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Author: Ian Welsh Page 119 of 437
I live (for at least a little longer) in a house full of Turks. I’ve heard the refugee stories, and I know what it takes to be called a “terrorist” (and not be one, at all.) So I can read between the lines here:
Here are the things Turkey got:
• Sweden/Finland will lift its arms embargo
• Both will support Turkey on PKK, stop support to YPG
• They will amend their laws on terrorism
• They will share Intel with each other
• They will extradite terror suspects 1/— Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) June 28, 2022
Extraditing terror suspects means “people who Sweden and Finland would otherwise judge were not terrorists will be extradited to Turkey, where they will be imprisoned and often tortured.”
This goes beyond Kurds; the secular opposition is treated savagely, and intellectuals and academics are particularly at risk.
Perhaps they’ll get the safety they sold their principle for from NATO, I have my doubts, but there is a strong case for it.
But they did sell their souls.
I first read Limits To Growth sometime around 1982. Limits used computer models to predict possible futures of resource use, pollution and population over-shoot.
At the time I thought it was right, and everything since then has come in about as it said.
The chart’s a couple years off, but notice that we’re hitting the food per capita just a few years after it expected. You can say “this is because of the Ukraine war” but we were at the stretching point, which is why one war (and a bunch of stupid sanctions) were able to do this.
Note that services and industrial output are expected to peak around the same time. Population starts dropping in about 20 years and the death rate goes vertical about the same time.
Notice how extreme the declines and rises are once they get going. This should be familiar to people from the Covid pandemic, but these trends will last for decades; indeed for generations.
I’m not sure I entirely buy the population model. It’s based on the fact that poor people have more kids, with some delay, but I think the one things the Club of Rome didn’t entirely take into account is how bad climate change and ecological collapse will be.
The point, now, is that we’re about at the peak or slightly past it. The collapse has started. Covid and Ukraine pushed us into it, but it was going to happen anyway, and there’s always an inciting event. What has changed is that there was no slack in the system (and no competence, with the single major exception of China) to deal with it.
The second point is, again, how sharp these declines become, often almost immediately after they start.
Food isn’t going to get cheaper almost anywhere for a while. Then what will happen is that multiple countries which have surpluses will disconnect from the world supply network so they can feed their own people. This won’t be done for humanitarian reasons at home, our elites don’t have such feelings, it will be done because food shortages are the fastest route to revolution, and that includes food shortages caused by too high inflation. If the food’s out there any can’t afford it, it amounts to it not being out there.
This chart doesn’t break out water specifically, but in a lot of places water is going to be in serious shortage. We’re going to lose a lot of river flow and a lot of rivers and lakes outright, because they are fed by glaciers and snow pack which are already in precipitous decline. In some cases there will be an increase before the decrease: floods and so on caused by more water flow as glaciers melt faster, but then there will be almost none.
In many regions there’ll be more rain and there’ll be more rain overall, but it’s not going to make up for the lost river flow and lakes, or for the aquifers we have drained or poisoned.
This is the map, it may be off in a few places, but it’s going to be essentially correct. It didn’t have to be, the book was published as a warning so we could change our ways, but we didn’t and so it’s turned from possible prediction into prophecy.
Come back to this chart over and over again as you think about and plan for the future, but remember that it is a global chart: local areas will have different profiles and charts especially as we de-globalize, and in response to this collapse we are going to de-globalize with a vengeance.
There are certain places you just don’t want to be, which will get hit earlier and harder. In the US, much of the Southwest and south (Texas, for example.) In Asia: Bangladesh in the first wave, then India soon thereafter. I don’t know Africa well enough, but the same regional effects will occur there.
On the human scale there will be mass migrations, refugee waves of tens to hundreds of millions and war over water and arable land. Multiple societies will collapse into warlordism.
This is the future.
Our future.
Covid continues to evolve and it continues to do so in response to whatever is holding it back most.
In the case of Omicron BA.4 and BA.5, this is immunity: either from vaccines or previous infection.
Increasingly, scientists think that variants including Omicron and Alpha probably originated from months-long chronic SARS-CoV-2 infections, in which sets of immune-evading and transmissibility-boosting mutations can build up
Whatever holds back a species most is what it will gain the greatest advantage from mutating to defeat. Since most of the world outside of China is no longer bothering with even the most basic non-vaccine measures to stop the spread of Covid, this means vaccines and natural immunity.
By now readers should be familiar with how exponential growth works, and these charts should make you twitchy.
Now, since nearly the beginning of the pandemic this blog has warned about how waves of reinfections would cause spiraling Long Covid numbers. It was obvious this would be the case, both because it appears possible to get it each time you’re infected and because even when there are not obvious symptoms, Covid often does some permanent organ damage, including brain damage, which shows up when people are tested.
Here’s the current known damage in the US, just for cases with actual symptoms.
https://twitter.com/LisaAMcCorkell/status/1539765280397701120
And here’s the math of reinfection:
Reinfections don’t need to be *more* severe to disable a large portion of the population within a couple of years. *If each infection adds a 20% risk of sequelae then the chances of ending up with sequelae after 2 infections is 36%. After 3 infections 49%. After 5 infections 67%.
— Dr. Lisa Iannattone (@lisa_iannattone) June 22, 2022
You don’t want to get infected and you don’t want to get reinfected, especially now that BA.4 and BA.5 are immune escape variants.
Where I live, in Ontario Canada, all mask mandates have been removed. For a while people kept wearing them anyway, but what I’m seeing now is that even in something like the subway or in streetcars, which are tailor made for infection, more than half of people aren’t wearing masks.
And unless you’re wearing a properly fitted N95 mask or a respirator, masks don’t protect you that well: masks primarily protect other people if you’re infected, and remember that it’s very easy to be infected and infectious and not even now it, plus in places with inadequate sick leave, of which Ontario is one, most people who know they’re infected still have to go to work if they can: they can’t take two weeks off, they need the money, and their bosses don’t have to let them have the time off.
So continue to take this seriously. I wear n95 masks when I’m inside buildings or in a large crowd outside. The pandemic isn’t over, and our response to it is essentially to rely on luck that eventually a variant will be produced which is even more infectious but much milder.
That may happen, but we don’t if it will or when. Till then, I advise taking reasonable precautions, and don’t believe it when a new variant happens and people say “oh, it’s milder.” It might be slightly milder in the sense of not very likely to kill you, without being milder in the sense of less likely to cause Long Covid.
I read a lot. I’ve read many thousands of books.
Books are mind control, quite literally.
The words in a book are mean to make you experience certain emotions, imagine scenes, and understand certain themes, including moral and ethical ones. A book is a small world with rules, and if you read enough books with the same rules, you learn the rules.
All of this is also true of audio and audiovisual media; they are intended to make you think certain thoughts and feel certain emotions. They, especially audiovisual media like TV, leave less room for visualization and the use of your own imagination (and are both more and less powerful because of it, doing the work invests you more, but fine control is lost).
Every time you read something (including this essay) you’re putting your mind; your consciousness, under the control of someone else.
They may have your best interests at heart (does Fox, MSNBC, Disney, or Ayn Rand?) and they may not, and even if they mean the best, well, what they think is best may not be, or may not, be for you.
This isn’t exactly a revelation. We know advertising works, we know propaganda works, we know media changes how people think of and view the world, and how they feel about it.
But I’ll suggest (trying to change your view) that you see it as mind control. It’s not necessarily bad, and in most cases you’re consenting to it, but you are letting someone else control your mind.
If you’re consuming media, including mine, and it’s making you into a person you don’t want to be, then the best thing to do is stop consuming that source of media, and in general, you should consider very carefully who you let control your mind.
Consider why they are doing so. Don’t assume it doesn’t matter — and for God’s sake, don’t think you’re immune, because you aren’t.
Media is mind control. It’s conditioning, and you need to know who’s controlling your mind, and who’s making you into what, and why, and who that benefits.
Does it benefit you?
No surprise, leaked opinion was accurate. There’s a decent map here of what it will mean on the ground:
Roe is overturned, looks like Alito’s leaked opinion in Dobbs is unchanged. This map can help you figure out what happens where you are. The guide in this link has a state by state breakdown (some states outlaw immediately some have waiting periods) https://t.co/WpPqwQEr5Y pic.twitter.com/dx3Pnd4kDV
— Molly Shah (@MollyOShah) June 24, 2022
Republicans have spent generations stacking courts, doing whatever they could to put ideologues there. They understood what appointments meant.
If you think Democrats are going to do anything meaningful about this, you are delusional. Democratic leadership does not care, though they’ll fundraise on the issue:
Thinking about how Pelosi and Clyburn just went out of their way to help an anti-abortion, pro-gun incumbent beat a young progressive woman by 289 votes. pic.twitter.com/MOhRSknfZD
— onagapnotsew (@westonpagano) June 24, 2022
The next time Republicans have the Senate, House, and Presidency they’ll pass a nationwide abortion ban.
Meanwhile, restrictions on guns will be increasingly struck down. Cops no longer have to read people their Miranda rights. Republicans want gay marriage gone. I think they’ll continue to allow cross-race marriages, at least as long as Thomas is on the court, and maybe longer, as they’ll need Hispanic votes. Free public schooling is also likely to go in many states. Contraceptives will be made illegal in many places.
America, fuck’yeah.
Bertrand Russel once called Plato the original intellectual fascist (in “A History of Western Philosophy,” which is well worth reading.)
In The Republic, Plato tries to come up with the ideal form of government and decides on a caste system, where children are educated, and then, based on their character and aptitude are divided into workers, enforcers, and rulers. The rulers are to be those who are philosophers by nature and training — those who love wisdom and are uninterested in wealth.
It’s easy to sneer at Plato, but there’s a reason why Whitehead’s line that “All of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato” has a lot of truth to it.
And one has to remember the context: Athenian democracy, the most famous in the Grecian world (and the most famous in Western history) had failed and been defeated by Sparta, after a reign of abuses which turned its allies against it. Entire cities were destroyed, with men killed and women and children sold into slavery. The most glorious city in their world, conquered and occupied.
Plato was never a democrat, and he hated Athenian democracy for killing his teacher Socrates, but he was looking at a real problem: those who became leaders in democracy were very often unsuited to rule. Pericles was great, aye, but he led Athens into a war it lost.
There are really two problems: the selection of leaders, and how they are treated. Lord Acton said that “power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Tends is important; it doesn’t happen to everyone, but it happens to most. When you’re powerful, you don’t have to care about other people without power, and over time, most people tend not to.
Further, powerful people spend time with other powerful people as equals or near equals and, in time, they become their own faction, and look after their own interests and not those of people without power.
The story of “crusading politician goes to the capital and gets corrupted” is ancient. A cliche. It’s a cliche because it happens most of the time; there are exceptions, but they are exceptions.
So, for any and all societies, the question is: How should we select leaders?
As I’ve said before, there can be no question that all societies on Earth have failed the leadership selection test (with the possible honorable exception of tiny, powerless Bhutan). We have failed because we knew of climate change and ecological collapse and we did nothing; indeed, we put our collective foot, hard, on the accelerator.
There’s an argument that this is just how humans are. There have been multiple collapses in history, including ecological, and we never seem to do anything to stop them.
But there’s another argument that we can find a better way.
Leadership and followership are related. I had this first brought home to me when I was in elementary school. From the third grade to halfway through sixth grade, I was in a class where the boys had two leaders. They were best friends, and they were friendly, inclusive of everyone, and tolerated no bullying. It wasn’t that they stopped it, though on a couple occasions did I see them step in, it was that their example was so much the opposite that it just didn’t happen.
Then, halfway through sixth grade, I went to another school and the leader of the boys was himself a bully, and bullying was rife.
Throughout my life, I’ve seen how groups and organizations become like the people who run them. Leadership is incredibly powerful, just by example, even before any “power” is used.
So the most important question in improving human society and groups is improving how we select and treat leaders, and by this measure, representative democracy has rather obviously failed.
This is noted often by conservative neo-reactionaries, but such folks are misguided at best. The eras of nobles or aristocrats (two different things), or of kings, were not better — they were often awful. The rise of agricultural kingships lead to cruelty of a type and scale hard for us now to imagine, and that continued throughout their history. One common punishment in Tudor England was opening someone’s stomach, pulling out their intestines and burning them while the person was alive; crowds would gather, treat this as entertainment and have a party while it was going on.
The answer to democracy’s failures isn’t some foolish nostalgia for a time which was worse; we need to find something genuinely new, or we will keep stumbling from catastrophe to catastrophe, and at some point said catastrophe will wipe us out.
So I suggest to readers to consider the question, which Plato tried to answer, of how to select, train, and treat rulers — and I would add that they should act in the best interests of all, especially including those they don’t know, both who are alive at the same time the leaders are, and those who will be alive after they are dead.
This is the human problem. If we can’t solve it, we can’t have good societies — save by chance and for brief periods.