Ian Welsh

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

Month: August 2018

The Hilarious Saudi-Canadian Dispute & The Less Hilarious Terrorism Threat From Saudi Arabia

By

On August 8, 2018

Comments

So, the Saudis are very very upset that Canada dared suggest they not violate human rights.

This is the offending tweet:

It started with a bit of fair tit-for-tat: The observation that Canada doesn’t treat its indigenous people well. Totally fair and true.

But then the Saudis, errr, escalated…

The Canadian ambassador to Saudi Arabia was expelled. Fifteen thousand Saudi students in Canadian universities have been ordered to go home and Saudi citizens in Canadian hospitals are being airlifted to non-Canadian hospitals.

Saudi Arabia has also ordered all state related organs holding Canadian securities to dump them, causing a drop in the Canadian dollar.

My reaction to all this is amusement, truly at the laugh-out-loud level.

Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, is hilariously incompetent and foolish. He keeps over-reaching. He tried to take out Qatar with an embargo and failed. He’s got an ongoing war with Yemen which is going to turn into a genocide. He’s selling off income-creating state assets to try and turn around the economy, in a step which will actually reduce state income and not improve the economy enough to make a difference.

He locked up a bunch of his relatives and other powerful Saudis, appears to have tortured them (at least one to death), and forced them to pay ransom to be released.

He’s running Saudi Arabia. He’s clearly an extraordinarily dangerous megalomaniac.

And his people threatened Canada with a terrorist attack!


There is no way that tweet can be taken as anything but a threat.

As Magnier says, any terrorist threat, especially by the biggest source of terrorist funding in the world, Saudi Arabia, should be taken seriously.

But…yeah, I’m sorry, fuck bin Salman. He seems to be confused about how much power he actually has. Canada needs nothing from Saudi Arabia. Nothing. We have plenty of our own oil, and that’s the only thing that Saudi Arabia has that matters in the world today.

Money? We have too much foreign money flooding in. Saudi Arabia’s money is a drop in the bucket compared to the Chinese money that has made housing unaffordable in all major Canadian cities.

Our problem isn’t getting foreign money. Our problem is we need to get rid of most of it. And if the Canadian dollar drops some, that’s fine. We export a lot.

As for the terrorist threat, by the leading terrorist country in the world (the US is it’s only competition), well, I do take it seriously. After all, most of the 9/11 attackers were from Saudi Arabia.

What Canada should do is just let it be known that if any attack that even remotely looks related to Saudi Arabia hits Canada, we’ll start supplying Saudi enemies with weapons–all the stuff that the Saudis don’t want them to have.

Oh, and as NATO members, we’ll blame Saudi Arabia, and state that an attack on one is an attack on all.

Saudi Arabia has only one card left that matters, other than terrorism: Selling oil in US dollars. That is it. Once the petro-dollar is broken (and it is going to be because other countries are moving to sell in something other than dollars), the US has no reason to continue supporting them.

Meanwhile, the rise of solar and electric cars means that the last oil boom is probably done, and if not, there’ll only be one more. Bin Salman’s desperate, and desperately stupid moves to try and diversify the economy won’t work: It’s too late and he’s doing it the wrong way.

The Saudi state will run out of money, and when states run out of money? That is when revolutions occur. Running out of money to pay the citizenry off and the enforcers is when it always happens.

Hopefully Bin Salman will be killed cleanly and not tortured, but I suspect a lot of his victims hope he gets a taste of his own medicine.

Saudi Arabia’s problems have almost nothing to do with foreigners making toothless observations about civil rights. Bin Salman should end his idiotic war in Yemen, stop picking foreign fights, then stand down and let someone competent take the reins. It’s the only chance his family has of keeping control of Saudi Arabia.

But, frankly, his family should lose control. Can’t happen soon enough. It’s just sad that so many people will suffer along the way. But that suffering is the responsibility of the Saudi royal family, not some powerless foreigners commenting on women’s rights who anyone with a sense of proportion would simply have ignored.

Pathetic.

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.

 

(A Just World) Hang’em High

By

On August 5, 2018

Comments

In a just world, all the leaders responsible for doing nothing (including corporate leaders) would be hung high and all their property confiscated (including that given to relatives and friends). This is going to lead to well over a billion preventable deaths, is genocidal for other species and may be genocidal for ours. As crimes goes it will be seen to exceed those of Genghis Khan by a wide margin.

Criminal negligence IS a crime.

As for those who were active deniers, since I don’t believe in torture, there is no punishment severe enough.


Also, as I have pointed out in the past, this is going to de-legitimize every ideology which failed to deal with it, including representative Democracy and Capitalism.

I’ve seen fools saying that the failure to deal with climate change wasn’t a failure of democracy. Such people are indeed fools. The major nations during the period when something should have been done were democracies.

Let me be clear, this is going to lead to famines and droughts which kill hundreds of millions of people, minimum. It will lead to water and land wars. It will lead to mass migrations which make past refugee “crises” seem as nothing.

With luck, it will transition to a new stable state which is not too bad for humans. It may even be plenty fine (even if most of the tropics will be uninhabitable for half the year if you want to, y’know, go outside.)

But getting there will suck, and we don’t know that we won’t get a runaway cycle that doesn’t stop anywhere good, or even survivable. I like to think it probably will, but the truth is that our understanding of climate is still too incomplete to be sure.

(Oh, ok, probably shouldn’t capital punish. Just lock’em up for life. Somewhere in the tropics.)

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.

How We Are Conditioned To Be Slaves

By

On August 3, 2018

Comments

Every ideology makes statements about human nature.

  • Capitalism: people are greedy;
  • Christianity: people are innately sinful;
  • Confucianism (Confucius original), people are neither good or bad, but pliable;

They make statements about how people should be treated. In capitalism, since people are greedy, they must be motivated with rewards. In Catholic Christianity, since people are innately sinful they must be forgiven, sin is natural. In original Confucianism, they must be trained to be good people.

All systems of learning are also conditioning processes. Take the discipline of economics. Economics believes  the idea that humans pursue self interest, know what it is, and make rational decisions to achieve it.

Studies have shown that there is only one group of humans who reliably act as economics predicts: people with economics degrees.

They learn how to think like an economist, and they make decisions like an economist.

For example, in sharing games.  One person is given, say,  $100 then has to give some to another person. That person decides whether to accept the offer. If they refuse, neither participant gets anything.

Economic theory says that the recipient should accept even a cent: after all, they’re better off than they would have been otherwise. But normal humans don’t do that. The less they are offered, the more likely they are to refuse.

Economics majors, on the other hand, take the offer.

Every discipline is like this. You learn to think like an economist, or sociologist, or political scientist or engineer, or doctor, or… whatever.

But life, overall, is like this.

Think about school. School is a place where you sit down, speak only when called on, do what you’re told, in the way you are told to do it. It is brutal indoctrination in obedience to teacher.

If it doesn’t work with you, what happens? Well, unless you’re very smart, you don’t get good grades. If it really doesn’t work with you, you get kicked out.

Higher education, required for almost all good jobs, cannot be received without good grades.

Indoctrination has failed, you will never have a good job, and thus you will never have power in society.

School exists to teach people to be obedient to power. It exists to make sure that when bosses tell them what to do, how and to be quiet unless boss gives permission, they do so.

Grab the kids at age 6, indoctrinate them while they’re young and almost helpless, deliver the results.

Kids are conditioned to act like employees. Like, frankly, wage slaves.

This is a very effective social system, because it does what it must: it makes sure that people who effectively resist the conditioning don’t get power later on.

The rare exceptions get power by going thru the capitalist system, outside the job system. They are extremely rare, but they are also conditioned, because capitalism has another conditioning set, where if you don’t do what is required to make a lot of money, no matter how bad (see how Bezos, in Amazon, treats his employees or Steve Jobs acted) you will never have a lot of power in that system.

Systems often break down when they either start letting thru the wrong people, or when they stop letting thru too many competent people.

Or they break down when the requirements of the system start producing results so bad it breaks the system (see Climate Change.)

To bring it back, why do Economists act like monsters when they become central bankers?

Because they’ve been trained to act like monsters: to take into account only self-interest. And being long time products of the education system (PhD + school = 22 years or so), they also know that, even if they don’t have a direct boss, they are to do what bosses and teachers would want them to.

After 22 years of conditioning, well, they just do it. It isn’t about rational thought, it’s about conditioning.

Meanwhile, the rest of us, conditioned to be slaves from childhood, sit there at our shitty jobs and just take it even if we’ve broken enough of the conditioning to walk. Because if we don’t, if the conditioning is shown to have failed, well, soon we won’t have a job, and then we won’t have a house or enough food.

This is how successful societies and ideological systems work.

It is also, a small piece of what you will learn in my book, “The Creation of Reality”, which is almost complete its first draft.

More later. In the meantime, you’ve been conditioned to be a slave. Recognize that, but be careful how you rebel, lest you suffer the consequences the masters have in mind.

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.

Page 2 of 2

Previous

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén