I hope 2016 was good for you, and I hope 2017 is better.
Category: Miscellaney Page 10 of 14
My friends, and the people who read me because they love to hate me:
There are a few hundred people in America who have noticeable individual influence over America’s elections and political system.
You aren’t one of them.
Responsibility is proportionate to power. As an individual American, your individual responsibility is miniscule.
It’s not your fault.
Now, as a group, Americans have great responsibility; Americans are responsible for America.
Americans are responsible, but most individuals have so little responsibility that they might as well have none.
I bring this up because I am seeing people in vast amounts of stress, guilt, anger, and fear over the election.
Don’t.
Also, even if you think that a particular result will be bad for you personally, the same rule applies: There is so little you can do about it, worrying about it is worrying about something over which you have no control.
This, my friends and haters, is a great way to be fantastically unhappy all the time.
Now, it’s easier said than done to stop a lifetime of worrying about stuff you can’t control, but the first step is understanding the pointlessness of it.
The food is still good, the world still holds plenty of beauty, and there is still happiness to be found.
But not if you are tying yourself in knots of guilt or worry over events over which you have no control.
Go do something nice for yourself, or someone else (doing something nice for someone else is one of the best things you can do for yourself), and let it all go.
If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Ah, the 80s.
(Part 1: Fiddle Music!)
Doesn’t appear to have gone far. Not enough colonels.
Has failed. Not enough troops, not organized well enough. Will increase Erdogan’s power significantly. Not good.
If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
A truck has plowed into a crowd at a Bastille Day celebration. Reports suggest about 60 casualties.
This is a tragedy.
It is not any more of a tragedy than the US attack on an MSF hospital in Afghanistan.
It is not more of a tragedy than the deliberate targeting of the Iraqi sewage system during the Gulf War.
The blood and pain of people who are not like you is not one whit less important than the blood and pain of people who are like you.
The number of people hurt and killed is important. Less death and pain is preferable to more death and pain.
Every single person killed or harmed by ISIS is the responsibility of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, along with the governments and militaries who backed them. There is no ISIS without the Iraq war. (It’s unclear if ISIS will claim responsibility, but the point remains that this terrorism is the result of the Iraq war.)
Causality is important when dealing with ethics. The consequences of invading Iraq were forseen by everyone with even the slightest amount of sense. Even the CIA and British intelligence called the consequences correctly.
Until people get their ethical reasoning straight, they will continue to create hellscapes.
I feel great sympathy for those in Nice who have lost someone. I feel no more sympathy for them than for all the Iraqis who have lost someone.
We are either all human, or we aren’t. A world where we aren’t is Hell.
If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Well, as long as recorded history, anyway.
I see a lot of angst and a lot of worry and a lot of anger about events. We have gun and police violence in the US. The rise of Trump, the crises shaking the European Union, economic stagnation or decline in multiple major economies, a military buildup on the Russian border, a refugee crisis, and a Middle East and North Africa which looks shakier and shakier. In the Far East, China seizes more and more, bringing it into potential conflict with multiple nations.
The neoliberal consensus is crumbling, the far-right is rising, and the real left is beginning to rise as well (Corbyn and Sanders are significant, not sidelights, and not the only ones). In South America, the left is retreat, even in shambles, with the right resurgent.
We have onrushing climate change and some reason to believe that we have passed the threshold beyond which change will be much more rapid. Fish stocks are collapsed and collapsing, there is some danger of ecosystem collapse, and on and on.
The most likely next US president (Clinton) is a terrible warmonger who appears to have a deranged hatred of Russia, the only other country in the world with enough nukes to, well, destroy the world. And it’s not as if Obama hasn’t been ratcheting things up already.
So, yeah, good news, there’s some, but overall it’s looking bad. We’re coming up on an age of war, revolution, and very probably serious food and water shortages combined with a practically unprecedented refugee crises.
Fun, fun, fun.
Or, as the case may be, not.
It’s always been bad for some. There was the Great Depression. There was World War II. There were huge famines in China, war in SE Asia, including the Khmer Rouge genocide. Terrible atrocities in Indonesia. And on and on.
Never in history has it been the case that large chunks of the world weren’t hellscapes. Some nations or regions managed peace and prosperity for generations, even occasionally for centuries, but those must be understood as beautiful outposts of peace and civilization, ever in danger of falling back into barbarism. (Not that the actual barbarians were often so bad. The barbaric Celts may have done the occasional human sacrifice, but Rome enslaved half the world.)
Human memory is short. In historical terms, we don’t live long and we think our lived lives are “normal” even if, in fact, they were lived during one of those rare civilized prosperous interregnums.
We think that industrialization changed everything, but it’s not yet clear that it did. Industrialization mostly allowed Europe to conquer the rest of the world, really. It created some high standards of living in core regions, and advances in medicine allowed unprecedented increases in population.
But it’s not yet clear that industrialized prosperity, in the style to which we’ve grown accustomed (and which has never reached everyone), is more than just an interregnum. There may be some rather hard and ugly limits on growth and prosperity due to Earth’s limits, both in resources and in our ability to handle the pollution we have spewed. Add to that our complete overpopulation, driving entire species to extinction, and threatening the ecosphere.
Again, fun.
So, the bad times will soon be on us again, for those of us they aren’t already on, anyway. If we’re old or sick, we may avoid them. If not, we’re going to get it in the neck.
But why despair?
Even in bad times, there will be good. Most of history has been bad, but people have still loved, they have still enjoyed food, and the beauty nature so generously provides. There has always been wine (or bathtub gin). Life has gone on.
It’ll probably go on this time, and if we manage to drive ourselves to extinction (still unlikely) well, no humans will be suffering any more.
Enjoy your lives as best you can. Take joy in the real things of your immediate lives. The horrors that are happening to others are not happening to you and making yourself unhappy because others are unhappy does nothing to help them, and harms you.
That doesn’t mean “do nothing,” it means do what you’re reasonably able to do, and don’t sweat the rest. There are billions of people on Earth, you aren’t personally responsible for this, and your contribution is not going to be the key if other people don’t also get off their asses.
Be realistic, accept no more than your tiny bit of blame, and then go eat a good meal, make love, and listen to some beautiful music.
Don’t destroy your real happiness over events for which you are almost entirely not responsible, and which you do not have the power to change.
The world’s always been hell for a lot of people, but there has always been beauty and love for many. If you can, be one of those who is kind to those whom the world is not. No more is, or can be, asked of you, certainly not that you crucify yourself: Your suffering will not redeem the world. Leave that to the messiahs, be human, and be as happy as you can.
If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Science advances one funeral at a time – Max Planck
For years it has been clear that real change wouldn’t come until the current generation of politicians and apparatchniks died off or were forced to retire in large numbers due to age.
One of Machiavelli’s maxims was that people don’t change. They learn whatever lessons they’re going to learn, become who they are, and then act much the same no matter what happens.
What we’re seeing with Sanders’ numbers makes this clear. He’s winning 90 percent+ of the under 30 brigade. In the Scottish independence referendum, we saw that minus the pensioner brigade, Scotland would have left Great Britain. Corbyn’s supporters tilt young.
And so on.
Now, these are very young people, being led by the very old: Sanders is a true civil rights baby, someone who actually walked the walk in the early 60s. Corbyn is a largely unreconstructed British social Labour politician from the sixties.
The left is being led by the remains of the last actually socialist generation. (Hilary’s close to that age, but was a conservative “Goldwater girl,” and she acts like it.)
But the people who are flocking to those oldsters are young, young, young.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)
And the people who are blocking left-wing change are generally old. Remember the Reagan Democrats? The Boomers, Silents, and GIs who gave their middle finger to the Great Society so long as they could have their nice suburban homes free of of “icky” black people?
As they die, change becomes possible.
They aren’t going to change their minds at this stage in their lives, the status quo is what they know and what they want.
What goes around, comes around. There is no end to history till we go extinct. The conservative era was never going to last forever.
What it has done is last too long–long enough to lock us into a rather nasty future. And because the conservatives have resisted any reasonable change from the left at all costs, there is a good chance some form of fascism will come to control many core countries.
This was expected. I’ve been warning for years that economic failure was setting up the conditions for fascism: You are more likely to get a Hitler or Mussolini instead of an FDR.
But, those on the inside, who are successful, don’t listen to those on the outside (like myself). They see no reason to do so, because they are “the winners” and the people on the outside are “the losers,” and why would you listen to losers?
And so, here we are. Good riddance to those who refused to deal with climate change and who presided over nearly 40 years of economic stagnation and decline.
The only problem is they have died too slowly. All humanity will pay the price.
(Caveat: You may be, and probably are, of the same age, and you’re probably a nice, good person who did not support these horrible policies. There are always some “Good Germans.”
The Hippies were great people who were right about almost everything. They also were a small minority who lost the culture wars.
So don’t take this post personally, though I know many of you will. (For the record, I think Gen-X, my generation, is pretty awful.)
I want you to realize that this sort of thing will be the norm when climate change really gets going. Drought, starvation, rising sea levels: The migrations will be vast.