed through countless foreign hands to come into yours. We all touch one another’s lives around the world from distances which used to have no relevance to the human experience of this planet.
We need to begin thinking, feeling, and living in accordance with this new reality. We cannot continue along the ecocidal, omnicidal trajectory that our small circles of compassion have made possible, or else we will go extinct.
That’s why you should care about Gaza. Because humanity’s collective failure to care about such things is driving our species further and further into misery and dystopia, and closer and closer to the precipice of eternal oblivion.
Saturday, September 7, 2024
Radagast: The Cure for Climate Anguish
The Cure for Climate Anguish. Rintrah, by Radagast. Sept. 7, 2024.
So I’ll try not to waste too many words on this, but the Dutch Extinction Rebellion protesters are blocking the entrance to the state museum in Amsterdam.
Ted Kaczynski famously warned that protesters should not create a rift between themselves and the general public. Rather, they should seek to find adherents, by attacking the excesses of the system they oppose. For his anti-tech revolution, he recommended focusing on genetic manipulation, rather than, let’s say, the electricity grid.
So if you block the entrance to the state museum, preventing people who have very little spare time from going to the museum, you’re inevitably just marginalizing yourself. You’re also marginalizing yourself of course if you start piling other leftists causes on top of your cause, like the Palestinians.
But I don’t think these people are seriously trying to save the world. I think they want to be able to say to themselves that they were “on the right side of history” and “tried everything”. Above all else, they’re trying to treat their own existential anguish.
They kind of ran out of ideas, so now they’re settling on a kind of “fifteen degrees to Hitler” leftist social shaming strategy. The fossil fuel industry is Hitler. ING, the Dutch bank, funds Hitler, so they’re nazi’s. The nazi bank also funds the museum, so the museum are nazi sympathizers.
But this is a bit of a dead-end social strategy. At this point, my honest recommendation is to just accept that the attempt to stop global warming has failed and we’re going to die.
“It was all looking pretty bleak. But then people blocked the entrance to a museum funded by a bank that also funds the fossil fuel industry and things began to get better!”
The Africans are fucked, the elephants are fucked, the orangutans are fucked.
But let’s be honest to ourselves. The African population is projected to swell to 3.5 billion by 2100. Global warming or no global warming, they were fucked to begin with. Their fertile soils are flushing down into the ocean.
Congo had 12 million people in 1950. They had 101 million in 2020. They will have 379 million by 2100. What did you think was going to happen? “Oh no, global warming caused millions of people in Congo to die of starvation in 2050 who would have otherwise died in a Malthusian catastrophe in 2080!”
Most people don’t zoom out, they live in the here and now. If you zoom out you’ll get anxious, because you will see your own ugly old mug and your death on the horizon. But if you’re going to zoom out, it would be better if you would recognize the inevitability of collapse too.
Nobody really knows exactly what’s going to happen, but you don’t have to be a genius, to recognize collapse is baked into the system by now. Forget about global warming for a moment. We don’t have the natural resources we need to keep the system going. The aquifers are depleting, our soils are flushing into the ocean, the pollinating insects are dying from our pesticides, our sperm counts are crashing and most of the population is obese.
The Koreans and Japanese are dying out, the Afghans and the Congolese are undergoing a population explosion. Call me racist if you want, but I don’t think the Amish-Afghan-Congolese coalition is going to build the same sort of society as the Japanese and the Koreans did.
If you think the temperatures we’ll get by 2050 are terrifying, wait until you see the resource depletion problem that kicks in much earlier. We don’t have the natural resources we need for the whole sustainable energy transition, there’s very little copper left in the world.
And if you think the resource depletion is scary, wait until you see the real problem, the pandemic problem. Congo has always had monkeypox. But in the old days people lived in isolated villages, so the virus would die out for lack of hosts, before finding its way into the next village.
But now people are living in giant refugee camps, in cities where children with bullet holes in their body lay in the same hospital bed as children with monkeypox. People now live in refugee camps where a hundred people have to share the same toilet. The women are forced to prostitute themselves, to feed their children. Just as nature tries to be merciful to the chickens we put in cages, nature tries to be merciful to the poor people stuck living in these refugee camps.
When you go from 12 million people to 101 million people, you make it much easier for a virus to spread to the next host, before dying out. Add some airplanes and truck drivers to that and a virus can spread to multiple other countries. That’s what happened to monkeypox. I said it before, I’ll say it again: Orthopox viruses killed 300-500 million people in the 20th century, even though smallpox was extinct by 1980. When this goes wrong, it goes very wrong.
“We’re going to save the Africans from global warming!”
Bro, you can’t save the Africans from monkeypox. The vaccines have finally arrived, but they won’t start vaccinating until they’ve trained the personnel, so the first vaccines will be administered in October at earliest. After that it’s a week or two before the vaccine is actually effective.
They will have 380,000 vaccines, on a population of 90 million in Congo alone. The capital city Kinshasa has already had its first 11 detected cases. There are 17 million people living there.
Good luck. This is going to turn into the same thing as SARS2, you’re just going to accelerate its evolution by vaccinating against it.
“I wonder what’s going to happen…”
Well, I have often released animals in Sim Life that showed this growth pattern and ate all the plants before the plants could produce seeds, so allow me to spoil the ending for you: They’re going to die. You can stabilize the ecosystem a bit, by releasing a plague virus before the animal population peaks, but otherwise they will probably just make all your plants extinct too.
But that’s just Congo. Nigeria will have 477 million by 2100, Ethiopia will be at 366 million. The EU will have 420 million by 2100, so yes, Nigeria alone would have more people than the EU. What do you think is going to happen?
By 2100 Nigeria would have the population density of the Netherlands! Forget about improving yields for a moment. In the Netherlands, we’re using 7% of our land, just for housing. Your food production is going to decline, simply because you’ll need to use your most fertile farmland to build houses and roads for your population. After all, your first cities like Lagos emerged in fertile river deltas, not in the middle of the desert up north.
We obviously won’t make it that far, collapse is baked into the system by now. But people don’t want to hear this, they want to think they can still dig their way out of this hole.
The crown of trees looks like this:
(see his post for pic)
This is how they stop pathogens from spreading. For generations, people living in the jungle did the same thing, they were highly xenophobic, they avoided other tribes.
But now countries like Congo are becoming an actual unified whole. And the number of flights worldwide exploded:
(again, see his site for pic)
So take a guess what’s going to happen.
The writing is on the wall by now.
Like the era of antibiotics, the era of controlling viruses through vaccination is of limited duration.
We’re now entering the pandemic era. Global warming will be of secondary concern.
So I’ll try not to waste too many words on this, but the Dutch Extinction Rebellion protesters are blocking the entrance to the state museum in Amsterdam.
Ted Kaczynski famously warned that protesters should not create a rift between themselves and the general public. Rather, they should seek to find adherents, by attacking the excesses of the system they oppose. For his anti-tech revolution, he recommended focusing on genetic manipulation, rather than, let’s say, the electricity grid.
So if you block the entrance to the state museum, preventing people who have very little spare time from going to the museum, you’re inevitably just marginalizing yourself. You’re also marginalizing yourself of course if you start piling other leftists causes on top of your cause, like the Palestinians.
But I don’t think these people are seriously trying to save the world. I think they want to be able to say to themselves that they were “on the right side of history” and “tried everything”. Above all else, they’re trying to treat their own existential anguish.
They kind of ran out of ideas, so now they’re settling on a kind of “fifteen degrees to Hitler” leftist social shaming strategy. The fossil fuel industry is Hitler. ING, the Dutch bank, funds Hitler, so they’re nazi’s. The nazi bank also funds the museum, so the museum are nazi sympathizers.
But this is a bit of a dead-end social strategy. At this point, my honest recommendation is to just accept that the attempt to stop global warming has failed and we’re going to die.
“It was all looking pretty bleak. But then people blocked the entrance to a museum funded by a bank that also funds the fossil fuel industry and things began to get better!”
The Africans are fucked, the elephants are fucked, the orangutans are fucked.
But let’s be honest to ourselves. The African population is projected to swell to 3.5 billion by 2100. Global warming or no global warming, they were fucked to begin with. Their fertile soils are flushing down into the ocean.
Congo had 12 million people in 1950. They had 101 million in 2020. They will have 379 million by 2100. What did you think was going to happen? “Oh no, global warming caused millions of people in Congo to die of starvation in 2050 who would have otherwise died in a Malthusian catastrophe in 2080!”
Most people don’t zoom out, they live in the here and now. If you zoom out you’ll get anxious, because you will see your own ugly old mug and your death on the horizon. But if you’re going to zoom out, it would be better if you would recognize the inevitability of collapse too.
Nobody really knows exactly what’s going to happen, but you don’t have to be a genius, to recognize collapse is baked into the system by now. Forget about global warming for a moment. We don’t have the natural resources we need to keep the system going. The aquifers are depleting, our soils are flushing into the ocean, the pollinating insects are dying from our pesticides, our sperm counts are crashing and most of the population is obese.
The Koreans and Japanese are dying out, the Afghans and the Congolese are undergoing a population explosion. Call me racist if you want, but I don’t think the Amish-Afghan-Congolese coalition is going to build the same sort of society as the Japanese and the Koreans did.
If you think the temperatures we’ll get by 2050 are terrifying, wait until you see the resource depletion problem that kicks in much earlier. We don’t have the natural resources we need for the whole sustainable energy transition, there’s very little copper left in the world.
And if you think the resource depletion is scary, wait until you see the real problem, the pandemic problem. Congo has always had monkeypox. But in the old days people lived in isolated villages, so the virus would die out for lack of hosts, before finding its way into the next village.
But now people are living in giant refugee camps, in cities where children with bullet holes in their body lay in the same hospital bed as children with monkeypox. People now live in refugee camps where a hundred people have to share the same toilet. The women are forced to prostitute themselves, to feed their children. Just as nature tries to be merciful to the chickens we put in cages, nature tries to be merciful to the poor people stuck living in these refugee camps.
When you go from 12 million people to 101 million people, you make it much easier for a virus to spread to the next host, before dying out. Add some airplanes and truck drivers to that and a virus can spread to multiple other countries. That’s what happened to monkeypox. I said it before, I’ll say it again: Orthopox viruses killed 300-500 million people in the 20th century, even though smallpox was extinct by 1980. When this goes wrong, it goes very wrong.
“We’re going to save the Africans from global warming!”
Bro, you can’t save the Africans from monkeypox. The vaccines have finally arrived, but they won’t start vaccinating until they’ve trained the personnel, so the first vaccines will be administered in October at earliest. After that it’s a week or two before the vaccine is actually effective.
They will have 380,000 vaccines, on a population of 90 million in Congo alone. The capital city Kinshasa has already had its first 11 detected cases. There are 17 million people living there.
Good luck. This is going to turn into the same thing as SARS2, you’re just going to accelerate its evolution by vaccinating against it.
“I wonder what’s going to happen…”
Well, I have often released animals in Sim Life that showed this growth pattern and ate all the plants before the plants could produce seeds, so allow me to spoil the ending for you: They’re going to die. You can stabilize the ecosystem a bit, by releasing a plague virus before the animal population peaks, but otherwise they will probably just make all your plants extinct too.
But that’s just Congo. Nigeria will have 477 million by 2100, Ethiopia will be at 366 million. The EU will have 420 million by 2100, so yes, Nigeria alone would have more people than the EU. What do you think is going to happen?
By 2100 Nigeria would have the population density of the Netherlands! Forget about improving yields for a moment. In the Netherlands, we’re using 7% of our land, just for housing. Your food production is going to decline, simply because you’ll need to use your most fertile farmland to build houses and roads for your population. After all, your first cities like Lagos emerged in fertile river deltas, not in the middle of the desert up north.
We obviously won’t make it that far, collapse is baked into the system by now. But people don’t want to hear this, they want to think they can still dig their way out of this hole.
The crown of trees looks like this:
(see his post for pic)
This is how they stop pathogens from spreading. For generations, people living in the jungle did the same thing, they were highly xenophobic, they avoided other tribes.
But now countries like Congo are becoming an actual unified whole. And the number of flights worldwide exploded:
(again, see his site for pic)
So take a guess what’s going to happen.
The writing is on the wall by now.
Like the era of antibiotics, the era of controlling viruses through vaccination is of limited duration.
We’re now entering the pandemic era. Global warming will be of secondary concern.
Wednesday, September 4, 2024
Welsh on Collapse
Types Of Civilization Collapse. Ian Welsh. September 4, 2024.
We’ve had a couple posts recently on collapse. One, by Nate Wilcox, on the possibility of civil war and a another by commenter Grim Jim on just how many people would die in a civilization collapse.
Let’s take a look at the dimensions of collapse.
First is slow vs. fast. John Michael Greer tends to push slow, though his position is more nuanced than that. In the slow collapse things just keep getting shittier, with, perhaps, some break points. (If there’s a civil war, there’s a big jump in crap.) In this model it’s hard to say exactly when the collapse happens. When did the Western Roman Empire fall? There are easily half a dozen possible dates one could argue for, and that’s a collapse complete with a barbarian invasion.
In general expect countries which can feed and fuel themselves to be in the slow collapse bucket, though there’ll be exceptions, especially if they can’t defend themselves. Canada is one of those, if it isn’t invaded by America, which it probably will be. Russia is also in it, if they don’t wind up in a nuclear war.
Remember that modern agriculture will be effected by collapse: heavy use of fertilizer, pesticides and oils makes it vulnerable. So if a country appears to have a massive surplus, well, it may not. When AMOC ends and Europe loses ten degrees celcius overnight, they may as well.
The same here is true of water: when glaciers finish melting and most snow pack is gone, there’s going to be a lot less of it. So look at where the surplus food and water is coming from.
Second is distribution by time and place. Everyone likes to quote Gibson, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” Some countries have already collapsed. Sri Lanka, for example. Others are further along the path: in the first world, Britain’s a good example. Within countries some places collapse first: Northern England is notably a hole. Catholic Belfast has never not been poor, and so on.
In the US there are places where we can be sure of regional collapse—as Sean-Paul pointed out to me, the Texas triangle is just going to run out of water in a couple decades. The American Southwest is doomed for pretty much the same reason.
As for that, the homelessness epidemic shows that for many Americans, the collapse is already here.
Internationally Bangladesh will be one of the first high-population countries to collapse. Among major countries, India will be one of the first. The Europeans can go any time when the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Current (AMOC) ends: and that’s due sometime in the next 50 years, as a “when not if” proposition. I don’t know Africa well enough, but obviously multiple countries there are already close to collapse and the only thin which could put that off would be concerted efforts by China (financially and developmentally) and Russia (food and resource aid.)
China’s a hard one to predict: they have huge climate change vulnerabilities, especially to flooding in the North, heat in the North and water in general. On the other hand, if they play it smart they have the world’s industrial base and the best chance of adaptation and mitigation, especially due to their alliance with Russia, which will keep them in resources and food longer than otherwise. Since Russia mutually benefits, they’ll keep the Chinese topped up as a priority.
Which leads to the bigger point: when food starts getting scarce countries will stop exporting, and this is when food importing countries will start real collapse (and food riots, and civil war.)
As for water scarcity, that’s when you’ll get water wars.
And both will exacerbate any internal tensions. When there’s not enough to eat or drink, the “other” whoever that is, is likely to get it in the neck. Countries with significant internal rifts, like India between Hindus and Muslims/High and Low-Caste will see incredible violence and mass murder of minorities. Whether that also describes America is a question much debated, but at the least there will be a vast increase in discrimination and at the worst purges or even civil war.
In Europe there will be huge backlashes against visible minorities, especially Muslim ones and perhaps also Jews, as they are tarred with genocide and accusations of controlling governments.
I would suggest to expect a general pattern of slow decline punctuated by cliff-drops. Things will slowly get shittier, then suddenly get a lot shittier. To give a small example, in Ontario where I live, before Covid you could expect to be seen in an emergency department within a couple hours and to get an MRI or CT scan within a couple months, often a few weeks. Now it takes ten to twelve hours to be seen in an emergency (unless you’re obviously bleeding out or can’t breathe) and imaging tests can take six to nine months.
In collapse some foods (starting with imported ones) will go from widely available to just not on the shelf. Medicines which are imported will stop being available, again in slow decline then suddenly, almost impossible to find.
Slow, then precipitous, then slow, then precipitous.
The general prescription here, for small groups and individuals is to make yourself as independent of the grid as possible, to figure out how to grow climate controlled food, and to find a water source. Even in slow collapse models there will be large numbers of brownouts, water will be shitty if available (hello England) and so on. If you can’t handle at least a few hours or days off-grid, life will be miserable.
Collapse isn’t a disaster movie, though there are parts of it that are. (All the people made homeless by wildfires know this, and there will be coastal inundations). Rather it’s a series of long slide, punctuated by catastrophes.
We’ve had a couple posts recently on collapse. One, by Nate Wilcox, on the possibility of civil war and a another by commenter Grim Jim on just how many people would die in a civilization collapse.
Let’s take a look at the dimensions of collapse.
First is slow vs. fast. John Michael Greer tends to push slow, though his position is more nuanced than that. In the slow collapse things just keep getting shittier, with, perhaps, some break points. (If there’s a civil war, there’s a big jump in crap.) In this model it’s hard to say exactly when the collapse happens. When did the Western Roman Empire fall? There are easily half a dozen possible dates one could argue for, and that’s a collapse complete with a barbarian invasion.
In general expect countries which can feed and fuel themselves to be in the slow collapse bucket, though there’ll be exceptions, especially if they can’t defend themselves. Canada is one of those, if it isn’t invaded by America, which it probably will be. Russia is also in it, if they don’t wind up in a nuclear war.
Remember that modern agriculture will be effected by collapse: heavy use of fertilizer, pesticides and oils makes it vulnerable. So if a country appears to have a massive surplus, well, it may not. When AMOC ends and Europe loses ten degrees celcius overnight, they may as well.
The same here is true of water: when glaciers finish melting and most snow pack is gone, there’s going to be a lot less of it. So look at where the surplus food and water is coming from.
Second is distribution by time and place. Everyone likes to quote Gibson, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” Some countries have already collapsed. Sri Lanka, for example. Others are further along the path: in the first world, Britain’s a good example. Within countries some places collapse first: Northern England is notably a hole. Catholic Belfast has never not been poor, and so on.
In the US there are places where we can be sure of regional collapse—as Sean-Paul pointed out to me, the Texas triangle is just going to run out of water in a couple decades. The American Southwest is doomed for pretty much the same reason.
As for that, the homelessness epidemic shows that for many Americans, the collapse is already here.
Internationally Bangladesh will be one of the first high-population countries to collapse. Among major countries, India will be one of the first. The Europeans can go any time when the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Current (AMOC) ends: and that’s due sometime in the next 50 years, as a “when not if” proposition. I don’t know Africa well enough, but obviously multiple countries there are already close to collapse and the only thin which could put that off would be concerted efforts by China (financially and developmentally) and Russia (food and resource aid.)
China’s a hard one to predict: they have huge climate change vulnerabilities, especially to flooding in the North, heat in the North and water in general. On the other hand, if they play it smart they have the world’s industrial base and the best chance of adaptation and mitigation, especially due to their alliance with Russia, which will keep them in resources and food longer than otherwise. Since Russia mutually benefits, they’ll keep the Chinese topped up as a priority.
Which leads to the bigger point: when food starts getting scarce countries will stop exporting, and this is when food importing countries will start real collapse (and food riots, and civil war.)
As for water scarcity, that’s when you’ll get water wars.
And both will exacerbate any internal tensions. When there’s not enough to eat or drink, the “other” whoever that is, is likely to get it in the neck. Countries with significant internal rifts, like India between Hindus and Muslims/High and Low-Caste will see incredible violence and mass murder of minorities. Whether that also describes America is a question much debated, but at the least there will be a vast increase in discrimination and at the worst purges or even civil war.
In Europe there will be huge backlashes against visible minorities, especially Muslim ones and perhaps also Jews, as they are tarred with genocide and accusations of controlling governments.
I would suggest to expect a general pattern of slow decline punctuated by cliff-drops. Things will slowly get shittier, then suddenly get a lot shittier. To give a small example, in Ontario where I live, before Covid you could expect to be seen in an emergency department within a couple hours and to get an MRI or CT scan within a couple months, often a few weeks. Now it takes ten to twelve hours to be seen in an emergency (unless you’re obviously bleeding out or can’t breathe) and imaging tests can take six to nine months.
In collapse some foods (starting with imported ones) will go from widely available to just not on the shelf. Medicines which are imported will stop being available, again in slow decline then suddenly, almost impossible to find.
Slow, then precipitous, then slow, then precipitous.
The general prescription here, for small groups and individuals is to make yourself as independent of the grid as possible, to figure out how to grow climate controlled food, and to find a water source. Even in slow collapse models there will be large numbers of brownouts, water will be shitty if available (hello England) and so on. If you can’t handle at least a few hours or days off-grid, life will be miserable.
Collapse isn’t a disaster movie, though there are parts of it that are. (All the people made homeless by wildfires know this, and there will be coastal inundations). Rather it’s a series of long slide, punctuated by catastrophes.
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