Ian Welsh

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

Month: May 2017 Page 2 of 3

The Off-Ramps Never Used

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On May 19, 2017

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This is an old joke:

A very religious man was once caught in rising floodwaters. He climbed onto the roof of his house and trusted God to rescue him. A neighbour came by in a canoe and said, “The waters will soon be above your house. Hop in and we’ll paddle to safety.”

“No thanks,” replied the religious man. “I’ve prayed to God and I’m sure he will save me.”

A short time later, the police came by in a boat. “The waters will soon be above your house. Hop in and we’ll take you to safety.”

“No thanks,” replied the religious man. “I’ve prayed to God and I’m sure he will save me.”

A little time later, a rescue services helicopter hovered overhead, let down a rope ladder, and said: “The waters will soon be above your house. Climb the ladder and we’ll fly you to safety.”

“No thanks,” replied the religious man. “I’ve prayed to God and I’m sure he will save me.”

All this time, the floodwaters continued to rise, until soon they reached above the roof and the religious man drowned. When he arrived in heaven, he demanded an audience with God. Ushered into God’s throne room, he said, “Lord, why am I here in heaven? I prayed for you to save me! I trusted you to save me from that flood.”

“Yes you did my child” replied the Lord. “And I sent you a canoe, a boat, and a helicopter. But you never got in.”

I am watching, right now, the British, offered an off-ramp by Jeremy Corbyn, and refusing it. Corbyn has been right in his life about almost everything: He was against every bad war, he was against cutting welfare, he was against privatizations, he was against bad trade deals, and bailouts, and so on.

More than this, he acted on that: He voted against them, spoke against them, marched against them. He has not taken bribes, he has not charged the taxpayer for fancy hotels or booze. He is a man of integrity who can reasonably be expected to do what he says.

Like all men of integrity, that means he won’t always tell you want to hear, but that’s the price you pay if you want an actual honest person in charge.

So, of course, Brits are going to elect May, a truly horrid woman who is complicit in taking wheelchairs away from the poor, and a thousand other things you can read about if you have the curiosity of a turnip and access to a search engine.

Many rowing boats, helicopters, and so on have been offered throughout my life. I remember the warnings about inequality rising from the mid 80s. I remember the warnings about climate change, also from the mid 80s. (They existed earlier, but I was too young.)

Candidates ran who were good on these things, including presidential candidates like Kucinich. They were laughed at and ridiculed. Everyone knows that you can’t actually tax rich people, forbid corruption, or not destroy the ecosphere’s ability to support human life for profit.

People screamed from the rooftops. Many many books were published. People went on TV. Huge marches occurred.

But candidates who would actually reverse bad policy were jokes. “Hahahaha. Only suckers want to do the right thing. He’s not a credible candidate, we have to vote for someone evil, just a little less evil than the most evil candidate!”

Hahahahaha.

The off-ramps were there. They were offered time and time again. And we refused them, time and time again.

At some point, the off-ramps will run out. In fact, they already have. All the off-ramps now lead to “OMG THIS IS SUCKSVILLE.” But the off-ramps coming up, and pretty damn soon, are labelled “First Level of Hell.”

The current catastrophes and the upcoming ones were all affirmatively chosen and then re-affirmed repeatedly by voting majorities or pluralities, and by the elites of every major country.

When you die, if there is a God, don’t ask him why he didn’t send help. Ask him why we didn’t accept it.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Get a Grip

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On May 17, 2017

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And lower the drama.

Yeah, the world system is broken, and yes, we are due for a series of catastrophes which will be apocalyptic for many. It’s already been apocalyptic for a lot of species, and there’s no cosmic calculus which says that humans are immune: The top of the food chain usually dies in great die-offs, actually.

But this stuff is in the future. Today, the majority of people are substantially as well off as they were in 2015. I doubt anyone reading this is doing so from, say, Yemen.

Trump is not the worst leader to ever lead a country, and so far he hasn’t done anything as bad as what either Bush (Iraq) or Obama (Libya) did. Of course, you’re probably American and may be scared of losing your Obamacare, but war is worse than that. It’s just that, hey, you’re American, and America is supposed to do the worst crimes to people overseas or to blacks, hispanics, and poor whites in dank hole prisons where you can’t hear them scream, where you can’t see their agony and degradation.

Now, of course, if your personal life is going to shit due to your personal economy, health, or social relationships, well, that’s bad, and that may even be related to politics (in the broader sense, it almost certainly is), but most people are about as well off as they were before Trump.

As I have pointed out repeatedly, people during WWII still managed to love, find time to be happy, write novels, and so on. This isn’t WWII, it isn’t the Mongol Invasions or the An-Lushan rebellions (far worse than WWII compared to the world population at the time, by the way).

If you’re basically healthy, have food, a soft warm place to sleep, and aren’t ruled by a tyrant in your daily life, well, life is basically fine–assuming no one you love is suffering hugely.

That was true two years ago, ten years ago, and one hundred years ago.

Unless you’re reading from Yemen or Syria or something, get a grip on yourself. Things are going to get far worse than this, and if you’re not too old and reasonably healthy, you’ll likely be here for at least some of it.

If you’re flying apart at this, then how will you handle catastrophe when it actually arrives?

Use this as an opportunity to learn equanimity or toughness (the two are basically the same), and how to be good to those around you even when things are somewhat shitty. When everything does go bad for your part of the world, will you keep it together and be a source of warmth, love, and competence? Or will you be broken?

It’s perfectly human to fear, and sadly human to live in fear of a future that isn’t here yet.

But it’s no way to live.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Usefulness of Alt-Left, EmoProg, BernieBros, and FireBaggers

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On May 15, 2017

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The existence of all of the above phrases brings joy to my life. I consider it like nature giving skunks a broad white stripe down their back, as an extra “bad, very, very bad” warning.

All of these phrases are, or were, used by centrists to disparage people to their left.

Emo-prog: “You have emotions about issues, which means you aren’t serious! Why can’t you debate reasonably about how many brown people we should kill, whether torture works, and how many people should be raped in prison? Having emotions mean you can’t be trusted with these decisions.”

Fire-Bagger: “You’re just like the tea-baggers because you want Obamacare to include a public option so that it can’t easily be destroyed by Republicans or gamed by insurance companies. Don’t you  understand this is the best we can do, and Republicans would never dare destroy it! We’ll build from it. People like you, you’re just like right-wing crazies who want to shut down the government!”

BernieBro: “You’re all men, you oppose Clinton because she’s a woman, and you’re racist. Racist and sexist. How dare you criticize the most qualified woman in history for Iraq and Libya. Only brown people in America count. And all you young women who support Bernie, you just want to sleep with young men. Traitors!”

Alt-Left: “There’s no difference between people who want universal health care and people who are Nazis!” (Notice that alt-left is the functional equivalent of FireBagger–name people for their exact opposite and pretend they’re the same.)

So I’m very grateful for these phrases because anyone who uses them non-ironically marks themself as my enemy (or a complete fool under the sway of my enemies). It’s that simple.

The centrists (who are really conservatives bordering on reactionaries) who bill themselves as the center left, assume that actual left-wingers have to vote for them. “I am offering a crumb, sir, a crumb, and the Republicans are not offering even a crumb.” They grow very very offended when left-wingers dare to stand up for actual left-wing principles, such as not bombing brown people to smithereens, or making sure everyone gets health care, or increasing the minimum wage to something, well, honestly, still pretty shitty.

Anyone who uses these phrases is a bad person. They aren’t as bad as actual Nazis or Republicans, but they are basically evil people. Hillary Clinton, their avatar and savior, couldn’t even bring herself to support a national $15/hour minimum wage, and they have done nothing meaningful, while in power, to stop climate change, despite acknowledging it is real.

I mean, at least Republicans have the grace to say, “No, I don’t believe in climate change. Therefore, I don’t think inaction will kill billions.”

Democrats and Labour and other “third Way” movements say, “This is a terrible, terrible problem which will kill wads of people, and, yes, I will sign a piece of paper but will do nothing that matters despite knowing that failure to act is effectively mass murder.”

So, Alt-left.

Great phrase. Use it early and often if you’re a douchebag centrist. It saves a lot of time for everyone.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Nature Does Not Grade on a Curve

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On May 13, 2017

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Globe on FireOne of the problems with how we are educated and how we work is that almost all of it is “grading on a curve.” What matters is what our teacher thinks of us; what our boss thinks of us. Except when it comes to sickness, nothing else matters even nearly as much.

It’s all “on a curve,” it’s all social bullshit. If you can convince your boss or teacher to pass you, you pass, and there’s no objective level required in most cases: The difficulty is set by a person.

Nature does not grade on a curve.

If a bear is chasing you, and you can’t run fast enough, you’re probably dead.

If your capitalist democratic system can’t handle climate change, a problem predicted decades ago (and in plenty of time to fix it), billions of people will die.

It doesn’t matter whether there are “reasons” why we couldn’t handle it, not to the dead.

It also doesn’t matter if there are “reasons” why we can’t come up with a better way of running the world than capitalism with a side of democracy or autocracy, depending on the country.

People are always nattering on about how capitalism is the bestest system ever. (Although what has really produced the changes they like is mostly industrialization, not capitalism, though that’s a different article.)

It’s nice that we can’t come up with something better than capitalism (er, ok, not nice), but capitalism has failed. That it hasn’t blown up yet is irrelevant to this. If my brakes and steering fail at 90 miles an hour as I’m heading towards a mountain cliff, well, no catastrophe actually happens until I not only go off the cliff, but hit the ground, but the future is set.

That’s where we are; the future is essentially set. We aren’t going to stop climate change, it’s doubtful we even can (it would, even theoretically, take massive geo-engineering at this point), so capitalism, and the political systems attached to it, like democracy and Chinese one-party autocratic rule, have failed.

It is that simple. And nature does not give a fuck if capitalism is the “bestest bestest system that we ever came up with” or if, qua Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

They have failed.

And what people are not getting through their heads is that they will be seen to have failed by those who have to suffer the consequences of our monstrous abnegation of responsibility.

They will be loathed; even as we who live in this era and especially those who were adults in the 80s and 90s, will not just be loathed, but treated as lepers, similiar to how we consider Nazis. (Yeah, I went there, deal.)

One of the problems with de-naturing (with living in almost entirely human made systems, and with pushing those bits we don’t control off into ghettos as we would illness), is that it means most people almost never experience a benchmark that isn’t set by other human beings. They feel, in their guts, that if only other people are convinced, any problem can be fixed or finangled.

No.

The bear doesn’t care that you can’t run fast enough because TV is funner than going for a jog, and nature doesn’t care that shareholders needed value and that oil barons didn’t want to be a little poorer (or whatever).

And neither will those who suffer from climate changes due to our ethical monstrosity and sheer incapability.

Capitalism is a shit system in a number of ways. It can be made to work, by people who stay right on top of it, as between the 30s and 70 or so, but it is prone to going off the rails. If all that meant was that the poor suffer what they must and the powerful do as they will, well, so be it, but it isn’t.

We must come up with better ways to run our societies. We are creating existential threats by failing to do so, and our infatuation with capitalism risks taking democracy down with it.

Worse worlds are always possible. So are better ones, and no system is ever “the best.”

And nature doesn’t grade on a curve.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Open Thread

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On May 12, 2017

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Please use this to talk among yourselves, should you choose. Trump fires Comey (he needed firing, but, ummm, not like this); and Sessions decides that the drug war should go back to the 90s.

Ick.

A Middle Class Which Aligns with the Rich Cuts Its Own Throat

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On May 9, 2017

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This was explained to me by Stirling Newberry years ago.

The middle class, can, broadly speaking, align with the rich or with the poor.

If it aligns with the rich, the policies it favors benefit the rich exponentially more than they do the middle class. Tax cuts went primarily to the rich, by magnitudes, for example. Real estate prices rising faster than wages made some middle class families rich, but benefited the rich magnitudes more than the middle class.

Money translates almost directly to power in capitalist societies and even more directly in capitalist democracies without adequate corruption controls (which is almost all of them). The rich become powerful faster than the middle class and ultimately the policies they favor do not include keeping the middle class healthy: The rich want low wages, “flexible” labour laws, bankruptcy laws that favor their interests but not that of the middle class, plenty of financialized rent streams, and so on.

The first generation to make the devil’s bargain with the rich can benefit, maybe even some of the second, mind you. A lot of “Reagan Democrats” won–they sold their houses, and they retired to some place sunny with cheap brown labor to wipe their bums in their senesence. But their kids are saddled with huge debt, make less money than their parents at every stage of their lives, and can’t afford to buy houses or even pay rent anywhere decent.

If the middle class sides with the poor, on the other hand, almost everything they do also helps the middle class. Poor people with money spend that money, and wage increases are much more useful to the middle class than capital gains because they are durable. And policies which reduce the size of the working class and poor, make the middle class bigger and stronger. The working class, absent a huge swell in their numbers, are no threat to the middle class.

Ironically, the working class and poor are a threat to the middle class precisely when the middle class aligns themselves with the rich, because that swells the number of the poor and makes them desperate. It also knocks a lot of middle and upper class down (the upper class is not the rich, they are its direct servants, plus a few others), and those people are angry and know how the system works.

The middle class not only justifies its existence ethically by helping the poor, doing so safeguards its own existence.

The right thing to do, ethically, is almost always the right thing to do in policy terms. Those who believe otherwise almost always pay a frightful price for their attempt to be clever in service to their greed and selfishness.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Macron Wins in France

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On May 7, 2017

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Le Pen’s result is actually somewhat worse than the polling, at 35 percent.

I remain convinced that the real loser of this election is Britain, which is going to find it brutal to leave the EU without an ally–and Le Pen would have been an ally.

Macron, who ran Hollande’s disastrous economic policy, will be a Trudeau-style leader, very shiny and so on, good on talking about social issues, but his policies are standard neoliberal: Take away workers’ rights, and grind them down in the name of labor market flexibility. These policies won’t improve the economy.

Hopefully next time, the real left will be in the final round (it was close this time with Melenchon).

It remains a pity that we have to grind this out, in great misery, rather than simply leaping to candidates like Corbyn, Melenchon, or (to a lesser extent) Sanders, but the electorate is still not willing to actually embrace positive change. Even when they want change, they want it done by assholes (Cameron/May/Trump) or by people whose track records indicate servile subservience to neoliberal norms (Trudeau, Obama, Macron).

So be it. We will simply have to wait for death and the time to make changes. It will cost us much misery and many deaths, but it is unavoidable.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Lying Liars, the Media, and Broken Democracies

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On May 5, 2017

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I want to return, briefly, to something simple.

You can’t make good decisions if you have faulty information. If you are being fed lies, and you believe them, you’re sunk.

I want to emphasize two numbers:

  1. 70 percent of Americans thought that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.
  2. 89 percent of stories about Jeremy Corbyn in newspapers during one period were found to misrepresent his positions.

As a result:

  1. Americans supported the Iraq War (at first, with notable exceptions).
  2. Brits do not support Labour, because they have been told a bunch of lies about its leaders.

In both cases, you are dealing with a media problem. In both cases, the media amplified and failed to correct various lies–or made them up wholesale.

The media likes to claim that they are the Fourth Estate and that they are required for a healthy democracy. But an unhealthy media, a dishonest media, makes things worse, not better.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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