Boris Johnson might seem an unusual place to start an essay on creeping climate change Authoritarianism, until one recognises the British chattering classes centred around London, like all highly educated elites, enjoying their overwhelming cultural power, were never going to forgive him for delivering a Brexit which wasn’t a watered down compromise, Brexit in name only. We may not live in the days of the Roman Republic where the weight of the votes of the few massively outweighs the votes of the many, but for the many it can sometimes feel that way.
Despite his own elite origins and affectations, Boris was the living incarnation everything the cosmopolitans resented about Brexit, and the fact that they only managed to win over a portion of the plebeian class with their doom-mongering predictions and dry narrow focus on the economy. They completely missed the point, it wasn’t about that, even if at least some minor economic harms have effected the UK since Brexit (most noticeable in trading intensity and the currency devaluating of Sterling relative to the Euro). Instead, it was about two things- immigration and the democratic mandate.
For some Brexit voters, especially the more educated and affluent, it was never about immigration. But we have to acknowledge the economic scarcity and damage to the economic interests of the blue collar class through neoliberalism, the free movement of peoples and immigration throughout the West. Sure, blue collar migration may create jobs for agency consultants and their admins, for property agents and lawyers, but that’s little consolation to construction workers in the UK who saw their wages more than half in the nineties.
To farm labourers, factory workers, drivers, maintenance techs, installers, non-seasonal agricultural workers, sales reps and warehouse workers, all of whose wages used to exceed those of the salaries of university educated office dullards, immigration over the past 25 years have been an absolute disaster. Most earned significantly more than the minimum wage, some still do- but buried in the economic figures of only about a 10% decline in wages at the bottom of the labour force, is the understanding that immigration has created opportunities for the more able and educated C1’s- the apparatchik of our modern economies- at the expense of the blue collar class.
But far more fundamental to this discussion is an understanding of the future need for the democratic mandate, the veto of the ballot box. At the time of Brexit, I voted to remain. Although I too found the sheer waste, mindless bureaucracy and lack of democratic accountability of the EU frustrating, I thought the benefits of EU membership outweighed the negative. I was wrong.
It’s become clear since the pandemic that the luxury beliefs of the highly educated class are going to become more and more of hindrance to the average person, more and more a tyranny. If they want us to give up driving petrol cars then make cheaper EVs. If they want us to stop using fossil fuels to power and heat our homes, build a new generation of nuclear power plants to provide cheap, safe and abundant power as both the French and Swedes have done. And don’t, whatever you do, expect us to stop eating meat, to shift to a plant-based diet or eating insects. Are they mad?
As it happens, I’m a pescatarian- I eat fish and dairy, but not meat. But I’ve never been one of those preachy types and made the decision after hearing a few detail from a friend who had worked intensive livestock farming during the summer. I was all of sixteen. But good job too. During a stint working as business-to-business sales exec, very much in the spirit of Glengarry Glen Ross, I experienced hypertension and went to the doctors- only to find that my cholesterol levels were 9.3. So I have other reasons for sticking to fish, and now take statins.
But what really crystallised it for me, the future intention to impose a rather bleak and authoritarian future upon us was news from the Netherlands. Apparently, a Dutch administrative court had taken it upon itself to rule that the Dutch government was in breach of EU regulations, and this court decision has led to political actions will likely result in a 30% reduction in total Dutch cattle. Just for fun- I thought I would link the news from an environmentalist website.
Farmers in the Netherlands may have to cut livestock production by 30% due to concerns about nitrogen and ammonia pollution (from the article)
The problem is it’s complete bollocks from a policy perspective. I don’t want to go into too much technical detail, but there are a huge raft of methods which can be used to reduce ammonia production from cattle and their contribution to coastal dead zones, ranging from more prolonged grazing to better manure and slurry storage, from managing feed and reducing crude protein, to using lower emission techniques for spreading slurries and digestate on land, none of which require a total reduction in cattle. In addition, cattle aren’t the only source of ammonia in agriculture and as well as changing types of fertiliser agricultural colleges have been pioneering soil testing so that farmers can be more sparing with both fertilisers and herbicides, without impacting yields.
It’s also important to stress that cattle are a vital part of the carbon life cycle. They are key to any regenerative farming strategy, as grass-fed cows are vital for soil sequestration and actually deposit nitrogen in the soil over time. This may surprise some, but recent research which looked at soil carbon measurements for the first time, decisively shows that grass-fed cattle are significantly superior to feedlot cattle, in terms of tacking climate change- to the extent that grass-fed cattle sequester 6.65kg of CO2 per 1kg of carcass weight, compared to 6.12kg of CO2 produced per 1kg of carcass weight, a net saving of nearly 13kg of CO2 per 1kg of carcass weight from switching for feedlot cattle to grass-fed. Far from being a problem for climate change, grass-fed cattle a vital part of sequestering carbon and restoring over-farmed land. Meanwhile, an AHDB study in the UK of dairy cows showed that crude proteins could be lowered to 14% without substantially reducing yields or having other negative implications, reducing the costs of feed by shifting from soybean meal to grass, whilst also reducing the cost of manure storage. Even modest (1.5%) reductions in crude proteins can lower ammonia production by as much as 30%.
Indeed, the Dutch ministry already had a plan for implementing a system of feed reductions, which they subsequently scrapped. The Dutch dairy farming industry had complained that the plan wasn’t farm specific, didn’t take account of the need to use protein-rich feeds to help vulnerable cattle recover. Instead they published their own plan which set the ambitious target for reducing total protein consumption of 3%. But as is so typical of the desire of government mandarinates to impose top-down rules from above, their own plans were hastily scrapped, the dairy farm industry proposals ignored, and the individual farms subjected to a tragedy of the commons where the lack of a universally applied but individually tailored plan meant that each farm feared to lose out in terms of competition and risk, by implementing plans individually.
What a mess! It’s so typical of government. As I’ve previously shown, even modest reductions in crude proteins can substantially reduce ammonia production and grass fed cattle not only sequester carbon, but their diet is inherently lower in crude proteins. Plus, once allows for the use of protein-rich feed sources in necessary circumstances, it can lower costs for farmers. Why not simply trial the system for three to four years, a period eminently suitable to overcome initial resistance and scepticism? Simple- less of a role for government in regulatory terms, especially given that measurements and policing would need to be carried out by the industry itself, with its expertise in cattle health and vulnerability.
But here’s the real scoop. Livestock cattle raised for food are outnumbered by dairy cows by a ratio of four to one. Beef cattle are a 400,000 population in the Netherlands, compared to 1.6 million dairy cows. Cutting beef cattle by 30% represents a 6% reduction in ammonia, whilst even the more measured proposals of the dairy farming industry could have reduced total ammonia production by 24%. But government doesn’t like feedback, or being usurped by people with specific expertise in the industries being interfered with. They prefer a top-down approach which is inimical to commerce, liberty and capitalism in general- staffing vast bureaucracies with regulatory apparatchik, with a net result which is far, far worse in tackling climate change, as well as broader environmental considerations such as coastal dead zones, and already overextended fisheries.
And this is the most important aspect of Brexit- with a growth in citizen journalism, and a combination of local and national politics, it should finally be possible to hold unaccountable civil service mandarinates and the elected politicians theoretically in charge of them accountable at the ballot box. In America, the federal system paired with a benign sounding Congressional legislative agenda can lead to the formation of federal regulatory bodies which lack any real congressional oversight, for the simple reason that Congress lacks the expertise to oversee anything, which has been made particularly apparent in much of their questioning of social media companies.
In many ways, the EU and Brussels are even worse. As an institution, it provides a layer of democratic unaccountability which is embedded at the structural level. Even if were possible to mobilise large segments of a national population to reject conventional politics and elect their own politicians armed with a specific list of issues to address, the regulatory apparatus would remain impervious for the simple reason that it sits above the level of national politics. It is by this measure alone we can see that Brexit was entirely justified and contains the last best hope in America and Europe of providing a reasonable alternative to the whims of unaccountable bureaucracies, provided Britain’s electorate can be shaken out of its lethargy and choose an alternative to the establishment parties. The French Yellow jacket movement points to the fact that Europe will likely burn in protests and rioting at the imposition of Environmental Authoritarianism, whilst British sovereignty at least contains the possibility that tyranny can be overthrown through the quiet and dignified method of the ballot box.
And here’s where we come to the role of the World Economic Forum, because once one strips away the often alarming slogans, soundbites and mission statements and find someone who has bothered to trawl through the reams of text, it becomes apparent that the only real policy prescription advocated for by WEF is the desire to see green infrastructure embedded in government expenditure. But I would argue that this isn’t the limit of their aims and ambitions, or indeed their methodology- with their role in advising governments and supranational organisations its clear that their agenda might also include such radical policies as the degrowth of entire industries, socially engineering populations towards plant-based diets and influencing the great and good towards supporting such policies, if they feel that the environmental and climate needs are a sufficient emergency to warrant such measures.
We’ve been here before, with foreign aid. Western government largesse accounted for over 2.3 trillion dollars in aid. Although there were successes in areas like medicine, education and other areas such as clean water, in the primary goal of shifting the ‘Third World’ out of poverty it was a singular failure. Why? Because when funds where allocated by Westerners brainstorming in offices the money was wasted. A good example of this relates to mosquito nets, where initially nets were thrown away or misused for everything from fishing nets to materials used in the manufacture of bridal gowns. However, in instances where effects were organised from the ground-up in the Developing World, the allocation of these resources proved astoundingly successful. In the instance given, real inroads were made when the mosquito nets were actually sold to the rich and powerful, becoming a high status good, and nurses were given cash incentives for getting their patients to choose mosquito nets, through advocacy. Needless to say the bulk of funding and decision-making was made educated Westerners with failure the most likely response, whilst expertise-led initiative planned from the ground-up in Africa remained a rarity, despite their often comparatively astounding success.
The real problem is the support of the cosmopolitan class for such policies. They are the influencers and shakers of our societies (or at least they have been until recently), and their ideas have a habit of filtering down into society as a whole. It doesn’t matter that in this particular case that they are completely wrong- they will proliferate their bad ideas on activist websites, circulating terrible, destructive ideas to other cosmopolitans and, ultimately, to schoolchildren. They were told that cattle were a major source of methane and had a high carbon cost, and now it’s been proved wrong- with some studies suggesting that shifting to a plant-based diet only reduces a person’s carbon footprint by around 3% to 4%. But they’ve held onto their anchor bias- that meat, and by extension cattle must be bad for the climate, because they want the world to atone for climate change. Nitrogen and ammonia levels are a convenient mechanism for implementing the types of population-level sacrifices they had originally envisaged and hoped for because of cattle methane.
It’s a superstition. A luxury belief which amounts to a mini-religion. They believe that humans are a cancer on the planet and we should be punished for our sins against Mother Earth, when the truth is we’ve been radically influencing ecosystems and climate for about 10,000 years, ever since the advent of the agricultural age. The core element of this luxury belief is that ‘we’ must sacrifice for the sake of the planet- it’s the only thing which captures their attention in narrative terms. It why they wholeheartedly reject nuclear despite the fact that it has been proven safe, far less harmful to humans than other energy sources, and can be built both cheaply and abundantly given the approach taken by either the French or the Swedes.
By ‘we’ must sacrifice, they mean us. Nothing incensed the doyens of legacy media that a more than doubling of gas prices in America didn’t initially lead to a reduction of fuel consumption of more than 5%. Didn’t the peasants know that it was in their best interests to sacrifice and use public transport rather than drive, despite the impracticality and longer journey times? They won’t give up their smartphones or social media, even though power usage from these sources equalled those of all global air travel in 2019. And at least when they make the ‘sacrifice’ of having a plant-based meal, they get the psychic profit from the status which comes from the approval of their friends. For mere lesser mortals, a plant-based meal is more likely to elicit a grimace, and a discrete question as to whether the wife is insisting upon a diet again.
The problem is that however smart of educated the highly influential cosmopolitan class may be, they don’t have the discipline to become experts across multiple domains. They will claim to have read a study, when in reality they’ve just read an article about a study- and often just the headline and the first couple of paragraphs. And a little knowledge is more dangerous than no knowledge at all, especially when they belong to a class which is used to getting its own way, successfully advocating for the implementation of policies the implications of which they little understand. And the rest of us are made to suffer as food, petrol, energy and whole slew of other goods become increasingly out of reach, whilst they suffer not at all, with their middling high incomes and families they can tap for loans with no intentions of paying back.
Meanwhile Dutch police are shooting at tractors, potentially hitting enraged farmers, justifiably upset that their livelihoods are being taken away due to the ignorance, obstinance and obtuse nature of government, supranational bureaucracies and a top-down central planning approach which is guaranteed to cause catastrophic harms, whilst achieving nothing near the successes on climate and environment that a market-led approach could manage. Welcome to the WEF’s dark dystopia. This is what happens when we let ignorant highly educated types make decisions far removed from the knowledge instilled by the ‘shop floor’ of commerce.
You'll be so much happier, safer and equal to all others once you submit and obey, Geary. Why do you resist so? Easy...easy...relax...trust us...we know best. You, I mean we, are all in this together, so just submit and obey and utopia is ours, I mean yours.
I've eaten roasted crickets at an Indian restaurant in Vancouver BC. They were tasty, nutty, something like pumpkin seeds. They also ground them up to make flour for chapati. But I've no intention of living on the joy of roasted and ground bugs alone when I have so much delicious non-bug foods for an omnivore like me ;-)
Many thanks. I love it, but the article does not explain how the carbon ends up in the soil. My guess would be that the cattle fertilize the soil such that carbon capture increases in proportion to increased grass growth -- grass being known to enrich soil carbon levels by rootlet die-off.
Hello Geary, unfortunately I did not have the opportunity to read your post carefully, but i would like to contact you to share a Theory that i have come about the conflict in ukraine, and why everybody in Europe behaves like a "going down the hill on a suicide route", so when you have time just drop a line.
Sure, just lay out or link the theory anytime you like. I have my own suspicions, other than the usual suspect of sheer stupidity- but by all means share.
This is dated November 2014, so the conclusion is that EU dominated by Germany which is absorbing more and more industrial might, then absorbing Ukraine, thus getting low cost trained educated labour would end up shifting the center of economical/industrial power of "the west", from US to an EU fully dominated by Germany, particularly being Germany an export industrial power house. So "relations between between US and Germany would be of conflict"
1) It's an interesting analysis, and I largely agree with the authors position on Germany working to ensure its industrial might. Germany has been an export surplus economy since the time of Bismarck- and if one looks at their industry in terms of harder manufactured goods, discounting things like clothing or other consumer goods (think machines, mostly), then the differences become even more stark- by the 1890s Germany was outproducing mainland Britain by a factor of five, and in the 2000s they were outproducing America by a factor of 4!
But there is another front- that of banking and finance. To say that Germany is fiscally conservative is like saying Hitler had an aversion to Jews. An understatement of epic proportions. In the current climate their aversion to money printing might appear justified until one considers that many of our global problem are supply shock related, the product of poor Covid policies which denied the potential costs of lockdowns and economic shutdowns, and caused by large parts of world socially conditioning their citizens to stop using in-person services in favour of physical products at exactly the time that most of the world's factories were operating at diminished capacities.
But more generally, the German crash of the Weimar Republic left an indelible cautionary tale on the German soul. They forget that the currency devaluation was deliberately induced- a means of escaping the crushing terms of the Treaty of Versailles- and process which they lost control of because of their arrogance and lack of caution. So the German watchword is austerity, fiscal discipline- we've seen the harms this policy and their dominance over the ECB has wrought- throughout Southern Europe and Eastern Europe. Greece was forced into austerity by German attempts to backstop banks in what can only be described as ODIOUS DEBT https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2002/06/kremer.htm . German and Swedish bondholders interests have been preserved over those of the public purse in Poland, with the result that pensions in Poland were stripped down to basic and illegal levels.
With Ireland and Greece, the British were forced to step in- swiftly with the Irish, and far too belatedly in the case of Greece- to the tune of £30 billion- to prevent a domino effect across the Mediterranean. Have you heard of Mark Blythe- he basically sums it up in this talk from Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQuHSQXxsjM . I keep meaning to read his austerity book- but other books keep getting inserted into the list :)
First crush the power of Germany, by making its industry not competitive and crushing many companies to buy them for peanuts. So dominance of "the west" by US would not be challenged.
Russia is supplier of cheap energy to Germany (hence heart of german industry competitiveness). Russia is pushed to a war it does not want (several US analyst advised that Russia would go to war if Ukraine ....).
Then sanctions are imposed and the EU is pushed to them and cannot escape them, the majority of the EU politicians are loyal to certain interest and not to the EU citizens.
The sanctions punish EU people and industries, much less than they punish Russia. Russia finds alternative markets and financial means (these were going to happen in anyway to escape US dominance by Russia, China, India, etc. we may as well accelerate them)
2) However, where your author goes wrong is at the political level. To say that the Germans were economically, diplomatically and militarily naive is another huge understatement. They are on the record as actually believing that their dependence on Russian gas actually constrained Russia militarily! And believed they had the power to sabotage Russia's economy by refusing to buy its gas, rather than the complete reverse being true. In many ways, the fears were more aligned with Germany entering into a new trading and economic axis with Russia and China and drawing the EU into the arrangement by default.
But the true protagonists in this tale are the American Washington Elite, specifically the Washington Foreign Policy Establishment. I think they truly drunk the Kool Aid on Russian Election Interference (which was part of broader effort to destabilise America through social media) and Hillary's emails, thinking that the Americans who switched from Obama and supported Bernie gave a flying fuck about these trivialities! Instead they completely missed the boat on just how loathed finance is by a substantial portion of the American public, cutting across party lines, to the extent that no one who has ever been too close to finance should ever run for President again in American politics.
Then there was the Deplorables comment. They honestly though this would drive people into the arms of Hillary, when evidence from the UK shows that if you accuse a candidate of one of -isms or -phobias (i.e. Racism) then people who were only thinking of voting for them take it as a PERSONAL insult, with the predictable result that they say 'fuck you' and vote for them anyway.
In part, the American approach has been the desire to eliminate the concept of a Russian sphere of influence. In many ways, they are still stuck in the deeply deluded belief that rational systems can be imposed, when we know from the Cuban Missile Crisis that if the main players had been of the majority consensus then the natural result would have been nuclear annihilation.
But the other aspect is the overriding desire to defang populism, to maintain the conventional status quo, the corrupt corporate duopoly at the centre. They honestly believe their own hype about anti-immigration sentiment being racism. Sure, it can manifest that way, at extremes- and it's not as though the Democratic message of Demographics is Destiny hasn't contributed to Great Replacement Theory, but where they see White Supremacy, they miss the point that for most Americans who are concerned about such things it's political and ECONOMIC replacement they are worried about.
Let's look at Australia as the prime example- where their immigration policy has done a fair job over the years of protecting blue collar interests- until recently stopping migrants from competing for these jobs. The average Australian construction worker earns 51 Aus dollars per hour, $35 US. Migrants may only account for 12% of the construction workforce in America (officially), but this results in a roofer for example, only earning $21 an hour ($22 under Trump!). Just as important is the psychic profit, bosses forced to treat you right to recruit rather than treat you like replaceable shit when they want to.
3) The irony is Trump didn't do a lot to halt illegal immigration, other than to provide a psychological incentive not to come, knowing that peoples asylum claims would be processed in Mexico, and they couldn't work in the black economy in the meantime. Obama was labelled the Deporter in Chief for good reasons. What Trump did do was stop 600K green card applications in very specific areas.
And what has been the result? Although all the leaders of the advanced economies loathe him, they have tried to emulate his approach. The only problem is they resorted to money printing to accomplish the same results during Covid, effectively removing large numbers of older workers into early retirement, and giving mothers other options. THE ONLY PROBLEM IS IT'S THE WRONG TYPE OF BLOODY WORK!
Older workers tend to shift out of physically demanding work, often taking a pay cut in the process. Women don't really compete with trade professional work. Think of it this way- if you are blue collar you have a kid who is smart then if you have any sense you want him to be an engineer and will be hugely proud of him, if he isn't good at academics you want him to be a trade professional and will still be proud!
Sure, at the diplomatic and geopolitical level they want to fuck Russia, and one cannot discount Russian interests either- because in the long run the Western obsession with removing fossil fuels is very much to their economic detriment- so don't discount a degree of deliberate Russian belligerence in negotiations. But on the NATO side, the incalcitrant stems from a desire to neuter the Russian sphere of influence, and the sense in American establishment circles that they made a mistake over Georgia.
Lets see how it develops as lets hope that the damage to lives of people is reduced.
I happen to be a kid of a blue collar family that ended up as an engineer, in a country that become a member of the EU when i was studying, and that education was watered down afterwards, and that is being flooded with emigration, so i completely understand your comment. I do not know what options are being left to the blue collar classes of the west.
1) european industry is crushed, 2) more countries have joined the nato, 3) all the nato members have signed for new weapons order produced by US, 4) all the EU countries have signed to buy the gas from US (& proxies) instead of Russia
Once these conditions are met, Russia takes a chunk of Ukraine, most probably all the side to the black sea, what is left of ukraine would be a state run by Poland, a peace is signed with Putin.
Putin becomes the bogeyman. Germany and Europe is crush and US "helps" to "rebuild", but being the supplier and having the tap of the gas. US industry has a lot of orders same as a war situation & plan marshall, but with just alocal war in ukraine, only for the ukraines, russians and europeans to suffer
The Russia, China etc are a "not friendly block", and US would keep the dominion from Japan to East Europe.
The history of this region's nationalism is telling me that Russia will not take all that much if anything at all (besides lots of body bags). Ukrainian nationalists fought against all during the WW2. Tthat is often misrepresented as fighting "with Germans" where in fact they were fighting against all they could and using Germans at least in part as a means to get their people the training and equipment they did not have. After the WW2 ended they were surrounded by countries controlled by SU and went on to fight for another 11 years, says Wikipedia. I know only about the country I come from, Poland - there the armed Ukrainian uprising went on for at least 4 years i.e. till 1949/1950. They inflicted a massive damage to NKWD units in Ukraine then.
Now they have all the equipment we can deliver, Russians can only destroy it once it reaches Ukrainian territory. There is also tactical support USA is giving thanx modern telecommunication and almost overwhelming level of support in form of reconnaissance (AWACS and satellites) - the sanctions do inflict damage - in high tech area also in military production. So the Russians can muster more people but they have a problem with not being able to kill the material supply - problem that is strangely similar to the one Germans had in WW2.
What the outcome of the conflict will be is not possible to say but there more Ukrainians get the more ethnic cleansing we are gonna get - see also conflicts in Yugoslavia esp. Krajina and Kosovo.
That is my estimation of what we are gonna get. Any predictions of the future are difficult of course.
Pity for all the dead and those that are going to die still.
5) The other thing I would say- beyond the posturing and belligerence on both sides, which was deeply irresponsible in the run up to the invasion- I would qualify my previous statements with the condition that there is little evidence of malice of forethought involved. It's not like they are staging the war in order to achieve peripheral objectives- other than Putin, who has plainly stated as much.
On the Western side it is more a matter of stupidity and arrogance- the belief that people will conform to the constraints of rational action, even when they have long-term objectives which to them are more important. I count myself in this camp- I honestly thought that Putin was greater strategic thinker- what I missed was the fact that he cared more about damaging the West than helping his own people. I also think he was misinformed as to the ease of the campaign and the support of the Ukrainian people.
But what we can clearly see is that Western politicians will never let a good crisis go to waste- especially when they were quite clear about the 'opportunity' Covid and the pandemic represented. And, with the Netherlands and Trudeau was can also see that they are also not above manufacturing their own crises for ideological objectives- they think if they sacrifice their own people's interests they will earn a favourable footnote, but history will remember them less kindly when it becomes apparent that climate change, although a serious long-term problem, is by no means the crisis they believe.
Here is an interesting piece of science for you- pay particular attention to fig. 18. https://link.springer.com/article/10.12942/lrsp-2013-1 . Years ago there was a British university meteorologist who had claimed to have developed a system using sunspots to predict weather events well into the future. He fell into dispute with the Met Office over payment and licensing for his work.
When they weren't forthcoming, he started placing bets with the bookies and was swiftly banned. Then got his students to place the bets. I'm not saying that climate change isn't real, but rather that the current volatility in weather systems might have other contributory sources- after all, put extra energy into any chaotic system and it is bound to produce more volatile results.
Germany just nationalized another set of Russian assets and promised to keep the biggest German refinery in the east open. That is actually interesting because these things have minimum capacity on which they work and not below as well they are tuned to type of oil that they can process i.e. they will stop but will be kept alive by the government as soon as we close the pipe from the east and that is on 1.1.2023 The nuclear power plants still go off line at the end of the year and the yearly tax increase on CO2 is also there.
German chancellor also said/twitted that the protesters will be considered enemy of the constitutional order and that the German democracy (whatever that is) is capable of defending itself. That is interesting esp. if one remembers the shit storm that some right wing politicians caused when she said in an interview (that must have been 2015/2016 I think) that border guards may use firearms (that is indeed true - that is what the law says and that is why the border guards have weapons). I am not sure why the chancellor is doing it anyway or why the military has now direct link to ministry of the interior. Demonstrations never brought anything and Germans are not violent people. Most of them also still believe all that zhe media says including that the reason the climate revolution does not really work is because we pay too little to support it and that the price hike on everything is because of Putin. This is what I hear from most of my friends - they are all university educated and mostly engineers. Is this religion or what is that exactly? In any case they will not get violent. Why would they they still vote the same crews in every time they have a chance to vote for anything else. So why bother with warning like this?
In any case these are indeed very interesting times.
I wonder how the world will look like next summer or maybe not - I do not want that. First time in my life I sleep uneasy. I guess I am paranoid and all will be good. That is what my friends tell me at least.
I just wonder how big a part in Putin's considerations was the expectation that Russia will be put under more and more sanctions whatever happens and that the offensive against separatists in the east was imminent. When one expect that the cards cannot be changed anymore and that kicking the table is already under way, one can just as well kick the table oneself. I am not saying that this was so but I think it is a possibility. Fact is also that the observers that we sent there reported an increasing shelling mostly from one side and this went on for weeks if not for months. The Russian troops build up was there for longer time so this was probably not the only consideration, if in fact it was one of the arguments made in the final round before invasion was decided. Then we do not know anything about build up of Ukrainian troops around Donbas, do we? Does this mean there was not any? We shall never know probably. Unless of course we plan on standing in Kreml one day, the way we know all about the war plans of Hitler for instance. But then there is media bias of course so.
BTW: have you noticed how quillette deteriorated of late? Left and right do not mean much to me but I liked to look there from time to time to see a bit more conscious view of reality than that of the normal media which right now cannot be trusted at all.
4) But at a grand level, don't discount the fact that this all about the desire to defeat populism globally. Think Trudeau (who apparently is following suit with the crazy policies which killed Sri Lanka, and encroaching on the Dutch). Think about the continuing demands to censure and end 'disinformation' which is short-form for stopping people increasingly relying upon non-establishment news sources. There are worrying signs when it comes to banking, with governments confiscating the funding mechanisms for protests and particularly in relation to state-run digital currency. And then there is Jan 6th, and the deliberate desire to make Americans care about something they frankly couldn't give a shit about.
But let's go full Conspiracy Theory shall we? In all probability the SCOTUS conservatives loathe Trump. They themselves are establishment types. The case set before them was to aim for a far more moderate ban beyond 14 weeks (not sure about this, so don't quote me). But they completely overreacted. Thomas even went as far as suggesting that they reverse gay marriage! Why? Perhaps its a ham-fisted attempt to give Dems a fighting chance in the midterms and for Biden to win in 2024 in a Trump rematch- so that conventional Republicans can retake the soul of the conservative movement. They simply don't understand that Trump is a figurehead, the symptom rather than the disease. And meanwhile the Libertarians are positioning themselves to be the new populists with the Mises revolution. I highly recommend watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsgFdPqOAhk&t=1132s
But the real means to defeating populism is fear. They are continuing with crazily inappropriate energy solutions and deliberate attempts to sabotage farming out of the mistaken belief that people will be motivated to return to the establishment Fukuyama era stability out of fear. They don't understand that we will simply set up our own parties and remove them from power. There is a growing movement. It won't be crushed. People are becoming more independent in their media choices and are able to create their own content. Their needs aren't being addressed and they won't be silenced.
They think that just because they invoke an external threat and put people under economic pressure, they can make people yearn for order and reset to the old politics. Did you the American Fed policy is aimed at creating 10% unemployment as a means of inducing the kind of economic desperation which will force people into accepting shit jobs with no prospects? Yes, there is the political level, and they are desperate to exaggerate the fears over climate to accomplish a rather deliberate political agenda- but it's all part of the same plot to cling to power and maintain establishment control, the status quo.
They just don't understand they are the ones causing the problem. You have to give people the OPTION of dignity, even if you know full well that many won't reach it. That's why they've failed- because they've resorted to labelling anyone who doesn't agree with them as racist or ignorant, when the real problem is they lack the empathy to realise they've established an intellectual hegemony of the smart in which everyone else is economically and socially devalued at a structural level. Only their opinions matter- but they fail to realise the depth of their hubris, just because you are smart it doesn't make you an expert on everywhere- they wilfully choose the experts they want, and which will suit the mood of the top 20%, and never resort the the dissenting viewpoint.
A now the little bit of tar in the vat full of honey: how many peasant uprisings were successful in the history? Sri Lanka is still fighting, You can count French revolution in maybe. The real peasants that take up arms that they have on their farms and march to the cities - I do not remember one but maybe I am overlooking something.
They all end up as the trackers did in Canada or just get ignored.
The main point is however not this but something else: the silly policies of the government in countries where the administration works may cause millions to die as it happened with Holodomor (which contrary to fairytales spread by MSM killed also 3m Russian and unknown number of Kazach peasants but that is another story). These policies are not limited to agriculture and covid. They do this with energy - prices go up allegedly because of Putin. Meanwhile I am sure there is a war because I watch non-western media but I am also sure that the war is just a ruse by the western elites to force their own programs. Get also this: Germany still insists it will go into lockdown in Winter. These people are dangerous because they are ignorant and intelligent enough to raise up in the hierarchy.
I am not overly optimistic about this. Stalin when ordering changes that directly led to Holodomor took notice of their infectivity because the catastrophe was so massive. They modify the measures somewhat so that people did not have to die and went on to rule for another 60y or so. NK did survived famines and Venezuela is still in its predicament. We may be in it for a long unpleasant ride.
Have you read Matt Stoller's BIG. It's a bit simplistic and assumes rights which only exist throu common consent, BUT.... It's quite good.
Pretty good comment. This is the problem with servants of Centralised systems. They won't admit their ideas are wrong and instead invite responsibility for War Crimes.
Not did not come to that one. I may put that on my list. I did spend some thought on the fact that whatever state some "escaped slaves" build on the new and empty land (sort of as USians did) will after a while acquire oppressive elements and will get deeply divided almost by nature of it as some people will strongly oppose the values it represents. The social contract that grounding fathers signed we all inherit w/o a chance to say no to it or parts of it. I suppose it would be enough reason to escape to Mars if such chance was technologically possible (it is not as far as I can see).
I think it's a bit more fundamental than that. Unfortunately our brains are adapted for tribal warfare, and I think human distributed networks have a natural tendency to polarise. The worst number of political parties is one, closely followed by two. What makes it all the more worrying is that social media is a terrible amplifier of our tribal natures.
Social media is worse though- it causes people to form tribal mobs. Niall Ferguson maintains that the last time we had a technological change of this magnitude was the Printing Press- which of course heralded in more than a century of religious wars and caused innumerable people to be burned at the stake as heretics.
I recall Jordan Peterson also talking about social media being an amplifier for certain types of behaviours but w/o attenuators that are common in analogue social life. There is something to it. We reached a state of frenzy few times before but till Trump became a president it all was mostly local, burnt a little and was over in short time. Now we have constant state of excitement. At least we in the West have. The worst of this is what will come out of it. With a bit of bad luck It will either go on and became real nasty or will be turned into the exact opposite when a few strong personalities come and calm down the situation.
I think comparison to religion wars is good but it is also missing a point or two. I had an argument about a political party with a neighbour recently. He is a good man, a civil servant here in Germany. He called AfD (which is regularly called right wing) nazis but could show only one name of a person hat was radical enough to be even a close shot. He moved to AfD after I referred to protests in which I was taking part - against the corona measures. For him these are at best a bunch of confused people in worst anarchists questioning the democracy etc. I could not agree and he came with AfD. You see I think where it goes - when questioned there is no substance but a very strong opposition to the a different perception of reality, change of subject, calling names etc. I have seen it few times over last few years. People raise their voice, sometimes even shout although nobody is questioning their view - something like a private 2min of hate. They do not react even to the facts provided by the institutions they take their own opinions from. It looks like they have certain view of reality that is significantly different from mine but unified among this social group. That is odd. In olden times when I was a student we never had a common opinion other than perhaps that we need another bottle. Here it is all nicely unified. This looks like a religion from outside but lacks the element of god and codified set of truths. There was a clip on YT called "war on sense making" which was possibly explaining this. In my own words we reached situation where we need to have a common base or else a discussion is impossible and this base has eroded over time or been destroyed.
We cannot even agree on facts. We look at the same 17s long video of alleged racists attack (in Chemnitz in Germany few ya) and see completely different things.
We still do not burn people on the sticks but this may come - masses of confused people that give up on fertilizer, safe energy supply and any idea of common national identity are ripe for a calamity.
The problem with the type of control exercised under COVID regimes is that government bureaucracies suddenly discover an appetite for more of the same. It makes them think they can use the corporate media to establish the same type of authoritarianism again. What they forget is they are missing one vital ingredient- fear, barring in the young who have been indoctrinated into believing CC is an emergency and an existential threat- rather than the long-term serious problem that it is.
The ingredient they are missing is the irrational (for all but the elderly and infirm) fear of IMMEDIATE danger. It is the reason why this time the people will not bow to them this time. There are major political changes on the horizon. Whether it will be enough to upset the established status quo of power, depends very much on the country.
Interesting analysis, Geary. I’d pipe up to say that plant based diets also aren’t nearly as healthy as they purport to be! Humans are omnivores. We need plants AND meat/eggs/fish. Sigh. But my vegetarian sister thinks meat is murder and humans are a stain on the environment so what can I do.
I eat fish myself. I gave up meat because a mate of mine worked for a high volume unit during the summer. I don't believe that some people have the right to tell other people how to live their lives.
Yes, I was completely unaware as well, until just the other day. To think that they've already tried these policies elsewhere and they led to economic collapse! What I find so frustrating is that there are already empirically proven solutions out there- but the Dutch government won't trial them because it will look like inaction, and doesn't produce the types of 'white charger' regulatory bureaucracies they had hoped for- well, it's obscene.
Once past the start this essay is a stunning piece of work. It analyses the bureaucratic mindset with a precision and mercilessness that is precise and astute.
The start does need a bit of work though. Two areas stand out - firstly Boris Johnson's character. He is, sad to say, not a man of the people. He is and always has been one of the elite but has been prepared to position himself as a 'likely lad' able to understand the ordinary voter's needs and aspirations. He neither understands nor cares about these beyond using them to lever himself into power. His actual behaviour manifests a particular disdain for the ordinary voter though.
The second is the understanding of poverty in the current digital world. In the West it is minimal. True poverty as experienced by the Victorian working man simply doesn't exist. One just needs to read the accounts of what it was like to be constantly hungry and having to work 12 hour days on top of that to understand just how entitled we are today. The elite were far worse then than now. Unchecked the capitalist approach leads inexorably to this sort of situation. We're far from it now.
Yes, I agree with you about Boris- he positioned himself as an eccentric from the start, mindful of the charge of elite status. Even the hair was planned. He was a superweapon for the Tories, though- his time on 'Have I Got New For You' made him pure electoral gold in the eyes of some portions of electorate, and if anything the affairs gave him an air of the charming rogue. He didn't deserve the generosity the British voter showed him.
I also agree on the poverty issue- but as Theodore Dalrymple observed from seeing the two types of poverty, one in the developing world and very real, and the other more a poverty of ambition and expectation- the latter seems somewhat more inescapable..
Elites are the same, we collectively moved away from that life back then.
It does not require a huge push to fall into a pit full of manure tho.
There have been many examples where well working administration through its ignorance and arrogance managed to destroy quite some lives. We do have all the ingredients in the West: more or less working administration, ignorance and arrogance of the elites is there too.
I shall see if I can afford my house after this winter - I live in Germany. We were ordered to prepare for war eeeee winter without gas heating. The war has nothing to do with it. The actions of the gov. do.
Cool! I noticed you follow me on Twitter and followed you back. I would also like to commend you for the essay you chose. At the time I wrote about the Dutch farmers, not a lot of people were talking about or writing about their plight. It may have just been a coincidence, but I noticed that within a couple of weeks of my essay, a number of more popular writers in the heterodox and contrarian space decided to cover it.
You'll be so much happier, safer and equal to all others once you submit and obey, Geary. Why do you resist so? Easy...easy...relax...trust us...we know best. You, I mean we, are all in this together, so just submit and obey and utopia is ours, I mean yours.
Meanwhile, untold economic damage will be done in the name of climate progress. I simply cannot wait till an edible bug shop opens up in my area...
I've eaten roasted crickets at an Indian restaurant in Vancouver BC. They were tasty, nutty, something like pumpkin seeds. They also ground them up to make flour for chapati. But I've no intention of living on the joy of roasted and ground bugs alone when I have so much delicious non-bug foods for an omnivore like me ;-)
"grass-fed cattle sequester 6.65kg of CO2 per 1kg of carcass weight, compared to 6.12kg of CO2 produced per 1kg of carcass weight"
That's really interesting, can you elaborate or provide a link?
BTW, this essay rambles a bit, Geary.
Sure: https://www.pastureforlife.org/research/new-beef-systems-research-includes-soil-carbon-measurements-for-first-time/
Many thanks. I love it, but the article does not explain how the carbon ends up in the soil. My guess would be that the cattle fertilize the soil such that carbon capture increases in proportion to increased grass growth -- grass being known to enrich soil carbon levels by rootlet die-off.
howdy, dolphin Ray😁
Hello Geary, unfortunately I did not have the opportunity to read your post carefully, but i would like to contact you to share a Theory that i have come about the conflict in ukraine, and why everybody in Europe behaves like a "going down the hill on a suicide route", so when you have time just drop a line.
Best regards
Sure, just lay out or link the theory anytime you like. I have my own suspicions, other than the usual suspect of sheer stupidity- but by all means share.
Ready steady go!!
please check
https://www.les-crises.fr/translation-germanys-fast-hold-on-the-european-continent-by-emmanuel-todd/
This is dated November 2014, so the conclusion is that EU dominated by Germany which is absorbing more and more industrial might, then absorbing Ukraine, thus getting low cost trained educated labour would end up shifting the center of economical/industrial power of "the west", from US to an EU fully dominated by Germany, particularly being Germany an export industrial power house. So "relations between between US and Germany would be of conflict"
1) It's an interesting analysis, and I largely agree with the authors position on Germany working to ensure its industrial might. Germany has been an export surplus economy since the time of Bismarck- and if one looks at their industry in terms of harder manufactured goods, discounting things like clothing or other consumer goods (think machines, mostly), then the differences become even more stark- by the 1890s Germany was outproducing mainland Britain by a factor of five, and in the 2000s they were outproducing America by a factor of 4!
But there is another front- that of banking and finance. To say that Germany is fiscally conservative is like saying Hitler had an aversion to Jews. An understatement of epic proportions. In the current climate their aversion to money printing might appear justified until one considers that many of our global problem are supply shock related, the product of poor Covid policies which denied the potential costs of lockdowns and economic shutdowns, and caused by large parts of world socially conditioning their citizens to stop using in-person services in favour of physical products at exactly the time that most of the world's factories were operating at diminished capacities.
But more generally, the German crash of the Weimar Republic left an indelible cautionary tale on the German soul. They forget that the currency devaluation was deliberately induced- a means of escaping the crushing terms of the Treaty of Versailles- and process which they lost control of because of their arrogance and lack of caution. So the German watchword is austerity, fiscal discipline- we've seen the harms this policy and their dominance over the ECB has wrought- throughout Southern Europe and Eastern Europe. Greece was forced into austerity by German attempts to backstop banks in what can only be described as ODIOUS DEBT https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2002/06/kremer.htm . German and Swedish bondholders interests have been preserved over those of the public purse in Poland, with the result that pensions in Poland were stripped down to basic and illegal levels.
With Ireland and Greece, the British were forced to step in- swiftly with the Irish, and far too belatedly in the case of Greece- to the tune of £30 billion- to prevent a domino effect across the Mediterranean. Have you heard of Mark Blythe- he basically sums it up in this talk from Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQuHSQXxsjM . I keep meaning to read his austerity book- but other books keep getting inserted into the list :)
What to do then?
First crush the power of Germany, by making its industry not competitive and crushing many companies to buy them for peanuts. So dominance of "the west" by US would not be challenged.
Russia is supplier of cheap energy to Germany (hence heart of german industry competitiveness). Russia is pushed to a war it does not want (several US analyst advised that Russia would go to war if Ukraine ....).
Then sanctions are imposed and the EU is pushed to them and cannot escape them, the majority of the EU politicians are loyal to certain interest and not to the EU citizens.
The sanctions punish EU people and industries, much less than they punish Russia. Russia finds alternative markets and financial means (these were going to happen in anyway to escape US dominance by Russia, China, India, etc. we may as well accelerate them)
2) However, where your author goes wrong is at the political level. To say that the Germans were economically, diplomatically and militarily naive is another huge understatement. They are on the record as actually believing that their dependence on Russian gas actually constrained Russia militarily! And believed they had the power to sabotage Russia's economy by refusing to buy its gas, rather than the complete reverse being true. In many ways, the fears were more aligned with Germany entering into a new trading and economic axis with Russia and China and drawing the EU into the arrangement by default.
But the true protagonists in this tale are the American Washington Elite, specifically the Washington Foreign Policy Establishment. I think they truly drunk the Kool Aid on Russian Election Interference (which was part of broader effort to destabilise America through social media) and Hillary's emails, thinking that the Americans who switched from Obama and supported Bernie gave a flying fuck about these trivialities! Instead they completely missed the boat on just how loathed finance is by a substantial portion of the American public, cutting across party lines, to the extent that no one who has ever been too close to finance should ever run for President again in American politics.
Then there was the Deplorables comment. They honestly though this would drive people into the arms of Hillary, when evidence from the UK shows that if you accuse a candidate of one of -isms or -phobias (i.e. Racism) then people who were only thinking of voting for them take it as a PERSONAL insult, with the predictable result that they say 'fuck you' and vote for them anyway.
In part, the American approach has been the desire to eliminate the concept of a Russian sphere of influence. In many ways, they are still stuck in the deeply deluded belief that rational systems can be imposed, when we know from the Cuban Missile Crisis that if the main players had been of the majority consensus then the natural result would have been nuclear annihilation.
But the other aspect is the overriding desire to defang populism, to maintain the conventional status quo, the corrupt corporate duopoly at the centre. They honestly believe their own hype about anti-immigration sentiment being racism. Sure, it can manifest that way, at extremes- and it's not as though the Democratic message of Demographics is Destiny hasn't contributed to Great Replacement Theory, but where they see White Supremacy, they miss the point that for most Americans who are concerned about such things it's political and ECONOMIC replacement they are worried about.
Let's look at Australia as the prime example- where their immigration policy has done a fair job over the years of protecting blue collar interests- until recently stopping migrants from competing for these jobs. The average Australian construction worker earns 51 Aus dollars per hour, $35 US. Migrants may only account for 12% of the construction workforce in America (officially), but this results in a roofer for example, only earning $21 an hour ($22 under Trump!). Just as important is the psychic profit, bosses forced to treat you right to recruit rather than treat you like replaceable shit when they want to.
3) The irony is Trump didn't do a lot to halt illegal immigration, other than to provide a psychological incentive not to come, knowing that peoples asylum claims would be processed in Mexico, and they couldn't work in the black economy in the meantime. Obama was labelled the Deporter in Chief for good reasons. What Trump did do was stop 600K green card applications in very specific areas.
And what has been the result? Although all the leaders of the advanced economies loathe him, they have tried to emulate his approach. The only problem is they resorted to money printing to accomplish the same results during Covid, effectively removing large numbers of older workers into early retirement, and giving mothers other options. THE ONLY PROBLEM IS IT'S THE WRONG TYPE OF BLOODY WORK!
Older workers tend to shift out of physically demanding work, often taking a pay cut in the process. Women don't really compete with trade professional work. Think of it this way- if you are blue collar you have a kid who is smart then if you have any sense you want him to be an engineer and will be hugely proud of him, if he isn't good at academics you want him to be a trade professional and will still be proud!
Sure, at the diplomatic and geopolitical level they want to fuck Russia, and one cannot discount Russian interests either- because in the long run the Western obsession with removing fossil fuels is very much to their economic detriment- so don't discount a degree of deliberate Russian belligerence in negotiations. But on the NATO side, the incalcitrant stems from a desire to neuter the Russian sphere of influence, and the sense in American establishment circles that they made a mistake over Georgia.
Very interesting view as well
Lets see how it develops as lets hope that the damage to lives of people is reduced.
I happen to be a kid of a blue collar family that ended up as an engineer, in a country that become a member of the EU when i was studying, and that education was watered down afterwards, and that is being flooded with emigration, so i completely understand your comment. I do not know what options are being left to the blue collar classes of the west.
What about the war? it has to last until
1) european industry is crushed, 2) more countries have joined the nato, 3) all the nato members have signed for new weapons order produced by US, 4) all the EU countries have signed to buy the gas from US (& proxies) instead of Russia
Once these conditions are met, Russia takes a chunk of Ukraine, most probably all the side to the black sea, what is left of ukraine would be a state run by Poland, a peace is signed with Putin.
Putin becomes the bogeyman. Germany and Europe is crush and US "helps" to "rebuild", but being the supplier and having the tap of the gas. US industry has a lot of orders same as a war situation & plan marshall, but with just alocal war in ukraine, only for the ukraines, russians and europeans to suffer
The Russia, China etc are a "not friendly block", and US would keep the dominion from Japan to East Europe.
The history of this region's nationalism is telling me that Russia will not take all that much if anything at all (besides lots of body bags). Ukrainian nationalists fought against all during the WW2. Tthat is often misrepresented as fighting "with Germans" where in fact they were fighting against all they could and using Germans at least in part as a means to get their people the training and equipment they did not have. After the WW2 ended they were surrounded by countries controlled by SU and went on to fight for another 11 years, says Wikipedia. I know only about the country I come from, Poland - there the armed Ukrainian uprising went on for at least 4 years i.e. till 1949/1950. They inflicted a massive damage to NKWD units in Ukraine then.
Now they have all the equipment we can deliver, Russians can only destroy it once it reaches Ukrainian territory. There is also tactical support USA is giving thanx modern telecommunication and almost overwhelming level of support in form of reconnaissance (AWACS and satellites) - the sanctions do inflict damage - in high tech area also in military production. So the Russians can muster more people but they have a problem with not being able to kill the material supply - problem that is strangely similar to the one Germans had in WW2.
What the outcome of the conflict will be is not possible to say but there more Ukrainians get the more ethnic cleansing we are gonna get - see also conflicts in Yugoslavia esp. Krajina and Kosovo.
That is my estimation of what we are gonna get. Any predictions of the future are difficult of course.
Pity for all the dead and those that are going to die still.
You have to concede that i have a lot of imagination. ;) haha
let me know your thoughts
5) The other thing I would say- beyond the posturing and belligerence on both sides, which was deeply irresponsible in the run up to the invasion- I would qualify my previous statements with the condition that there is little evidence of malice of forethought involved. It's not like they are staging the war in order to achieve peripheral objectives- other than Putin, who has plainly stated as much.
On the Western side it is more a matter of stupidity and arrogance- the belief that people will conform to the constraints of rational action, even when they have long-term objectives which to them are more important. I count myself in this camp- I honestly thought that Putin was greater strategic thinker- what I missed was the fact that he cared more about damaging the West than helping his own people. I also think he was misinformed as to the ease of the campaign and the support of the Ukrainian people.
But what we can clearly see is that Western politicians will never let a good crisis go to waste- especially when they were quite clear about the 'opportunity' Covid and the pandemic represented. And, with the Netherlands and Trudeau was can also see that they are also not above manufacturing their own crises for ideological objectives- they think if they sacrifice their own people's interests they will earn a favourable footnote, but history will remember them less kindly when it becomes apparent that climate change, although a serious long-term problem, is by no means the crisis they believe.
Here is an interesting piece of science for you- pay particular attention to fig. 18. https://link.springer.com/article/10.12942/lrsp-2013-1 . Years ago there was a British university meteorologist who had claimed to have developed a system using sunspots to predict weather events well into the future. He fell into dispute with the Met Office over payment and licensing for his work.
When they weren't forthcoming, he started placing bets with the bookies and was swiftly banned. Then got his students to place the bets. I'm not saying that climate change isn't real, but rather that the current volatility in weather systems might have other contributory sources- after all, put extra energy into any chaotic system and it is bound to produce more volatile results.
@a crisis that cannot go to waste.
Germany just nationalized another set of Russian assets and promised to keep the biggest German refinery in the east open. That is actually interesting because these things have minimum capacity on which they work and not below as well they are tuned to type of oil that they can process i.e. they will stop but will be kept alive by the government as soon as we close the pipe from the east and that is on 1.1.2023 The nuclear power plants still go off line at the end of the year and the yearly tax increase on CO2 is also there.
German chancellor also said/twitted that the protesters will be considered enemy of the constitutional order and that the German democracy (whatever that is) is capable of defending itself. That is interesting esp. if one remembers the shit storm that some right wing politicians caused when she said in an interview (that must have been 2015/2016 I think) that border guards may use firearms (that is indeed true - that is what the law says and that is why the border guards have weapons). I am not sure why the chancellor is doing it anyway or why the military has now direct link to ministry of the interior. Demonstrations never brought anything and Germans are not violent people. Most of them also still believe all that zhe media says including that the reason the climate revolution does not really work is because we pay too little to support it and that the price hike on everything is because of Putin. This is what I hear from most of my friends - they are all university educated and mostly engineers. Is this religion or what is that exactly? In any case they will not get violent. Why would they they still vote the same crews in every time they have a chance to vote for anything else. So why bother with warning like this?
In any case these are indeed very interesting times.
I wonder how the world will look like next summer or maybe not - I do not want that. First time in my life I sleep uneasy. I guess I am paranoid and all will be good. That is what my friends tell me at least.
I just wonder how big a part in Putin's considerations was the expectation that Russia will be put under more and more sanctions whatever happens and that the offensive against separatists in the east was imminent. When one expect that the cards cannot be changed anymore and that kicking the table is already under way, one can just as well kick the table oneself. I am not saying that this was so but I think it is a possibility. Fact is also that the observers that we sent there reported an increasing shelling mostly from one side and this went on for weeks if not for months. The Russian troops build up was there for longer time so this was probably not the only consideration, if in fact it was one of the arguments made in the final round before invasion was decided. Then we do not know anything about build up of Ukrainian troops around Donbas, do we? Does this mean there was not any? We shall never know probably. Unless of course we plan on standing in Kreml one day, the way we know all about the war plans of Hitler for instance. But then there is media bias of course so.
BTW: have you noticed how quillette deteriorated of late? Left and right do not mean much to me but I liked to look there from time to time to see a bit more conscious view of reality than that of the normal media which right now cannot be trusted at all.
4) But at a grand level, don't discount the fact that this all about the desire to defeat populism globally. Think Trudeau (who apparently is following suit with the crazy policies which killed Sri Lanka, and encroaching on the Dutch). Think about the continuing demands to censure and end 'disinformation' which is short-form for stopping people increasingly relying upon non-establishment news sources. There are worrying signs when it comes to banking, with governments confiscating the funding mechanisms for protests and particularly in relation to state-run digital currency. And then there is Jan 6th, and the deliberate desire to make Americans care about something they frankly couldn't give a shit about.
But let's go full Conspiracy Theory shall we? In all probability the SCOTUS conservatives loathe Trump. They themselves are establishment types. The case set before them was to aim for a far more moderate ban beyond 14 weeks (not sure about this, so don't quote me). But they completely overreacted. Thomas even went as far as suggesting that they reverse gay marriage! Why? Perhaps its a ham-fisted attempt to give Dems a fighting chance in the midterms and for Biden to win in 2024 in a Trump rematch- so that conventional Republicans can retake the soul of the conservative movement. They simply don't understand that Trump is a figurehead, the symptom rather than the disease. And meanwhile the Libertarians are positioning themselves to be the new populists with the Mises revolution. I highly recommend watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsgFdPqOAhk&t=1132s
But the real means to defeating populism is fear. They are continuing with crazily inappropriate energy solutions and deliberate attempts to sabotage farming out of the mistaken belief that people will be motivated to return to the establishment Fukuyama era stability out of fear. They don't understand that we will simply set up our own parties and remove them from power. There is a growing movement. It won't be crushed. People are becoming more independent in their media choices and are able to create their own content. Their needs aren't being addressed and they won't be silenced.
They think that just because they invoke an external threat and put people under economic pressure, they can make people yearn for order and reset to the old politics. Did you the American Fed policy is aimed at creating 10% unemployment as a means of inducing the kind of economic desperation which will force people into accepting shit jobs with no prospects? Yes, there is the political level, and they are desperate to exaggerate the fears over climate to accomplish a rather deliberate political agenda- but it's all part of the same plot to cling to power and maintain establishment control, the status quo.
They just don't understand they are the ones causing the problem. You have to give people the OPTION of dignity, even if you know full well that many won't reach it. That's why they've failed- because they've resorted to labelling anyone who doesn't agree with them as racist or ignorant, when the real problem is they lack the empathy to realise they've established an intellectual hegemony of the smart in which everyone else is economically and socially devalued at a structural level. Only their opinions matter- but they fail to realise the depth of their hubris, just because you are smart it doesn't make you an expert on everywhere- they wilfully choose the experts they want, and which will suit the mood of the top 20%, and never resort the the dissenting viewpoint.
how true.
A now the little bit of tar in the vat full of honey: how many peasant uprisings were successful in the history? Sri Lanka is still fighting, You can count French revolution in maybe. The real peasants that take up arms that they have on their farms and march to the cities - I do not remember one but maybe I am overlooking something.
They all end up as the trackers did in Canada or just get ignored.
The main point is however not this but something else: the silly policies of the government in countries where the administration works may cause millions to die as it happened with Holodomor (which contrary to fairytales spread by MSM killed also 3m Russian and unknown number of Kazach peasants but that is another story). These policies are not limited to agriculture and covid. They do this with energy - prices go up allegedly because of Putin. Meanwhile I am sure there is a war because I watch non-western media but I am also sure that the war is just a ruse by the western elites to force their own programs. Get also this: Germany still insists it will go into lockdown in Winter. These people are dangerous because they are ignorant and intelligent enough to raise up in the hierarchy.
I am not overly optimistic about this. Stalin when ordering changes that directly led to Holodomor took notice of their infectivity because the catastrophe was so massive. They modify the measures somewhat so that people did not have to die and went on to rule for another 60y or so. NK did survived famines and Venezuela is still in its predicament. We may be in it for a long unpleasant ride.
I was on a course with a Postgrad. Apparently the Peasants Revolt was not quite what we thought. More of an adventure for Sons not due to inherit.
Have you read Matt Stoller's BIG. It's a bit simplistic and assumes rights which only exist throu common consent, BUT.... It's quite good.
Pretty good comment. This is the problem with servants of Centralised systems. They won't admit their ideas are wrong and instead invite responsibility for War Crimes.
We've seen it before.
We will see it again.
Cunts!
Not did not come to that one. I may put that on my list. I did spend some thought on the fact that whatever state some "escaped slaves" build on the new and empty land (sort of as USians did) will after a while acquire oppressive elements and will get deeply divided almost by nature of it as some people will strongly oppose the values it represents. The social contract that grounding fathers signed we all inherit w/o a chance to say no to it or parts of it. I suppose it would be enough reason to escape to Mars if such chance was technologically possible (it is not as far as I can see).
I think it's a bit more fundamental than that. Unfortunately our brains are adapted for tribal warfare, and I think human distributed networks have a natural tendency to polarise. The worst number of political parties is one, closely followed by two. What makes it all the more worrying is that social media is a terrible amplifier of our tribal natures.
Social media is worse though- it causes people to form tribal mobs. Niall Ferguson maintains that the last time we had a technological change of this magnitude was the Printing Press- which of course heralded in more than a century of religious wars and caused innumerable people to be burned at the stake as heretics.
I recall Jordan Peterson also talking about social media being an amplifier for certain types of behaviours but w/o attenuators that are common in analogue social life. There is something to it. We reached a state of frenzy few times before but till Trump became a president it all was mostly local, burnt a little and was over in short time. Now we have constant state of excitement. At least we in the West have. The worst of this is what will come out of it. With a bit of bad luck It will either go on and became real nasty or will be turned into the exact opposite when a few strong personalities come and calm down the situation.
I think comparison to religion wars is good but it is also missing a point or two. I had an argument about a political party with a neighbour recently. He is a good man, a civil servant here in Germany. He called AfD (which is regularly called right wing) nazis but could show only one name of a person hat was radical enough to be even a close shot. He moved to AfD after I referred to protests in which I was taking part - against the corona measures. For him these are at best a bunch of confused people in worst anarchists questioning the democracy etc. I could not agree and he came with AfD. You see I think where it goes - when questioned there is no substance but a very strong opposition to the a different perception of reality, change of subject, calling names etc. I have seen it few times over last few years. People raise their voice, sometimes even shout although nobody is questioning their view - something like a private 2min of hate. They do not react even to the facts provided by the institutions they take their own opinions from. It looks like they have certain view of reality that is significantly different from mine but unified among this social group. That is odd. In olden times when I was a student we never had a common opinion other than perhaps that we need another bottle. Here it is all nicely unified. This looks like a religion from outside but lacks the element of god and codified set of truths. There was a clip on YT called "war on sense making" which was possibly explaining this. In my own words we reached situation where we need to have a common base or else a discussion is impossible and this base has eroded over time or been destroyed.
We cannot even agree on facts. We look at the same 17s long video of alleged racists attack (in Chemnitz in Germany few ya) and see completely different things.
We still do not burn people on the sticks but this may come - masses of confused people that give up on fertilizer, safe energy supply and any idea of common national identity are ripe for a calamity.
The problem with the type of control exercised under COVID regimes is that government bureaucracies suddenly discover an appetite for more of the same. It makes them think they can use the corporate media to establish the same type of authoritarianism again. What they forget is they are missing one vital ingredient- fear, barring in the young who have been indoctrinated into believing CC is an emergency and an existential threat- rather than the long-term serious problem that it is.
The ingredient they are missing is the irrational (for all but the elderly and infirm) fear of IMMEDIATE danger. It is the reason why this time the people will not bow to them this time. There are major political changes on the horizon. Whether it will be enough to upset the established status quo of power, depends very much on the country.
Interesting analysis, Geary. I’d pipe up to say that plant based diets also aren’t nearly as healthy as they purport to be! Humans are omnivores. We need plants AND meat/eggs/fish. Sigh. But my vegetarian sister thinks meat is murder and humans are a stain on the environment so what can I do.
I eat fish myself. I gave up meat because a mate of mine worked for a high volume unit during the summer. I don't believe that some people have the right to tell other people how to live their lives.
My sister still eats fish and eggs
🤔
Thank You very much, Sir Geary. Enjoyed it immensely. TYTY.
I just had someone link me this- https://redstate.com/bonchie/2022/07/09/watch-protesters-storm-presidential-palace-in-sri-lanka-after-climate-hysteria-destroys-the-nation-n591691
It appears the Netherlands aren't an isolated incident.
TYTY sir! I hadn't been following this at all. I saw the headline that the palace was stormed, but had ZERO, zip, zilch, NADA IDEA of the reason(s).
And only to think: To what dark ESG allies will we all be led down?
Yes, I was completely unaware as well, until just the other day. To think that they've already tried these policies elsewhere and they led to economic collapse! What I find so frustrating is that there are already empirically proven solutions out there- but the Dutch government won't trial them because it will look like inaction, and doesn't produce the types of 'white charger' regulatory bureaucracies they had hoped for- well, it's obscene.
Once past the start this essay is a stunning piece of work. It analyses the bureaucratic mindset with a precision and mercilessness that is precise and astute.
The start does need a bit of work though. Two areas stand out - firstly Boris Johnson's character. He is, sad to say, not a man of the people. He is and always has been one of the elite but has been prepared to position himself as a 'likely lad' able to understand the ordinary voter's needs and aspirations. He neither understands nor cares about these beyond using them to lever himself into power. His actual behaviour manifests a particular disdain for the ordinary voter though.
The second is the understanding of poverty in the current digital world. In the West it is minimal. True poverty as experienced by the Victorian working man simply doesn't exist. One just needs to read the accounts of what it was like to be constantly hungry and having to work 12 hour days on top of that to understand just how entitled we are today. The elite were far worse then than now. Unchecked the capitalist approach leads inexorably to this sort of situation. We're far from it now.
Yes, I agree with you about Boris- he positioned himself as an eccentric from the start, mindful of the charge of elite status. Even the hair was planned. He was a superweapon for the Tories, though- his time on 'Have I Got New For You' made him pure electoral gold in the eyes of some portions of electorate, and if anything the affairs gave him an air of the charming rogue. He didn't deserve the generosity the British voter showed him.
I also agree on the poverty issue- but as Theodore Dalrymple observed from seeing the two types of poverty, one in the developing world and very real, and the other more a poverty of ambition and expectation- the latter seems somewhat more inescapable..
Elites are the same, we collectively moved away from that life back then.
It does not require a huge push to fall into a pit full of manure tho.
There have been many examples where well working administration through its ignorance and arrogance managed to destroy quite some lives. We do have all the ingredients in the West: more or less working administration, ignorance and arrogance of the elites is there too.
I shall see if I can afford my house after this winter - I live in Germany. We were ordered to prepare for war eeeee winter without gas heating. The war has nothing to do with it. The actions of the gov. do.
Thanks for your essays! I now follow you on Twitter as @cannygrannies (aka LocalUpEverything) I clipped part of your essay as a Tweet. I'm new to substack, as your comment here> https://quillette.com/2023/01/11/a-report-from-the-stanford-academic-freedom-conference/ brought me to your substack.
Cool! I noticed you follow me on Twitter and followed you back. I would also like to commend you for the essay you chose. At the time I wrote about the Dutch farmers, not a lot of people were talking about or writing about their plight. It may have just been a coincidence, but I noticed that within a couple of weeks of my essay, a number of more popular writers in the heterodox and contrarian space decided to cover it.
It's an essay I am particularly proud of.