Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

The Spiritual View “I Am Awareness”

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On November 26, 2024

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The functional chassis of all real spirituality are metaphysical statements, often called views. Each view is a way of understanding reality. Every view in real spirituality is connected with a “way”. The way is the path to being that view.

The “I am awareness” view is that of chunks of Hinduism, especially Vedanta and its various offshoots. The best book written from this perspective is “I Am That”, which I recommend highly. A good one, especially the first forty percent or so is “The Essence of Enlightenment” by James Swartz.

The “I am awareness” argument is that the only thing which always exists is awareness, and therefor that is what we are. We are not our bodies, or even our consciousness: both can be absent and awareness still exists.

Everything I am aware of is an object in consciousness. This is obvious. All of these objects change over time, often appearing and disappearing. Whether they exist or not, I always exist: they are dependent on me, I am not dependent on them.

One may suggest this isn’t true by two methods. The first is “I’m not aware when I’m in deep sleep.” With enough meditation of the right type you can prove that wrong: you can be aware that you are deep asleep and if someone yells near you while you’re in deep sleep you wake up, so awareness appears to still exist.

The second is that awareness didn’t exist before birth, and won’t exist after death. This is a more serious objection, but it’s not proven, and certain experiences on the spiritual path where you appear to exist without the body suggest it may be wrong. Instead you simply don’t remember before your birth.

To many this will seem like utter nonsense, but most people haven’t done the necessary work to have an opinion worth caring about.

There are a few ways or paths towards this view. The main one is simply examination. Is it true that objects come and go and I remain? Watch sense objects and see what happens. This is meditation. It’s part of what Buddhist Vipassana does, actually, though only part.

A second is to simply concentrate on the sense of “I am” and don’t pay much attention to anything else.

A third is the Vedantic super-imposition method: you learn the view and apply it. Whenever you think “I am the body”, you simply correct the thought to “I am awareness.” (There’s more to it than that, I’m simplifying vastly.)

Our normal view is something like “I am the mind, which is produced by the body, and I live in a world that is not me.”

Most spiritual paths say that the body exists in the mind (it does, though that doesn’t have to mean that it isn’t produced by the brain).

So what’s the benefit of having this view, of grounding it in?

First, you let go of sense objects. You don’t push bad sense objects away (pain, fear, etc…), and you don’t try and grasp good sense objects (love, happiness, etc…)

If you leave sense objects alone, what happens it that the bad ones bother you less and the good ones last longer.

Second, when you don’t regard the body and mind as “you” suffering drops massively. It’s not happening to you, you don’t have to care. Suffering is basically pain times attachment.

Third, your conditioning weakens. Every time a conditioned sense object comes up, if you react to it with anything but detachment or detached love, it is renewed and usually grows stronger. Say you were once burned and are now scared of fire. Every time you see or hear fire you are scared. You try and push the fear away. The fear is renewed, and may even grow stronger. If you don’t care, if you don’t react or you counter-act the fear with love or another positive emotion, the conditioning weakens.

Fourth, your general level of fear grows lower. Over time your ambient anxiety drops. Almost everyone has some anxiety, even if it’s below the threshold of consciousness. As fear goes away it is replaced by a directionless detached love. You feel love all the time. When this starts, it’s intermittent. You feel happiness or love for no reason you can determine. Over time it becomes more and more steady. (I’ve spent fairly substantial time in this state. It’s not theoretical.) As best I can tell, human nature when truly not scared IS love.

The more solid your identification with awareness is, and the less you identify with consciousness, sense objects and the body, the better your experience is. This seems to be what the Hindu types are talking about when they say that the nature of the self is bliss. You no longer rely on getting things, having things or circumstances in order to feel good. You just… feel good.

There’s more to all this, of course, rather vast volumes have been written about it, often in allegorical language which is hard to understand if you weren’t trained it. But this is the essence: you are awareness, and fully knowing that frees you of the need for objects at any psychological level. Of course, if you want the body to stick around you’ve still got to take care of it, but you are no longer subject to the tyranny of running from desire to desire and away from fear after fear.

***

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Explaining Ukraine To Your Uncle: The Causes of the War

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On November 26, 2024

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Now that even the Council on Foreign Relations is admitting Ukraine can’t and won’t win its war against Russia, there might be some serious cognitive dissonance for people who’ve not been paying much attention and bought into the official narrative on the war.

If you find yourself faced with the proverbial ignorant uncle at Thanksgiving this year and want to appear fact-based rather than conspiratorial, maybe the following round up of links and sources about the beginnings of the war will help.

It’s bad enough that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in a losing and pointless effort, but it’s important to rebut the narrative that Russia was the aggressor and not NATO and the US.

The work of researcher Ivan Katchanovski is definitive and completely debunks the official US narrative on the Maidan Revolution:

His work was vindicated in a Ukrainian court in 2024.

Uncle Ignorance should also familiarize himself with the names Stephan Bandera & Yaroslav Hunka. Bandera has been regarded as the “Father of Ukraine” since 2014. Hunka is a Ukrainian SS veteran who received a standing ovation at a session of the Canadian Parliament last year.

That’s not to even get into the consensus reality that NATO expansion backed Putin into a corner and that US foreign policy legend George Kennan called it “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

The Brookings Institute 1999 history of the post-Cold War efforts to enlarge NATO will read like “Russian propaganda” to anyone whose knowledge of the war came from MSNBC starting from a blank slate in 2022.

Also, your Uncle will want to be beaten about the head and shoulder with this 2008 confidential cable from current head of the CIA and then US ambassador to Russia, William Burns who strongly opposed Bush & Cheney’s offer to invite Ukraine into NATO (revealed by Wikileaks.)

Also the story of the Ukrainian Civil War from 2014 to 2022 has been systematically mistold.

Key graphic which shows how Ukraine dramatically upped their shelling of civilians in the independent republics just prior to Russia’s invasion — forcing Putin’s hand.

Graph of explosions per month in Ukraine from 2014 to 2022.

Source:The Special Monitoring Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE SMM)

Uncle “Ukraine Is Heroically Resisting Aggression” will also want to learn all about the horrific mass murder of anti-Maidan counter-protestors in Odessa in 2014 that is VERY well known in Russia and Ukraine and almost completely unknown in the US.

Norwegian Professor Glenn Dieson has a fine piece explaining “How the Strategy of Fighting to the Last Ukrainian Was Sold to the Public as Morally Righteous..”

Here’s a sample quote from his piece:

For almost three years, NATO countries have boycotted diplomatic contacts with Russia, even as hundreds of thousands of men have died on the battlefield. The decision by diplomats to reject diplomacy is morally repugnant as diplomacy could have reduced the excess of violence, prevented escalation, and even resulted in a path to peace. However, the political-media elites skilfully sold the rejection of diplomacy to the public as evidence of their moral righteousness.

This article will first outline how NATO planned for a long war to exhaust Russia and knock it out from the ranks of great powers. Second, this article will demonstrate how the political-media elites communicated that diplomacy is treasonous and war is virtuous.

This is just scratching the surface but essentially for those who been exclusively following US & UK media, everything they know about Ukraine is wrong.

Enjoy those awkward conversations around the table!

Why Assisted Suicide Bills Will Proliferate & Deaths Will Increase

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On November 25, 2024

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Nothing saves money on people who are old, disabled and unable to work like just killing them.

Covid killed mostly old people. That saved the government money in the long run, although in the short run it was expensive, except for Sweden where they just euthanized their old people with Covid instead of treating them. (Gave them opiods even when they had enough oxygen and drugs.)

Since Covid, however, there’s been an unfortunate increase in people who can’t work because they’re chronically ill.

This isn’t hard to understand. Britain is massively importing young people who can work, or older people who have lots of money, but at the same time the number of people who are liabilities, financially speaking, is exploding. If you have a liability the easiest way to get rid of it is to… get rid of it.

Canada’s in the same boat, and these bills will spread.

Assisted suicide isn’t automatically a bad thing, mind you. If people were properly supported and cared for I’d support it. People who are in a ton of pain and won’t get better ought to have the option.

But when the government is whining about benefits and cutting them, as in Britain, one doesn’t expect this is being done from a humanitarian impulse. And the medical and social workers, in hospitals and palliative care centers that are overstretched and don’t have enough nurses or doctors or beds, well, convincing someone who’s taking up time or a bed to just die already will have to be pretty tempting, sometimes even with somewhat good motives: to free up resources for people who can be cared for.

But, of course, what will often happen is that chronically ill people or homeless types who could live for quite a long time and with proper care could be fairly happy will wind up dead because in Britain and Canada we don’t help them enough: to get enough housing, food, help and pain meds (given the way we’re so scared of opiates.)

Wikipedia lists some known cases of abuse of the law:

  • In 2017, a mother of a young woman with cerebral palsy was told by a doctor that not applying for MAID was “selfish”. Her daughter was in the room when the conversation took place and described the experience as traumatic.[71]
  • In 2018, Roger Foley was being treated for cerebellar ataxia at an Ontario hospital. Foley alleged that his only options were to be forcibly discharged from the hospital and then treated by an organization that had previously failed to provide him adequate care or apply for MAID. Foley hired a lawyer for a charter challenge.[72]
  • In 2019, Alan Nichols successfully applied for MAID while being hospitalized for suicide ideation. The reason given on his application was hearing loss.[1]
  • In September 2021, Rosina Kamis, a 41-year-old Malaysian woman, applied for MAID citing fibromyalgia as the reason. However, in conversations and recordings shared with friends, she mentioned financial hardship and social isolation as additional factors influencing her decision.[73]
  • In February 2022, an anonymous Torontonian suffering from extreme chemical sensitivity syndrome with the pseudonym Sophia had a medically assisted death after failing to find affordable housing that was free from tobacco smoke and other chemicals.[74] This case was addressed by her health care provider in testimony provided to the Special Joint Committee on MAID, and was referenced in their final report.[75]

One can safely assume there are many, many more. The fact is that even doctors and social workers think some lives are worth more than others. No one who’s spent time in the medical system believes otherwise.

The West is in decline. Our elites are wedded to austerity as a “solution”. They often, probably usually, feel that people who are non-productive are useless eaters and a burden on the state.

That combination is going to lead to a truly vast expansion of measures intended to get people off benefit rolls.

In a way assisted suicide, or euthanasia, is the most honest of those policies and maybe even the most merciful. There’s nothing honest about deliberate policies which make people homeless, leading to most of their deaths, after all. Politicians know that winding up on the street long term is essentially a death sentence, they know that policies like mass immigration without increasing the housing supply to match will cause homelessness, so they know their policies cause homelessness and death but they can pretend it’s an unintended side effect.

Just killing people is at least not hypocritical.

***

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 24, 2024

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On November 24, 2024

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By Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

General Strike 2028 

Cory Doctorow [Pluralistic, via Naked Capitalism 11-22-2024]

…Trump is a scab, Dems need unions, Dems are not faithful to unions, unions make the Dems better, workers want unions, the public loves unions, and union membership is falling… it’s the union bosses’ fault.….

Those shitty union bosses? They’re on the way out. In 2023, the UAW held its first honest elections for generations, and radicals, led by Shawn Fain, swept the board. How did workers win their union back? They unionized more workers! Specifically, the UAW organized the brutally exploited Harvard grad students, and the Harvard kids memorized the union by-laws, and every time the corrupt old guard tried to steal the leadership election, one or another of them popped to their feet, reciting chapter-and-verse from the union’s own rules and keeping the vote going:

https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/

Fain led the UAW to an historic strike: the UAW took on all three of the Big Three automakers, and cleaned their clocks. UAW workers walked away with three new contracts, all set to expire in 2028. Fain then called upon every union to bargain for contracts that run out in 2028, because if every union contract expires in 2028, we’ve got the makings of a general strike.

That means that when the next presidential election rolls around, it’s going to be in the middle of the most militant moment in a century of US labor history. That is an opportunity.

Labor movements fight fascists. They always have. Trump and the GOP are not on the side of workers, notwithstanding all that bullshit about supporting workers by fighting immigration. Sure, when the number of workers goes up, wages can go down – if you’re not in a union. Conservatives have never supported unions. They hate solidarity. Conservatives want workers to believe that they can get paid more if labor is scarcer, and there’s some truth to that, but solidarity endures in good times and bad, and scarcity ends any time bosses figure out how to offshore, outsource, or automate your job. Scarcity is brittle….

Organizing a 2028 general strike under Trump won’t be easy. Workers won’t be able to secure support from the courts or the NLRB, whose brilliant Biden-era leadership team is surely doomed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

But the NLRB only exists today because workers established unions when doing so was radioactively illegal and union organizers were beaten, jailed and murdered with impunity. The tactics those organizers used are not lost to the mists of time – they are a tradition that lives on to this day.

The standard-bearer for this older, militant, community-based union organizing was the great Jane McAlevey (rest in power). McAlevey ran organizing and strike drives as mass-movements; she wouldn’t call for either without being sure of massive majorities, 70%-95%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

McAlevey understood union organizing as a source of worker power, but also as a source of community power. When she helped organize the LA Teachers’ strike, the teachers didn’t just demand better working conditions for themselves, but also green space for their students, and protection from ICE raids for their students’ parents. They did this under Trump, and built a turnout organization that flipped key seats and delivered a House majority to the Democrats in 2020.

In her work, McAlevey excoriated the kind of shittyass Dem power-brokers who just lost an election to a convicted felon and rapist, condemning their technocratic conceit that the path to electoral victory was in winning over precisely 50.1% of the vote in each tactically significant precinct. McAlevey said that’s how you get the nightmarish Manchin-Synematic Universe where Dems can’t deliver and workers don’t vote for Dems. To transform America, we need the kinds of majorities that McAlevey and her fellow organizers won in those strike votes – majorities that produced durable, anti-fascist power that turned into electoral victories, too.

The Revenge of the Deplorables?

Les Leopold, November 20, 2024

The working class started abandoning the Democrats long before Trump became a political figure, let alone a candidate. In 1976, Jimmy Carter received 52.3 percent of the working-class vote; In 1996, Clinton 50 percent; In 2012, Obama 40.6 percent; and in 2020, Biden received only 36.2 percent.

This decline has little to do with illiberalism on social issues. Since Carter’s victory, these workers have become more liberal on race, gender, immigration and gay rights, as I detail in Wall Street’s War on Workers.

Furthermore, my research shows that mass layoffs, not illiberalism, best explains the decline of worker support for the Democrats. In the former Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, for example, as the county mass layoff rate went up the Democratic vote went down. The statistical causation, of course, may be off, but the linkage here between economic dissatisfaction and flight from the Democratic Party is straightforward.

Unions to Democrats: Don’t blame us for Tuesday’s losses

Nick Niedzwiadek, 11/06/2024 [Politico]

Despite persistent fears that labor might break for former President Donald Trump, exit polling showed Vice President Kamala Harris winning voters in union households 55 to 43 percent, roughly on par with President Joe Biden’s performance in 2020. (A separate survey from NBC News had Harris up 10 points among union voters.)

In fact, union voters were one of the few groups that did not appreciably shift toward Trump and Republicans….

Lean Into the Punch: Labor under Trump.

Hamilton Nolan, November 22, 2024 [How Things Work]

…For all of their public talk about how they plan to fight, the instinct of the leadership of most big labor unions in America when faced with a hostile federal government is to do the opposite—to withdraw into their shells like turtles and try to weather the storm, to protect what they already have as best they can until the next election rolls around, when they will pour everything into the campaign of a friendlier candidate, who they presume will reset the playing field to a more welcoming state, which will then allow them to flourish.

This mentality will get us fucking smashed over the next four years….

Many stories have been written about what Project 2025 and another Trump administration will mean for labor policy and the takeaway is “bad things.” The NLRB will be hostile. All prospects for helpful labor legislation will disappear. Related policy action helpful to worker power, like aggressive antitrust enforcement, will cease. Many bad things are coming down the pipeline, but let me touch on three big ones:

  • The NLRB….
  • Government employees … Trump, with the help of Tweedlee and TweedleDOGE, is going to do everything he can to strip labor protections away from federal workers, purge career employees, install political loyalist hacks in positions that should really have career civil servants, and laugh as federal agencies stop working properly because there are no qualified employees there left to run them….
  • The legal assault on the entire structure of America’s labor law regime: Parallel to what the Trump administration will be doing with policy and inside of government agencies, there is already an ongoing attempt by employers to attack the legality of the NLRB and, more broadly, the National Labor Relations Act itself. (More on that here.)….

There are precisely two things to be done, beginning now, and continuing for the next four years. One thing is to organize….

The other thing to do is to strike. More bluntly: to do more legal as well as illegal strikes. (Teachers in Massachusetts are showing us the way right this minute.) The legal regime that corporations are salivating to dismantle is the same one that has, for decades, laid out the ground rules for who and how and where and when strikes could expect to be sanctioned by the law. Take away those rules and the only silver lining for workers is that the shackles are off….

Frontline Democrats Won With Progressive Populist Messages

Luke Goldstein, November 22, 2024 [The American Prospect]

Longtime Democratic moderates who attacked big business and monopolies outpaced Harris in swing districts.

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Open Thread

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On November 23, 2024

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

What Does Ukraine Look Like Post War If Russia Imposes The Peace?

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On November 22, 2024

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If you want to demilitarize a country you can do it by treaty, or you can do it by fact. Germany was demilitarized after WWI, but it retained the ability to build a large military and eventually did so.

The Russian view is that Ukraine needs to be demilitarized, de-Nazified and made neutral, it will otherwise remain a threat to them.

The demilitarization strategy is fairly simple: kill or disable everyone who can and will fight. This has been a grinding war, but at almost every stage Russia has had air, drone and artillery supremacy. It has taken great care to disperse attacking troops and to keep its own casualties down.

Casualty ratios are a matter of great dispute, but I cannot imagine that the side with air, drone and artillery superiority is taking the most casualties. I would guess the exchange rate is between 3:1 and 6:1. Once again, we won’t know until some years after the war.

Ukraine’s population is crashing. Pre war it was 42 million, as of 2023 it was probably 28 million and there’s no way it is not even lower now.

So to a large extent Russian tactics support the goal of demilitarization. Even if Russia could do “big arrow”, why do them before the Ukrainian military is ground to dust and Ukraine is demographically exhausted? Win the war, but fail to end Ukraine’s ability and willingness to fight and there’s just going to be another war.

Which is why anything but a neutral Ukraine, genuinely neutral, or a Russian satrapy is also unacceptable. Ukraine wasn’t and isn’t part of NATO but that didn’t keep NATO from using it as a cat’s paw against Russia. If Russia wants a defanged, safe Ukraine on its border, it’s no longer just about staying out of NATO, true Austrian cold war style neutrality will be required.

And the since the neo-Nazis who are influential in the military and government, despite their small numbers, will never not be hostile to Russia, Ukraine has to be be de-Nazified. Out of the military, out of power, and either dead or in prison for a very long time.

Demographics isn’t the only thing which creates capability to fight, of course. The more of Ukraine that Russia takes, the weaker Ukraine will be in the future. What is particularly important is to take the entire coast and landlock the Ukrainian hump, but farther West Russia takes land, the less of a threat Ukraine is to the Russian heartlands.

Smaller population, worse geography, no Nazis anywhere near power, no allies to feed it weapons and help it fortify, and genuinely neutral: these are Russia’s post war goals for Ukraine.

These are maximal goals, and they require a completely defeated Ukraine, likely one that signs an uncoditional surrender. If they can be accomplished with a negotiated surrender, fine, but if Russia is wise it will fight till it gets the terms necessary to defang Ukraine and make it useless as a Western catspaw.

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What Should Now Be Obvious To Everyone About the Ukraine War

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On November 21, 2024

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As I said, day one, Russia was going to win this war if it wanted it enough. Russia’s advance is slow, but it is certain and it is NOT going to be reversed unless the US declares war, which is NOT going to happen. The Ukrainian army is finally nearing collapse, which I’d expect some time next year. The war will last another two years at most, I’d guess.

Peace will be made under the terms Russia wants, or the war will continue. Ukraine is still fighting, but everyone with the least lick of sense knows it is going to lose. Ukraine will have to accept the terms imposed on it, because if it doesn’t Russia will just keep going.

Trump’s peace plan (ostensibly) as floated in the WSJ was essentially a frozen conflict with a twenty year guarantee of not joining NATO. That’s not going to fly. Ukraine will be a demilitarized neutral state at best, if it won’t surrender it’ll be defeated and have a government imposed on it. The Russians will not cut any sort of deal with the West which requires the West to “keep” the deal. They believe that the West is “agreement incapable”, that is, that it will not obey any deals it signs if it doesn’t want to (as it didn’t obey the Minsk agreement) so no peace treaty which requires western enforcement or has Western troops in any part of Ukraine will be acceptable.

Russia has done just fine out of all this. Its people are happy and optimistic, its economy is booming and it’s now the 4th largest economy on PPP GDP terms and probably third in realistic terms: it has tons of resources, food, tech and a decent amount of industry, and it will handle climate change better than most nations. It is locked into the Chinese orbit as a junior partner, but China doesn’t spew contempt at Russia 24/7 the way the West does and has for my entire lifetime, nor slam it with repeated sanctions. (The sanctions started way before the war, and were mostly justified on the basis of “Russia shouldn’t run its own internal affairs the way it chooses. And the poor, poor oligarchs.”)

Again, this was always the most likely outcome and everyone who thought otherwise refused to look at the very simple differences in size, population, resources and industry between the two nations.

As for Ukraine, the best deal they could have gotten was offered by the Russians near the start of the war, but they believed NATO and the US and Boris Johnson and thought they could win. The result is going to be a much weaker and poorer Ukraine, probably with half the pre-war population.

Meanwhile sanctions, instead of harming Russia, boomeranged and hurt Europe far more than Russia, and have contributed to Europe’s ongoing de-industrialization.

Nobody in power the West or Ukraine has anything to be proud of in how they handled this. Even the depraved argument of “let’s fight to the last Ukrainian and weaken Russia” hasn’t worked, instead Russia is stronger than it has been since the fall of the USSR.

*Golf clap*

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Labor Membership & Power Requires Elite and Mass Support

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On November 20, 2024

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The Great Depression was cause by a demand problem: there wasn’t enough demand for goods, prices crashed and so did employment.

The policies put in place by the New Deal were almost all intended to increase demand and prices. Farm support, social security and so on. Elites were slaughtered by the great crash of 29 and the Depression. Not all supported the New Deal, in fact many don’t, FDR bragged they hated him. But obviously FDR had elite support.

This chart shows what happened:

I think that’s pretty clear. Union membership soars with new Deal, plateaus, then slowly declines. Elites after WWII were not nearly as scared, the economy was good, and Truman’s veto was over-ridden when an anti-union bill which made foreman inelligible for union support passed.

Over time public support for unions also declined. What happens is that those who remembered the depression and the time before it age out: we’re not talking GI, we’re talking Lost and older generations. The GI saw the depression, but they didn’t experience the roaring 20s. They didn’t get what life was like before all the wage, price and demand supports put in place by FDR.

But the mid 70s these people are out of power: not only was there a wave of deaths, but in the 70s there was a movement to replace them in Congress. The incomers wanted process fairness, not outcome fairness and they replaced the old timers. (Matt Stoller has written about this extensively.)

Soon afterwards the neoliberal era dawned, and its intention was to make the rich richer and everyone else poorer: to crush wages, ostensibly to deal with the supply shock by stopping people from consuming goods and services which required petroleum products. Children of the 70s supply shocks, they were terrified of inflation and figured that rich people don’t produce inflation which matters. (This is before the era of private jets.)

In general all successful political action requires some part of the elite to support it. It doesn’t have to be all, it doesn’t even have to be a majority (it wasn’t during the New Deal) but it must exist. Popular support is a power source, but it requires transmission and an engine to turn it into action.

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