Tag: 2

Reducing Suffering

On June 27, 2025

As a Canadian, the issue of people removing snow from the sidewalk is a big deal. Some years ago, I lived near a house where they never removed the snow. It piled up until it was almost four feet high, and some partial thaws meant that underneath all that snow was ice. Every time I had to walk in that direction I cursed the owners (there was an SUV that came and went, so I knew it wasn’t uninhabited). One time, I did slip, and I was furious, even though the pain of the fall was minor.

Thing is, I don’t enjoy being furious or upset. Oh, a little anger is sometimes nice enough, but overall it’s an unpleasant feeling unless you’ve been having even worse emotions like fear, despair, powerlessness, or self-pity.

This is what Buddha called the second arrow. If you’ve been shot by an arrow, you’re in pain. If you’re upset that you’ve been shot by an arrow, you’re adding additional suffering.

Let’s run through three scenarios. Imagine each of them briefly, as if they happened to you:

1) You turn a corner and trip over a fallen branch, falling. You’re a little hurt (abraded hands), but basically okay. How upset are you?

2) You slip on some ice someone was supposed to clean up and fall. You’re a little hurt, but basically okay. How upset are you?

3) You’re walking down the street, and someone sticks out their leg and trips you, then laughs at you. You fall, but catch yourself. While a little hurt, you’re basically okay. How upset are you?

If you’re a normal person either #2 (negligence) or #3 (active malevolence) upsets you more. Probably, it’s the asshole who tripped you. (You might also get upset at the branch and kick it, swear at it, or enjoy breaking it, but hopefully not.)

The point here is that being upset makes your suffering worse. It also doesn’t deal with whatever caused the problem. Picking up the branch you tripped over, getting the city to fine the person not shoveling their snow, and either calling the cops or in times and places where it’s allowed, beating the hell out of the guy who tripped you might make sure there are no repeats.

You can do any of those things without being upset, through cold, clear calculation. If you don’t remove the branch, you or someone else could trip over it again. If you don’t convince the homeowner to shovel the snow, same thing. If you don’t make the tripper decide tripping people is a bad idea, he’ll do it again.

Much of why we get upset is that we have expectations about how other people should behave or even how the world should be. (How dare that branch trip you up!) Then, we think that if someone hurts us, we should get upset.

But, again, being upset doesn’t hurt the other person (though a display of anger might make a difference if you can make them scared of you) and doesn’t get them to change their behaviour. Indeed, in the case of the tripper, they want you to be upset. Your anger is part of their reward, just like how online trolls are trying to make you angry.

Being upset does hurt you, though. It makes your suffering worse.

But if you believe you should be upset, you will be.

So the first step is to ask yourself: What benefit there is to being upset? Do this all the time when something makes you upset, just ask yourself, “Does this help? Do I like feeling this?” Maybe you do (usually in the case of anger), but most of the time, the honest answer is gong to be no.

Over time, if you keep doing this, you’ll be upset less and less. You’ll change the reflex.

We add suffering to almost everything. If you get a bad headache and are upset because it “isn’t fair,” that adds suffering to the headache. If you get upset at yourself for doing something stupid, that adds suffering. I used to be like that; I stopped when I realized that, after decades of being harsh with myself, my behaviour hadn’t changed. In other words, being upset when I made a mistake wasn’t reducing the number of mistakes, it was just making me unhappy. (When I did stop being too self-critical, mistakes decreased somewhat, ironically.)

Buddha’s Second Arrow is the low-lying fruit, the easiest way to reduce your suffering — suffering which doesn’t help you deal with whatever issues you face. When you’re cool and calm, you’re more likely to fix whatever the problem is — if it can be fixed — faster and more competently than you are upset.

Pull out the second arrow.

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The Middle East Is Hastening Ukraine’s Fall & The End of the European Era

By Ian Welsh

On June 25, 2025

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The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

Rarely spoken of is the effects of the Middle Eastern wars on Ukraine. For a long time, Ukraine got everything it wanted, but since Oct 7th, it has been #2, or worse, on America’s priority list. Mossad has a great deal of influence in America, just short of control, almost certainly due to a sickening collection of videos and pictures, and Israel has received the first cut off everything it needed: most especially of interceptor missiles.

Even so, the reason that Israel and the US called for a ceasefire and Iran did not (though it accepted one) is that Israel was less than a week from running out of air defense missiles, and as best I can tell, the US could only have supplied about another 7-10 days worth.

What this means for Ukraine is simple enough, they’re being absolutely hammered by Russian missiles and bombs. They don’t have enough air defense, they don’t have enough missiles for the air defense, and there is no reasonable prospect of re-stocking. The West’s larder is empty.

The tempo of Russia advances continues to increase. It’s still slow, but it’s at least eight times as fast as it was a year ago, and as Ukraine runs out of men, weapons and ammunition (Western shortages go far beyond air defense), plus as morale continues to plummet in Ukrainian armed forces, the prospect of “big arrow” warfare grows closer.

As I’ve said before I expect that period will arrive next year. The fighting age male population is decimated, those willing to fight are or will be mostly dead, and Russia will win the war decisively, taking whatever they want to. The only danger of this not happening is Putin accepting a peace offer before that: like Khameini, he is very cautious, doesn’t like war and wants it over. If Zelensky ever gets his head on straight, or is replaced, he’s likely to accept a peace deal much short of what can be accomplished by arms and an unconditional surrender.

This will be a HUGE loss for the West. The first war they have decisively lost on the battlefield in generations. There will be no concealing it, and the inability to ramp up production of weapon systems and munitions will leave the collective West so weak that no one will be able to believe they could win a conventional war against China, or even Russia.

It will, psychologically, be the end of Western hegemony. For almost 400 years the West has been dominant, and since Industrial Revolution, overwhelmingly dominant.

That era is almost over. The economic aftershocks will be huge: the end of American dollar hegemony is likely within five years, ten at the most and the entire world except, perhaps, Canada, the US and Europe, will re-orient to China. The US will even lose South Korea and Japan as reliable allies, indeed, it arguably already has (more on that another time.)

This is a literal epochal period. The “nothing ever happens” fools are missing that this is the end of a literal era: the era of European supremacy (the US is just a European settler state and Britain’s successor.)

The new era will be multipolar only if China wants it to be. They are approaching “America after WWII” levels of industrial and technological power. However, for at time, they will probably allow a multipolar world, as they are smart enough not to want to be a superpower or “world cop.”

Normally this would cycle to a superpower period, but environmental issues are likely to short-circuit normal macro-geopolitical cycles. Everyone will wind up in survival mode, and the question will be who manages this best. Whoever does will lead the next cycle, which will occur long after most or all of us are dead.

So, as best you can, you may as well be interested. You are living in truly interesting times, which come around only every half millenia or so.

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It’s The Economy, Stupid (AKA Economists)

By Ian Welsh

On November 6, 2024

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Over ninety-nine percent of economists did not predict the 2008 financial crisis.

The vast majority of economists were pro-globalization, by which I mean pro offshoring and outsourcing. They said it would be good for America, they were wrong.

China is predicted to wind up with over 50% of the world’s industry by 2030. Forget all the bullshit about great power competition. It’s over. There may be a war, but if there is one the West will either lose or the world will be destroyed in a nuclear exchange.

Back in the 90s an economist called Brockway liked to say “Economists are bad for your health.”

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Let’s bring this back to the election. I thought that abortion would be the election defining issue. Stupid of me, though abortion was #2 and only four percent behind inflation. It was inflation, which given how much I write about it, I should have expected. Two tables from the CNN exit polls:

Abortion was the second most important issue. Inflation was #1, and people who voted for pro-abortion measures voted about 9% less for Harris.

Economists meanwhile keep talking about the #Vibecession: the idea that there is no recession, people just think there is.

Economists, as usual, are full of shit. They have a professional dependence on official statistics and refuse to realize that many of them don’t reflect reality. As I have written in the past, according to official inflation statistics the price of cards did not rise between 2000 and 2020. In another case, you will be happy to know that medical service costs are going down. Hedonic adjustments are completely out of control: prices are dropping, you see, because products are so much better now. (There are other finangles, this is the main one.)

Growth numbers are based entirely on nominal growth minus the inflation rate, as are real wage numbers.

I would bet that the US economy has been contracting since 2008, but since inflation is understated, it isn’t visible.

I would also bet that median welfare for Americans has been declining since somewhere between 1968 and 1979, though average might have been increasing till 2008 because of how much money was being shoveled to the rich and wealthy.

We live in a pretend world, and economists are the chief pretenders, the sycophants telling the Emperor how wonderful his new clothes are.

To riff on Galbraith, economists exist to make astrologers look good.

Economics, as a discipline, should be wiped from the face of the Earth. The less than 1% of economists who aren’t charlatans or fools are not enough to justify the harm economists do, which exceeds even that of MBAs.

Harris lost because of the insistence of Democrats that the economy was good, inflation was fine, and that voters were too stupid to read their own grocery bills. Because of this belief Harris said she wouldn’t have done anything different than Biden did. What she needed to do was get out there and say she was going to drive down prices, especially rent and groceries.

As for Trump, we’ll talk more about the effects of his economic plans, if instituted, later.