We are now just over $7k raised, putting us about $1,000 from the second tier, of:
Three more articles, this set most likely on the conditions that create golden Ages, including one on how to create an ecological Golden Age (what we need next.)
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There is much moaning and wailing about how people in many Western countries, and in the US in particular, are not taking Covid seriously. Not wearing masks, not giving up Thanksgiving, not staying home, and so on.
This is to be expected. Part of it is that our elites are not taking it seriously. We are regularly told of important people going out to a restaurant to eat, or whatever.
Others, like Trump and many Republicans have downplayed Covid.
But the simpler explanation is based on one of the firm rules of human nature:
Whatever it is that we must do, must be good, because we must believe we are good.
People have no choice but to play Covid-roulette. The choice is to work, and take a chance on getting Covid, or not work and wind up homeless when you can’t pay the rent. Since Covid is only a chance, and homelessness is sure, you go work.
Since you must work, and since anything you do must be good, because you must believe you are a good person, therefore Covid is no big deal, because if it is a big deal, by working you may be putting other people as well as yourself at risk.
But you’re good, so therefore that can’t be so, therefore Covid is no big deal.
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This mechanic is one of the greatest sources of evil in human history and society. The correct response would be to shrug and simply note the calculus: “If I don’t work, I’m homeless, so I work and yeah, some people may die because of that, but the people who could easily afford to pay me not to work (the government/central banks) won’t, so, so be it.”
When choosing a lesser evil, admit “I am choosing a lesser evil.” Admit “I am still doing something bad, but I do not see a third option.”
If you don’t do this, you can’t move towards creating that third option, and by denying reality you make things far, far worse, as well as being a dishonest fool.
Anyway, the actual responsibility is on elites who don’t do the blindingly obvious: cancel rent and mortgages and pay small businesses to close, while providing actual essential workers with serious protecting. Get the pandemic down to zero, track and trace and outbreaks, quarantine and so on. Since it has been done, it can be done.
All of this Covid denialism, combined with vaccine fears, is going to cause a great deal of trouble as the vaccines come out and a lot of people refuse them. Vaccines provide herd immunity only if enough people take them.
Welcome to dystopia, courtesy of fucked up elites and the human need to feel that we’re good, whatever our objective actions are. (This need may be a human need that is somewhat culture bound, however. We can hope it isn’t invariable.)
There was a time when almost no one would have put forward anything like the below, today, guillotine references are routine.
Today’s parents have forgotten that children’s play should teach them how to be responsible adults. pic.twitter.com/bGprm9rv09
— Will works for the working class (@ClassFirster) December 3, 2020
Back in the 2000s, I spent a fair bit of effort advocating for policies to help the majority of Americans and Westerners by pointing out to the wealthy and powerful that, historically, sometimes oppression ends very very badly. This effort failed abysmally, as have other similar efforts, sometimes by the brighter and more forward looking of our inbred overlords.
Fast forward to today, and these sorts of images are everywhere. What was once verbotten, because the Terror is taught to everyone to be the worst thing possible and the French Revolution as the bad revolution (as opposed to the American revolution, which was supposedly good, unless you were a slave or a native).
The terror was, well, a TERROR. The revolution did not last, but the vast majority of those who ruled pre-revolutionary France did, indeed, die. When the allies won, despite their attempts, the Bourbon restoration was a failure. The people necessary to have made it a success, were, simply, dead.
As I have noted a few times here, the Terror was less terrible than the millenium of oppression that came before it. For those who need the point spelled out in angry detail, Mark Twain has you covered.
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At any rate, Western elites have continued this process. Huge swathes outside the core of Paris are, I am told, essentially third-world slums. Vast numbers of Americans have been driven into poverty and homelessness and huge tent cities spring up, and then are cleared by police in the most punitive way possible (destroying homeless peoples’ possessions), but then spring up again, because what the hell are they supposed to do?
The middle and even the lower upper class lives in terror of falling out of their comfortable spot into the lower class or homelessness. Covid has vastly enriched the already rich and about triple decimated small businesses, while throwing further millions into poverty.
Americans are now willing to vote for men on horseback types, Trump proved that, even if he was a fake, a blowhard and essentially incompetent at anything but campaigning (which he was very, very good at, and if he hadn’t fumbled Covid, I am confident he would have been re-elected).
People are tired. Younger generations like the Millenials and Zoomers have never seen good times, and even X-ers only got a whiff of them, with most never having been part of them. The dotcom boom was short, and passed a lot of people by entirely. Same with boomlets like the Massachussets miracle.
The standard way to deal with the hoi polloi is to split them into groups and make them compete with each other. Our elites have dutifully run this playbook, and sometimes even very well, but as there is less and less upward mobility, less and less chance of being one of the blessed few (mobility has collapsed), this becomes harder and harder to pull off. People stop thinking they’ll ever get ahead, stop seeing the guy or gal next to them as the problem and look up towards the top to see who’s really oppressing them.
Add in the joy of climate change added to normal imperial decay and generational economic cycles and you have a triple whammy slouching down that road, baring its thousand mouths dripping with blood.
There was a possibility for a gentle revolution. For a sweet, kind, caring redistribution of wealth; a gentle and careful breakup of power and wealth, leaving the wealthy still rich, but not obscenely so, still powerful but not an oligarchy.
If that was going to happen, Corbyn would be Prime Minister (instead of virtually thrown out of the party, as Labor leader Starmer continues his purge of the left), and Sanders would likewise be President. Everything necessary was done to make sure neither of those things would happen, that the gentle revolution would die aborning. There will be no rebirth of the great society of the post war period, with environmental protection and equality for women and minorities added.
This being so, there will either be a steady state police-surveillance state, abetted by modern company store serfdom, keeping people in eternal debt and despair, or there will be revolution. That revolution may come from the right, or from the left. If it comes from the right, the oligarchs will mostly be okay, a few stupid ones will be made examples of (as Putin did with Russia’s oligarchs), the others will bow, patronage will go to the half of the poor willing to kill the other half, and life will continue.
If it comes from the left, well, the rich are right, that’s the real danger. At best they will lose everything, at worse, well, those guillotine memes tell you their fate. Machiavelli understood this, and he was right. When you hurt a man you must destroy him entirely: He must have no power left at all, or he will take vengeance. The left cannot tolerate oligarchs or anyone who was willing to work for them who does not jump to the left’s side immediately as the revolution begins.
Hopefully, it won’t be a Terror, but it may be, and it may be because people are terrified already and they want their overlords to feel what they have felt, to know despair and fear and hopelessness. They want revenge, and indeed, something that is close to justice, because their overlords, as Covid has demonstrated, have been killing them and impoverishing them for money for a couple generations now.
The guillotine is a symbol of the fact that the powerful aren’t always the only ones who may inflict terror.
If our elites were in any way wise, they would back down, but they are not, and so the guillotine will rise ever higher in our collective consciousness until, perhaps, it reaps its bloody harvest once again.
Back in August, when it became clear that schools were going to reopen in countries like the US and Britain that did not have Covid under control, and which never would control Covid until there is a vaccine, I wrote an article warning against going back to school while Covid was out of control.
I’d think twice before sending my kids back to school under these circumstances.
I was told this was wrong, that it’d be OK. So let’s revisit that (specific examples courtesy of the Republican Dalek):
Here’s a nice little pie-graph from Toronto, Ontario:
Children get Covid. Most don’t have symptoms, but they can pass it on. Some, even though they don’t have symptoms, will have long term damage. Because they don’t have symptoms, most children won’t be tested, so the numbers above are surely significantly lower than the actual count.
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Once they get it, children, showing no symptoms, can pass it on to their parents, grandparents and any one else who comes into contact with them. They may be somewhat less infectious than adults, but that isn’t the same as not being infectious. The older the kid, the worse (high schools absolutely should be closed.)
Re-opening schools was moronic. But if you want the hoi polloi to go back to work, well the schools have to be open, because schools are primarily childcare. Note that high end workers are still isolating at home: the City of London is still effectively shuttered. Our lords and masters sure aren’t putting themselves at risk if they don’t need to.
Sending your kid back to school may be something you had to do, legally, or because you have to work, since if you don’t, you and the kid wind up homeless. So you play Covid-roulette. But as a public health measure it was stupid at best, criminally malign at worst and people who didn’t need to send their kids back shouldn’t have and often didn’t. Many schools don’t even make children wear masks, and schools, with kids locked into rooms for hours on end in close proximity, are near ideal for Covid spreading.
Our elites do the wrong thing, repeatedly, knowing it will kill or impoverish a bunch of us, and they don’t care. It’s that simple.
We’ve raised just under $6,000 so far, which means we’ve reached the first goal at $5,000 – five linked articles in a series about political concepts and how to actually use them. Most people learn political and economic concepts, but the knowledge really does them no good, since no on explains when they work and how, or when they don’t work.
Fundraising has been slower this year than normal. Readership is up, so it’s probably what you’d expect: the pandemic has been bad for a lot of people.
That said, donating or subscribing does make a big difference to me. If you find my writing valuable AND you can afford to donate or subscribe (please don’t if it will cause you hardship), I’d greatly appreciate it.
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