August 2010
And I feel fine.
I wish to make a few predictions about the end of the world. Which is coming soon. [429 words]
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Thu 26th The Story of Your Enslavement is a ten minute look at the illusion of freedom. It speaks of modern nation-states as farms for humans, designed to harvest our productivity in the same way a dairy farm harvests cow-milk. This is, I fear, all too accurate.
Iceland’s democracy is still paralysed while the bankers carry on exactly as they were before the crisis. Wall Street bonuses rose another seventeen percent last year—a slightly lower figure than the current effective unemployment rate in the US.
A democratic society, in theory, is one where every citizen has some sense of ownership and influence in their government. Yet every democracy in the world appears to be owned not by all citizens but by a wealthy political class, who are now themselves all but owned by corporate interests.
Corporate ownership of the political class is no real surprise when one looks at the figures involved. BP’s annual revenue (for example) is more than double the entire GDP of New Zealand. This should suggest a certain frightening imbalance of power, given that BP’s sole mandate is economic profit.
This is going to end badly. 0 Comments
Tue 24th
Within the span of a couple generations, we abandoned a durable, finely textured, life-affirming set of living arrangements characterized by self-sufficient family farms intermixed with small towns that provided commerce, services, and culture. Worse yet, we traded that model for a coarse-scaled arrangement wholly dependent on ready access to cheap fossil fuels. Then we ratcheted up the madness to rely on businesses that use, almost exclusively, a warehouse-on-wheels approach to just-in-time delivery of unnecessary devices designed for rapid obsolescence and disposal.
I just can’t quite register this one, but I’m trying:
In 2002, as I edited a book about global climate change, I concluded we had set events in motion that would cause our own extinction, probably by 2030. I mourned for months, to the bewilderment of the three people who noticed. About five years ago, I was elated to learn about a hail-Mary pass that just might allow our persistence for a few more generations: Peak oil and its economic consequences might bring the industrial economy to an overdue close, just in time. If we abandon the industrial culture of death, we might persist until your children are old enough to die a “normal” death. But the odds are long and the time short.
Sat 21st
It cannot be taken lightly that white men are in control of the record industry as a whole (even with a few black entrepreneurs), and control what images get played. Young white suburban males are the largest consumer of hip-hop music. So performance of black masculinity (or black sexuality as a whole) is created by white men for white men. And since white men have always portrayed black men as sexually dangerous and black women as always sexually available…
Proposition 8: ‘No Rational Basis’
California’s Proposition 8, the statewide ban on same-sex marriages, has been struck down. It’s a good thing, but it has little effect on us directly.
However, some potentially useful things came out of it. In particular, the legal process required evidence to be presented and assessed for all the claims made by those both for and against same-sex marriage. Given the perfect opportunity, and no lack of funding, those arguing that same-sex marriage was destructive and undermined the institution of marriage were able to find… no convincing evidence at all. The law was struck down primarily because it had, in the judge’s words, ‘no rational basis.’ No evidence could be found that same-sex marriage is harmful.
I suspect most of us intuitively know that anyway, but it’s helpful to know that there is concrete evidence for that view, and none against.
A couple of summaries of the judge’s findings can be found at Fannie’s Room and the Yes Means Yes blog.
July 2010
Cancer of the Colony
Colonial expansions leave three kinds of ex-/post-colonial nations in their wake: Rich & White, Poor, and Fucked. No matter which way you cut it, the indigenous people are never left in good shape. Here’s how it breaks down. [727 words]
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Absolution
When I was a child I was taught in all seriousness that, if the Nazis were ever to come to your house and ask straight-up ‘are you hiding Jews in your attic?’ (and you would be, because that’s, like, the holiest thing possible) the correct response was to say ‘yes, we are,’ then to hold your breath and clench while you waited for God to swoop in and Jedi-mind-wipe the Nazis into thinking you’d said ‘no’ (and of course because God put the words there the Nazis would believe it and just go away.) This, despite the biblical precedents of the Hebrew midwives lying through their teeth to Pharaoh and ‘do not put God to the test.’ It always seemed a monstrously bad idea. (I imagined God shaking his head and muttering “am I going senile? Because I don’t remember sending a fucking PLAGUE OF STUPID.” God has a way with words.)
Or take, for another example, Tibetan buddhists. It’s against their moral absolutes to kill animals, but it appears to also be against their absolutes to starve to death. So they will frighten yaks into running off cliffs and dying prolonged, horrible deaths on the rocks below.
The end result (animals dying) is of course exactly the same, but because they have to sidestep past a moral absolute, they end up taking the path of greater suffering.
Or take the Hindu absolute of not interfering with the sacred cow. What starts out as respect for the divine is twisted into something quite different when that absolute (‘don’t interfere’) is taken to the logical extreme – Indian cities are crowded with diseased and injured cows, because medicine and care require ‘interference’ in the technical sense.
Want another example? Look at the increasingly ridiculous interpretations of ‘honour the Sabbath and keep it holy’ during the time of Jesus’ ministry – all of which Jesus himself hand-waved past when he was hungry, or people were sick, or there was work to be done…
Moral absolutes are unworkable.
Because I Have To
I am a cold, hard pragmatist. (I hear you laughing; bear with me.) My advice for a long and happy life would be roughly ‘don’t think too much, and don’t make things more complicated than they need to be.’ (Your laughter is growing.)
Seriously, I do my best to follow my own advice. It’s all about defining your terms. Easiest first: I think I make things only as complicated as they need to be, it’s just that that proves to be still quite complicated. Which makes sense. We’re all quite complicated people.
If I’m honest, I think a little too much. I’d define ‘too much’ as the point where you stop seeing results; where the thinking is no longer making your life better. Most of my thinking, though, most of it, still gets me results. And in the last couple of years I’ve managed to greatly reduce the amount of completely useless spinning-in-a-loop second-guessing that I used to do, so that’s something.
I wouldn’t recommend anyone copy my approach to life. It’s a lot of work, and it is quite complicated. But the point is that it’s necessarily complex, and it’s working pretty wonderfully for me. Sure, I can’t manage a real job, or a conventional faith, or (maybe) monogamy — if I could, I probably would. But I live the only way I’m able to live.
The State of the World as of Now
We’re currently paying for our reliance on oil at the rate of an entire Exxon Valdez spill every week. Meanwhile, no one seems to care that the Nigerian pirates turned to piracy in the first place because the same thing has been happening on their coast for a good decade now, and there’s no fishing left for them.
To summarise the last half-century: we made it through the cold war, invented the Internet and the iPad, and were just getting up a good head of panic about the 50-years-off conclusion to cascading climate change, only to get well and truly blindsided by a malfunction in state-of-the-art 19th century resource exploitation.
Seriously. It’s 2010 and the end of the world as we know it is a fucking oil spill. Extra deliciousness? Our only hope might be to hit it with a nuclear bomb.
Of course, still no one cares about the spill in the Niger delta. Unlike US happenings, we actually have to seek out news from most of the rest of the world.
(The relative newsworthiness of the different regions can be seen clearly in the efforts put into censoring news coverage of each of the spills. There’s no big effort to conceal the effects of the African disaster.)
And, to no one’s surprise, the piracy in the Niger region is portrayed as a criminal matter to be stamped out, rather than, you know, a perfectly legitimate response to horrifying, survival-threatening injustice.
All of which to say, really: old news. Old fucking news. Welcome to the future.
May 2010
Fri 21st An email I received:
I am capt.Mark Bennett of the US Army base in Iraq for peace keeping i found your contact detail in a address journal am seeking your assistance to evacuate the sum of $5,000,000 to you as long as i am assured that it will be safe in your care until I complete my service here in Iraq. This is not stolen money and there are no dangers involved.
SOURCE OF MONEY: some money in various currencies was discovered concealed in barrels with piles of weapons and ammunition’s at a location near one of Saddam’s old palaces during a rescue operation, and it was agreed by all party present that the money be shared amongst us, this was quite an illegal thing to do, but I tell you what? No compensation can make up for the risks we have taken with our lives in this hell hole. The above figure was given to me as my share, and to conceal this kind of money became a problem for me, so with the help of a German contact working here and his office enjoys some immunity, I was able to get the package out to a safe location entirely out of trouble spot. He does not know the real contents of the package, and believes that it belongs to an Asian American who died in an air raid, and before giving up, trusted me to hand over the package to his family. I have survived 2 suicide bomb attacks by the special grace of God. get back to me in my person email: [email removed]
Capt Mark Bennett
One of the more intricate back-stories I’ve heard. 5 Comments
