Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Author: Ian Welsh Page 56 of 436
Let’s start with something very simple: Israel is committing a genocide is Palestine, and the Israeli state was founded by terrorists and has always been based on ethnic cleansing.
After World War II there was a huge backlash against anti-semitism: prejudice against Jews, because we had seen it end in Germany’s gas chambers. The Zionists used that in their project to take another people’s land for their own: to stand against a Jewish country after the Holocaust seemed wrong.
But this is a case of kindergarten ethics: two wrongs not making a right. The Zionists (not the Jews, the Zionists) stole another people’s land and did so violently.
Then, especially from the 67 on, they engaged in vicious apartheid, and continued to steal the land and homes of Palestinians.
After the first Intifada they started routinely killing Palestinians, along with other atrocious behaviour.
I have stated and firmly believe that the current death toll from the Gaza war is in the hundreds of thousands. You can check out the methodology here. They are certainly nowhere near as low as the official death count of something over 40K.
This is the result of deliberate starvation; attacks on hospitals till there is only one left slightly operating; cutting off medicine and water; herding refugees into high density camps then attacking them; shutting off water, and policies intended to lead to plague. All of these policies are entirely deliberate and done with knowledge of their certain effect.
Now let’s talk about anti-semitism v.s. anti-Zionism.
One is ethnic hatred: “Jews are evil.” The other opposes a political movement, “there should be a Jewish apartheid State on land taken from other people.”
Zionism started with ethnic cleansing and has moved on to genocide. To not be anti-Zionist is to be, at best, a moral imbecile and more commonly is a depraved political stance. That stance starts at “I’m OK with genocide” and ends with “I support genocide.”
The next issue is that accusations of anti-semitism have been weaponized. I lost my patience when they were used to take out Corbyn, who was in no way anti-semitic and if there were a Holocaust would be one of the people willing to die to try and stop it. We’ve seen how every protest against the Gazan genocide has been labelled anti-semitic.
So ordinary, moral people, have stopped having a default belief in accusations of anti-semitism because the vast majority of such accusations are now attempts, in effect, to use the Holocaust and people’s repugnance at what led to it to justify ethnic cleansing and another genocide.
Further if there is a rise of anti-semitism in the world, it can be laid 99% percent at the feet of Israel, Zionism and those who cover for the Gaza genocide. When a country wrapping itself in the fig-leaf of “we’re the Jewish nation” undeniably commits a genocide then accuses those who protest of hating Jews and Judaism, some people will fail to make the Zionist/Jewish distinction. “They say they’re Jews, and that Judaism permits this, so Judaism is bad,” such people will think.
The greatest enemy Jews and Judaism have and the greatest creator of anti-semitism in the world is Israel. And anyone and any nation supporting them is helping create more anti-semitism.
All ideologies aren’t bad, though all can go bad, but Zionism was born with ill will: it was always the project to steal the land and homes of another people.
To Sum Up
Zionism is an ideology which starts with ethnic cleansing as its base. Evil.
Judaism is a religion, which, like almost all religions, can be used to justify evil, but is pointed more towards the good. Hillel’s “Whatever is hateful and distasteful to you, do not do to your fellow man” would have prevented this entire sickening mess, and is far more representative of Judaism than the Zionist perversion.
Jews are an ethnic religious group (there are lots of secular Jews), who are no more intrinsically evil or good than any other group.
Anti-semitism is bad, like all racism.
Anti-Zionism is good, like all opposition to ethnic cleansing and genocide.
A UK-Chinese collaboration has sequenced the DNA of all the 827 kinds of wheat, assembled by Watkins, that have been nurtured at the John Innes Centre near Norwich for most of the past century.
In doing so, scientists have created a genetic goldmine by pinpointing previously unknown genes that are now being used to create hardy varieties with improved yields that could help feed Earth’s swelling population.
Strains are now being developed that include wheat which is able to grow in salty soil, while researchers at Punjab Agricultural University are working to improve disease resistance from seeds that they received from the John Innes Centre. Other strains include those that would reduce the need for nitrogen fertilisers, the manufacture of which is a major source of carbon emissions.
“Essentially we have uncovered a goldmine,” said Simon Griffiths, a geneticist at the John Innes Centre and one of the project’s leaders.
“This is going to make an enormous difference to our ability to feed the world as it gets hotter and agriculture comes under increasing climatic strain.”
If some obsessive, one individual, hadn’t collected these seeds, then an institution had kept them safe, we’d be a lot more likely to starve in the future.
The most bio-diverse land ecosystem are rainforests, and we’re cutting them down, destroying entire ecosystems. Destroying ecosystems is like burning your house to save on heating bills. Leaving aside all the climate change issues, and that collapsing ecosystems may lead to collapse of life support for humans, each animal, plant, microbe or insect we make extinct has the potential to have genes which could lead to scientific advances: not just in food crops but in medicine and if we don’t have civilization collapse, for gene therapies and enhancements of incalculable value to humanity.
Increased longevity, faster healing, improved immune systems, greater heat or cold tolerance and far, far more could be lost because of this short sightedness.
It took hundreds of millions of years to create such a diverse web of life, and on the human scale, once it’s gone, it’s gone and we aren’t getting it back.
We should either stop (we aren’t going to) or at the least preserve samples of everything we can, in vaults designed to run for at least centuries with minimal human support and without requiring more than simple maintenance. If we’re young enough, the lives we save might be our own, if not our grandchildren and later descendants will thank us, and, just perhaps, we might may be able to bring back to life some of the species we are currently genociding.
Over 46,000 businesses have gone bankrupt, tourism has stopped, Israel’s credit rating was lowered, Israeli bonds are sold at the prices of almost “junk bonds” levels, and the foreign investments that have already dropped by 60% in the first quarter of 2023 (as a result of the policies of Israel’s far-right government before October 7) show no prospects of recovery. The majority of the money invested in Israeli investment funds was diverted to investments abroad because Israelis do not want their own pension funds and insurance funds or their own savings to be tied to the fate of the State of Israel.
What this means is that Israeli is surviving on American charity. Not only is it impossible for Israel to wage war without American supplies, it is impossible for the Israeli economy to avoid collapse without American aid.
Russia, it appears, now has advisors on the ground in Yemen. If they were intending to give Ansar Allah weapons, this would be the first step. American weapons have been used to sink Russian ships, and Putin has warned that if America supplies weapons and helps with the firing and targeting of those weapons against Russia, Russia will return the favor.
Sinking some American ships would be revenge served cold and I wonder if one of the reasons that Iran and its allies are taking their time with a retaliation attack for the assassinations is because of coordination with Russia.
If I were an American, I’d be pretty happy about the guy, unless I have a problem with mass murder of foreigners.
On the good side:
- signed a bill giving free breakfast lunch to all students;
- 20 weeks of paid family & medical leave, for America, excellent;
- right to repair bill;
- free college tuition for students whose families make less than 80K;
- banned non-competes;
- and so on.
So, domestically, excellent. But he’s pro-Israel:
Israel is our truest and closest ally in the region, with a commitment to values of personal freedoms and liberties, surrounded by a pretty tough neighborhood.
“The values of personal freedoms of liberties” about an apartheid state is pretty rich.
To the Jewish Community Relationship Council, June 2, 2024 (aka, while the genocide was ongoing):
I see people debating something I don’t feel is debatable here. The ability of Jewish people to self-determine is foundational to everything […] and the failure to recognize the State of Israel taking away that self-determination. So it is anti-semitic, and that is a statement of fact.
If what you’re going to do with your “self determination” is commit a genocide, then you shouldn’t have self-determination. Note also the conflation of Israel with being Jewish, which if I were Jewish, I’d object to on the strongest terms, not wanting to be associated with mass murder.
Of course he’s the VP pick, Harris is healthy and he’s unlikely to matter a great deal. That said, he’s about as good as Harris was likely to pick. I’d say that the Harris/Walz ticket is better for more Americans than Trump/Vance, as long as you can get past the whole genocide thing.
Consider that damning with faint praise.
We’ll start with the proximate:
As mobs attempt to burn down hotels housing asylum seekers, don’t forget Nigel Farage led a campaign to publicise these hotels. He recorded himself turning up at a series of them in 2020 and asked his followers to identify more hotels, saying some residents “might be ISIS”.
Then let’s move backwards:
First there’s been a lot of anti-Muslim propaganda thru the years, including entire TV and movie eras where the most common villains.
Second is a sustained right wing campaign complaining about demographic replacement and stating that immigrants are more likely be criminals than natives.
Third is the fact that Britain has been bringing in massive numbers of immigrants when there isn’t enough housing, driving up prices and leading to homelessness.
Fourth is that the the UK has been in decline for over forty years. A lot of people are hurting. There aren’t enough good jobs, yet somehow the government is allowing in record numbers of immigrants.
When I was young I said to my father that I didn’t see a lot of racism. He, a child of the Great Depression, replied, “wait till times are bad.”
The “other”, the immigrant, is always an easy target. The actual villains are the UK’s ruling class and if violence is the method then the correct response would be to Bastille them, but people are rarely capable of understanding that their most profound enemies are those who rule them. Putin is not a significant danger to Americans or Brits: their own politicians and corporate leaders are responsible for their poverty, increasing death rates, sickness and homelessness.
If you want a good country again, figure out a way to replace your leadership class wholesale. Nothing else will work, certainly not burning hotels with powerless immigrants in them. That’s pathetic and stupid, on top of being immoral.
Be better and be smarter.
Though newer readers will be forgiven for disbelieving it, during my early online career I was primarily considered a finance and economics blogger, though I’d write about almost anything. Among other things, I predicted the financial collapse, including the DOW bottom and the month it would happen in. A correspondent once went thru the Wayback machine and found that there were less than forty people who made the prediction in advance.
I lost interest somewhere around 2010 and moved my primary focus to other topics: at the time mostly ideology and how it interacted with the political economy. There was no reason in continuing: my goal had always been change, and the Fed, Congress and Obama had all confirmed that the only change was to be the end of any real spar of capitalism.
So I’m not going to write about the proximate cause of the current financial collapse, but instead look at the bigger picture that lead here.
First we have the offshoring of real industry, primarily to China. There is a real economy, and financial skyscrapers, no matter how high, are based on them. The bottom line is that the West no longer has the industry to hold up the skyscraper.
Second is that the 80-now long bull market was entirely a creation of government policy: mostly thru the Federal Reserve, but with serious assists from Congress and the President. There was a time when stock buyback were illegal, for example. There was a time when the Fed didn’t run a “the markets must always go up” policy: in fact, during the 50s and 60s the stock market traded sideways, even though real economic growth was, by every measure, higher than in the post 80 period.
Third is the response to the 2008 financial collapse. Not the collapse itself, but the response, which was to bail out the people and institutions which had caused the crash, to immunize thru fines and agreements those who had engaged in massive and widespread fraud, to force the burden onto homeowners by allowing banks to steal houses; and in general terms to ensure that the same people who had caused the crisis were in charge afterwards, but more powerful and controlling larger institutions.
Then they patted themselves on the back and said they’d saved the world. Capitalism isn’t a system I like, but one of its virtues is that if you fuck up you go out of business: if you’ve made a lot of bad decisions you aren’t allowed to keep making bad decisions. Bernanke, the Fed, Congress and the Presidency put an end to that dynamic and essentially ended even the shadow of real capitalism in America, and indeed, in the West.
This meant that resources were terribly misallocated, and that further economic decline was inevitable, since there was no possibility of a new economic elite rising based on actually producing good products and solving real problems. It also mean that further financial crises were inevitable, and that in the end those crises would not be able to be papered over, because, Virginia, there may be no Santa Clause but there is a real economy where things have to actually be made and built and grown and dug up and refined.
The fourth factor is the decline of US dollar hegemony. It isn’t obvious in the numbers yet, but it’s real and those who are making long term bets against it will regret doing so. I won’t go on about this, since I’ve written a dozen articles or so on the topic in the last two years.
We’re at the end of somewhere between two and five centuries of European/Western world superiority and dominance. It’s going to suck for Europe, the Anglosphere and most of our allies. There’s just no way around that, and the decision points are past. A recovery is theoretically possible, and I could even write an article giving the outlines of what’s necessary, but there’s no political possibility of doing it and our current elites are too incompetent to make it work anyway. A revolution which throws out our entire leadership class is a pre-condition and by the time we got that done, the day would have passed anyway.
All of which is, I suppose, just a long way of saying “economic decline sucks and isn’t going to stop,”