and my ramblings about being human aren't entirely
unrelated to politics.
See Also (or instead)
Severn Cullis-Suzuki (age
12) gave
a speech to the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. I advise everyone above the age of 12 to listen to
those younter than themselves. I'll leave the 12-year-olds (and yonger) to
decide who they should listen to, but won't be surprised (or offended) if
they're a bit shy of listening to the grown-ups.
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and
Gaza, responded
to Trump's sanctions against her with the powerful punishing those who
speak for the powerless, it is not a sign of strength, but of guilt. Ne'er
a truer word were spoken.
When memorials to atrocity tell only of the atrocities one group of men of
violence have perpetrated, against members of some other group whose men of
violence are
committing their own atrocities – that go without memorials –
the latter men of violence do not want their audience to care about the
difference between the other group and its men of violence. That
is how
they justify their own atrocities, by composing memorials that seek to
justify unfocussed revenge. The men of violence always do this: your men
of violence blur the distinction between them (the others your men
of violence want to get rid of) and their men of violence to justify
massacring civilians (while pretending to regret – yet striving to keep
folk from
paying attention to – any collateral damage, that arose from
their utter disregard for the distinction between the group and the men of
violence that pretend to be part of it). They know that, by doing so, they
shall enrage some among them who were formerly peaceful, making them easy
for their men of violence to recruit, thereby ensuring that you are in
danger from an ongoing threat that your men of violence can pretend to
defend you from, by committing crimes of violence that
ensure this whole toxic cycle
continues indefinitely. And, of course, in order to defend you from it,
they have to wield power over you, which keeps them in power, just as their
opposite numbers, their men of violence, use the other half of that cycle
to hold power over them. Divide and conquer is an ancient
strategy, that men of violence have learned they can use to scare people into
acquiescing to their rule. Two (or more) groups of men of violence get to each
dominate a population they gaslight into thinking of them as ours, while
those men of violence effectively collaborate to consolidate each other's power
so as to ensure those others shall consolidate their own.
A Guardian journalist wrote
a scathing
interpretation of what candidates for the Tory leadership said in a
leadership debate, pointing out that their own party's policies are the primary
cause of most of what they need to fix.
The
UK's kleptocracy problem details the ways that UK professional services
facilitate the appropriation of wealth, by powerful figures in the former Soviet
Union, and its laundering into legitimate wealth that gives them a nice
western lifestyle and the ability to spread their kleptocratic culture by
infecting the UK Conservative party with it. None of which should be a
surprise: the UK and US are poor countries
ruled by rich elites who ensure businesses are so organised as to siphon off
the wealth created by their poor citizens into the pockets of the elites, while
trapping in poverty those whose work actually creates the work, just the same
way things work in the kleptocrats' home countries.
An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment
of all republics. –
seen attributed
to Plutarch.
Kenan Malik
reviews a
retrospective of photography, by Chris Killip and Graham Smith, showing the
realities of working-class life in the north of England in the 1970s and 1980s.
These photographs can't but make you ask the question: why don't we revolt
here?
Kenan Malik, again,
gives a
cogent critique of misplaced fears about so-called AI blinding folk to the
very real threat of this modern technology, which is that it consolidates the
power
a tiny
amoral minority has ove the overwhelming majority of humanity.
Susie Alegre
hits a
nail on the head with if something is so complex that it can't be
explained, then there are certain areas where it shouldn't be used.
Rhyming, humour and catchiness aren't necessarily correlated with
correctness, but
folk are
singularly susceptible to treating them as if they did. Which makes life
easy for folk who don't care about truth.
George Monbiot disects the seldom-spoken truth
that money
is power and democracy a thin veneer over a toxic foundation of plutocratic
oligarchy.
Jessica
Hagy's Indexed cartoons are not
infrequently quite illuminating.
He also
recognised that
the essentials of life include whatever is necessary to take your place in
public without shame, which includes an adequate income. The same article
also tells me (indirectly) that the UK national median income in 2022 is around
£19,600, roughly what I pay in tax each year; UK taxpayers with income levels
similar to mine pay less, so I hope they (and those paid even more) have the
good grace to not grumble about what they do pay, when half the nation's
population has less income before tax than half what they're left with
after.
A visit to Roberto di
Cosmo's web site will give some interesting insights into Micro$oft's
antics. Those who can't read French might benefit from buying one of his books,
CyberSnare or The Planetary Hold-Up instead.
Bruce Schneier on the common
falacy that alleges a conflict between privacy and security.
Now that we can watch what's going on inside people's heads, the issue
of cognitive
privacy is a topic we need to address: before the technology gets
invented and abuses get embedded into the default mode of the corporate-designed
hardware everyone starts using for their neural links to computer systems.
We've seen how credit companies, search engines and social media have gathered
information about us without keeping us fully informed of how they're using it,
which we didn't find out about until it was already clearly abusive –
let's not repeat that mistake with something infinitely more personal. At the
same time, rights to mental privacy could even be a good way to push back
against what the corporate spies have done to us already.
On the delights
of Border
Control and its blatant discrimination.
The decline of the west is driven
by the
capitalist machine's efforts to suck wealth out of the economy, into the
largest bank accounts, to the detriment of everyone else.
On
why denunciations
are usually lies, e.g. Historians who investigated the files of the
Gestapo in Nazi Germany estimated that personal malice motivated 40% of
denunciations to the secret police…
On
why you
shouldn't trust a messaging app's claims of security. Any mob of gansters
could have done the same as the AFP and FBI did, and blackmail you with what
they gleaned. Or just use it to take out their competitors.
Amita Guha's account, Fingered by the
movie cops, of how the DMCA can cause someone to be punished for being
falsely accused. This article is a perfect illustration of the common fallacy
that law-abiding folks have nothing to fear from being snooped on: when
the snoop makes a mistake, law-abiding folks can get punished for things they
didn't do; and, in this case, there is no means either for them to obtain
compensation or even to oblige their accuser (and the ISP who punished them) to
acknowledge their innocence.
Steven
Hoke's logarithmic
tax rate proposal, in which a quite straightforward tax system would, in the
U.S.A., raise the same total revenue as the existing one while reducing the
taxes on all but the insanely rich – while making it way easier to map
pre-tax income to tax paid. I discuss Hoke's proposal in comments
on the
blog post, via which I found a link to it.
Matthew
Steward's analysis
of how a meritocratic elite, by wealth the top 10% except for the top
0.1% of America's wealth, has held onto roughly 60% of the nation's wealth
throughout the last century, albeit declining slightly (to around 55% now) to
the benefit of the bottom 90% in the post-war era. The top 0.1%, meanwhile, has
now recovered to about 20% (where it was around 1930, having been a little
higher in the late 1920s) after dropping down to less than 10% in the late 1970s
(a state of affairs Reagan managed to fix, at the expense of raising the
national debt to unprecedented highs, millions of millions of dollars). The
9.9%'s share has bumbled along roughly steady in the mid-50s% since then, while
the top 0.1% has dragged the bottom 90% down from the 35% they had in mid-1980s
to barely 20% now. The top 0.1% and the bottom 90% have roughly half each of
the mid-40s% that the intervening 9.9% doesn't own. That 9.9% is the bulwark
that protects the 0.1% from the 90%, while ever striving to join the former and
living in fear of falling into the latter.
One good way folk can reduce their harmful impacts on the environment is
by cutting waste, so it's heartening
to see
a story of a French municipality exploring the ways that ordinary folk can
reduce the amount of waste their households produce.
Another area of life in which those who can afford to take holidays can
reduce environmental (and other) harms
is in
choices about holidays, not just where to go but also how to get there, what
do do while on holiday and what you really want out of a holiday. (Albeit, from
personal experience, air travel manages to win on speed, price and conveniece
over the gentler path of rail travel. I suspect that is partly because
politicians like the former more than the latter.)
The
denialists all
follow the same script, from the opponents of slavery two centuries (and
more) ago to the present-day climate-deniers. When their prior case is blown to
smithereens, they pretend they never argued that case and invent a new set of
lies. They are not interested in learning from those who know better, only in
propping up the status quo from which they're used to profiting.
The origin of the black = slave story goes back
to the
Portuguese exploitation of São Tomé and Príncipe, which
other European powers were quick to reproduce.
The consequences of dumping CO2 into the atmosphere have been
know for some time. Högbom and
Arrhenius,
in 1896, worked out how much a doubling of its concentration would heat the
Earth. By the 1950s, the fuel and car industries were funding research and
getting disturbing answers.
Ann Jones, in The Nation (USA),
reports: After I Lived in Norway, America Felt
Backward. Here's
Why. (For reference: I live in Norway. I like it here.)
Robert Reich reports
on the
evidence that now unequivocally shows trickle-down is a myth and
tax-cuts for the rich increase inequality, whereas putting prosperity within
reach of the masses benefits everyone,
including the
environment.
Reducing the human population of the
planet needn't
imply any loss of prosperity; increases in participation and productivity
can make up for the loss in gross numbers. Indeed, reducing inequality so that
more folk get a shot at prosperity – which makes them better able to
participate and apply the ideas they have, including those that improve
productivity – is a far more effective way to improve general quality of
life than Elon Musk's preferred solution of expanding the population of
desperately poor people he can exploit to make himself ever richer at their ever
more miserable expense. Only one planet has the complex self-sustaining
ecological tapestry without which we cannot live; trashing it is bad for us and
worse for those that shall come after.
Peter Leeson describes situations in which anarchy
has worked better than government.
I see a common thread
from the religious
upheavals around the British Civil War that leads
into enlightenment
ideas on freedom of religion. Jefferson's writings on the subject contain
clear echoes of the reasons the Levellers, among others, gave for their strident
rejection of authority.
I'm pleased to see that the EU seems to have caught the clue-train in
regard to Open
Access to data.
I have reservations about much
of what Yanis is
saying generally, but I never believe explanations which presume the
stupidity of the people involved (about half way through) is an excellent
point and well worth sharing.
Catch
shares motivate fishermen to be ecologically responsible.
An antagonist minion in Gene
Catlow manages
to sum up what's
true of Corporate Mission Statements on the rare occasions that they're not
entirely BS.
Nick Davies on how PR hacks get over-worked journalists to pass
off propaganda as
news.
One of the core misunderstandings about propaganda – and, more
importantly, how to combat it – is the delusion that it has to do with the
audience believing it (whether fooled or confused by it). That leads to
supposing that the way to fight it is with Truth and Honesty. As
it turns
out, what actually matters is the consumer's sense of belonging. They know
they're being lied to, but they also know that – by buying into the lie
– they get to belong to a community that, one way or another, they've been
persuaded to want to be a part of. It is about feelings, not truth.
Brian W. Vaszily's assorted articles discussing some scary
truths about marketing.
Advertising, social
engineering and the new world order, a fine diatribe against the culture of
distraction our media peddles; 'though the author associates all morality and
virtue with religion, and I have some disagreement on what constitute morality
and virtue, the general thrust is sound. If you want to find the cause of moral
decline in our culture, look to the corporate media, not your political
opponents.
The
beginings of the history of making folk feel bad about themselves in order
to con them into buying products they didn't need; insecurity sells !
… higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate
with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD
infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies
… (full
article).
William Dalrymple casts a critical eye over the history of
the East
India Company and pokes the obvious parallels with contemporary corporate
power.
It's possible to so structure power
as to have decent folk
offer to take it on, and have a better chance of being lumbered with it, so
as to avoid the trap where only the psychopaths, who want it, find its appeal
overcomes the downsides of being lumbered with it – which now include
death-threats on social media.
Hans Kundnani takes a close look at the nature of collective identity
in an
article about Europe and European identity.
Jane Gleeson-White, of a family that includes three generations of
economists, writing
about the massive flaw in orthodox economics – the resources (natural
and relational) and labour (principally domestic) it ignores –
characterises what economics should be about: economics is the art of
managing and caring for the Earth, this planetary household, and therefore for
ourselves, all of us, equally; and that the economy is a sacred social space
organised around relationships of care.
Zoe
Bee's video on Grading
is a Scam (and Motivation is a Myth). From
the
conclusion: If
you want your students to engage with material, if you want them to grow to
be curious and critical thinkers, then you have to get rid of grades, you have
to communicate with your students, you have to relinquish your control, you have
to give your students freedom and trust them with it. You are not their master,
their interrogator holding a gun to their head unless they do what you want.
One might well say the same, to governments, of their citizens; or, to
businesses, of their staff. A little later, she explains that we need
change if we
want to end up with a more equitable society full of critical thinkers and
curious, motivated, passionate people. Equally, I add: if those with power
resist such change, it's rational to suspect they do so because
they don't want that outcome.
A brief (and fascinating) history
of the neutron bomb
– and its creator – sheds some scary light on political
processes.
As context to the recent transition in public attitudes towards and the
legal status of gay marriage, XKCD 1431
contrasts its history to those of interracial marriage. The public seems to
have become broad-minded faster than legislatures.
Apparently Randal shares my suspicion
that financial analysis is less scientific than its proponents claim. (The
hover text on this is an insightful quote from 1984, too. James Tobin rather
than Orwell.)
Before taking seriously anyone who claims our modern grasp of genetics
will let us breed a race of super-humans,
heed Adam
Rutherford's advice (author of Control: The Dark History and Troubling
Present of Eugenics, published by Orion): Rather than meddling at the
edges of a science that we barely understand, why not concentrate resources on
that triumvirate of inventions that have, over centuries, been shown to
transform and improve human capacities beyond all imagining: education,
healthcare and equality of
opportunity ? (And, incidentally, anyone claiming they'll produce
people with IQs of 1000 has failed to undertand how the IQ test scores are
computed. The artificial massaging of scores to make them fit a Gaussian
distribution with mean 100 and variance 15 makes nonsense of the claim.)
Jeremy Bentham
is famous for starting the utilitarian school of social philosopy. He
had
read many
books from earlier sources, that contributed to his perspective and now help
modern academics to understand him better. His aim of promoting the greatest
good for the greatest possible number is subject to various interpretations.
Personally, I care more about enabling as many as practical to have an honest
prospect of attaining prosperity – any greater good than that (reliably
having at least some surplus beyond their basic needs) for those gaining it is
less important to me than helping yet more folk attain that foundational
standard. Without it, freedoms are seldom meaningful, liberty is constrained by
want. I can accept Bentham's position if we read it as: pick a base level of
prosperity, maximise the number of folk who have an honest prospect of attaining
it; once that's (pretty close to) everyone who actually cares to try to attain
it, feel free to raise the base level. I see a world that takes an opposite
reading (if we shoe-horn its behaviour into Bentham's goal): to pick some
insanely high level of wanton wealth and maximise the number of folk who can
attain it, ignoring the number of folk who can barely survive in the process
that sustains that maximised elite. When it sees a limit to how many folk can
attain that insane extravagance, it raises the target level of wealth and
maxmises the (tiny) number of folk who can attain that.
The Doonesbury comic
strip is full of insightful satires on politics; unfortunately, it's now on a
site which only gives you the latest month without a premium
subscription, so I can no longer offer you a link to their page for the
1993/Nov/29th strip which begins Trudeau's excellent take on the conspiracy
theorists … but (oh, irony) I can link to the images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12.
On the subject of dictators,
here's The
Final Speech From The Great Dictator (the video didn't play for me, but the
transcript worked just fine), Chaplin's uplifting counterpoint to his parable
about the rise of tyranny.
Trump's lies are legendarily common: when his supporters ask for evidence,
the hard part is chosing which and finding good explanations. Here's some
from nrdc.org
and politifact.com's false
and pants
on fire categories.
Trump has (since long before he saw an opportunity to hijack the waning
Republican party) been loud-mouthed about talking tough on crime,
yet now
whinges about being how he's been treated, despite this being way more
lenient than folk accused of crimes far less pernicious than those of which
he has been convicted by a jury that the lawyers he promised to pay
lots of money to (and, who knows, might even eventually do so) had a fair hand
in selecting. He deserves to be roughed up by cops, suffer violent head-tramua
in the course of being forced into a police car and deprived of the right to
vote – all things he has said it's proper to impose on folk for mere
suspicion of a crime.
In stark contrast to everything that spewed from the cheetos-hole that
followed him, here's
Obama's thoughtful address to a room-full of journalism students on the
importance of participating and, especially, voting.
Another Obama speech, this
time to the Canadian
Parliament, in which he makes the case for prosperity and security for all
– within each nation, and world-wide – being the only way to assure
our own prosperity and security.
Lawrence of Arabia foreshadowed the modern Iraqi
situation. He was an expert on guerrilla insurgency – having fomented
one, among the arab peoples of an area including much of what is now Iraq.
Franklin Delano Rosevelt made good use of metaphor in persuading the
U.S.A to
support the nations opposing the Nazis.
Israel's government
routinely aids
and abets crimes by settlers who violate the property rights and
human rights of Palestinians. This routinely involves campaigns of intimidation
to drive the long-standing residents of the land away, followed by destroying
their homes so that settlers can then take their land as their own.
Victor
Pickard points
to the distinction between positive rights (freedom to
…) and negative rights (freedom from …) to outline
some of the changes in how understanding of the US constitution has drifted away
from what its authors meant by it. The public's right to be honestly informed
about what matters to them trumps any argument that the right to free speech
entails a freedom from accountability, such as fact-checking. If you lie to the
public, the public has a right to be alerted to the contrary truth, alongside
your lies.
If you've ever wondered
why Private Eye refers to
journalists as lizards, you may find it educational to read
about Otto
von Bismarck, first actual implementor
of social
democracy.
Sometimes, losing a
battle can
cause the losing side to rally – the results of which may prove
singularly unwelcome to the winning side (much like
a Pyrrhic
victory).
To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or
that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and
servile, but is morally treasonable to the American
public.
Theodore Roosevelt.
If you run into someone who desperately needs
to prove something about
himself (and this is usually him; I guess there may be exceptions),
it's because: it isn't true, he knows this and he
doesn't want to face up to that. Read pretty much any biography of a
prominent Nazi on Wikipedia and you'll see this pattern played out with
(sickeningly) comic clarity. It's not just the Nazis:
the Brigatte Rosse
desperately needed to prove their alleigance to the working classes; the
September 11 mass-murderers despertately needed to prove to other Muslims
that they weren't spoilt Europe-raised children of well-to-do families.
Nationalists
trying to
pass themselves off as patriots take this even further.
On the up-side
of nuclear
armageddon 
Jessica
Hagy's Indexed cartoons are not
infrequently quite illuminating. 
in 1896, worked out how much a doubling of its concentration would heat the
Earth. By the 1950s, the fuel and car industries were funding research and
getting disturbing answers. 
