So I’ve been kicking around this idea for some years now, and it’s been greatly on my mind for the past few weeks. As time goes on, things appear to be getting clearer, and I’m getting a stronger hold on my thesis. This is the beginning of what I hope to be a much longer treatise or series on this theme, and your comments and feedback are very welcome either in public or private to help challenge, develop and hone it. I’ll be around to discuss and explore with commenters, but please, no tech issues or questions today. That’s soon, not today.
Succinctly, I think we are already deep into the effects of Climate Change without realizing it. To be clear, I’m not talking about the alarming carbon dioxide levels or growing average high temperatures, recurring new monthly record high temperature, fires in Alberta, abnormal highs in Alaska, drought in the Southwest, diminished Arctic ice, or decreased reflectivity of glaciers and snow deposits world-wide due to pollution and soot. This is not about any physical aspect of Climate Change and the Anthropocene era. I’m concerned with the internal psychological, value, and cultural effects, those subsequent effects on populations, and what I see as larger trends worldwide.
I’m not usually a doom-and-gloomer, but there are a lot of powerful and scary currents across a wide swathe of humanity right now that seem, at their root, to share some intangible motivation. I think it’s fear – not of the other, not of progress or modernism or capitalism or Judgement Day or gay rights or transsexuals or Donald Trump or women’s rights or blasphemy or sacrilege or hippies or ethnic minorities or anything else rooted in our normal experience.
I think we, as a species, are already waist-deep into Climate Change and we’re acting like many other species do when put under serious, unseen-from-their-perspective environmental stress: we’re freaking out, and as tension rises, striking out against others and tearing down social and cultural edifices and the order that has served us well for the past few hundred years.
I fear that the future truly is undiscovered country as human history, norms, rules, etc. did not develop under this type of environmental stress – we’ve flourished coincident with a mild climate, and moved on when local climate changed too much or too quickly. Too many ascendant disharmonic forces across the globe strongly question, challenge, threaten, or violate their previous norms of behavior, treatment, principles, values, and history for me to not feel there is a trend, and it’s related. And no, it’s not the plants working together to drive us insane and reclaim the Earth for Mother Nature. And yes, for you wiseacres and cynics, in a way, the ascendency of women’s, gay, and transsexual rights is a positive effect of this break with who we thought we were.
It’s Happening Everywhere
I spend a lot of time reading about, thinking about, reading and listening to the Far Right so-called fever swamp. And to my ears, things have changed, and it truly scares me. Trump is like a stumbling, wind-up toy with lit sparklers sticking out of its head in a dry and dusty storeroom filled with rich fuel. But he’s no more than a match, which is horrible enough and will likely be tragic. He’s just one example, too close, gaudy and loud to ignore, and even if we Americans dodge the bully bullet, the rest of the world is also being challenged, and the good guys won’t win everywhere, certainly not every time.
Trumps scares me and it’s taken a lot of introspection to figure out why – it’s what he’s building off of that really scares me. He’s tapped into something for, although I don’t think he’s very smart in a traditional sense, he is a genius (not used lightly) at reading people and getting under their skin, intuiting what will anger them or put them off-balance so he has an advantage. The thing is, the people he’s appealing to are not just in the South or rural areas, or even just the US, or even the Western or developed world. There are far-right/quasi-fascist movements rising across Western and Eastern Europe, even Western Asia that share an anger, rooted in fear. And they are sharing, working together, learning and cross-training. These are movements that promise a return to greatness, incorporating a fundamental theme of palingenesis. They are organizing, recruiting, training, influencing, even winning (or almost winning, thank you Austria!) elections. Far-right leaders across Europe have reached out to or attended meetings or rallies with Trump!
It’s familiar to those of us who have studied the Right or Fascism – a focus on purity, on land, on blood, on heroes of old, on a strong leader who has the will to set things right. On rebirth, trying to recapture some idealized past when things were better and those “others” knew their place and it was at our feet or cowering in fear. When the future was exciting and not full of dread.
The thing is, it’s not just in Russia, the ‘stans, Europe, or the US. It’s ISIS. It’s the LRA. It’s Boko Haram. It’s Somalia/Kenya. It’s Y’all Queda and other resurgent secession and Confederate movements. It’s the Zetas and other drug gangs that are just as horrible as ISIS. (yes, they’re a drug gang but they are also powerful rebellions and mini chiefdoms that control large parts of Mexico’s territory) It’s a dozen more groups spread across the world. It’s happening almost everywhere, and where there’s not such a growing movement, there are established powers that are dropping their masks and embracing division and cultivating fear, selfishness, scarcity, and envy. And not being called on it like they would have been in the past. It’s like norms and expectations no longer are considered important. And it’s happening everywhere. It’s never been this way before, never so pandemic.
The Era of Migrants
Into this maelstrom of psyche and influence, a new problem has emerged. It’s here, and it won’t stop for hundreds of years – the era of mass human migration. Many point to the unprecedented drought in Syria as leading to the mass migration of the rural population to the cities, the subsequent overcrowding, scarcity of jobs, food and relief, the subsequent rebellion and fracturing of the formerly-strong Syrian state, and it did. You move lots of people and things change.
This instability, coupled with the US-caused fractures and instability in Iraq, and touched off by a millennial cult wishing for an end-times-inducing battle between the powers of the West and their holy warriors bathed in blood, has resulted in ISIS and it has spread. And so we now see millions of refugees, internal and external, and this Era is just beginning.
Germany has been at the lead in accepting their brothers and sisters in humanity, but I fear that a few more exploitations by ascendant movements in Europe coupled with inevitable ISIS attacks will result in walls and dogs and machine guns and barbed wire being first tolerated, then accepted, then embraced as these pressures transform us into something different: more reptilian, less Enlightened.
The thing is, climate migrants are not just far away. Certainly, a not-insignificant portion of Central American emigrants are seeking escape from social fractures heralding collapse of their fragile governments and systems. Just a few weeks ago, an entire city of 125,000 people evacuated due to Climate Change-caused fires in Alberta. Luckily, this was a temporary evacuation, but next time, it may be permanent.
In case you missed it, our first domestic climate migrants are escaping the rising water and sinking land. From Southern Louisiana, very poor rural refugees are being helped by a new model program that will become commonplace the rest of our lives – helping Americans, our brothers and sisters, to relocate and not be thrust into abject poverty and hopelessness.
This is good – while our issues are still small and before they grow, we’re trying to figure out how to best handle this type of situation domestically. But as evidenced by a not-insignificant portion of our governing class (ahem, Republicans) not seeing the importance of fully funding our efforts against Zika before it becomes a much bigger problem (and it will), I fear that we will not continue to develop the capacity and mechanisms to move and incorporate internal climate migrants. So when we need to relocate millions of Americans permanently, we will not be able to do it well, and we will have discord and likely pockets of rebellion and retributive violence against falsely-accused “others”. This is what animals do when under extreme environmental pressure.
When an environment changes and the stresses on a population increase, we humans move on or we fade away. That’s been our history as a species, and one of the chief reasons that we’ve been so successful on this planet the past 500,000 years or so. But in this case, we’re all on the Titanic and we’re all just re-arranging the deck chairs since there are no lifeboats. I think that at a very low, primeval level, we, as a species, know that. And so we are already well into freaking out. We just haven’t realized it yet and we don’t have the leadership and level of trust in our cultures to identify, manage, and overcome our animal nature at the worldwide scale.
So while I look around and marvel at the wonders of everything from our technology, art, science, the beauty and glory of this planet, and the wonderful, kind, silly, beautiful things billions of people do for each other every day, I am filled with optimism and joy. But no matter how much I smile and greet the day, I fear that things will quickly devolve.
The only reason we as a planet survived the Cold War was through wisdom, procedure, communication, fear, and the knowledge that one small mistake could blow everything up. I fear that because this is not as much of a conflict and certainly lacks a clear enemy and intuitive visual of the results of failure – a barren, lifeless radioactive planet -we are not going to be able to adapt well to this ever-growing pressure. Although it seems logical that if there’s a major climate-related issue before the election, the Democrat would be elected, I fear that we’re gibbering apes, and the cocky bully baboon will step into power.
Adam L Silverman
Alain, there’s a lot to unpack here and I don’t have the time this moment, so get with me offline if you like. I’ve spent a lot of time tracking food and water scarcity issues in Iraq – as in most of 2007-2009, as well as the effects of drought in the Levant on everything from the Israeli-Palestinian dispute to the Syrian Civil War to the Iraqi Sectarian issue. I think your central premise/thesis is good, but I’m not sure, except in select locations, that we’re really seeing the stress induced results yet.
While the Syrian Civil War was partially driven as a result of the Levantine drought, making the refugee crisis also partially a result of the same climatic issue, without the Civil War in Syria, which is also a proxy Saudi-Iranian-Turkish war for regional hegemony (and none of the proxy conflict is driven by the drought that I can tell), and also partially the result of the rise and transformation of AQI into IS, which is on the US and the Coalition from OIR, there would be no refugee problem and crisis. So untangling this is going to be very, very hard. The rise of Boko Haram predates the water crisis on Lake Chad that has just made the news. And that crisis is partially driven not by water levels or pollution, but by patterns of settlement that predate when the British drew the border between Nigeria and Cameroon and are in conflict because of those borders and who lives where.
Tl; Dr: its complicated!
singfoom
Not pooh-poohing your concerns, but I think it’s the same as it ever was. For all of human history, that point in human history each milestone was another point at which we dealt with something never seen before.
Whatever era of history you pick, there are large uncontrollable forces causing this nation or this tribe to move or enroach on another nation/tribe. The scale and breadth of those forces are larger now than before sure, but that’s also part of where we’re at due to visibility.
When the internet shoots the news of this issue or that calamity around the world in minutes as opposed to word of mouth, letters, telegrams, phone calls, we see it all happening in real time. Sure, there’s a lot of problems in the world. I have no fear that we as a species will survive whatever we do to the planet.
We might we incredibly reduced in numbers due to some catastrophe, but somebody will survive and flourish and build another society and do it all over again. Or our planet will be blown up for a galactic overpass. We should all carry towels just in case.
Formerly disgruntled Clinton supporter
Very thought-provoking, Alain. I wish we could count on our fellow humans to be a little more vulcan!
Brent
I haven’t fully absorbed everything you have written here but the above did jump out at me. My comment is that it is actually not that difficult to make others angry or fearful. It certainly doesn’t require genius or any sort of fine tuned intuition. Most people don’t do it because its not really in their interest to stoke others’ fears. Most people are also not sociopaths.
My real point is that nothing Trump is doing or saying involves any nuance or contemplation. He is really just saying and doing what Republicans have always said and done EXCEPT that he is saying the quiet parts loudly. He will pay a political cost for that. He just doesn’t know it or doesn’t care.
muddy
A book you might enjoy is Empires and Barbarians – Migration and Development and the Birth of Europe. Great herds of hundreds of thousands were charging back and forth across Europe and Asia. The Alans (!) for instance were Persians from north of the Caspian Sea, who went all the way across Europe to Gibraltar, and then to North Africa from the west, rather than the east where they came from.
I think the difference in modern is that people expect there to be harder lines on a map and that they remain the same. The movement of disease is of course stronger now due to the speed of travel.
Alain the site fixer
@Adam L Silverman: I’d like nothing better than to discuss this, on- or offline. From this perspective, the rise of any one group or local climate-caused migration doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
Looking, listening, reading, and analyzing, I can’t escape this growing fear that this instability across so many different places and peoples isn’t so much a drumbeat of the impending Apocalypse, but is going to be the new normal. Some of what I’m trying to wrap my words around is intangible – unseen, unconscious, primal reactions to environmental stress. This isn’t necessarily new but as the pressures grow we’re going to get worse, not better.
Alain the site fixer
@Formerly disgruntled Clinton supporter: As long as Vulcans appreciate cats, I agree. I’m sure I’m in the majority of Juicers who, when young, wanted to be Spock and apply his reason instead of those overly-emotional humans!
Alain the site fixer
@Brent: Brent, part of this Trump thing is that he’s a bully. My older half brother is a bully and shares the Bully’s amazing ability to quickly and effortlessly identify buttons they can push, emotional pressure points, etc. For many reasons, I hate the person my brother has been and how he treats and manipulates people, but he’s a piker compared to Trump. A lot of it is dominance and posturing, but don’t mistake his skill. I loathe the man but he’s got an amazing skill that pretty much won him the Republican nomination without any of the normal campaign mechanisms and systems. He’s quick to anger so you can easily goad him into an off-balance position, but he’s quite good at bluster and verbal squid cloud in those situations.
Alain the site fixer
@muddy: thought I had it in my library as I’ve looked through it at least once, but it’s on the Kindle-to-buy list. Thanks!
CONGRATULATIONS!
I would suggest that the human issues you’re seeing are not from climate change but from overpopulation. Not to say that climate change isn’t at work as well, but…I’m fifty years old. The world’s population has almost tripled in my lifetime alone. It’s not sustainable and nature has some pretty awful ways of correcting it, and we are overdue for a correction.
ETA: Too many people, too few resources, and climate change is merely exacerbating that. As for your timeline out of “hundreds of years”, that’s not happening. The dieoff is coming in mine and your lifetime. Hundreds of years from now, there will be people…but not many.
chopper
i’ve been thinking this a great deal recently. i think there’s a collective subconscious cynicism about the future that is creeping in more and more every day. even people who tend to ignore climate change or resource depletion on a day-to-day basis still find it having an effect on their general worldview, like it’s whispering in their ear at night. i think a lot of people in america at least are becoming more and more convinced that the future isn’t going to be great and they don’t know what to do about it. so they’re turning cynical and are easy pickings for guys like trump who try to convince them that it’s the immigrants or the muslims, or the ‘dilution of our culture’ (a common theme in right-wing nationalism which is starting to rise all over these days).
Original Lee
Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is coming to an area near you. I wish it could be several generations away yet, but am afraid I’ll see it before I die.
lollipopguild
@Brent: I agree with Brent on what he says about Trump. Trump tore thru the GOP field because they could not disagree with him in any major way. He is loud and proud on his racism and blowing things up. The Gop has spent the last 50 years lying to their voters and Trump is the result because HE is going to deliver 50 years worth of lies to his voters. Trump winning is an extinction event-the USA as we know it will disappear.
p.a.
@singfoom: yes, agree. I’m not competent to comment on psychological causes/effects, but as far as population migrations, shifts etc. there’s nothing new to see. Hell unless you’re an aboriginal American living here in the Western Hem you- and I- are still living out a barely 500 year process.
Miss Bianca
You bring up some fascinating points, Alain (the fact that I’ve been thinking about a lot of the same things lately would be *completely* coincidental to my opinion, of course). I think stress and strain *are* going to be the new normal, and the re-emergence of right-wing nationalism worldwide is a warning shot across the bows – there are more, and less, rational responses to the waves of migration that are emerging from conflicts and climate change, and we have an obligation, I think, as thinking humans, to do what we can to combat right-wing extremist responses to it – and voting for the (not insane) Presidential candidate is the least of it.
On the other hand, I can’t except in my most pessimistic moments give way to despair over it – as ALS noted above, these things are complicated, driven by hosts of factors both apparent and unseen, and subject as a result to surprising factors in solution as well as propagation.
Alain the site fixer
@Brent: Of course I focused on Trump and bullying and didn’t consider this more fully:.
I agree that it’s easy to make others fearful or angry. And maybe that’s all it is, but there is so much similar going on in so many countries and cultures that I suspect it’s more pandemic than unique instances. Again, it may not be caused by any specific event or noticeable cause. Basically, unseen stressors causing reactions that are missed contemporaneously but are clearer in hindsight.
And no, the world’s not going to end. That’s not so much my fear. I’m worried about who or what we will turn ourselves into because we are, at our core, apes of the Planet Earth. And reason and Enlightenment are too easy to throw away when anger and fear, stress and dread pump us full of hormones and chemicals that prioritize our emotional responses and leaps to judgement over effective procedural problem solving.
Germy Shoemangler
@Alain the site fixer:
I remember “The Trouble With Tribbles” episode. Spock seemed to like the purring tribble, as did Uhura. (The Klingons despised them and Kirk and Bones saw them as useless annoyances.) I have to assume Vulcans wouldn’t mind having cats underfoot. If Spock was cool with tribbles, why not cats?
Matt McIrvin
Here’s the thing: I have a libertarian friend who once wrote an essay with almost the same thesis as yours, only he said that the thing we were reacting to without realizing it was that our civilization was collapsing thanks to big government, paper fiat currency and welfare dependency.
chopper
@Miss Bianca:
there’s also a lot more economic stress in people, not merely because wages have been stagnant for a long time, but because the economy is becoming more and more confusing and unknowable. it used to be that a pretty educated person could learn and understand how our economy generally worked, now it’s so crazy and convoluted that it’s like string theory. and as 2008 taught us all, lots of our livelihood is tied up in this crazy machine that nobody really seems to know how to operate.
not that this is the major factor or anything, but i think it just adds to the general feeling of uncertainty.
Brent
@Alain the site fixer:
No point in going around and around on it. I simply disagree. I think as far as human interactions go bullying people is one of the easiest things anyone can do. Its just, in most cases, pointless (not to mention cowardly) if you are actually trying to get anything useful accomplished with other human beings and morally abhorrent to people with any sense of their own dignity. I also think it has a very limited appeal to a very limited audience.
We will find out by September or so if I am correct (I sure hope I am!).
Big Ole Hound
In this country, Obama, as well as oceans, delayed some of this anti-immigrant frenzy by a few years except from the South. I think major problems will arise here with the influx from Southeast Asia and China for terrorist, climate and economic escape. Many many million more people from Asia will sacrifice everything to come here then the second generation will begin to take over larger and larger segments of the economy and politics. We are seeing this in the tech, service and real estate speculation areas now. We simply do not have the infrastructure or resources to handle this influx so stricter quotas or immigration laws may be required.
Matt McIrvin
Personally, I think the main thing causing stress in the West is that a lot of people are way more bigoted than we like to admit, and these countries are all getting less white, which in a democracy means that white people are not going to be supreme forever, hence general discontent with democracy.
Migration induced by climate change can and will feed into that.
Alain the site fixer
So there’s about 10 more parts to this general thesis that I hope to get to sometime. One thing that was part of the genesis of this thesis was my uncle regaling me with stories of how Texans had dealt with the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. How folks thought the world was going to end, and what effects that had on some towns and local populations. This was New Year’s eve 1998, and of course we were talking about the millennial fever in some Christian groups. I would simply credit the current craziness to that and the post-millennial shift that’s happening, but these things are happening in lots of other cultures, some Christian, many not. It’s almost like we’ve all got this nightmare we don’t remember when we wake up, but it causes us to act differently when conscious. I fear that time will bring us more evidence and I pray to Almighty Athiesmo that we don’t have a massive die-off of humans during my lifetime. if that’s going to happen, I hope I’m not around because I could not bear that pain. I used to think I’d be a survivor of such a calamity, but there’s lot to be said for not having to bear witness to such unimaginable pain
Alain the site fixer
@Miss Bianca: You’ll appreciate that some of this thinking most certainly was affected by the Royal Gorge fire a few years back. To have to be ready to flee with your loved ones and not much else if the fire comes over the hill, to not be able to go outside or breathe well inside because of the smoke – it made me appreciate the fragility of society and helped to clarify some primeval drives and reactions that are so deep we don’t realize or admit they can control us.
MattF
One sorta-related semi-on-topic point to make– for every current dilemma, there’s a ‘technical’ solution that doesn’t quite work for reasons you didn’t quite anticipate. Note, e.g., this article from the internet of shit about gadgets in the internet-connected home. There’s a very big difference between 99% reliability and 99.99% reliability, and we’re all going to learn about that difference.
Mike in NC
75 years after World War Two, much of the world seems to be ready, willing, and able to embrace fascism again. The Rise of Drumpf is due to the ever rightward drift of the GOP and also the resentment of so many “Real Americans” that we twice elected a non-100% white guy (without a plutocratic background) to the highest office in the land. Factor in too our worthless news media that thinks its only job is to serve up infotainment because ‘both sides do it’.
muddy
@Alain the site fixer: You will be glad to have it on kindle. I have the paperback and it’s ridiculously thick!
Libby's Person
I share your general sense of fear. I do applied research on the implications of complexity for problem solving in the public sector – practical approaches to dealing with so-called ‘wicked’ problems. I switched fields mid-career to do this because the future terrifies me. One of the defining characteristics of complex adaptive systems (like social and ecological systems) is that change is non-linear and based on thresholds, which means that by change doesn’t happen gradually – some condition crosses a critical threshold, and state change occurs like a ‘switch’ getting thrown. It can take some time for the effects of the change to manifest, but basically by the time we can actually measure change effects, the change has already happened. There is so much published research now documenting measurable changes in ecosystems, weather patterns, distribution of disease vectors, etc. It takes a very conscious effort of will for me to keep working and not to give into despair.
You are right, Alain – the planet will still be here whatever we do. In fact, it’s unlikely that humans are going to go extinct anytime soon. However, it’s all too likely that the next 50-100 years are going to be hellish for humans.
…I think I need to go walk my dog now.
germy shoemangler
@Brent: From what I’ve seen and heard from RW commenters on various other sites and at my workplace, some of them think Trump is not a true conservative (because he was a “democrap” until recently and has too many liberal ideas) and the rest of them (the ones who like him) do NOT think of him as a bully, but as someone fighting back against the REAL bullies; the liberals.
Miss Bianca
@Alain the site fixer: Understood. (btw, did you mean the turn of the 20th to 21st? – bit confused). In addition to fires and like natural disasters that threaten our region, I remember the Y2K prepper fever between 1998 and 2000 very vividly – and I’m sure it formed part of what was subconsciously driving my decision to relocate from a huge city to a very small town that was, in fact, capable of feeding itself for a while at least, if shit really went to smash, much as I might be ashamed to admit it now. But I remember not being about to LOL, but giggling quietly to myself in the coffee shop in Paonia, as I overheard the North Fork Horse Patrol – so-named – debate what they needed to be stocking up on, and one of the women saying loudly, “well, I’m not going to stock beans and rice because I *hate* beans and rice” – and that being the moment where I was like, “fuck it – I’m not wasting my mental energy worrying about this disaster shit”.
singfoom
@Mike in NC:
The incentives for a journalist to challenge power in our society are very little for established journalists. Sure, the plucky up and comer can make a name for themselves by challenging someone in power when they have evidence or a piece of knowledge the person in power is vulnerable to…
But for the people that are already in the system, what incentive do they have to speak truth to power? It’ll just lose them access. It’s a sad state of affairs. It’s shitty because plenty of people want serious news that doesn’t equivocate, but most people tend to want the echo chamber, whether they’re left or right or somewhere not on that spectrum.
Our current media environment is set up to confirm your already existing biases and never challenge them. You have to go out of your way to read and watch things you don’t agree with and apply critical thinking to everything to find the “truth” as it were. And that’s tiresome and we have families and lives…and so it goes. This started out less negative.
redshirt
Great post Alain. Please continue!
I agree with everything you stated, and I stand amazed/horrified that it’s mainly because of a very small percentage of Americans – the Right Wing. By holding American politics hostage for the past 40 years, we’ve not only poisoned our political system but because of America’s influence, we’ve helped poison the world – the Middle East, for example.
When we could have been taking pragmatic action against Climate Change worldwide, we don’t, and won’t, because of Republicans. A few million evil Americans will cause the deaths of millions and suffering of so many more. And why? For a short term bribe/lobbying money, and a rigid, hateful ideology.
America’s failure to burn out the Confederates after the Civil War has now endangered the entire world, and I don’t see how we escape their influence before it’s too late.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
In a world of diminishing resources and consequent upheaval, the proper approach is for the haves to learn how to share nicely with the have nothings. Trump is the opposite of that, and appeals to the selfish hoarding tribal IGMFY instinct which is the human default setting. I like to think there are more of us than them, but I think we’re all becoming crabs in a bucket and the far right feeds on that. Even the oligarchs won’t be able to wall themselves off forever from the extremes of weather and resource wars. I can’t imagine how we’re going to maintain civil society in the face of these stresses for long, with everyone armed to the teeth.
PVDMichael
Interesting hypothesis, but I dont really think it explains what Donald Trump (and to a lesser extent Sentor Sanders) has tapped into.
There was a briefly-mentioned survey that said the most common thread amongst early Trump supporters was “authoritarian” viewpoints. So when do people seek authoritarian figures? Maybe the answer is: When there is a perception that there is currently no authority…
I feel like the 2016 is the culmination of a several-decades-long effort by most of the right-wing (and recently joined by a more nuanced effort from some on the left) to demonize and delegitimize all institutions and authorities. Hatred of government was soon joined by demonization of media, teachers, higher academia, scientists, activists, bureaucrats, labor, Hollywood, the UN. This has been joined by some demonization of corporations, banks, energy companies, the police, organized religion, the media, pollsters from the left. (I don’t mean to play the both sides do it game, but when Barbara Boxer is demonized as a “corporatist”, we’ve got some problems here).
We can’t have reasonable debates, because there are no “facts” that we all agree on. Nobody is recognized to speak with any authority on any of the issues. We’ve become a nation of conspiracy theories and social media bubbles.
Betty Cracker
@Big Ole Hound: Oh my stars and garters, The Yellow Peril!
Betty Cracker
@redshirt:
Do you really think that brand of stupid was ever confined to south of the Mason-Dixon line?
Gravenstone
@Mike in NC:
I’m sure I overstate things, but I was recently thinking to myself that the resurgence of Nationalist politicians of all stripes might well lead to a European land war within the next decade or two. And I don’t mean the (relatively) low intensity ones that Putin likes to instigate as he tries to claw back the old USSR.
Gravenstone
@Betty Cracker: The “brand” per se wasn’t isolated there. But that is certainly where it gained enough influence to rise to power. Thus starting the long trail of destruction that continues today.
Major Major Major Major
redshirt
@Betty Cracker: It was at the beginning. It’s been digitized and now is found everywhere. Too late to contain now.
Alain the site fixer
@Miss Bianca:
So it was New Year’s Eve 1998 and we were discussing the upcoming change to the 21st and he told me about his research into how people handled the change from the 19th to 20th. His thinking was that folks would act similarly but more so because of the millennium and religious belief.
Major Major Major Major
@Alain the site fixer: Data liked cats.
Miss Bianca
@Alain the site fixer: Ah. Got it now. Of course, for your student of history, the cyclical nature of human freakouts is both fascinating and bizarrely comforting. There were Doomsdayers back around the year 1,000 who were freaking out seriously about the Day of Judgement being just around the corner. It’s just the nature of what we expect to wipe us out that seems to change – the Second Coming in Year 1,000, a computer virus in the Year 2,000…other viruses and plagues, water scarcity, nuclear war…the hits just keep on coming!
ETA: Not that those are comforting thoughts…it’s just that there’s some comfort in knowing that we seem to be hard-wired to freak out at signs and portents as well as real things – and knowing that, we might be able to combat that tendency a bit more effectively.
JimV
Thoughts (worth of course exactly what you paid for them):
I think climate change is beginning to be a factor in world political instability, most prominently in Syria, but as a previous commenter said, population is a more fundamental cause. The world had a population of about one billion in 1900, over seven billion now. If it were still one billion, climate change would be occurring much more slowly. There was an article in “Scientific American” in the mid 1990’s, estimating that the maximum population the Earth could support (on one bowl of rice and one gallon of fresh water a day per person) is about ten to twelve billion. (That was without taking climate change into account.)
There is an online site called the World Clock or something like that, which says we have already this year used up more than the annual renewable resources of the world (wood, fresh water, etc.) which means we have spent the interest on our inherited resources and will spend down the principal for the rest of the year.
There is a classic experiment which I replicated as a freshman at Michigan State. You grow a certain microbe (I forget its name) in potato agar, and measure its growth by taking daily samples on microscope slides, and counting the microbes within a circular field of the microscope. Plotting the population versus time looks like an exponential curve (reverse ski-jump) at first, but then the curve humps over and starts to descend. Then it usually heads back up again for a while, then back down. Eventually it keeps going down.
On bullies, I would average your and Brent’s views as follows: practice makes perfect. If you want to make Carnegie Hall, start young and practice, practice, practice.
Betty Cracker
@Gravenstone & @redshirt: A passing acquaintance with human nature and world history prevent me from latching onto such a simplistic theory.
Major Major Major Major
@redshirt: America isn’t the Number One Big Villain in climate change. Don’t forget about China and India. And we still have some on our side who want to ban bridge technologies like fracking, and many many people worldwide who are scared of nuclear.
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major: China and India still produce far less greenhouse gas per capita than the US (by more than a factor of 10, in India’s case); they’re much larger countries, and they’re currently choking themselves with pollution to develop their way up from poverty.
Since the pollution is a public-health menace entirely aside from greenhouse emissions, and better technology is available today, I have a feeling they may bootstrap themselves to cleaner power faster than the United States ever did, though that’s not saying much.
Alain the site fixer
@redshirt: I agree wholeheartedly with most of what you say. One symptom I hope to get to in a future post (there’s a lot to this whole thesis, this is the opener) is how something fundamental about our country and how we view ourselves shifted, unnoticed. I used to think that the only recent major change to our internal sense of identify was that we sold our soul to win the Cold War, doing all kinds of illegal, awful, unethical, crime-against-humanity-type things in pursuit of the greater good. I don’t discount that change – we betrayed our values and principles in countless ways and times, and still do – but I realized that, in my lifetime, something about our country had changed and we don’t seem to have noticed.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Amending our Constitution. The last real active Amendment was in 1971. Yes, in 1982 a 10 year effort was successful in getting a 202 year-old-Amendment finally ratified. We used to recognize that we had to change our rules, on average every 15 years or so. And yet the failure of the ERA was either a harbinger or a mirror of the fact that our notion of ourselves had changed. Maybe it’s because of the parties beginning the great divide of liberals and conservatives, or perhaps we are subconsciously clinging to this vain hope of some holy writ that will help guide and protect us from an ever-clearer future of dread. I’m not sure, but I’d have thought that after winning the Cold War, we’d have used some of the lessening of pressure to rewrite some of our rules.
redshirt
@Major Major Major Major: No, but we set the lead. If America had been aggressively working towards climate change amelioration it would have set the tone worldwide. That instead we prevent things being done gives cover to others to do the same.
redshirt
@Betty Cracker: Southern slavery was a fairly unique institution.
Hungry Joe
@Alain the site fixer: Re “I fear that we’re gibbering apes, and the cocky bully baboon will step into power.”
The anthro major in me cannot let this pass: Baboons are monkeys, not apes. Also, baboons are mostly savanna dwellers, whereas apes …
Sorry, but I just HAD to get that into the record.
Oblio
I’ve seen this coming since I was a lad in the 60’s, thanks to my geek-centric love of the science-fiction genre. As Robert A. Heinlein wrote in ‘The Green Hills of Earth’, “The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.” As a species, we COULD resolve the coming self-created crisis in myriad ways, but there are just too many stoopid humans among us who simply don’t give a fck and will just continue to dissolve into their digital gaming world or keep on blindly breeding or amass even more wealth and hide behind their 10-foot walls. Somehow I feel relieved that in 30 or so years I’ll cease living this conscious existence, but between now and then… hoo boy, it’s gonna be rough. Let’s hope something, someone, somewhere can slap us alongside our stoopid human faces to wake up and smell the decay. I remain cautiously optimistic, even now. WE CAN STILL DO THIS.
ruemara
Alain, I think you might be right. For years, a dominant group has been on top because the scales are weighted in their favor. As equality has lessened those weights, the burden of being an under class has started to be felt. As such, the consequences of imperialism for economic supremacy as well as domestic cultural supremacy have also meant they suffer in similar ways to people they were taught deserved it. They have a lot of anger, which will never be aimed at the right people. Sane people better buckle up, because even if the world’s still biggest superpower avoids the proven historical toxin of white male imperialism with nukes, there will be small scale backlash and there’s still other versions of the whirlwind sown in 19th & 20th centuries sitting out there, festering.
We all thought technological progress was leading to that possible IRL Star Trek future. That peaceful Star Trek future came out of a nearly destroyed humanity.
Alain the site fixer
@Major Major Major Major: Both poem excerpts brought a smile to this once-upon-a-time-English major and major (no pun intended…or was it??) Trekker and Star Wars lover. Truly, If I could just be with cats and a few humans, I’d be happiest. I am one of those “cat whisperer” types; I can walk down a street and see a cat across the street and point and it will come over and greet me. Not just here – all over the world, cats seem to notice and approve of me. And it’s reciprocal, I can assure you! I’ll send AL my two darlings soon.
Alain the site fixer
@Hungry Joe: Damit, that’s right! That’s why there was something that didn’t feel quite right about that phrasing. I’ll revise my draft, though perhaps it still is appropriate if we wish to deny his being of similar lineage :)
redshirt
@Oblio: We could successfully tackle climate change, using technology, and our standard of living wouldn’t suffer a bit and it would make a lot of people a lot of money. But nope, because generic R congressman needs coal and oil money after he’s done “representing” the people.
liberal
OT: And now, time for some much-needed comic relief.
liberal
@redshirt: IMHO cutting CO2 emissions is going to be much more difficult, technically, but yes, the biggest problems are political, not technical.
Sadly, I put the chance of homo sapiens surviving the next 200 years at much less than 50%.
liberal
@Oblio:
Agreed, but…Antartica is paradise compared to, say, Mars (etc). A lot cheaper to get to, too.
redshirt
@Alain the site fixer: At this point in our politics, I’m glad it’s difficult to amend the Constitution. It keeps some restraint on the Right Wing.
Do you actively read Right Wing sites? I do, with many breaks, and it’s perpetually horrifying. I stick to freerepublic.com as a representative of the whole. Just terrifying to read what these people think.
Major Major Major Major
@liberal: The species will be fine, it’s civilization you should be worried about.
redshirt
@liberal: I don’t think climate change could finish us off. It’s not ever going to be that bad. But climate change plus worldwide instability plus increased access to nuclear weapons, and yeah, we could certainly nuke ourselves to extinction.
redshirt
@liberal: There’s no where we can escape to, realistically. Putting 12 people on the moon or Mars or in a space station means squat.
liberal
@PVDMichael:
Sorry, but if you don’t think the banks (at least the big banks, and the shadow banking system, and the rest of their enablers in the FIRE sector) should be demonized, having lived through 2008, you’re one of the enemy.
Betty Cracker
@redshirt: True, but it is not the root of all evil in the post-1865 world, which seems to be what you’re suggesting. It’s not even the root of all evil in America, but rather one of many horrible manifestations of greed, ignorance and inhumanity that have played out across this continent (and every other with a significant population of human beings!). The genocide of Native American people is another example. Did that not also stain the American character from sea to shining motherfucking sea? Did that not also inform this country’s tendency toward international gangsterism?
liberal
@redshirt: Agreed. That’s exactly my point (though I didn’t explain myself fully). Global warming plus resource depletion (not just fossil fuels, but soils, metals, etc), plus overpopulation plus human propensity for warfare means Bad Shit Is Coming.
Alain the site fixer
@ruemara: Thank you for this perceptive comment. I shall absorb and reflect on it. I think there’s some important discussion about the nirvana that the Star Trek vision provides as a carrot, and yes, that only came about because of war and strife. That was a big thing for Roddenberry – he served in WW2 and was quite aware of the horrors that likely would recur.
liberal
@Betty Cracker: Problem is that current political problems in the US (mainly, stupid white people who vote Republican) is largely (if not entirely) the fault of the South. At least that’s the conclusion you’d draw if you naively just looked at where the crazy is concentrated these days.
Of course, there’s stupidity all over.
liberal
@Major Major Major Major: Not so clear.
germy
@Alain the site fixer:
I discovered I had that particular superpower rather late in life. I grew up in a household with NO pets (mom was allergic) and didn’t acquaint myself with the feline species until I was into my late 20s.
I sometimes imagine that if Trump gets elected, I’ll see a whole bunch of comments here on balloon-juice and other blogs: “My cat disappeared! Has anyone seen the cats? Where did they all go??”
They can sense an approaching earthquake and take appropriate measures (hide) so I imagine they’ll conceal themselves completely in the event of a Trump presidency.
Someone should ask Trump about cats. “Do you like cats?” His probable reply: “Hell no, I HATE cats. Always have.”
redshirt
@Betty Cracker: I think it’s at the root of quite a bit of it. It’s a mindset, based on fear, hate, and ignorance. Generations of southern leaders were inculcated with the politics of slavery and that has morphed directly into Republican politics of today.
The genocide of Native Americans is primarily a southern phenomena too, pushed into the west pre-Civil War with slavery politics at its center, and after the war as a consequence of post Civil War instability. Not that leaders in the North don’t have bloody hands on this either, of course.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
This. Totally this.
liberal
@redshirt: Yeah, hence my comments re “space”. (I went that route cuz of “Heinlein”.)
Eventually we’ll have either the tech to put lots of people “up there,” or we’ll have had enough time to put a self-sustaining presence up there slowly but surely. Except that we’re going to blow ourselves up first.
I mean, these problems are technically solveable. But we can’t even do the easy things, like “Don’t invade Iraq” or “Don’t support Donald Trump [you dumb white voters].”
Major Major Major Major
@germy: Oh god, disappearing cats? I don’t want to live in a Murakami novel.
Chris
@Gravenstone:
How about civil wars? I’m not seeing any wars between the major European powers happening (except maybe Russia versus The Rest). What I can totally see is more ethnic/sectarian tensions coming to a boil and sometimes leading to ethnic cleansing or ethnic cleansing attempts. Less World War and more Yugoslavia.
germy
@Major Major Major Major: Do you really think they’d stick around under a Trump administration?
I don’t know where they’d hide but I’m certain we wouldn’t be able to find them. They’re smart.
liberal
@redshirt: I don’t know the history well, but I assume in the context of this conversation that Northeners were also pretty blameworthy. Sherman’s post-Civil War career was spent fighting Indians (IIRC). And wasn’t Custer previously in the Union army?
For context, though: I’m sure we would have murdered many of them anyway, but AFAICT most of the population drop in N. and S. American native populations was due to inadvertent exposure to Old World diseases. Sadly, they were doomed.
Betty Cracker
@redshirt:
Human beings are evil, rapacious, cruel, greedy fucks.
schrodinger's cat
I am reading up on the history of WW I right now. When was the world not a perilous place? I don’t buy this premise that things are the most terrible they have ever been. Trump and Sanders rise is because of almost 40 years of Reagnomics.
Alain the site fixer
@redshirt: I’ve been a loyal FR reader (and for years until I could no longer ignore the drool and spittle-flecks, Lucianne.com). It’s an important thing to read – it’s a deep window into many an angry white man’s world. I like it very much because it’s discussion and so I can understand how people think.
I steer clear of Breitbart but I do listen to their radio programming. It’s a rising blood and soil enabler – I fear that they, and some of the for-profit right wing dirty tricksters (like James O’Keefe, and now the revelations about Peter Thiel’s financing of a legal hit on Gawker Media) are happy to take paid clients and present a message, lie and spread calumny in service of their fascistic goals.
I’m reminded of why I feel so conflicted about wishing for a society that once again blamed family for the acts of their kin. I mean it’s 100% un-American and unfair, but there’s a good argument for such shame-based mechanisms keeping people from going too far out of line. It makes sense that I learned of this from the Japanese; there is huge pressure to not bring dishonor to the family name. And so there’s much less skullduggery in business and politics as people have something valuable to lose. In the land of the second chance, that mechanism doesn’t exist.
And I am not claiming that there’s no crime or graft or theft or what-have-you in Japan, just that they have a strong cultural/social force that encourages more virtuous and ethical behavior.
schrodinger's cat
@Betty Cracker: Heh Churchill said the same about the starving millions in Bengal and Bihar. All the while Indians were dying to keep the home islands safe in WWII.
germy
@schrodinger’s cat:40 years of Reagnomics
I’ve lived in his shadow for my entire adult life. I hope my offspring (who are having a tough time of it as they make their way in his world) enjoy a pendulum swing back to something resembling normal.
Chris
@Betty Cracker:
It depends on what you mean by “the brand.” There aren’t enough pixels in the universe to describe all the ways in which racism isn’t confined to the South. What’s always struck me as “different” in the South isn’t that it’s more racist but the lengths to which its racists will go, vis-a-vis the people they perceive as “lesser” but also vis-a-vis the entire world, to protect their privileges. It may or may not be the “most racist” part of the country, it certainly isn’t and never has been the only racist part of the country. But it remains the only part of the country that threw an actual revolution to protect its slave-owning privileges (not because they were about to die but because, for the first time in their lives, somebody had become president who wasn’t a fan of it), and also the only part of the country where, a century after that, entire states rallied to a third party based on the single platform of “segregation now, segregation forever.” (Twice).
There is, or at least there historically has been, something in the water, so to speak, when it comes to the South.
Chris
@redshirt:
I don’t even think this is right either. The South didn’t start the fire. There’ve been strands of this kind of worldview all over the country. They mix and match over time. (Outside of the South, for example, the Ku Klux Klan in its twentieth century reincarnation was probably more of a successor to the Know-Nothings than to anything related to slavery, the Civil War or Reconstruction).
redshirt
@Betty Cracker: I don’t disagree, but you could look at post Civil War genocide as a by product of the Civil War – all those vets and weapons had to be used in a “productive” manner. But yeah, Northerners played their part.
Are you trying to argue that the South is no more responsible for the current Republican party than anyone else? That’s the vibe I’m getting.
germy
@Chris:
http://www.chaunceydevega.com/2016/05/the-elizabeth-bathory-of-american.html
redshirt
@Chris: Racism is certainly not a Southern only phenomena. But as an official institution? That’s primarily a Southern thing. But of course as I’ve said, it’s spread everywhere now. My governor – the loathsome Paul LePage – is as bad as anyone.
Also, the politics of Southern slavery were baked into the founding of America and heavily influenced the early years. Missouri Compromise for example. That influence continues to today.
Alain the site fixer
@schrodinger’s cat: It’s not that they are the most terrible they’ve ever been, it’s that systems that have worked for us for hundreds of years are failing. And with so many people, the scale of misery will dwarf even the most horrible body counts from the past.
Things will be the most terrible they’ve ever been when those behind walls start shooting those who want to come to safety. But first the walls will go up, so that’s not tomorrow, assuming that Hillary wins. And no I don’t envision Trump ordering wall guards to fire on folks below the wall, but having the wall is the major step in marking a clear line between “us” and “them” that makes such cruelty easy.
germy
@Alain the site fixer: There will be no wall. Didn’t one of his spokesmen recently call it a metaphorical wall?
Matt McIrvin
@Alain the site fixer:
There very much was fascism in Japan, though, and those same forces helped drive them there.
Chris
@liberal:
Yep. And Sheridan, and probably many others I’m not thinking of. That’s one of the sadder things about the post Civil War era: the same U.S. Army that dealt one of the biggest blows to white supremacy in the South went on to ruthlessly enforce it in the West, and by “the same U.S. Army” we’re not infrequently talking about literally the same people.
fedupwithhypocrisy
@Alain the site fixer: ‘Mad Max’
redshirt
@Alain the site fixer: Wow, I read their crap but I can’t stand to listen to it. You’ve got a stronger stomach than I.
The tribal honor phenomena you describe also works the other way. Belong to a racist tribe and any acts of tolerance will be frowned upon and you’ll pay a social price.
redshirt
@fedupwithhypocrisy: That’s why Fury Road shook me to the core (and the Road Warrior before it): It seems a likely result of the path we’re walking, as opposed to the harmonious Star Trek future.
Betty Cracker
@redshirt:
No. I’m saying the nativist, racist asshole blight would exist even if the Union Army had utterly obliterated Dixie after the Civil War. It wouldn’t have the exact same configuration, but it seems to be human nature, to some extent, in that it occurs all over the planet.
Chris
@germy:
Were they ever not?
Yes, agreed on that part.
@redshirt:
No, not necessarily. Again, the prime counter-example to this is the systematic ethnic cleansing of the American Indian tribes, which were also government policy, and in that case pretty much all over.
@Matt McIrvin:
Wasn’t Imperial Japan a traditional conservative thing (albeit one of the nastier versions) rather than a fascist thing? Using Paxton’s formula, the “traditional elites” in Japan (the military, and more recent elites like the industrialists) were the ones running the show, not a mass populist movement like the German Nazis or Italian Fascists.
pat
Eventually we’ll have either the tech to put lots of people “up there,” or we’ll have had enough time to put a self-sustaining presence up there slowly but surely.
Up where? The Earth can’t support more than 10-12 billion. How many would we have to “move” “up there” in order to have a better life down here. And what would prevent them from destroying the planet that they land on the way we are doing to this one? I have never understood this.
Overpopulation. Too many people. That is the core problem, as I see it, and I blame the Catholic Church and other paternalistic religions. Look at South and Central America and the Middle East and India and think where we would all be if the Birth Control Pill had become widely available in the 60s.
Thank you all for some very thought-provoking comments.
Brachiator
@Alain the site fixer:
I disagree in part here.
Romney was a classic bully. Someone who talked tough, but who was essentially a coward.
Trump, as you say, identifies buttons and can push pressure points. But unlike Romney, Trump fancies himself to be a counter puncher. He enjoys fighting back. But he is thin skinned, and it is not clear that he can take a really hard punch. He shakes off most attacks even when it is clear that he has been wounded. This makes him dangerous because psychic wounds only make him fight back harder, even if he loses in the long run. His ego protects him and convinces him that a loss wasn’t really a loss.
schrodinger's cat
@Alain the site fixer: What systems do you speak of, that have existed for hundreds of years? This country has existed for less the 300 years, a blip even by the standards of recorded history. Life for humans has always been brutish, nasty and short.
redshirt
@Chris: This will sound terrible, but ethnic cleansing is a different beast then slavery. One is a short term goal, the other forms the foundation of the economics of a society and everything that goes along with that.
Poopyman
@pat:
And I blame doctors. And teaching universities. And pharmaceutical companies and the medical industry. How many times would you have died from something already? I count 10-12 for myself, and I’m not yet 62.
cckids
@germy:
I can’t imagine him with a pet of ANY kind. He is just such an obviously, totally selfish bastard, I can’t see him bothering to even have a token pet for a photo shoot. Think of how the eagle attacked him.
SAD!!
germy
@cckids: Authoritarians hate and fear cats.
redshirt
@Betty Cracker:
Well, that’s a hypothetical we’ll never know. But I disagree. Sure, there are assholes everywhere. Greedy pigfuckers in every society. But when institutions are built around these concepts, that’s different. When entire ideologies are focused on the concepts of racism and intolerance and hate, that’s different than some idiot bigot.
I know you agree that the Republican party is enormously negative for America and the world. But you seem to not want to accept the massive influence the South has had in making that so.
Poopyman
@Poopyman: That’s a half-formed comment. The other half is that I’m very glad for all of those things, and while it’s tempting to blame the Church, I think human nature is going to trump any social institution. People have many children because until less than a hundred years ago, some/most kids did not reach breeding age. Just ask my uncle who died at 6.
Poopyman
@cckids: I image Trump would say ” I LOVE cats! I’m a UUUUGE fan of cats. They’re delicious!”
redshirt
@Poopyman: Right? Overpopulation is not THE problem, though it does exacerbate matters. I’d hope by now Malthusianism has been thoroughly debunked, but clearly it has not.
But we’re not warming the planet because of overpopulation. We’re doing so because we lack the will to move off burning fossil fuels even when we have better alternatives. That’s a political problem, not a demographic one.
Linnaeus
@redshirt:
These are both manifestations of a deeper ideology: white supremacy, turbocharged by capitalism.
Emma
@Alain the site fixer:
It’s more like it turns outwards to assault the other: The Nanking Massacre. Their treatment of the Ainu. Korean comfort women. In fact, the Japanese culture is one of the most violent cultures we have — as well as one of the most beautiful.
redshirt
@Linnaeus: Yes, of course. But ethnic cleansing is probably as old as humanity. The Southern form of slavery is only as old as America and is far more influential to our current situation.
I’m not defending ethnic cleansing for the record. Just comparing evils.
Seanly
I think the world has been in conflict over resources since the 1930’s. I’m not a historian (INAH?), but Japan’s, Italy’s, and Germany’s aggressions in the later half of that decade can be tied not just to their fascist leaders’ desires for territorial gains and subjugation of others, but also to lack of natural resources (as well as food production).
By no means am I trying to give any cover for the behavior and war crimes of those nations, just that I feel some of their motivation was about securing natural resources such as iron, grain, and oil.
We’re already seeing the impacts of climate devastation such as the Syrian refugee crisis. And for how long has Saharan African been a humanitarian disaster? 30 or 40 years now? As the arable land decreases in acreage and productivity, we will see more refugee. Some of it may be more subtle like America during the Dust Bowl but much of it will be mass migrations.
Poopyman
@Linnaeus: Only very recently. Both slavery and ethnic cleansing have existed (and thrived?) outside of white culture (not a race), and predating capitalism. Say rather that they exist
edto further tribal supremacy and economic superiority.redshirt
@Emma: Great point. And even today, the Japanese can be defined by their homogeneity and resistance to change that.
Poopyman
@Seanly:
That’s for sure. Conflict over resources has existed since two tribes met at a watering hole.
ETA: Maybe I’d better say it explicitly – conflict over resources is baked into our DNA.
schrodinger's cat
@Poopyman: My two kittehs will fight over who gets to sit in a box. Territorial mammals is territorial.
pat
@Poopyman:
Good point. But it doesn’t negate mine.
Betty Cracker
@redshirt:
Nope. I’m calling bullshit on a very specific thing, i.e., your theory that all the evil was located in the South and could have been eradicated if the Union Army had wiped it out before it spread. That’s just demonstrably not true, given that some of the very people who would have completed the theoretical eradication went on to commit genocide that started well before the Civil War was even a thought. Your heroes were white supremacists too.
MomSense
I am so with you on this, Alain. And I feel responsible for the human beings I decided to bring into this world which compounds the hopelessness and anger.
Without going into detail, dealing with the human concerns of climate change is my middle son’s field. He and his classmates do struggle with the magnitude of the problems and with despair. Climate change is a crisis now in many communities around the world even as many of us aren’t experiencing it acutely. He doesn’t talk about it as much as he used to. When he is home from school, he is usually in need of care in the form of laundry, favorite meals, hikes on our favorite trails, play with the dog, and lots of laughter.
I agree with you that it is present in the unease/anger that is happening all around us and to us even if we aren’t aware of it consciously.
cckids
@germy: True. That resting-bitch-face, “fuck you, why are you looking at me” attitude that (to me) is a huge part of their appeal would make someone like Trump crazy.
Crazier. I’d fear for any animal in his presence.
Helmut Monotreme
@Alain the site fixer:
One word: Yakuza. That urge to protect the family from dishonor can just as easily result in people losing fingers when they are disgraced. That urge to protect the family from dishonor probably makes it quite a bit harder to find an informant in a corrupt organization. That urge to protect the family from dishonor can result in people refusing to acknowledge an error until well after it is obvious to the entire world (the management of TEPCO in the wake of their disastrous mishandling of the Fukushima crisis and resulting meltdown.)
Matt McIrvin
@Poopyman:
People don’t have many children once they get a reasonable standard of living, and a modicum of old-age security, and when women have a choice in the matter. Sure, some still do, but not on average.
World population is still increasing, but it’s not exponentiating; the rate has been slowing down in absolute terms since the 1980s and in percentage terms, if I recall correctly, since the 1960s. In most of the middle-income, less-developed world, total fertility rates are not much higher than in the US: just above replacement level, and below replacement in many of the richest countries.
The only countries whose population is still exploding are not just the poor, but the poorest of the poor: lots of countries in Africa, and a few other exceptional places like (surprise, surprise) Afghanistan and Iraq. Africa is probably going to be a considerably larger fraction of the world population 50 years from now, but they’ll make the transition to lower fertility too if they get the chance.
So the problem is really more how we give the people who already exist a decent standard of living without breaking the ecosphere. And we know this is technically feasible; the question is just whether it’s politically feasible.
Linnaeus
@redshirt:
Oh, I didn’t think you were – let me make that clear. My point is that both were linked via an ideology that was widely shared in the US and by larger processes that involved many actors.
Linnaeus
@Poopyman:
They have, but I’m speaking about the US context specifically.
schrodinger's cat
@Betty Cracker: Racism was the basis of colonialist era. It was used a justification for treating people as subhuman. Even Canada was not immune. Trudeau recently apologized for the incident.
cckids
@Poopyman: lol. But too close to true. More like “I love cats! They always think they can land on their feet no matter how high a tower you throw them off.”
Rob in CT
I think this is overwrought and mostly wrong.
People generally don’t like change all that much. Whether it’s white people freaking out about not being in the majority in the near future (and “wanting our country back!”) or something else. Sure, climate change can feed into that, but there’s always something.
I actually think human civilization will muddle through.
The US constitutional order… that I’m less optimistic about. Our system is screwy and basically requires that political parties not really act like disciplined, ideologically coherent political parties. We have parliamentary tactics in a presidential system and it means gridlock to the max. This leads to frustration, which leads to either: 1) radicalization (I, for one, have become a partisan Democrat in reaction to this); or 2) checking out (“it’s all rigged/corrupt, screw it”). Result: more dysfunction. I don’t see how this feedback loop gets reversed without serious ugliness.
redshirt
@Betty Cracker:
Obviously, not “all the evil” was located in the South. But the failure of Reconstruction to eliminate the elite class of the Confederacy allowed them to mutate into Jim Crow and the institutional racism now present in the Republican party. Not sure how this can be denied. Otherwise, explain Strom Thurmond and his ilk.
schrodinger's cat
@cckids: Did you see that story about the kitteh and the Chechen leader?
cckids
@schrodinger’s cat: No. Should I be afraid to go look? :(
schrodinger's cat
@cckids: Chechen strongman wanted helped finding his lost kitty and posted on Instagram about it.
Major Major Major Major
@schrodinger’s cat: @cckids: Is it like Keanu? I think I’m gonna see that this afternoon.
ETA: So it is.
Matt McIrvin
Concerning population and Japan, a thing that’s happening there is that their economy is trying to adjust to a population that is more or less flat, rapidly aging, and imminently declining, since their birthrates are very low and they’re not keen on immigration. More immigration-friendly countries will be able to stave that off for a while, but at some point, even without anything like a sudden die-off catastrophe, the world will start to run out of high-birthrate countries and their populations will start to decline too; the age pyramids are already turning upside down.
I think we need to think long-term about how to adjust to this. The answer isn’t just “encourage people to have more babies again”, because that’s ecologically unsustainable. In a rich society, a stable or declining population is probably a problem you want to have. But it can lead to economic stagnation if your institutions are organized around perpetual growth of the potential labor force. It might be a partial answer to technological unemployment, though: maybe a growing potential labor force would be a problem anyway.
schrodinger's cat
@Major Major Major Major: @cckids: Here you go.
Cacti
@srv:
Who says it would necessarily have to come from the west?
Germy Shoemangler
@Major Major Major Major: We LOVED Keanu. Very funny, satisfying movie. There’s a drug trip scene where the cat speaks in the voice of Keanu Reeves… I will say no more.
Betty Cracker
@redshirt: Now you’re moving the goal posts, so I’ll just say it one more time and leave it at this: People are crazy, evil, rapacious, cruel and greedy fucks — all over the world. We would still have a nativist, racist asshole problem in 2016 even if Jeebus himself had smote Dixie into a smoking crater in 1865. The circumstances wouldn’t be exactly the same, of course, but yeah, there would still be assholes like Donald Trump and Paul LePage, even without Strom Thurmond, just as there was a Mussolini and a Milošević. A cursory glance at a world history book should make that abundantly clear. That’s all I’m saying.
Matt McIrvin
The problem of fewer engineers and scientists in the West is not a supply-side problem. There are plenty of kids who want to study science and engineering; what there aren’t is jobs for all these people, which is what discourages them from continuing in the pipeline.
rp
Very thoughtful essay. I think you may be right about the global angst, although it’s probably misguided. If anything, this is likely the most stable and peaceful period in human history. Global life spans are increasing, knowledge is increasing, more people are being lifted out of poverty, etc. That could change of course, but I don’t see any reason to assume a cataclysmic shift is likely.
OTOH, the anxiety seems to be real. I think you can cite the huge number of popular post-apocalyptic novels, movies, and shows from the last 10 years as evidence of this trend.
Matt McIrvin
@srv: Maybe not, but again, that is a supply-side solution for a demand-side problem. If we want a lot of science we have to be willing to pay for it.
gene108
@pat:
It wasn’t just people having huge families. In many cases, post-colonial places started investing in infrastructure and improving access to medical care.
From the Worldbank
Data only goes back to 1981, but India for example cut its child mortality rate from 111 per 1,000 live births, in 1981, to 38 per 1,000 live births in 2015.
Family planning did not catch-up as quickly as the improved medical care, so you end up with a population boom over the last 60+ years.
In most countries birth rates are going down. It’s mainly Africa, at this point in time that has birth rates in excess of 4 births per woman.
If family planning can be pushed in Africa population growth will largely start to level off.
Poopyman
@schrodinger’s cat: Hmmmmm.
Would a true cat lover let his cat go unnamed?
redshirt
@Betty Cracker: I guess we’ll agree to disagree. You seem insistent on claiming the South is no more at fault for the current Republican Party than anyone else, which I’m not sure how you can justify. But you haven’t, rather you just say instead everyone sucks. But there were abolitionists. There were people who fought for civil rights. There were places that didn’t employ slavery. There are differences in systems, the system that developed in the American south helped poison this country and that poison has now spread everywhere.
Poopyman
@Matt McIrvin: A-fucking-men. Tripling NASA’s, NOAA’s, NSF’s, and NIH’s* budgets would barely be a blip on the national budget, especially if a few porky defense items were put out of their misery. (I’m looking at you, F-35.)
* – I know I’ve left a few funding vehicles off due to memory lapses. Sorry ’bout that. Feel free to add.
Major Major Major Major
@Matt McIrvin: The problem is that science is boring and expensive and slow and liberal, though, and impossible to report on. “The Internet” is a once-in-a-lifetime invention at the end of a 100-year slog. These things don’t just drop out of the sky.
EDIT: Agree with Poopyman, but we have to convince people to do that for years and years and years if they expect awesome things. We should lock it in somehow. Or do the “Manhattan Project For Global Warming” thing.
redshirt
@Major Major Major Major: Building a new power grid would do the trick. It would require a massive effort and much funding, but it would produce more in profits and jobs, while revitalizing the American manufacturing base and securing the country’s power systems against failures, overload, terrorism, and solar phenomena, all the while directly combating Global Warming. It’s win-win-win and so, of course, it’s not even discussed.
Major Major Major Major
@redshirt: Haha true. I mean, I talk about it, but that’s basically the guarantor of “not even discussed.”
schrodinger's cat
@Poopyman: Its probably some silly name, which will destroy street cred, think Chechen equivalent of Mr. Snugglebum.
Major Major Major Major
@schrodinger’s cat: priljubiti se kundak, according to teh google. or something
Miss Bianca
@schrodinger’s cat: Chechen strongman haz kitty?
rikyrah
@redshirt:
Because, it was just a coincidence that it went solidly Republican AFTER the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.
Ok.
sure.
uh huh.
Chris
@Miss Bianca:
The new “Hitler was nice to his dog.”
Major Major Major Major
@Chris: Say what you will about Hitler, but you gotta admit, he did kill Hitler.
rikyrah
@Linnaeus:
True, but slavery is embedded within the very DNA of this country.
And, there would be no American financial engine without it.
There is not a block of the American Financial Foundation that doesn’t have its roots in slavery.
The ramifications of this truth is obvious, and obvious why so many go to such lengths to try and dismiss the true harm of slavery to the Black population of this country.
Betty Cracker
@redshirt: Le sigh. That’s not what I was saying at all. But yeah, agree to disagree, argle-bargle, etc. This has otherwise been a pretty interesting thread! Lots of food for thought.
Miss Bianca
@Chris: Did you go to the link and look at some of the tweets? The burning/blown up buildings with “find Kadyrov’s cat before he does this to your house” messages were funny in a very dark, Slavic-humor way….
germy
@redshirt:
Because the GOP philosophy is not “win-win” it’s “we win-you lose”
Major Major Major Major
@Alain the site fixer: I wanted to quote more of the Whitman but the problem with Whitman in polite(ish) company is you have to stop before he becomes too… you know… Whitman…
Brachiator
@redshirt:
The United States was built around racism and slavery, not just the South.
Linnaeus
@rikyrah:
I agree. That was Poopyman’s quote, not mine. :)
Poopyman
@Major Major Major Major: Wait a minute. Did you just run “Mr. Snugglebum” through Google Translator? And it gave you the Chechen equivalent?
Major Major Major Major
@Poopyman: ‘snuggle’, then ‘butt’. no ‘mr.’ I think I ended up getting “to snuggle, butt”.
Poopyman
@Linnaeus: Yes, and my point was those two institutions predate the US by a long way. I was not making any judgement or defense of the American economic system vis-a-vis slavery.
Miss Bianca
@Major Major Major Major: oh, *do* go on, M4! : )
rikyrah
A blog I love, Pragmatic Obots Unite, does a weekly theme. This week’s theme is Bullwhip Days: Voices of Our People. Actual slaves recounting their lives – it was a New Deal project- collecting the remembrances of actual slaves.
For too long, American slavery, in all its evil was glossed over. Which is why, as a Black person, I never co-sign when others whine, ‘ do we need another Slave movie/tv show.’ I say yes. If it’s going to tell THE TRUTH about American slavery. We’ve had plenty of garbage whitewashing of American Slavery – but, honest-to-goodness truth telling pieces about it. No. Not really.
It’s one the reasons why I can’t recommend highly enough the television series Underground, from WGN. It just completed it’s first season. And, it was unflinching in its depiction of American slavery. Every week gave me at least one ’12 Years a Slave’ moment, and always disturbed me down to my soul. Then again, it’s supposed to. It should be used in every school to teach THE TRUTH about American slavery.
Major Major Major Major
@rikyrah: That’s cool. The New Deal did a bunch of different kinds of audio recordings, didn’t they? I know they also hired out-of-work writers to travel around taking down oral histories.
Oh, for the days of a government willing to do that. But, you know, without the catastrophe that preceded it.
Miss Bianca
@rikyrah: I’ll have to put “Underground” on my list. If the first season just completed, that means it will be out on DVD soon, I hope.
Brachiator
@srv:
They’re still better informed than the morons who get their news from Fox News, or National Review or The Wall Street Journal.
Chris
@Brachiator:
I do believe there was a study in the early Obama years that said that not only were Fox viewers the most poorly informed people in the country, but also that the more assiduously they followed Fox News, the more ill-informed they were!
schrodinger's cat
@Miss Bianca: A very cute one, you can click the BBC link. He is skritching the kitteh’s belly.
Origuy
@schrodinger’s cat: I believe it’s a Bengal cat.
Brachiator
@Chris:
Sure, I can easily believe this. In addition, I’ve noticed a trend that intensified during the Terry Schiavo case, that some conservatives create and use Internet sites that reinforce their ignorance. You see this to some degree also in the way that people tailor Facebook and Twitter. They link to or follow only those who think like they do, creating a perfect circle of stupidity.
J R in WV
@Alain the site fixer:
I’m old enough that the crisis we feared as young men and women was nuclear warfare. I was 11 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and tried to dig a shelter beneath the family home – frustrated because it was cap rock on a big ridge, way too hard to make a dent in with hand tools at 11.
Now, of course, we have new problems, over-population for sure. Climate disruption, for sure. But I’m old, so 20 odd years more of interesting problems, and I’m out of here. But I’m interested in doing what I can to meet these challenges. Contributing to people I think will do the right things. Helping out in elections coming up.
Ready to defend myself and my community if necessary.
One thing, Alain, as others have mentioned long ago, for really long full text posts, maybe you could put two thirds or more on the jump, so as not to fill up the front page so much.
Thanks again for bringing up such consequential issues!
redshirt
@Betty Cracker: I guess I’m unsure what your point is then, other than what I summarized. The South was the birthplace of slavery in America, the Confederacy, Jim Crow, and the stronghold of today’s Republican party. Is this just a random coincidence?
Uncle Cosmo
@srv: You: STFU & GTFO of this thread. I wouldn’t even wipe my arse with your opinions, fuckhead.
And I don’t even give a shit if (as seems highly likely) you’re one of Cole’s butt-buddies having some “fun” trolling us. That sort of “fun” ought by rights to get you run over by a bus.
cckids
@schrodinger’s cat: Belated thanks!
Elizabelle
Alain: glad to see you writing a longform piece; looks well worth the read. Have to catch up with all of you.
Great (apparent!) thesis from my skim, that free floating anxiety from observing symptoms of climate change (maybe even when denied) is driving angriness in society and politics. Something’s going on. Americans and others observing from abroad are wondering about the angriness and sheer meanness pervading American culture.
E
Thank you for this post Alain. We are in a climate emergency that is going to have vast social effects beyond the obvious geo-physical ones. All the spats about Bernie v. Hillary and the snarky responses to the Bundy folks etc. are going to be seem so small. I personally am considerably more educated on what is happening to our climate than most, and I am genuinely terrified.
J R in WV
@Chris:
I have to disagree with almost every word of your post. The south absolutely DID start the fire, and poured gas on it, before Lincoln took any action whatsoever. The KKK is stone racist, today just like the two previous incarnations. Know Nothings were a branch of the same hatred rootstock as the Klan.
Some people matured out of that stew of hatred, but more were falling into it at the same time.
J R in WV
@redshirt:
I do think there are two strands that led to the current Republican apparatus, one is the racist Klan folks, the members of the party who have never held any more power than a precinct captain. The other is the John Bircher branch, which believed that Dwight Eisenhower was a commie undercover agent, as crazed as that is.
Those businessmen, like the Koch brothers, who funded the Birchers for years, and now fund the rightmost Republican leaders, were crazy. Their (Mr Koch) father, who founded the fortune, did it on money taken from Stalin. This has to have made the brothers crazy.
Chris
@J R in WV:
You’re aware that “the fire” I was referring to was American racism, not the Civil War, right? Meaning, no, the South absolutely did not start it. It existed all over the country. The KKK is stone racist? Yes. It is. … your point? Know Nothings were a branch of the same old hatred rootstock as the Klan? Yes. They were. And yet, not Southern. The point was that even when originally Southern phenomena like the Klan spread to the rest of the country, the reason it takes in these parts of the country is that they also have racist traditions of their own.
Chris
@J R in WV:
I agree. I’ve had a theory for a while that the Trump/Cruz (or, more honestly, Trump/everyone else) split in the party represented a split between the “racist Klan folk” (Trump) and the Birchers (Cruz).