The outcome of last week’s vote concerning Britain’s membership in the European Union has set off
anguished cries and handwaving across much of the internet and the mass media. The unexpected defeat of the pro-EU camp, though, has important lessons to offer, and not just for those of my readers who live in Britain; the core issues underlying the Brexit referendum are also massive realities in many other countries right now, and will likely play a very large role—quite probably a decisive one—in this year’s presidential race here in the United States.
Now of course part of the outcome has to be put down to the really quite impressive incompetence of the Remain campaign. The first rule of political campaigning is that if something isn’t working, it’s time to try something else, but apparently that never occurred to anybody on the pro-EU side. From the beginning of the campaign to its end, very nearly the only coherent arguments that came out the mouths of Remain supporters were threats about this or that awful thing that was going to happen if Britain left the EU. Weeks before the election, as a result, faux headlines yelling BREXIT WILL GIVE YOU CANCER, EXPERTS WARN and the like had already become a common topic of internet humor.
That was bad enough—when the central theme of your campaign becomes a punch line, you’re doing something wrong—but there was another point that everyone in the pro-EU camp seems to have missed. Soon-to-be-former Prime Minister David Cameron spent much of the campaign insisting that if Britain left the EU, there would be harsh budget cuts in the National Health Service and other programs that benefit ordinary Britons. The difficulty here was of course that Cameron’s government had already inflicted harsh budget cuts in the National Health Service and other programs that benefit ordinary Britons, and showed every sign of doing more of the same—and “Brexit Will Do What We’re Doing Anyway” somehow didn’t have the clout that Cameron apparently expected it to have.
More generally, Remain supporters never got around to offering positive reasons for Britain’s EU membership that would convince those who weren’t already on their side. Instead, they simply insisted that “any thinking person” would vote Remain, and anyone who disagreed had to be a xenophobic Nazi moron. Their behavior in the wake of defeat has by and large been the same, alternating between furious statements that the 52% of Britons who voted to leave the EU must all be drooling fascist bigots, and the plaintive insistence that people couldn’t possibly have intended to vote the way they did, and can we please have the vote all over again?
Absent from the entire Remain repertory, before as well as after the vote, was any sense that the question of continued EU membership for Britain involved substantive issues about which it was possible to have reasoned disagreement. It should have been obvious that telling people that their concerns don’t matter, and berating them with schoolyard insults when they demur, was not going to convince them to change their vote. That this was not obvious to the pro-EU camp, and shows little evidence of becoming any more obvious even in the wake of defeat, hints that the issues in question are things that the pro-EU camp is utterly unwilling to see discussed at all.
I suggest that this is exactly what’s going on, and a glance back across the last century or so of British political history may help point out the unspoken realities behind the shouting.
A hundred years ago, two parties dominated the British political landscape: the Conservatives (aka Tories) and the Liberals. Both parties were run by and for the affluent. While a series of electoral reform bills over the course of the nineteenth century brought more and more British men into the electorate—British women got the vote in two stages, with wealthy women over 30 admitted to the electorate in 1918 and all adult women in 1929—both parties readily learned the trick of dangling meaningless favors in front of the poor to get them to vote in the interest of their soi-disant betters.
The rise of the Independent Labour Movement, the forerunner of the Labour Party, was a masterly counterstroke to this kind of political gamesmanship. Instead of letting themselves be led about by the nose for the benefit of the affluent minority, the ILM and then the Labour Party put the interests of working people and the poor at the forefront of their agenda, and refused to be bought off with scraps from the tables of the rich. By 1945, as a direct result, the Liberal party had been reduced to irrelevance and the Labour Party became one of the two major parties in British politics.
In Britain as well as America, the pendulum started swinging the other way in the last quarter of the century. The triumph of Margaret Thatcher in the 1978 general election had the same role there as Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 did over here: a new, more aggressive conservatism took up the Left’s rhetoric of class warfare with a vengeance and inverted it, ushering in an era in which the rich rebelled against the poor. The Labour Party under Tony Blair, in turn, responded to that shift the same way that the Democrats did under Bill Clinton: both parties quietly dropped their previous commitments to the working class and the poor, and focused instead on issues that appealed to affluent liberals. They gambled that the working class and the poor would keep voting for them out of habit and misplaced loyalty—and over the short term, that gamble paid off.
The result in both countries was a political climate in which the only policies up for discussion were those that favored the interests of the affluent at the expense of the working classes and the poor. That point has been muddied so often, and in so many highly imaginative ways, that it’s probably necessary to detail it here. Rising real estate prices, for example, benefit those who own real estate, since their properties end up worth more, but it penalizes those who must rent their homes, since they have to pay more of their income for rent. Similarly, cutting social-welfare benefits for the disabled favors those who pay taxes at the expense of those who need those benefits to survive.
In the same way, encouraging unrestricted immigration into a country that already has millions of people permanently out of work, and encouraging the offshoring of industrial jobs so that the jobless are left to compete for an ever-shrinking pool of jobs, benefit the affluent at the expense of everyone else. The law of supply and demand applies to labor just as it does to everything else: increase the supply of workers and decrease the demand for their services, and wages will be driven down. The affluent benefit from this, since they pay less for the services they want, but the working poor and the jobless are harmed by it, since they receive less income if they can find jobs at all. It’s standard for this straightforward logic to be obfuscated by claims that immigration benefits the economy as a whole—but who receives the bulk of the benefits, and who carries most of the costs? That’s not something anybody in British or American public life has been willing to discuss for the last thirty years.
The problem with this kind of government of the affluent, by the affluent, and for the affluent was outlined in uncompromising detail many years ago in the pages of Arnold Toynbee’s monumental A Study of History. Societies in decline, he pointed out, schism into two unequal parts: a dominant minority that monopolizes the political system and its payoffs, and an internal proletariat that carries most of the costs of the existing order of things and is denied access to most of its benefits. As the schism develops, the dominant minority loses track of the fundamental law of politics—the masses will only remain loyal to their leaders if the leaders remain loyal to them—and the internal proletariat responds by rejecting not only the dominant minority’s leadership but its values and ideals as well.
The enduring symbol of the resulting disconnect is the famous Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, where the last three French kings before the Revolution secluded themselves from an increasingly troubled and impoverished nation in order to gaze admiringly at their own resplendent reflections. While Marie Antoinette apparently never said the famous sentence attributed to her—“Let them eat cake”—the cluelessness about the realities of life outside the Hall of Mirrors that utterance suggests was certainly present as France stumbled toward ruin, and a growing number of ordinary Frenchmen and Frenchwomen turned their backs on their supposed leaders and went looking for new options.
That’s what has happened in Britain in recent decades, and the last few elections show it. In the general election of 2010, voters blindsided pollsters and pundits alike by flocking to the Liberal Democratic party, until then a fringe party. That was an obvious demand for change, and if the Lib-Dems had stuck to their guns, it might have resulted in the eclipse of the Labour party within a few more years, but the Lib-Dems chose instead to cash in their ideals and form a coalition with the Tories. In the 2015 general election, as a direct result, the Lib-Dems were flung back out onto the fringes.
2015 had an even more significant result, though. In an attempt to head off the UK Independence Party (UKIP), another fringe party showing worrisome gains, Tory PM David Cameron pledged that if his party won, the UK would hold a referendum on EU membership. Polls claimed that Parliament would again be split three ways between Conservatives, Lib-Dems, and Labour. The pollsters and the pundits were blindsided again; apparently a good many people who claimed they were going to vote for Labour or the Lib-Dems got into the privacy of the voting booth and cast their vote for their local Tory instead. Why? Thursday’s vote suggests that it was precisely because they wanted a chance to say no to the EU.
Fast forward to the Brexit campaign. In polite society in today’s Britain, any attempt to point out the massive problems with allowing unrestricted immigration onto an already overcrowded island, which can’t provide adequate jobs, housing, or social services for the people it’s got already, is dismissed out of hand as racism. Thus it’s not surprising that quite a few Britons, many of them nominally Labour voters, mumbled the approved sound bites in public and voted for Brexit in private—and again, the pollsters and the pundits were blindsided. That’s one of the downsides of the schism between the dominant minority and the internal proletariat; once the dominant minority loses the loyalty of the masses by failing to deal with the needs of those outside the circles of affluence and privilege, sullen outward conformity and secret revolt replace the mutual trust that’s needed to make a society function.
The EU, in turn, made a perfect target for disaffected voters among the working class and the poor because it’s entirely a creature of the same consensus of the affluent as the Labour party after Tony Blair and the Democratic Party after Bill Clinton. Its economic policies are guided from top to bottom by the neoliberal economics that came into power with Thatcher and Reagan; its unwavering support of unrestricted immigration and capital movement is calculated to force down wages and move jobs away from countries such as Britain; its subsidies inevitably end up in the pockets of big corporations and the well-to-do, while its regulatory burdens land heaviest on small businesses and local economies.
This isn’t particularly hard find out—in fact, it takes an effort to avoid noticing it. Listen to people bemoaning the consequences of Brexit in the latest reports from the British media, and you’ll hear a long list of privileges mostly relevant to the affluent that the speakers worry will be taken from them. Aside from a few fringe figures, those who voted for it generally aren’t talking, since they’ve learned from bitter experience that they’ll simply be shouted down with the usual shopworn accusations of racism et al.. If they were willing to talk, though, I suspect you’d hear a long list of burdens that have mostly landed on the ordinary working people so many of the affluent so obviously despise.
It’s probably necessary to note here that of course there are racists and xenophobes who voted for Brexit. Equally, there are people who have copulated with dead pigs who voted for Remain—I’m sure my British readers can name at least one—but that doesn’t mean that everyone who voted for Remain has copulated with a dead pig. Nor, crucially, does it prove that necrosuophiliac cravings are the only possible reason to vote for Remain. One common way to define hate speech is “the use of a demeaning and derogatory stereotype to describe every member of a group.” By that definition, the people who insist that everyone who voted for Brexit is a bigoted moron are engaged in hate speech—and it’s a source of bleak amusement to watch people who are normally quick to denounce hate speech indulging in it to their heart’s desire in this one case.
Let’s look deeper, though. There are, in fact, a significant number of poor and working-class Britons who hold deeply prejudiced attitudes toward foreign immigrants. Why? A large part of the reason is the fact that the affluent, for decades now, have equated racial tolerance with exactly those policies of unrestricted immigration that have plunged millions of the British working class into destitution and misery. In the same way, a great many poor and working class Britons couldn’t care less about the environment, and a large part of the reason is that the terms of debate about environmental issues have been defined so that the lifestyles of the affluent are never open to discussion, and the costs of environmental protection cascade down the social ladder while the benefits flow up. As Toynbee noted, when society splits into a dominant minority and an internal proletariat, the masses reject not only the leadership but also the ideals and values of their self-proclaimed betters. It happens tolerably often that some of those ideals and values really are important, but when they’ve been used over and over again to justify the policies of the privileged, the masses can’t afford to care.
Those Britons who are insisting that the majority doesn’t matter, and their country must stay in the EU no matter what the voters think, have clearly not thought through the implications of last Thursday’s election. Party loyalties have become very fluid just now, and the same 52% of British voters that passed the Brexit referendum could quite readily, with equal disdain for the tender sensibilities of the privileged minority, put a UKIP majority into the House of Commons and send Nigel Farage straight to 10 Downing Stree. If the British establishment succeeds in convincing the working classes and the poor that voting for UKIP is the only way they can make their voices heard, that’s what will happen. It’s a very unwise move, after all, to antagonize people who have nothing to lose.
Meanwhile, a very similar revolt is under way in the United States, with Donald Trump as the beneficiary. As I noted in an earlier post here, Trump’s meteoric rise from long-shot fringe candidate to Republican nominee was fueled entirely by his willingness to put himself in opposition to the consensus of the affluent described earlier. Where all the acceptable candidates were on board with the neoliberal economics and neoconservative politics of the last thirty years—lavish handouts for the rich, punitive austerity for the poor, malign neglect of our infrastructure at home and a monomaniacal pursuit of military confrontation overseas—he broke with that, and the more stridently the pundits and politicians denounced him, the more states he won and the faster his poll numbers rose.
At this point he’s doing the sensible thing, biding his time, preparing for the general election, and floating the occasional trial balloon to see how various arguments against Hillary Clinton will be received. I expect the kind of all-out war that flattened his Republican rivals to begin around the first of September. Nor is Hillary Clinton particularly well positioned to face such an onslaught. It’s not merely that she’s dogged by embarrassingly detailed allegations of corruption on a scale that would be considered unusually florid in a Third World kleptocracy, nor is it simply that her career as Secretary of State was notable mostly for a cascade of foreign policy disasters from which she seems to have learned nothing. It’s not even that on most economic, political, and military issues, Hillary Clinton is well to the right of Donald Trump, advocating positions indistinguishable from those of George W. Bush—you know, the guy the Democrats claimed to hate not too many years back.
No, what makes a Trump victory in November considerably more likely than not is that Clinton has cast herself as the candidate of the status quo. All the positions she’s taken amount to the continued pursuit of policies that, in the United States as in Britain, have benefited the affluent at the expense of everyone else. That was a safe choice back when her husband was President, and both parties were competing mostly over which one could do a better job of comforting the comfortable and afflicting the already afflicted. It’s not a safe choice now, when Trump has thrown away the covert rulebook of modern American politics, and is offering, to people who’ve gotten the short end of the stick for more than thirty years, a set of policy changes that could actually improve their lives.
Now of course that’s not what the politicians, the pundits, and the officially respectable thinkers of today’s consensus of the affluent are willing to talk about. The same dreary rhetoric applied to the pro-Brexit majority in Britain is thus being applied to Trump voters here in the United States. “Racist,” “fascist,” “moron”—all the shopworn, sneering tropes that the privileged use to dismiss the concerns of the rest of the population of today’s America are present and accounted for.
The passion with which these words are being flung about just now should not be underestimated. I had an old friend hang up on me in midsentence because I expressed a lack of enthusiasm for Clinton; we haven’t spoken since, and I have no idea if we ever will. Other people I know have had comparable experiences when they tried to discuss the upcoming election in terms more nuanced than today’s conventional wisdom is willing to permit. One of the most powerful and most unmentionable forces in American public life—class prejudice—pervades the shouting matches that result. To side with Clinton is to identify yourself with the privileged, the “good people,” the affluent circles gazing admiringly at themselves in the Hall of Mirrors. To speak of Trump in any terms other than cheap schoolboy insults, or even to hint that Trump’s supporters might be motivated by concerns other than racism and sheer stupidity, is to be flung unceremoniously outside the gates where the canaille are beginning to gather.
It has apparently not occurred to those who parade up and down the Hall of Mirrors that there are many more people outside those gates than there are within. It has seemingly not entered their darkest dreams that shouting down an inconvenient point of view, and flinging insults at anyone who pauses to consider it, is not an effective way of convincing anyone not already on their side. Maybe the outcome of the Brexit vote will be enough to jar America’s chattering classes out of their stupor, and force them to notice that the people who’ve been hurt by the policies they prefer have finally lost patience with the endless droning insistence that no other policies are thinkable. Maybe—but I doubt it.
353 comments:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/28/its-time-for-the-elites-to-rise-up-against-ignorant-masses-trump-2016-brexit/
Does it looks like a textbook example of elite's senility for you? It sure does to me! It's as if the author is begging the masses to hang him on a lamppost.
6/29/16, 4:04 PM
Justin said...
One aspect of the money economy that I find troubling is the absurd values assigned to desirable patches of urban or suburban real estate. If you do the math, the prices and rents that these places command (and I'm not talking about places like London, San Francisco, Vancouver, DC, I just mean any semi-prosperous coastal town) could be used to purchase absurd amounts of real things. For instance, an average Canadian uses about $1200 worth of oil a year (at present prices), which in any of the cities one can expect to find a job in, is at best two months rent and often closer to one. If you make the assumption that most of us in the LTG community make that oil is a master resource, you see both the absurdity and the importance of oil - Canada has a GDP of $52000 based on a consumption of $2000-2500 (natgas, ore, oil, coal) worth of primary resources.
If you believe the generally accepted narrative that renewables will let us keep on going the way we have been, but energy will become more expensive as a result, then it stands to reason that a person who can afford to live in a desirable suburb or urban center will be relatively less affected by energy prices as a result (or food prices or what have you). I'm a good example of this, I spend far more on rent than I do on energy, whereas the opposite is true for people living in more rural parts of the same province. I can see the lack of concern for the notion that a carbon tax or whatever - after all, if you pay $1000 in rent and $40 for power and $0 for gas (directly), what do price increases mean for you?
I also notice that on my facebook, which is mostly populated by educated late-20s/early 30's types, the ones who are doing really well for themselves almost always work for the government. Having had some contact with that world, it's not one you'll be accepted into without the usual mannerisms, shibboleths and family backgrounds - in other words, immigrants not welcome. In a certain sense, I can imagine them as the courtiers at Versailles - the complex is the size it is for a reason after all.
Up here in Canada, the government is spending a fortune on climate change - if they burnt the money on an altar int might work by slowing down the economy - but instead it goes to fund the lifestyles of those in academia and industry that are smart and connected enough to capture it.
6/29/16, 4:24 PM
JacGolf said...
6/29/16, 4:27 PM
David, by the lake said...
Proposed Amendment #1 (Unfunded Mandates)
Congress shall pass no law imposing a mandate upon the several States in absence of such appropriations necessary to fulfill the obligations imposed.
Proposed Amendment #2 (Congressional Term Limits)
No person who is or has been a member of the current Congress shall be eligible for election or appointment as a member of Congress if that person has been a member of the previous four Congresses.
Proposed Amendment #3 (State Selection of Senators)
Article 1. The seventeenth amendment to the Constitution is hereby repealed.
Article 2. Each State shall establish the method by which the Senators from that State are appointed or elected to their offices.
Proposed Amendment #4 (Proportional Election of Representatives)
Article 1. Seats of a State’s delegation to the House of Representatives shall be allocated proportionally among the political parties registering in that State for the election, according to the proportion of the total vote within that State for that party.
Article 2. Each political party shall be awarded a number of seats equal to the whole number of its proportion of the total vote. Any remaining seats shall be awarded singly, beginning with the party with the highest proportion of the total vote and proceeding to the next-highest, until all remaining seats have been awarded.
Article 3. Each political party shall publicly register a slate of candidates with the State, with the awarded seats being allocated according to the ranking of the candidates within that slate.
Proposed Amendment #5 (Secession)
Article 1. A State may elect to secede from the Union established by this Constitution.
Article 2. A State shall affect its secession by a resolution of a two-thirds majority of its legislature, subsequently ratified by a two thirds majority of a State referendum.
Article 3. Any former State, upon seceding, that desires to reinstate its membership in this Union must request admission as a State by Congress.
6/29/16, 4:32 PM
RepubAnon said...
Now, they've seen a man who called himself a Socialist come very close to defeating the Democratic Party's ordained choice. They've seen a campaign based on warning people of disaster if they vote the wrong way - the one they were planning to run against Mr. Trump - fail. Hopefully, even the Democratic campaign consultants who have been losing elections for years now by mouthing DC insider memes at the general population caught a clue.
Because the other lesson of the Brexit campaign is that the folks making those big, populist promises about, say, massively funding the NHS, were lying through their teeth. It was all a con job run on desperate people who knew that King Stork was at least addressing their concerns, while King Log was merely telling them the same recycled lies they'd heard so many times in previous campaigns. Given the choice between a continued march toward the poorhouse and someone promising to change things - and they'll go for change.
Hopefully, the Democrats have woken up and will tack back to the left. If Donald Trump wins, we could see "Twilight's Last Gleaming - the South China Sea edition" on TV screens in about 2 years. Nothing like a good war to win elections.
6/29/16, 4:41 PM
Pantagruel7 said...
6/29/16, 4:45 PM
tokyo damage said...
Speaking of things we're not talking about: outside of some real tiny lefty blogs, Trump was the only guy to tell a big audience the obvious implication of HRC's email scandal: whoever she sent the 'deleted' emails to STILL HAS THEM, and we could be looking at a POTUS who is being blackmailed by all sorts of goofball dictators - in short someone accountable to everyone BUT the voters. Even your Max Blumenthals and Chomskys haven't touched that one, although if you ask any adult how email works, they'll tell you both parties get copies. If I'm wrong and someone else has been saying 'blackmail, I tell you!' to an audience of a million, please let me know. Because I can't stand for Trump to be the 'go-to' guy for anything truthful.
6/29/16, 4:47 PM
kayr said...
I have been taking the time to read transcripts of Trump's speeches and policy positions and they sound good like all politician's speeches sound. However, I can't see that Trump will follow through with any of his promises as it would hurt his own little empire. He is after all part of the privileged class. He just seems to be successfully pandering to disaffected voters. In fact it gives me the creeps when I think about it. Voting for the status quo isn't appealing either so as far as I can tell, there is no presidential candidate that stands a chance of winning worth voting for.
6/29/16, 4:47 PM
peacegarden said...
“But wait, there’s more!” The repeated racist labeling and haughty expressions on the faces of the talking heads and comedians are making me feel nauseated.
They don’t get it, but they will.
Pass the popcorn, please…this is going to be verrry interesting!
Gail
6/29/16, 5:07 PM
disposium said...
6/29/16, 5:10 PM
disposium said...
6/29/16, 5:13 PM
Leo Knight said...
6/29/16, 5:24 PM
Paul said...
Children are emotional. Adults are rational. There is a child within us all. Thus we can be manipulated.
Cold pricklies from the Bremainers. Rack and ruin! And in the early days, billions were wiped from the paper value of the UK economy. A week later, the FTSE has regained and surpassed it's pre vote level.
Warm Fuzzies from the Brexiteers. The summers will now be longer. The NHS will now issue everyone with their own personal hospital. Oh, hang on... We will take back power from the unelected eurocrats and give it to...? Well who exactly? The People?
So we throw off our shackles, and get to vote out the politicians that blight our lives, and replace them with...?
It's both interesting and depressing to see how the Brexit vote has affected the Labour Party. The establishment left have been tugging at their leashes to depose the upstart Corbyn. I wonder if he can weather the storm?
6/29/16, 5:31 PM
TJ said...
To me this election isn't so much about a class war between the privileged and the proletariat. It is, given that the only two options being offered by the ruling class are two world class thieves who have spent their
entire professional lives deeply embedded in the corruption of the US's political / military / capitalist system, simply the election one would expect in a society that is far, far down the road of decline. The only real debate is which of the two, Secretary Clinton or Mr. Trump, will accelerate that decline the most.
The cry of Mr. Trump's proletariat isn't “WE WANT FAIRNESS”, or “JUSTICE”, or “LIBERTY”. It is “WE WANT OURS”. They call out for the open oppression of the “others”, of marginalizing anyone who isn't “US”, for cranking up Jim Crow, beating back the rights of women, and forcing “God's rules” on the ungodly. The privileged have betrayed western society, but those who have been betrayed don't seem to have much to offer as an alternative.
Mr. Trump, after all, didn't hijack the Republican party. He simply pulled the cover off of the policies and attitudes the Republicans have pursued and displayed since Ronald Reagan conned his way into the White House. More likely western society with its pretend-democracy, bankrupted fundamentalist “morality”, and dedication to nothing but greed, has simply run its course. The chaos surrounding the British vote to leave the UN, (though I think the vote itself, and the outcome, was completely justified) and that surrounding the circus that has become the hallmark of all US “elections”, are symptoms; the convulsions of a fatally ill patient in the final hours.
6/29/16, 5:32 PM
Mister Roboto said...
6/29/16, 5:34 PM
zach bender said...
6/29/16, 5:37 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Justin, that's a good point. I'll be talking in a future post about the ways that the environmental movement has committed suicide, and the transformation of global climate change into an excuse for government and academic featherbedding will be part (though only one part) of that discussion.
JacGolf, oh, no question -- a Trump presidency is nothing to look forward to, though it would probably be better than a Clinton presidency. One way or another, it's going to be a mess.
David, interesting. I have some amendments of my own to propose, but that's raw material for a future post.
RepubAnon, given Hillary Clinton's track record in the State Department and her continued cheerleading for neocon regime change schemes, it seems to me that a Clinton presidency would be even more likely than a Trump presidency to end in Twilight's Last Gleaming territory.
Pantagruel7, bingo!
Tokyo Damage, I haven't heard anyone else mention that, so I'm sorry to say you're stuck with the Donald.
Kayr, understood. The thing I'd point out is that the longer the current conventional wisdom remains welded in place, the more destructive the final explosion will be. Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable...
Peacegarden, it's definitely in the extra-large-popcorn-and-tall-soft-drink category of spectacle!
Disposium, excellent! On the level of humor, I imagine a new Cthulhu-for-president slogan: "Vote Cthulhu 2016 -- He'll Devour The Rich First!" On a more serious level, you're quite right, and the hint of hysteria in current rantings on the part of the privileged really does echo Lovecraft's own frantic terrors. As for immigration, I'm in favor of it as well; I'd be perfectly willing for the US to admit any number of Syrian refugees, say, on condition that an equal number of those who are currently advocating for unrestricted immigration volunteer to move to Syria to offset the population gain.
Leo, if a post of mine doesn't generate at least a few outraged howls, I hang my head in disappointment. ;-)
6/29/16, 5:48 PM
Peter Parpan said...
"When a political system becomes completely non-functional people will accept tyranny rather than anarchy, they will accept a government that functions brutally rather than a government that doesn't function at all. And so we face a situation where charismatic demagogues who can promise to make change happen can get a mass following."
-John Michael Greer 2013
6/29/16, 5:49 PM
Don Plummer said...
I read this in a comment from a British resident on social media, but I don't know whether it's fact or not; perhaps some of the British readers here can verify it (or not): I was told that the UK's leaving the EU will have little immediate effect on the UK's immigration policies.
6/29/16, 5:54 PM
John Michael Greer said...
TJ, it would probably be fair to characterize Trump's supporters as saying "We Want Ours," and Clinton's as saying "We've Got Ours." Other than that, you're taking a small subset of Trump's supporters and using them to denigrate the lot, which isn't exactly impressive for someone who wants to talk about fairness, justice, and liberty, you know.
Mister R., and the same thing could be said, on similar grounds, for Clinton and her supporters.
Zach, the policies I have in mind are enforcing the immigration laws, pulling out of trade treaties, and putting obstacles in the way of offshoring jobs. Those would indeed improve the lives of people who've gotten the short end of the stick, by increasing the number of jobs in the US and decreasing the use of mass illegal immigration to drive down wages. It interests me that no matter how many times I specify which policies I'm talking about, people like you keep on trying to avoid discussing them...
6/29/16, 5:57 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Don, the schoolyard insults I was referencing, as I think you know perfectly well, are those that insist that anybody who votes for Trump is by definition a racist moron. As for his electoral chances, yes, and people have been saying that since he entered the contest for the Republican nomination; none of that slowed him down, and it won't slow him down against the frankly incompetent campaign Clinton's running, either. I bet she spends most of the time between now and November claiming that voting for Trump will give you cancer or something!
6/29/16, 6:00 PM
Grebulocities said...
6/29/16, 6:02 PM
Cortes said...
The caliph Al-Musta'sim was captured and forced to watch as his citizens were murdered and his treasury plundered. According to most accounts, the caliph was killed by trampling. The Mongols rolled the caliph up in a rug, and rode their horses over him, as they believed that the earth would be offended if it were touched by royal blood. But the Venetian traveller Marco Polo claimed that Al-Musta'sim was locked in a tower with nothing to eat but gold and “died like a dog
6/29/16, 6:09 PM
aunteater said...
6/29/16, 6:10 PM
Mark Luterra said...
I simply cannot stand to listen to Donald Trump speak. He is not truly a representative of the internal proletariat (he is wealthy, famous, and has never personally struggled with any of the concerns of the lower classes), and the fact that he has managed to cast himself in that role so successfully exposes his true identity as a master strategist. He is following the reality TV rulebook, saying exactly what he needs to say to get the most votes while defying the predictions and projections of those who claim to know what's going one.
I don't for one minute believe that Trump really cares about any of the ideals he claims to espouse. He wants one thing - to WIN - to add to his narcissistic resume of self-aggrandizing life accomplishments. He is a master of language as meaningless emotional utterance, and he has managed to successfully unite most of the angry people in the US by claiming he will do something - NOW, FAST, GREAT - about whatever it is they are angry at.
Anger, in the absence of a real plan or set of principles, is not a recipe for good governance or problem-solving but instead for descent into xenophobia, violence, and hatred.
It is my perspective that Donald Trump has managed to use his knack for psychological strategy to ferret out the internal proletariat vote a few years before the wave would break on its own. It is my hope that Hillary will win this fall - four more years of the same is not too much to bear with unpredictable anger as the alternative. In that case the effect of this election will be to alert the internal proletariat that it is possible for their candidate to win - and four years from now we will then have a better selection of anti-status quo candidates to choose from: candidates who are not simply master strategists but representatives of the voting majority.
6/29/16, 6:15 PM
Justin said...
It's worth noting that viewership for CNN et. al. is well into the low millions or high fractions of millions - Fox is doing a bit better with at least 5 million or so watching. Alex Jones of Infowars fame is supposedly out performing CNN (although his audience is more international).
The Conservative Party of Canada recently tweeted "because it's the current year" - not just an attack on something Trudeau and his cronies like to say, but at least in my mind an attack on progressivism - the notion that we're on some upwards-sloped curve to some glorious future forever, amen.
Sci-fi writer and culture critic Vox Day had this to say about Trump (I paraphrase): "My father was on Tarawa beach. He told me that if everyone is frozen up under fire and isn't sure what do do, if they look to you for guidance, you have to do or say something or it'll go to hell. He told me about a lieutenant who found himself in such a situation and decided to bumrush the Japanese position - and when he got to the top of the hill he found the division behind him. I would say that Trump is doing something similar - I'm not optimistic about his motives, I don't think he's going to fix much, but he's taking charge at a time when there is no apparent leadership and things are clearly going wrong, but at least he's charging the hill, and if we get up there, at least we can shoot back".
6/29/16, 6:19 PM
Paul said...
I think of it as The Three 'A's. Aspergers, Alcohol and Anger management. The people yelling "Moron" are afflicted by one or more of these.
I managed to discard one of the three. It wasn't alcohol :)
Anyway, Corbyn is an interesting case. He wasn't calling for a straightforward acceptance of the EU. The EU has had some benefits too, such as the Human Rights Act, and the Working Time Directive, which limited the number of hours workers could be forced to work. It has also functioned reasonably effectively as a means of redirecting wealth towards poorer areas of Europe. I live in Merseyside, England, which benefitted from EU grants far more than it's citizens gave through their taxes. Corbyn's stance was that the EU wasn't perfect, that ordinary working people were right to have a grievence, and that the best way to reform it was from within. He's far from a fringe figure. Yet his nuance was interpreted as ambivalence, and used to reassert establishment control.
6/29/16, 6:28 PM
Dau Branchazel said...
Two nights ago, a car in front of a mosque was firebombed in Perth, Western Australia, where I live and the fire-bombers spray-painted F*** ISLAM on the wall. Are they representative of Australian society? Not totally, but yet this sums up to my mind, a sentiment that is strong here, and has it's biggest outlet in the debate around immigration. There is a selective blindness to many people's view of what immigration means. A colour blindness. The majority of immigrants to Perth are from the United Kingdom, Ireland and South Africa. It is a rare thing that anyone complains about these predominantly white people coming and taking our jobs. That ire is focused on people from the Middle east and Africa. I think it is undeniable that this has played a part in the Brexit campaign. Not just a small one either.
And as for Trump, I personally do not think he is a moron, but I do think he is racist. He may be offering a change of pace, but his remarks about the "Mexican" judge, and Mexicans in general are telling. Yet he has a lot of support from the Hispanic community probably because it seems like they've been shafted for years by the establishment and here is this pseudo-straight talker offering a a new vision (and who, I think, would turn his back on any promises he makes the second it is in his interest to do so). I also think, that if it weren't for the potential of government checks and balances, he could well grow into a fascist ruler. Sealing off borders on religious grounds and monitoring Islamic people internally would be a good start. This mixed with the run-of-the-mill American exceptionalism that always pervades American politics, and his extremely high opinion of himself could be disastrous. Which is not to say that the previous years have been better, but I think if you want a man to bring the dissolution of the union that you have mentioned so frequently, he may be your man.
I appreciate your attempt to flesh out these debates and infuse them with actual facts, but I just can't look at Brexit or Donald Trump without seeing the tide of racism being on the rise. And my fear also is that it will now affect how Europeans view each other again. Even in the eighties and nineties, French and English still had this old rivalry and tossed bitter stereotypes at each other. With so many of Europe's youth mingling and working and playing together I really think this has done wonders for creating international friendship and removing the animosity. It would be a shame for this trend to go backwards on account of Europe splitting.
6/29/16, 6:28 PM
John N. said...
It's been said elsewhere that 'racist' has been bleached of its former meaning and is becoming a term of hate-speech against those of European decent. I can't say I disagree vigorously.
On a lighter note, may I present your readers with Nigel Farage's gloat-session in the EU parliament. You can tell he's relishing rubbing his victory in his opposition's faces.
6/29/16, 6:30 PM
Jason B said...
Bravo on a good argument. I think ANY characterization of Trump as wanting to implement policy "enforcing the immigration laws, pulling out of trade treaties, and putting obstacles in the way of offshoring jobs," is incomplete. Trump is a metaphor. He MIGHT (if elected) enforce immigration laws, pull out of trade agreements, put obstacles in the way of offshoring jobs. He might not (if elected). More likely, he'd make some symbolic moves (try to pass legslation to build a bigger wall between the USA and Mexico etc).
But, who really knows? As it stands, based on who he was before now, he certainly does't seem to stand for much.
Reading my twitter feed today, I note an article that points out that Trump's campaign includes pro-trade lobbyists.
https://theintercept.com/2016/06/29/trump-team-tpp/
Amazing!
If this fact is in fact a fact it could only be bolstered by the writer's claim that Trump has a history of saying whatever the hell he wants to say with no regard to whether he believes what he's saying or not: Trump, the writer asserts, "has a very long history of changing his positions, including taking diametrically opposing views on abortion, immigration, Israel policy, and the minimum wage."
The upshot? Trump plays the game better than any of the others. No doubt in my mind. He knows how to win this and he might just...and, maybe that should be the discussion, since no one, as far as I can see, seems to be making any headway towards dealing with trade, immigration and global markets.
I think what we are faced with is a world in which these things might be out of our control. In which those who control technology are the ones who control everybody else. It should go without saying that those, in this argument, are the ones who control the levers of the media. That, in a nutshell, is what drives the frustration people feel (myself included) with the "status quo."
Thus, I don't know that there could possibly be a coherent meaning to attribute to the why of people voting for Brexit or Trump, other than frustration (real or perceived) at being rendered invisible and powerless. Those things stand for something else. They are ephemeral. They barely have any meaning at all!
6/29/16, 6:31 PM
Bill said...
Japan is wise because, like Great Britain, it is also a group of small crowded islands. Japan has only a third more land area than Oregon State. If Japan had the same population density as Oregon, Japan would only have about 6 million people. Japan imports over 60% of its food, but pro-growth English language media never consider what will happen when the food ships quit coming. When that disaster does strike, having a cohesive and declining population that values group cooperation is going to be a definite plus for Japan. On the other hand, not being a real member of that society will be a minus for me, but I’m already old so it doesn’t matter.
6/29/16, 6:32 PM
Rich_P said...
I don't think they're intentionally malicious or conspiratorial -- just utterly clueless as to what's going on outside of their Hall of Mirrors.
For what it's worth, I supported the "leave" camp for complex reasons related to my political philosophy and inherent distrust of centralization. But I can't really discuss this with my "liberal" colleagues: they're extremely tolerant and multicultural, but only within a very small and clearly demarcated circle. By supporting "leave" (or restoring strong federalism in the U.S.), I must be some sort of closeted bigot or rube.
One final point: the emergence of an angry internal proletariat precludes discretion, nuance, and moderation. This is one of the more interesting plot points in A Canticle for Leibowitz: after the nuclear holocaust of the 20th century, the survivors, incensed with the arrogance of the scientists who built the bombs and the politicians who advocated MAD, took out their rage on all books and educated people, leading to another Dark Age.
6/29/16, 6:38 PM
Allexis Weetman said...
6/29/16, 6:38 PM
Yellow Submarine said...
It's rather disconcerting to see Toynbee pitching precisely the same policies that affluent liberals have been promoting; policies that you have pointed out have done immense damage to nations like the US and UK, especially to the wage class, including globalization, the abolition of tariffs and other trade barriers to protect national economies, the diminishing and abolishing of nation-states in favor of large scale entities like the EU and UN, and the free movement of peoples without respect for national borders or identity. He defends these policies in the name of "Democracy" and "Free Trade", just like our senile elites do and he has a very condescending attitude towards what he calls "parochial sovereignty", just like present day liberals do.
Toynbee was very much a part of the liberal establishment of his day and its very interesting to see what the practical results of the policies he was promoting have been nearly a century later. I must admit that while I find many of Toynbee's insights to be invaluable, my opinion of him has been diminishing recently as I have been reading through this particular section since he was one of the people in the Western political and academic establishment who was pushing for the sorts of policies that led to the establishment of the EU, trade treaties like NAFTA, TPP and TTIP, and the mass immigration that has been used to screw over the wage class.
Again, I don't doubt that Toynbee has some brilliant insights and is well-worth reading, but my sympathies are very much with Oswald Spengler and ultimately, I find his worldview to be much more convincing.
6/29/16, 6:54 PM
Toro Loki said...
2016 A.D. Britain leaves Rome.
Outrageous levels of immigration from third world countries= barbarians invasions.
Hope all my fellow pagans are busy getting ready for the Dark Ages.
6/29/16, 7:06 PM
John Roth said...
I see Clinton as a one-term president, for the simple reason that if Sanders has the brains God gave a rutabaga, he'll be building a grass-roots organization that will be able to make some realistic proposals for the way forward. Hopefully, he'll listen to the pain points that Trump has his thumb on and do something about it - as of right now he's talking to a completely different demographic about completely different issues.
Clinton doesn't have to run a competent campaign, whatever that means. All she has to do is allow Trump to alienate enough of the electorate, and she's in. He's well on the way to doing exactly that.
6/29/16, 7:10 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
The farther I get into this election year, the more I think that your model, and the conventional media model, of who the Trump voter is and why is kind of misconceived. I live in deep Trump country, "Make America Great Again" signs have been appearing on roadsides for months. One candidate for the State house in an extremely white and conservative corner of the state actually translated this into the words everyone really hear in their heads, and put up campaign billboards for himself with happy caucasian faces that said "Make America White Again." But the strongest Trump supporters are NOT the poor around here. They are the rural middle class, the old families, the landlords and slumlords, the business owners, those who live comfortably on their government and pension payments here in the "Check Republic" (that's a pun, note the spelling).
So all these statistics showing that Trump's voters are less well educated and less affluent I think are ignoring important covariation. Trump's voters are the same people the Republicans have been courting with their "Southern Strategy" for decades. They are the same people who would have been Dixiecrats in the 1950s and 1960s. These voters occur nationwide, of course, as the Republicans have discovered to their everlasting glee. They are NOT the disaffected former wage class. They are the same old small town and rural conservatives they have always been. Again, they are the rural middle class.
But here is the thing: The rural middle class is less well educated than the urban middle class. And they make less money than the urban middle class. It's cheaper to live out here, $50K is a quite comfortable middle class household income, but would leave you in a squalid hovel in most urban areas. And since you don't neek $100K to survive, you don't need advanced degrees to make a living wage. Really, when I say "rural," I actually mean the exurbs and outer newer suburbs, the formerly rural areas that are now feeders and bedrooms for urban areas, and retirement places for those who despise Florida and Arizona (i.e. sensible people). So if you take the average middle class person in Trump country, they are less well educated and lower income than the average middle class person in Hillary/Bernie country. But they are NOT "poorer."
Again, I live in deep Trump Country in a truly rural area beyond the exurbs. Trump's base here is not people who lost their jobs to globalization. It is the same old same old of conservative middle aged and older folks as has always been the "Republican Base," the same people who got Reagan elected (demographically, not literally, of course). Trump just has them motivated with his code words and dog whistles, and their voter turnout and enthusiasm have skyrocketed.
There's also not yet much evidence that Trump is going anywhere farther than where he already is. I just checked the most recent 17 polls on the national election on RealClearPolitics, every single one shows Clinton leading by between 1 and 12%, a margin that has increased in recent months. There's no evidence yet that he is catching on beyond the base.
Though he doesn't necessarily agree entirely with my thesis, here's another voice from Tennessee about Trump (abundant profanity, because that is the way we talk around here):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsqKyv86pEY
6/29/16, 7:17 PM
Christophe said...
What on earth makes you think we are going to get a competent candidate? This is what decline looks like. Many voters are far more worried that the next time around we won't even have candidates as competent as this time (I know that is rather hard to picture, but it is fully within the realm of possibility.) Consider how rapidly our options have deteriorated over the past few decades, and take history as the best predictor of the future.
Many see any candidate despised by the establishment as a dream come true, and the Democrats' ability to smash their anti-establishment candidate only serves as clear warning that such rare opportunities must be seized or lost. The disaffected proletariat is being squeezed so hard it doesn't have the luxury of waiting for another election cycle.
I seriously doubt that the disenfranchised portion of the electorate will take a 4-year time-out in making its opinions on its progressing enslavement known. We choose among the options available, not the ones we wholeheartedly wish were available.
6/29/16, 7:20 PM
Rita said...
Before immigration from the EU became an issue the UK had been absorbing large numbers of immigrants from former colonies--Pakistanis and Indians, Jamaicans, Africans, Hong Kong Chinese and so forth. Of course these immigrants came with the advantage of having learned some English and of being familiar with British customs, holidays, sports, literature and so forth. There is still resentment, but I think it is of a different quality than being asked to accept Poles, Ukrainians, etc.
Quantities matter also. The US has about 11% immigrant population (not sure if that includes estimates of illegal immigrants) The UK also has about 11%, but the population and land area is so much less that the impact is obviously heavier.
6/29/16, 7:24 PM
Ben Johnson said...
I then suggested that since I live in a deep 'red' state, and have no interest if voting for Hillary, I would cast my presidential vote for the Gary Johnson. I don't really buy most of what his party sells, but i'm not interested in the corporate sponsored parties at all after seeing the Democratic Party establishment sell Bernie down the river.
Their response revealed much. I got to hear all about how no one will vote for Trump because he's racist. Then I got to hear about how Hillary's scandals are unimportant compared to the scandals of the Trump family. Finally, I was told that a vote for the third party meant I obviously wanted to waster my vote. (I was told the same thing in 2012 when I voted for Jill Stein. Alas, the Green party will not be on the ballot in Oklahoma). My parents wall into that exact category of Democrats who hissed at George W but whose eyes glaze over when you mention that Obama orders the drone killing of American citizens without trial.
6/29/16, 7:29 PM
Kevin Patrick Beckett said...
Keep plugging/chipping away at the edifice of ignorance - your column is a bright spot in the week.
6/29/16, 7:41 PM
pygmycory said...
The trouble with comparing today to 1970, is that all those free trade agreements, technological change and outsourcing are confounding factors.
6/29/16, 7:43 PM
Jes Gallagher said...
6/29/16, 7:43 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
In other words, in about thirty seconds they turned an EU supporter into an EU hater. All I've been saying since it started, and I'm amazed how often it's shouted down, is "It's not all racism." I find it hard to believe the majority of British adults are so racist they would vote against their own interests merely to spite brown people. I also doubt they don't know what they're voting for, and am confident many have good reasons. So I expect to see the British who voted leave double down on it, especially if they end up staying in the EU.
Also, if the EU is really this unstable, such that one country leaving brings it to the brink of collapse, leaving asap is a very good idea, in my opinion at least.
6/29/16, 7:44 PM
fedd2746-3e6c-11e6-a08e-9f05e63eae82 said...
It seems to me the election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is to abstract a thing to grasp in daily life. It's like a time sync that keeps us from living and the hour glass doesn't have to return the sand when the vote is done. I'm not saying be disinterested in it; I'm saying don't obsess about politics. It's like political discussion itself has become a vice as much as political parties have- There must be tactile things in life and not endless philosophy without metaphor or story at least. If I see fine print that doesn't paint a picture, rather describing a machine, I run away.
Just putting this out there for people to think about.
6/29/16, 7:47 PM
Dale NorthwestExpeditions said...
I return to your blog every week because of the clarity of your thoughts, and the fact they typically align with mine. Tongue in cheek as I write this. I am also astonished by the input and comments of your readers. You have this incredible skill, shown again in this weeks presentation, to take today's issues and clarify them in a way that our main stream media appears totally incapable of doing. Please keep up the good work!
6/29/16, 7:49 PM
Nastarana said...
Write in someone else. I think quite a few disgruntled Bernie supporters will be writing in his name.
The Green Party and its' probable nominee, Dr. Jill Stein. She might want to consider offering the VP slot to soon to be former Congresswoman and leftist heroine Donna Edwards. The Greens would be, I think, well advised to emphasize Dr. Stein's experience as a physician in private practice, and downplay her academic credentials.
The Libertarian Party and its' nominees, former NM Governor Gary Johnson and his running mate, former Mass. Governor William Weld. Johnson is now at about 10% in at least some polls; 5 percentage points more and he gets to be in debates.
I don't see Clinton carrying any western state except possibly CA and HA. If Johnson, appealing to western voters as "one of us", can successfully portray Trump as a spoiled brat Richie from NYC without in the process offending Trump's voters, I think he might carry some western states, and if this goes to the House, which I think is a very real possibility, he could be elected by Republican house members who have been insulted one too many times by Trump.
I also think it at least possible that Stein and the Greens could carry one or two New England states, especially if Stein has the wit to go after Clinton for her unwavering support for, and acceptance of largesse from, the world's most hated corporation, Monsanto. Tell me who your friends are and...
6/29/16, 7:51 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
I figure if I work at it I can eliminate Internet use completely as soon as you get a print version of the Archdruid Report going (Which I will happily pay quite a bit of money for), but I really hope to get a head start on learning to live without it since I expect it to fail in the near future, or at least get far to expensive for the average person.
This has proven quite unpopular with so many people.... I've even gotten people who think it's because I can't afford it who offered to pay for me, when I could easily afford it, but I just don't want it. I'll see how things go once I discontinue it, but I feel it's likely my limited social media will vanish too, once it becomes so inconvenient to use.
I've already tried getting rid of it before but social pressures made me get it again. I associate with different people now, am prepared for the social pressures, and have a vision of the future and what I want, so I think I'm more prepared. But in any case, this is still a ways down the road: I see no point in making too many changes all at once. I'll learn the skills needed for this one step at a time, taking my time and learning as I go. That's the point of collapsing now, right?
If anyone has advice on how to collapse now, I'd love to hear it, and thank you in advance to those who offer me advice on this journey I have set off on.
6/29/16, 7:57 PM
Unknown said...
"Zach, the policies I have in mind are enforcing the immigration laws, pulling out of trade treaties, and putting obstacles in the way of offshoring jobs."
Presidential candidates do make promises they have neither the ability nor the intention to fulfill. President Trump will have the ability to enforce existing immigration laws. If he wants new laws, the Republicans in Congress may oblige him.
The Trump administration will be able to negotiate new trade agreements, but treaties require Senate approval. The national security and big business factions in both parties are opposed to protectionist legislation and I don't think Trump can overcome their opposition. Both NAFTA and TPP are driven by national security concerns as the elites understand national security.
Square that opposition to any legislation impeding the offshoring of jobs, though there may be executive actions Trump could take about that.
6/29/16, 7:58 PM
John the Peregrine said...
I expect you're going to anger a lot of your readers on the "social justice" end of the left with this post, which is a good thing. If there's one group that's allergic to having their views held up to any scrutiny, it's definitely the affluent part of the left. Upper class liberals have their views reinforced day in and day out by every pundit and celebrity, who are in lockstep agreement with the same set of policies as they are. The affluent left faces so little substantive criticism, especially in mainstream venues, that it's like an animal kept in sanitary conditions for too long, to the point where the most common infections or diseases can trigger a fatal immune system overreaction. Conservatives and right-wingers seem to have a thicker skin, if only because they face orders of magnitude more abuse. It's nice to see the narrative finally slipping from upper class liberals, after all these decades.
6/29/16, 7:58 PM
John Crawford said...
I have experienced a similar reaction when attempting to address the issues with Hillary Clinton and have likewise been ostracized at the fellowship hour after church. I am not a Trump supporter but, addressing the issues he is exploiting are critical to extending the arc of collapse and thus allowing at least a bit more time to adapt to the consequences of the ongoing economic and social disintegration.
6/29/16, 8:04 PM
gwizard43 said...
What troubles me is the fact that while these movements may be rooted in working class dissatisfaction, but are ripe for hijacking by the same forces that those affluent elites insist must be behind it all in the first place.
After all, I'm sure there was a wide spread sense of satisfaction following the French Revolution at the comeuppance of the elites - until it became clear that the guillotines didn't stop there. So while the Brexit vote feels eminently satisfying to many of us as a well earned comedown for global elites, schadenfreude at it's finest, what ensues could easily turn out to be an even more pernicious system. A point you've often made in the past.
And just as Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage aren't likely to turn out to be truly uplifting and empowering the poor and downtrodden, the same seems to me likely to apply to Trump.
That is, in both cases, it's not at all clear that those poor and downtrodden masses, of whose plight Joe Bageant spoke so passionately and eloquently, will be better off as a result of these forces that have been loosed.
BTW, I don't know if you follow Chris Smaje's blog, but he's waxed passionate about this issue in a couple of recent posts, including his most recent. There's no doubt some daylight between your political position and his, but that's all the more reason to ingest both!
6/29/16, 8:05 PM
Jon Rudd said...
With Victoria Nuland as the hawkish National Security Advisor goading Hillary into something brilliant like an invasion of Russia.
6/29/16, 8:19 PM
Abelardsnazz said...
Other friends seemed more concerned about overseas holidays, visas and paying for overseas university tuition, now that the pound has fallen.
Many friends and family are in Scotland, which voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU. This was mostly taken to be a sign of the Scots' sanity, lack of racism and internationalist ideals. Personally I saw it as a sign that the disaffected unhappy masses have bought into the idea of an independent Scotland as being their preferred vehicle of radical change.
6/29/16, 8:42 PM
Greenish said...
I presume this is not unrelated to my membership in most all of the privileged categories, despite being strongly aware of the cognitive dissonances present for many years, and having at least mentally -if not culturally or practically- separated my worldview from the neoliberal techno-utopian consumerist one.
6/29/16, 8:44 PM
Stephen Heyer said...
Do you have to cover everything about an issue so completely and well? Some of us like having a few holes left in an argument so that we can at least bicker a bit.
It’s not that I think you are always right (just mostly) but rather that everything you present is plausible, credible and coherent. And, for reasons I’ll present next time discussion on this blog makes it vaguely relevant, I think plausible, credible and coherent is about as close as we can expect to get to anything about the near future.
That’s one of the main features of event horizons.
Stephen Heyer
6/29/16, 8:45 PM
Jason B said...
6/29/16, 8:50 PM
Myriad said...
Clinton 2016: Don't Rock the Handbasket!
Trump 2016: Bad Idea, But What Have You Got to Lose?
However, it appears to me that Trump has so far been erring in a way you've been warning us about since 2008: relying too much on abstractions, the more abstract elements of a campaign (specifically, media news coverage and social media), while neglecting the physical components (such as offices containing lists of supporters and people who can get those supporters to knock on doors and drive seniors to polling places). On that level, Clinton has been out-building Trump organizationally by orders of magnitude. Maybe that's a temporary condition, or maybe that old fashioned stuff is irrelevant given the political landscape you've laid out. But unless Trump's present "biding his time" includes an awful lot of very fast work in that area, and without expecting much help from the experienced establishment Republican minions who are best at it, I have to see it as a huge (or "yuuge") and potentially crippling disadvantage. People can believe what they believe in whatever numbers, but in the end they have to pull the levers or push the buttons.
Sure, if all those Clinton phone bankers and door knockers were only saying things that infuriate a majority of Americans they'd be worse than useless. But they're not; they're adapting. They've co-opted Sanders talking points about student loan debt, stronger labor unions, and a higher minimum wage, among other things. Now that both presumptive nominees are promising things the working class wants (even though no one believes they will happen), status quo party demographics (which favor Clinton) loom larger.
6/29/16, 8:50 PM
Bootstrapper said...
Something very similar is happening here. In the run-up to the Australian Federal Election, there has been an unusually frequent number of comments about the "inadvisability" of voting for minor parties and independent candidates, from both the major parties and media commentators alike. The campaign to 'vote small party and independent' is all over the social media. And, it's only gotten more intense since the Brexit result. The only response to this, that the major party candidates seem capable of, is to mouth the timeworn meme that a vote for anyone but them, is "wasted" and that a 'hung-parliament' will result in "chaos". That and the usual "sledging" of non-major-party candidates and independents (particularly Nick Xenophon), who look like doing well. The feeling is one of a groundswell of disappointment and anger just waiting for a chance to express itself, this Saturday.
Cheers! Paul
6/29/16, 8:51 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Cortes, exactly. When the dominant elite succeeds in alienating the internal proletariat completely, something like that's the usual result.
Aunteater, and which party has more of them in its pocket.
Mark, what makes you think that the next round of candidates will be any better? For all you or I know, if Trump is defeated this time around, the next guy to succeed in rallying the masses will be fond of armbands and jackboots.
Justin, I think I know the guy the Onion interviewed!
Paul, er, the EU is effective at redirecting wealth toward the poor parts of Europe? In what alternate universe is this? The Eurozone is a wealth pump that benefits Germany and a few other northern countries at the expense of the Mediterranean countries -- Greece, Italy, and Spain in particular have been bled dry.
Dau, I think you're missing my point. The fact that some opponents of mass immigration are racists does not mean that racism is the only reason why people might be concerned about mass immigration -- and in Britain in particular, huge numbers of people have solid economic reasons to object to a process that drives down wages.
John, of course. "But Trump's a racist!" serves the same role in this discussion that all the handwaving about the benefits of the internet did when I pointed out that the survival of the internet depends on its ability to pay its own costs -- a way of dodging an acutely uncomfortable issue.
Jason, obviously I disagree. Whether or not Trump's statements mean anything, the way that voters have ignored the pundits and flocked to him means a great deal, as I've tried to point out.
Bill, Japan's policies are extremely sensible. The faster they get their population down, the more likely something more or less like Japan is to survive into the next century.
Rich_P, true enough. The desperate are rarely if ever interested in nuances.
Allexis, I've heard the same thing from a number of British readers of mine who vote Labour. If the politicians and pundits want to see Mr. Farage become Prime Minister, they're going about it the right way.
Submarine, good. Toynbee was a member of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, the British affiliate of the Council on Foreign Relations; his ideas have in large part guided the Anglo-American establishment for three quarters of a century -- and I think it's crucial to see his book as a reaction against Spengler, an attempt to defend the plutocratic-democratic state against Spengler's criticism. That's one of the reasons I find both men useful.
Toro Loki, I've been getting ready for them for all my adult life.
6/29/16, 8:56 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Thanks for the new word: canaille. Nice one.
The other interesting thing going on I reckon is that income for most people is earned in tokens and over the years I have noticed that an increasing amount of those tokens are being funnelled into the murky world of high tokens! (Hope you like that term, I just made it up?) All the while this has been sold to the population as a welfare safety net, but what most people don't tend to realise is that the fat cats who eat the tokens, want 2% of the balance every year and they don't tend to realise that there may be a slight difference between hedge funds and pension funds. The other thing is that this has allowed for the slow unravelling of the welfare safety net. And nobody seems to notice.
Hey, we have a federal election down here this weekend for both houses of Parliament. Should be fun, and even little old me has a role to play. ;-)!
I agree with your analysis. Although the essay forced me to go and grab a Camomile tea.
Incidentally it is raining down here and what is unusual about the rain is that rather than being a gentle winter rain, it is torrential. It is a real shame that people don't seem to understand that this is Spring and Summer rainfall.
Cheers
Chris
6/29/16, 9:25 PM
Wendy Crim said...
I remember when GWBush won in 2000- we were all told, by liberals, it was the end of the world and he'd lose in 2004. In 2004, same. In 2008, all the conservatives lost their collective minds. In 2012 when Obama won again, they all said "the country is screwed".
You know what has changed for me and my friends and family? Not much. We certainly have less money with each passing administration, but we all still go to work and the store and watch our kids grow up and eat dinner together. We still laugh and cry and just get on with it. Hillary and Trump are both horrible. One of them will win. And I'll make dinner and take my daughter to practice and walk the dog. And most likely our family will get poorer, because that's what's happening in the world now. But, there are worse things than being poor.
Thanks for the blog I enjoy it so much.
6/29/16, 9:45 PM
Ursachi Alexandru said...
There are poor areas in my country that have benefitted from infrastructure projects financed by EU funds. And in my city, many historic buildings have been renovated and consolidated also with EU funds. But it's a double-edged sword. Our forests are being decimated right now, and much of Romania's lumber is exported to Austria and Germany. We don't have any viable populist-nationalist political forces just yet, but those who exist on the fringes are already trying to exploit this.
I still think that the EU should be reformed, but not dismantled. There are too many demons that can be unleashed if that happens.
6/29/16, 9:53 PM
Sheila Grace said...
sheila
6/29/16, 10:00 PM
Wendy Crim said...
6/29/16, 10:01 PM
Jason B said...
6/29/16, 10:02 PM
roland said...
roughly translated:
"the people have lost the trust of the government. Would it not be for the best, if the government would dissolve the people and elect a new one?"
Berthold Brecht, 1953 i think.
the german president joachim gauck would agree enthusiastically, although the sarcasm might be lost on him.
This is what he said a few days ago:
"Die Eliten sind gar nicht das Problem, die Bevölkerungen sind im Moment das Problem"
another rough translation:
"not the elites are the problem, at the moment the people are the problem."
joachim gauck, 2016
here's the source for those who can and want to read it (no i'm not going to translate it for you. My german is not as good as it used to be anyway)
http://www.compact-online.de/brexit-neue-rekorde-an-volksbeschimpfung-gauck-elite-ist-nicht-das-problem/
there is indeed nothing new under the sun.
6/29/16, 10:06 PM
patriciaormsby said...
In what region are you located? Quite a number of participants in the comments here live in Japan. Some are in Kyoto, others clearly in Tokyo. I'm at the foot of Mt. Fuji. (Maybe we ought to try getting together like many others here are doing.)
I share your impression that Japan is at least heading in a better direction than most places, but has a very long way to go. Also, their reasons for rejecting massive immigration and reducing their population have little if anything to do with rational future planning. Raising kids takes loads of money, so they just can't afford them, but even more than Americans, they believe in technology. As times get more and more desperate, I think they are likely to ignore the problems technology has created and turn to it as a last hope. Farmland is being lost at a terrible rate, and there are all kinds of structural impediments to participation in agriculture. If they continue in their current direction, they are likely to turn to someone like Monsanto for solutions and really screw up their remaining farmland. And for us? Well, I guess it will be pass the popcorn, Bill. It would be a shame to waste such a spectacular without any good friends around to share it with!
I also get the impression that 99% of the Japanese have no idea what the significance of the Brexit vote really was, even the international and relatively socially aware.
6/29/16, 10:15 PM
Wendy Crim said...
We haven't had home internet for almost two years- no cable, no Netflix, no computer. We are super unpopular with lots of people :-) Our kids thought they would die, but amazingly they survived. We all spend a lot more time outside now, year round. The public library is our go-to for Internet. Next year our oldest will be 18 and our youngest 12. At that point oldest moves out, we will be moving into a much smaller place with no tv at all and no more cell phones- except the one my husband needs for work. Kids and I will have a landline. I'm looking so forward to it. Good luck collapsing now and avoiding the rush!
6/29/16, 10:18 PM
David Carter said...
An insightful article as always, I will be spreading it among my many confused and hurting friends (especially long-time UK residents who are citizens of other EU countries) here in Britain. We are seeing some very nasty outbreaks of racism which in the eyes of some have apparently been legitimized by the referendum outcome.
Just a point of information: 52% of Britons did not vote for Brexit. It was 37% of those eligible to vote, or about 27% of the whole population. Of course I know what you meant, but I think it's worth making the point that this was hardly a ringing mandate for such a radical change.
Thanks for the heads-up on the dead pig, by the way. I had no idea until I Googled it after you tipped me off.
6/29/16, 10:24 PM
Unknown said...
The biggest irony of the past few years politically is that progressives want to wage ideological war on rural white men, while inviting over people whose cultures are openly intolerant and hostile to democracy, secularism and progressivism itself.
For context, I was Nader voter only a decade ago. Most of the people I talked to disagreed with me but it was a low hostility conversation. Now I can't have an honest conversation with almost all of my friends - once any of my ideas resemble thought crime... it's the same reaction I see from a lot of the normally thoughtful people on this blog. "Dog-whistling", "purposefully inciting bigots", "xenophobic", "misogynist", the words have lost almost all semantic content beyond "he hurts people's feelings".
6/29/16, 10:43 PM
Dau Branchazel said...
6/29/16, 10:47 PM
Ien in the Kootenays said...
6/29/16, 10:57 PM
Stuart Jeffery said...
I think that the failure of the remain camp was threefold. Firstly as you point out we were fighting an uphill struggle against a disaffected working class who wanted to stick two fingers up at Westminster - a standard protest vote and one that a lot of people are regretting (nose bitten clean off).
Secondly, the only offering from the elite classes to the working classes is an aspiration to become middle class, i.e. not to be who they are any more. This also translates to: if you are working class, you are worthless.
Finally, there is a lot to be said about the magic in the campaigns. The ritualistic mantra of 'taking control' from the leave campaign was far more powerful than any intellectual argument the remainers had.
6/29/16, 11:14 PM
Gottfried Wilhelm Melvin Hicks-Leibniz said...
https://youtu.be/arT40qHKuHQ?t=13m18s
A 30 minutes well invested.
TL;DL(isten)
(And these are only a few of the points much better articulated during the interview)
1. The political elite (not even Farage and other leading Brexiters) have a real plan for leading Britain out of the EU.
2. The referendum was advisory and not legally binding, only advisory. Parliamentary sovereignty is paramount, and Parliament still needs to endorse the "will of the people" before invoking Article 50 to formally start the process of leaving the EU.
3. The political elite's current plan seems to invoke "buyer's remorse" and dragging out the period of uncertainty of a formal Brexit. This will have unexpected consequences for the 52% (or some fraction thereof) who feel their vote has been hijacked.
4. The same phenomenon happening in the UK is the same across other European countries and the US, i.e. "global Trumpism".
5. Clinton's campaign website of the "issues" she's running on are listed in alphabetical order. Unfortunately, there's no other leader with a positive equivalent to "Make America Great Again", besides Sanders who has a slim chance of becoming the next US president. In other words, Trump will probably win.
6/29/16, 11:28 PM
koen said...
When you look at the references you realize Toynbee has been reading books in English, French and German - the languages of the main powers of his age. Today's books are merely an Anglo-Saxon echo chamber. Today, you would be hard pushed to find thinkers fluent in English, Russian and Chinese - the languages of the main powers of this age.
Also, when you read Toynbee you have to let the words sink in. We are conditioned by the tools we use - Powerpoint and 140-character Tweets. Skimming hundreds of short messages is no problem to us, but we can no longer cope with a chapter of hefty sentences.
6/29/16, 11:37 PM
Chloe said...
I voted Leave, basically on the principle that the dynamics you've sketched out above will have a worse fallout the longer they're left to fester, and despite being very tempted to spoil the ballot. Since I run in today's elite circles it's fair to say I haven't been very open about this fact - it's fair to say I'd be willing to spend the ten hours on explanation if I thought any of my peers would understand at the end of it, but instead I find myself walking the line of how far I can criticise the EU without starting a full-blown feud. Fun times.
For anybody wondering: if Britain joins the European Economic Area, the migration laws will be pretty much exactly as they are now. If it doesn't, the government will still be hard-pressed to limit immigration; it's important to remember that migration may be encouraged for elitist reasons but it's also part of a typical periphery-core direction of movement in declining civilisations. If Britain becomes an authoritarian isolationist state, yeah, that might make some difference, because nobody will want to live here.
6/29/16, 11:58 PM
Yahoo2 said...
In my head I see the levers and buttons of political influence are in the fiscal/business and the social/community areas.
Surely that is where our various countries policy and attitude are actually molded?
6/30/16, 12:10 AM
MawKernewek said...
This isn't entirely true. In the 2005 general election, 5,985,454 votes were cast for the Liberal Democrats, 22% of the national vote, and the party won 62 seats. In the 2010 general election, 6,836,248 votes went to the Liberal Democrats, which was 23% of the national vote. An increase, but nothing spectacular. In fact the party won fewer seats, 57, since the first past the post system requires to win in constituencies, and perhaps the new Liberal Democrat voters were too diffusely spread to make that happen.
6/30/16, 12:15 AM
John Michael Greer said...
Bill, here in Cumberland, the Trump campaign headquarters is in the poor part of town, and Trump yard signs are all over the neighborhoods where the poor live. The South may be atypical -- here in the rust belt, Trump has a great deal of support from the poor, and not just the white poor, by the way.
Rita, and you'll notice the Swiss seem to be doing tolerably well these days...
Ben, yes, I've heard all the same things. Gah.
Kevin, thank you. I'm trying to point and laugh at our current crop of underdressed emperors as loudly as I can!
Pygmycory, nope. As far as I know, no study exploring that possibility has been able to get funding, and I suspect none ever will. Lacking that, we have to go by historical experience and those rules of political economy that seem to work more often than not, such as the law of supply and demand.
Jes, I disagree. It's very easy to apply that kind of cynicism to democratic systems, but I'd argue that it's simplistic. Of course democracies are corrupt and subject to manipulation -- they always have been and always will be -- but they can, as in this case, reflect the opinions of that fraction of the people who take an interest in politics, and doing so is a good way to have a slightly less abusive kind of government than the alternatives. I'm with Winston Churchill on this one: "Democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the others."
W.B., no argument there. The spit-slinging frenzy on the part of the pundits and the privileged that followed the Brexit vote was the closest political equivalent to a two-year-old's tantrum I've seen in a tolerably long time.
Fedd27, I don't disagree. You'll notice that I put maybe one post a month into politics, and the others head in different directions.
Dale, thank you!
Nastarana, I'm definitely considering a Bernie write-in or a Green Party vote this year. I consider Trump a less disastrous choice than Clinton, but you'll notice that this is very lukewarm praise -- and since I expect him to win at a walk, I might as well put my vote to use helping to boost one of the alternatives.
W.B., congratulations! That's a big step -- a declaration of independence from one of the great time-wasters of our era. I'm sorry to say that at the moment my livelihood depends on having more access than I can get from the local library system, or I'd never have gotten home internet service in the first place. (I was a very late adopter, and not an enthusiastic one.)
Unknown Deborah, of course. Enforcing the immigration laws and using executive orders to, say, penalize companies that offshore jobs in terms of access to government contracts, would be a good start, though.
John the P., I ain't arguing!
John C., I'm not surprised you got that kind of reaction. Class prejudice runs very deep in American public life.
Gwizard43, of course things could go messily wrong -- and in fact they probably will. The point I want to make is that the affluent classes can no longer count on being able to get whatever they want at the expense of everyone else, and the sooner that's grasped, the better.
6/30/16, 12:34 AM
William Hays said...
6/30/16, 12:41 AM
Unknown said...
If it was about jobs being stolen it would not be a Mosque being attacked. it would be a Chinese food stall.
6/30/16, 12:44 AM
David from Normandy said...
About Brexit, please don't underestimate the possibility that, though voted, it never happens.
For outing, the Brits executive has to ask it formally. And it is already sure that it won't be the case until next prime minister, that is to say at least three months from now.
So many things can happen in three months...
Of course, even if it never happens, business as usual is probably a thing of the past.
Storm is rising ever more, and I have not a clue about what might happen precisely after the current squall.
6/30/16, 1:09 AM
Jason Heppenstall said...
I wrote a blog post a few days before the referendum was held outlining why I considered voting Leave would be an ethical choice – the one that held out the possibility for doing the least damage in a bad situation. I made sure to be very careful with how I framed my argument, because Project Fear was in full swing and people in the Remain camp were calling anyone who disagreed with them a racist or a bigot. Before I put it out to the world I dithered for a moment – slightly fearful of the consequences. But then I reminded myself that we live in a democracy where free speech is valued, and so I pressed it. The screen button on Blogger that reads ‘Publish’ in this case might as well have read ‘Commit Social Suicide and Run For Cover’.
In the days that followed I got a few good and thoughtful comments from regular readers (many of whom will be present here) but it wasn’t until it ended up being shared of social media that the haters started coming forth. And boy did they come forth. I can confirm that all the regular bulling names have been hurled my way, and then some. Of course this is all water off a duck’s back when it’s anonymous people that you don’t know, but when long-term friends and even relatives started using them I began to feel taken aback. “Democracy wasn’t invented so that people like you could abuse it,” snarled someone whose funeral I shall now probably not attend. “You have no empathy for the little people like me,” wailed a boutique-owner who enjoys several exotic holidays every year. I tried to repel their accusation but they just hammered on with the same illogic and it wasn’t long before I realised I was dealing with straw zombies. You can hit ‘em and destroy ‘em but they just keep coming.
At the same time I got a couple of private messages from grateful people who said I had influenced the way they had voted but begged me not to let on to anyone.
End of Part 1
6/30/16, 1:13 AM
Jason Heppenstall said...
And so it seems the mass of those whose lifestyles have not yet been (noticeably) shafted by neoliberalism will do whatever it takes to repel the black swans circling in the skies above. At least one of my eyebrows was raised to see people from the Transition Network movement (“Local, self-sufficient, optimistic”) sharing the same basic position as Goldman Sachs and billionaire vulture fund financier George Soros (who now writes for The Guardian). And it was a masterstroke of foot-shootery on the part of the Remain campaign to wheel out multi-millionaire footballer David Beckham the day before the polls opened in the hope of trying to persuade the ‘little people’ to vote against their natural instincts – certainly an own goal in this case.
In the aftermath, apart from all the groupthink and the two minutes’ hating going on, there’s the emergent phenomenon of conspicuous grieving. I know of people who held a ‘grief party’ where they held hands and shed tears over the fact that a giant and undemocratic neoliberal superstate will no longer have so much influence over their lives. “Who will care for the planet now?” wailed a Greenpeace poster. Others are wearing safety pins in their lapels to ‘reassure’ immigrants that they personally are not racists (which is an unexamined narrative: 2/3 of Leave voters cited constitutional and democratic considerations to have been more important than immigration, and many naturalised immigrants voted Leave too).
Another narrative that is being heavily promoted at present is that older voters have ‘stolen the future’ of younger ones. This despite the fact that only about 3 in every 10 people under 25 actually bothered to cast their vote, contrasted with a much higher turnout for older voters (who, one might argue, have lived long enough to realise Project Fear was just that). Many over 50 said they would ‘crawl through minefields’ to get a chance to throw a rotten tomato at David Cameron and the EU. Young voters in London (who were being counted on to swing it), by contrast, didn’t want to go out in the rain. It is the latter group who are now demanding a second referendum.
My takeaway from this is that people don’t like to have a mirror held up to them. I have always been concerned that one of the main unknowns in any collapse situation is the way our fellow citizens will behave. If this Brexit vote is anything to go by we should probably be more worried about this point. I’m grateful at least to know whom I can trust not to freak out at the drop of a pin. That, at least, is something positive that has come of this.
6/30/16, 1:13 AM
DiSc said...
I work in the Netherlands, and of course Europeans are all abuzz with the referendum results.
I was listening to colleagues talking about the topic yesterday. My colleagues are well-educated young engineers used to travelling every month, who never have to worry about unemployment, lead the metropolitan hipster lifestyle, have generous pension benefits, and are all married to foreigners. While they are not exactly part of the elite, they definitely profit from the current arrangements. And they could not fathom the referendum results.
They of course said the predictable things: that such a small majority should not be enough for such an important decision, that since the Leavers were mostly uneducated, and the Remainers well-educated, education level should somehow be taken into account. That the Leave arguments were all lies (on which I do not really disagree, but that is not really the point).
And that now most people have regretted their vote anyway, so Britain should have a new referendum and forget about the whole thing once Remain wins.
As an uneducated immigrant son of uneducated parents who have seen their meager prospects worsen substantially over the past 20 years or so, it all sounded very arrogant and blindsided indeed.
And as you write, I kept my mouth shut. I had no intention of defending Brexit against 10 people who are, in citizenship rights, salary and hierarchy my betters.
But you f***ers just wait until a new referendum pops up in mainland Europe - and sooner or later it is bound to.
6/30/16, 1:19 AM
Kevin Warner said...
In a novel of the Mau-Mau rebellion I read as a teenager - "Something of Value" - the author, Robert Ruark, quoted an old Basuto proverb: "If a man does away with his traditional way of living and throws away his good customs, he had better first make certain that he has something of value to replace them."
And there we have it. For three quarters of a century we have been seeking to re-order our society according to commercial precepts. And now we can see the results as they come in. Consider.
We no longer have citizens but consumers. Our spirituality (not to be confused with religion) has been replaced with materialism. We no longer seek community fellowships but fill them with commercially-packaged games which often come down to watching a bunch of millionaires play a ball-game between themselves.
Regular full-time jobs with future prospects has been replaced with zero-hour contracts and ad-hoc worker placements. This ranges from near the top to all the way down deep into the labour pool. Know another name for contract workers? Mercenaries.
Communities have been shredded with no thought as to the implications for the people there. Margaret Thatcher herself insisted that there was no such thing as society. It has become a sort of Social Darwinism with those left out abandoned but still watched - and policed!
In summation, all those bonds that gave our life meaning have been cut and what we have in place has not proven worthwhile. Not even close.
All the experts that came out for Remain - the economist, the politicians, the soldiers - had all proven themselves highly flawed in both their thinking and their judgment over the years but had not realised it themselves. What is worse, many of them were either responsible for how our society is being shaped or demanding an intensification of it.
People like Obama thought that they could directly threaten the British people thug-life style with dire retaliation. It did not work in 1940 and it sure as hell did not work in 2016.
It may be that we are in for dark times but as they say - it is only in the dark of night that you can see the stars.
6/30/16, 1:22 AM
John Michael Greer said...
Abelardsnazz, "maybe we live in a self-referential bubble..." Oh, if only their equivalents in the US could have that moment of insight!
Greenish, it might just be that you put different weights on the variables. As with the issue of Brexit, the US election is one in which it's possible to have reasoned disagreement as to the best choice -- though you'll find few people who will admit that!
Stephen, I know, I know, it's a dreadful habit of mine. ;-)
Jason B, you say that like it's a bad thing.
Myriad, Trump didn't have much of a ground game in the run for the nomination, and he still swept past vastly better funded and organized candidates. My guess is that he's counting on the same effect this time, and I don't think he's mistaken to do so. The ground game matters most in a contest between candidates who don't actually differ that much on the issues; when the voters are worked up about issues that are central to the campaign, campaign organization is a lot less important. What Trump needs to do to win this election is to convince the wage class in the flyover states that he can do something about the malign neglect that's been inflicted on them for the last forty years. That won't take organization -- it'll take stump speeches and viral publicity, which he's extremely good at. But we'll see...
Bootstrapper, hmm! I hope the third parties and the independent candidates do well. Anything that'll shake the grip of the consensus of the affluent is a good thing.
Cherokee, I hope the cup of tea helped. Not surprised that you're getting weird weather -- for the first time ever recorded, the northern hemisphere's jet stream crossed the equator and fed into a jet stream in your hemisphere. That's dramatic, and if it keeps happening, it will send global climate into completely unfamiliar territory.
Wendy, that's a useful attitude to have.
Ursachi, you're in a very different situation from Britain's, of course, and I can well see that the EU would make a lot more sense from where you stand. If it can be reformed in some way that would deal with its cascading problems, that would be welcome -- but it doesn't exactly give me hope to watch so many EU officials insisting that change is not an option.
Sheila, you're welcome and thank you. I grew up in the south Seattle suburbs and lived in Seattle until I couldn't stand it any longer; "chewed up and spit out" is an understatement. The city I knew and loved is a festering corpse, with an assortment of overpaid tech flacks as maggots-in-chief.
Jason, you might consider learning what the word "fascist" means, as you're misusing it. This post might be a good place to start.
Roland, yes, I saw that. My guess is that we're going to hear a lot of self-serving tosh from various rich and influential people about how stupid democracy is, since people just won't do as they're told! All of it will just bring the tumbrils closer.
6/30/16, 1:30 AM
Hugo Costa said...
6/30/16, 1:46 AM
Mean Mr Mustard said...
For those still accustomed to thinking in traditional left-right political dimensions, the political compass suggests a more complex pattern.
https://www.politicalcompass.org/uk_eu_referendum2016
https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2016
In both cases, the battleground is within the Authoritarian Right quadrant.
The factions against Cameron (who lazily assumed an easy win) are a banker never elected to Westminster (Farage) fellow Old Etonian Boris, and two of his journalist friends (Gove and Vine) who are closely linked to newspaper owners wielding their influence. Meanwhile the Neoliberal Blair faction of the Labour Party are using the crisis as cover to oust the populist Corbyn, who claims to represent the traditional working class.
The troubling thing is that judging by their immediate demeanour, these hard-right conspirators - who instantly jettisoned all their promises, and apparently weren't expecting or didn't want to actually win this - 'you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off' according to 'Lady Macbeth's' allegedly leaked email. And they have no plan - anymore than Bush and Blair had for 'liberated' Iraq. Certainly they weren't expecting Cameron to immediately resign - but without pulling the Article 50 trigger.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/29/michael-gove-sarah-vine-leaked-email
While these people in the Westminster and media bubble treat this as a jolly parlour power trip, both the minimum wage and salary class will be made to suffer the consequences. Nobody in the political arena has emerged with credit - apart from the savagely murdered Jo Cox MP.
cheers
Mustard
6/30/16, 1:48 AM
John Michael Greer said...
David, 52% of those who cared enough to vote voted for Brexit, and as I recall, quite a few more people voted in this election than in the last general election, so as mandates go, it's considerable.
Unknown, I know. I've noted here more than once that what passes for thinking in today's America amounts to verbal noises expressing vague emotional states, and very little else.
Dau, duly noted. As I suggested in the post, though, I tend to think that the framing is an effect rather than a cause.
Ien, thank you.
Stuart, certainly those were important. I also think that the incompetence of the Remain campaign was a huge factor. When British humor websites are giggling hysterically about the core strategy of the pro-EU camp, that's a bit telling, wouldn't you say?
Gottfried, thanks for the link, and many thanks for the summary.
Koen, excellent! One of the advantages of older books is that they show you what language is capable of doing and being when it's not being debased into 140-character twits -- er, tweets.
Chloe, I'm enjoying it only because I've acquired a taste for political gallows humor. It's a real mess, and none of the likely outcomes are particularly pleasant. Still, keep in mind that independent nations can, and many do, pass laws limiting immigration, and those laws work. Did you see the discussions earlier about Swiss and Japanese immigration policy? Neither of those nations are authoritarian isolationist states, and neither one admits many immigrants.
Yahoo2, to my mind that's an overly simplistic view. The relations between economics, society and politics are complex -- far too complex to model using simple mechanical metaphors such as levers!
Mawkernewek, thanks for the correction.
William, thank you.
David, that's true, but as I noted in the post, the most likely result if the British government refuses to act on Brexit is that Nigel Farage will become Prime Minister in 2020. A storm is rising, and he's tolerably well positioned to ride it.
Jason, I'm sorry to hear you had so much hate speech flung at you. Stick to your guns -- I'm coming to think that people defending the consensus of the affluent these days are so frantic and angry because they themselves no longer quite believe in the slogans they're mouthing. We're approaching an inflection point of quite some importance, when old narratives get tossed aside because the gap between the world they imagine and the one we actually inhabit has gotten too wide; on the far side, things will look very different indeed.
DiSc, and it may happen in the Netherlands, or so I hear.
Kevin, thanks for that final image! More generally, what you're describing is a reality here, too, and it's just as completely ignored by the chattering classes. They may not be able to ignore it for much longer.
6/30/16, 1:57 AM
John Michael Greer said...
Mustard, no question, it's a mess, and going to get messier!
6/30/16, 2:01 AM
Mikep said...
Perhaps you will be able to throw some light on the voting systems employed in your fictional Lakeland and Atlantic Republics over the coming weeks.
Mike
6/30/16, 2:05 AM
DiSc said...
No, I do not think a referendum will come to the Netherlands next. The undoing of the EU will proceed from the periphery, not the core.
Maybe non-Euro countries like Denmark and Sweden, or UK clients like Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic will turn increasingly anti-European and have their own referendums.
That will increase the relative power of Germany (that has already happened with Brexit, and will continue). As the center collapses in Italy and France, no-one will be able to keep the Germans at bay, who will exact increasingly sadistic sacrifices from the other countries.
Eventually the French will retreat from Europe under a strong man (woman?), or Italy will have a civil war or secession and default on the huge public debt, taking down the rest of the Euro banking system and the Euro itself.
But the Netherlands will not play a significant role: they will just sit there, between too large neighbors, awaiting the events like in WWI & II.
6/30/16, 2:25 AM
Scotlyn said...
An evocative phrase that, like myself, will resonate with readers of this blog differently than he, perhaps, may have intended.
We have, for the most part, been innoculated against the lure of the harpies singing that song along the cliffs...
6/30/16, 2:28 AM
Robert Honeybourne said...
People in the home counties looked at the GDP and people in the inner cities couldn't see a GP (general practitioner); that's the difference!
The thing I can't see is whether overall, those of the exiters who had seen for many years that the status quo didn't work for them, will be better off or not
It is not possible to foresee, whether the UK will do better or worse out of the EU. If it does better, who will get the share
There is a real danger that rather than getting a bad share of the wealth of what is a very large economy, the divide will grow
If the economy shrinks. There will be some very disgruntled people out there
A point I would make, is that the whole country has been turned upside down because Boris Johnson wanted to be PM. He knew confidently that we would remain ('I'm a winner Cameron said). He would then gain favour of the Europhobes in the Tory party while the Europhiles would just be happy we remained. It's truly shocking that this can happen
To a degree, the UK threw out Europe because we didn't have a UK party that could change the status quo AND get elected
So here we are. Maybe you could choose Sanders before it's too late?
6/30/16, 2:31 AM
SumErgoSum said...
Thank you for your post outlining what most media refuses to even play lip service to - the class struggle between rich and poor, and the way that the rich have managed to move the narrative for the past generation.
I am one of the many who have seen the malign neglect first hand, and saw how argument from those who were being constantly disadvantaged has been sidelined and sneered at. While the propaganda of the affluent and the language of division ruled the waves.
You are right that what a lot of the politicians and affluent class say; alongside those who have been indoctrinated in to their viewpoint is bigotry and hate speech, but as always, they get to define what that is.
You can't try to argue that large areas are impoverished without being shut down with spurious arguments about the so called wealth of the country and insistence that things will get better for us eventually using the same policies that have failed us. You can't point to the grossly inflated profits of the banks and the multinationals and wealth of the cities without being accused of being anti business and progress. You can't mention the anti-democratic nature of the European state without being called paranoid and ironically accused of wanting totalitarianism.
We cannot have our say, our arguments are ignored or outright shouted down. Disbelieved and unexamined, subverted and misquoted. A captive media and an endless parade of talking heads that will only argue for more neolibralism and more wealth redistribution to those the powers favor.
And the immigration debate has been so shot down that no moderate voices can be heard. I would love to be able to point out the good points of immigration, alongside the bad points, in a way to improve it for everybody. But you can't even try to start a conversation that mentions the bad points without having to declare you are not a racist. And you know you will still be accused of it nevertheless, for having the temerity to speak up. So many of us do not. Leaving only the extremes to argue their minority viewpoints.
This is the true danger of the situation. The only parties that are willing to address the concerns of the majority are ones on the extreme. We have seen over so many years that our politicians are not representing anyone but the ones who are neglecting us, and we are now seeing the disintegration of those parties now we finally managed to speak our mind.
Politics has failed in Britain, along many other countries that have followed the same path. It would be nice if they could learn from this defeat, but I do not hold out much hope. The optimism in politics to actually reform has been beaten out of us for a long time, and I fear that extremism may rise again as a result.
6/30/16, 2:35 AM
Scotlyn said...
I've been pondering how to explain that neither the Left nor the Right appear to be attending to business, and how there seems to be a different set of cardinal points lining up as a faultline - "inside" and "outside". One might say inside the Global Technocracy Machine, things work a bit like the Federation depicted in Star Trek. All-inclusive, open to committed technocrats from any planet, there is never any voting or apparent need to decide contentious issues in a democratically accountable way, and everyone's skills locate them in a place where they are valued, and also sustained without having to argue terms and conditions. Then "outside" there are all the different planets, local, diverse, but hopelessly parochial and backward, continually needing to be rescued... or so it looks from "inside"...
From outside, that spaceship looks odd, dangerous, dependent on an ability to exploit every planet to keep its crew so invisibly sustained...
I've decided that, my personal stance vis-a-vis the Global Technocracy is... barbarian.
6/30/16, 2:40 AM
Sébastien Louchart said...
I must once again congratulate you for your insightful prose. Each week since 2008, I've been looking forward for my weekly dose of wit, clear thought and humour. Thank you!
Besides the style, your blog and its commenters has now become my major source of information of the US presidential campaign and I hope it'll remain so for the general election.
I'm looking forward to grab a copy of Twilight's Last Gleaming as I've been reading the short stories on the blog over and over. I loathe at ordering it from a-zon, do you know by chance if your publisher has a relay in continental Europe? Or whether or not a translation in french is planned?
6/30/16, 2:41 AM
Yossi said...
Now that remain has lost many of them spew out ageist diatribes about the old betraying the young, not seeming to realise that they are “using just the same kind of demeaning and derogatory stereotype to describe every member of a group.” that they accuse the leavers of using against immigrants.
6/30/16, 2:53 AM
Matt said...
I have no disagreement with you about the incompetence of the Remain campaign, and you have been a trailblazer (as with Trump) in understanding the context.
I think, though, that there is one thing you are underplaying in the recent political context that leads you to a view of Remainers that is a bit of a caricature. Of course there are some strong reactions - many Remainers think there will be numerous and severe consequences to Brexit, a view I don't particularly share. And those who call for a second referendum can justifiably be accused of being sore losers, as long as we recognise that the Brexit campaign would (and DID, when Farage thought he was going lose) make the same demand if the boot was on the other foot.
The fact is there are many Remainers, affluent and otherwise, who would agree with you 100% about the way the working classes have suffered under globalisation, and who have fought (or at least voted against) the succession of right-wing governments that attacked the labour movement, privatised the NHS, cut benefits for disabled people, dismantled social housing and so on.
And here's the context I think you are missing (although it may be implicit in your Whigs and Tories review): Euroscepticism isn't something new - it's been grinding on as an issue for decades now, and through that whole time its chief proponents have been those who are most enthusiastic about attacking the labour movement, privatising the NHS etc. etc.
The upshot is that, for the Remainers I have spoken to, the response is much more nuanced, despite the disappointment and anger they feel. They are more likely to see many Brexit voters as duped or conned, rather than moronic. It may be patronising but, given the charlatans running the Brexit campaign (and their actions since the vote) it's hardly irrational, and it doesn't constitute class hatred.
This may be a key difference with Trump, by the way. Politically he is something of an unknown quantity. That can't be said of the leaders of Brexit in the UK.
Matt
6/30/16, 2:56 AM
Ursachi Alexandru said...
Yes, it frustrates me to see that the pro-EU camp keeps making the same mistakes over and over again. This whole "it's going to be the end of the world if you don't choose the EU" approach is extremely counter-productive.
6/30/16, 3:04 AM
Don Plummer said...
Trump is highly unpopular--more so than even Hillary Clinton.
One thing you haven't mentioned: Trump is very likely, if he is elected, to make Supreme Court nominations that will strengthen the stranglehold of rapacious corporations on our economy. At least Hillary Clinton isn't likely to do that. For that reason alone, I cannot cast my vote for Trump.
6/30/16, 3:07 AM
Andy Palmer said...
6/30/16, 3:08 AM
Bryan Hemming said...
I'm sure there were many voters who would've been quite happy to vote for a more democratic European Union that represented the interests of all Europeans rather than the interests of a tiny elite of globalists, many of whom don't pay taxes in Europe, or have any interests in Europe, apart from financial ones. Unfortunately, a third option wasn't on offer, precisely because the army of fat cats running Europe are more than happy with things the way they are. And also because, in their supreme arrogance, they thought they were bound to win in the end.
As a Englishman born of a Norwegian mother living in Spain with a German partner, I am about as European as you can get. At the moment I'm thinking of taking up the option of my birthright to Norwegian citizenship. Out of all the options I might have, it's the one that fits my 'sitting on the fence' attitude towards the Europe we have best.
6/30/16, 3:22 AM
MigrantWorker said...
I am Polish but have lived in the UK for the past ten years, so the Brexit conversation is very close to my heart indeed. Not being a British citizen I was not able to vote, but would have voted to Leave given the opportunity.
Both Leave and Remain slogans had no effect on me. I had my answer long before the campaigning even started. I saw how Greece was treated a year ago, and to me it showed that EU is a dangerous company to hang out with. Thinking of it now, I don't recall this particular point ever being made in media of record; I wonder how many people think along similar lines, unnoticed.
The idea of a second referendum is beyond ridiculous. For the 43 years that the UK was part of the EU it has managed to negotiate for itself a number of exceptions, preferential treatments etc. on a thinly veiled threat (i.e. promise) that if you impose yourselves too much on us, then we may leave. Now it has an opportunity to keep that promise - and it wants to say instead that no, it's just us talking. Then why would it still keep the special treatments? Again, I do not recall a similar line of reasoning mentioned in the media.
The Scottish politicians are now making noises about a second Scottish independence referendum, pointing out that Scotland has voted almost 2 to 1 in favor of Remaining. I say let them vote, and let them leave if that's how the vote turns out. I'd rather have a friendly neighbor that a housemate with a grudge.
And on a more personal level, Poles are now being harassed. Slogans to the effect that Poles are unwelcome were painted on a Polish shop and a Polish community centre, and also printed on a homemade leaflet which was then distributed in a certain village. Now this is reported widely by the media. Funny how similar things were not newsworthy before the referendum. Frankly, they shouldn't be newsworthy at all - when a native population of 60+ million and an immigrant group of 1 million interact, there's bound to be some friction somewhere sometime. That does not make us victims, and we don't like being portrayed as such.
MigrantWorker
6/30/16, 3:26 AM
ed boyle said...
Two famous songs by German bands reflected zeitgeist, wind of change(film gorkypark) and freiheit(freedom, freedom it's the only thing that counts). Decades later former Eastern Europe is an economic, political, military colony of Germany with mass emigration. Nato expansion, risnig nationalism, dictatorial regimes show a phase of democracy reached by weimar Germany. Ukraine is way past that phase, a central african basket case. The ideals in video for wind of change, 'we could be all brothers', were misused by the elites to push their profit agenda as far as it could go geographically. Various articles now ask what will result out of this. Could the wealthy manipulate the agenda somehow to gain the upper hand even when EU disintegrates? Perhaps we could get a trade breakdown and severe recession in even core countries like germany, france, holland, england, scandinavia leading to extremist takeovers, nazi type purges, civil war in europe. Freedom is a coin with two sides. Free to do what? New car with a roadmap to nwhere. Sociopaths have a tendency to grab stearing wheel. Ideology of monied elites, racist crazies are both unwelcome. Golden rule has few adherents during a revolution. Where does one stop. After nazi takeover revenge was taken and blood flowed. Hitler finally put out the word to stop. Pol Pot was more thorough, permanent revolution. Robespierre lost own head. Of course in the end hitler only stopped internal murders as they were germans. Foreign killings had yet to start. Left wingers like mao, pol pot, lenin , stalin based killings on ideology, not blood lines. Everyone has their own mentl illness. Unleashing a flood dam washes away good with bad all at once. Civil war atmosphere building up the more change is blocked. If Trump wins lots will happen. If he loses the dam will burst more violently later. Europe luckily can break apart in pieces gradually. This should hinder cold war with Russia at least and TTIP. American revolution helped french revolution. Now maybe Europeans help Americans revolt. Let us hope it turns out peaceful, is not hijacked by all too extreme elements.
6/30/16, 3:45 AM
Matthew Griffiths said...
Politics downunder is no less amusing, frustrating and useless. Australia votes on 2 July and could end up with its 6th Prime minister in about 7 years. Or something. I've lost count.
My entry for your latest 'space bats' short story competition:
The Island
The unexpected discovery of an artifact from the past brings back old memories and stirs up new tensions on a Hawaiian island...
http://eastwestfuturestories.blogspot.com.au/p/the-island.html
Regards
Matthew
6/30/16, 4:14 AM
patriciaormsby said...
What I am curious about is what do you think happens after "the bubble of American military invincibility has been popped"?
My main reason for opposing a Clinton presidency is I fear what might happen on the mainland in an all-out war since some of the elites seem to think they are invincible. On the other hand, if America's ability to throw its weight around were curtailed without invoking MAD, it might ironically provide a real reason to vote the old harpy in.
So sad, BTW, to hear of Seattle's fate! I will always remember it as the most beautiful little city I ever saw, with its fish market and abundant blackberries. The Vladivostok of America! (Which in turn prides itself on being "the San Francisco of Russia").
6/30/16, 4:15 AM
Tony f. whelKs said...
I thought the campaigning was pretty atrocious on both sides - I was convinced by the end that Cameron must have been a closet Brexiteer, his performance was so lacklustre.
Anyway, I had a lot of people explaining why they were voting whichever way they did, whilst nodding sagely and saying that I 'couldn't possibly comment'. Most of the Outers who I spoke too will be disappointed, because their reasons for voting as they did will not be met. In fact, both sides are going to be disappointed by the outcome in the long run.
From my small, unscientific sample of the voters, I could discern a few strands of support for Brexit. Some clearly were concerned about issues of 'sovereignty' and red tape and the democratic deficit. Some just wanted to 'stick it to the establishment'. Some felt pushed out of economic chances by EU migration. And some, frankly, were just out and out racists, xenophobes, and misanthropes.
Some I've spoken to since have said they voted 'leave' to register a protest, because they thought Brexit would never win, and that they are now horrified at what they had done.
I was particularly disturbed on the day, because a lot of people came to the polling station saying 'I want to vote with a pen because it says on Facebook that the polling booths only have pencils because our votes will be rubbed out if we vote to leave'. Such uncritical acceptance of that sort of conspiracy theory betrays not only flawed analytical skills, but a profound ignorance of how the whole system is staffed, organised and policed. So much for informed decision-making.
This latest wave of violence against minorities is also a worrying sign. It's as though the old far-right groups have been emboldened by the vote, taking it as 'permission' to return to their street-fighting ways. To hear of schools being leafletted with 'kick out the Polish vermin' bills, attacks on mosques and community centres etc is worrying. And the rhetoric going with it: 'We won the vote, so **** off back home now'. My first thoughts were 'Merry Krystalnacht, Nigel'.
So, all round, bit of a humpty-dumpty watershed. The parliamentary Labour party isn't helping either, leaving the only alternative rallying point for the working classes out of commission for the duration, but that's their own mess to sort out, now.
But anyone thinking they've 'stuck it to the establishment' will be sorely disappointed. Boris may be a shoe-in, or maybe not, but don't imagine this Anglo-Saxon, middle-aged, Eton-educated male is anything but the establishment having a bad-hair day. I never thought the day would arrive when I'd have to utter the words 'I think I prefer Theresa May'!
And talking of Borises, I can imagine who else is rubbing his hands with glee....
6/30/16, 4:34 AM
John Iceville said...
If PM Tsipras didn't ignore the astounding Referendum result of 62% against austerity measures (a political coup by the EU and Germany), by totally disregarding the result and betraying the Greek People and his supposed Left principals, the EU would have been in a lot of trouble already.
Now, a year later, the dam has cracked visibly and water leaks through tiny holes that become bigger and bigger and bigger. Want proof? Check this great research out: http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/06/13/europeans-face-the-world-divided/
It tells us that the Greeks are already out of the EU, spiritually and ideologically at least. Hungarians, Polish, Italians and French, follow suit. So the only question remaining, contrary to Herr Schauble's recent declarations that Germany is the almighty leader of the rest of the inferior puny Europeans and calls for a Euroarmy to command, to suppress all Resistance, is this one: will EUexit (all out) be really, really bloody or a peaceful event?
6/30/16, 4:36 AM
Jason Heppenstall said...
Oh, that's quite alright. I hope I didn't come across as complaining - I was just trying to illustrate the point that there is likely to be trade-off between attempting to fit into a community and the possibility of there being fallout when hot-button issues get discussed. Writing about these things could be seen as an occupational hazard of the regular civilization dysfunction analyst (CDA). We should perhaps be supplied with plexiglass screens, like bus drivers or social security clerks.
BTW - I forgot to post a link to the blog entry I was referring to in my comment. Here it is.
6/30/16, 5:14 AM
Hereward said...
With apologies to Lewis Carroll
`Twas Draghi, and the eurorogues
Did game and gamble with your wage:
All wimpy were the Borisgoves,
But for the meme’s wraith Farage.
Beware the Junckerwock, my son!
The jaws that drink, the hands that slap!
Beware the Merkel bird, and shun
The fulminous Verhofstadt!"
He took his votal sword in hand:
Long time the Euro foe he sought --
So rested he by the referendum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in offish thought he stood,
The Junckerwock, with eyes of flame,
Came minging through the Belgian wood,
And farted as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The votal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went Gallupping back.
"And, hast thou slain the Junckerwock?
Come to my arms, my Brexit boy!
O fabulous day! Hurrah! UK!'
He chortled in his joy.
`Twas brilliant, as the slimy toads
Did groan and grumble in their grave:
All mumsy were the Borisgoves,
As they waved goodbye to Dave.
6/30/16, 6:12 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
I honestly don't know which is a bigger disaster, four years of Clinton followed by a backlash giving us someone who makes Trump look like MLK, or four years of Trump trying to actually do the things he proposes. Neither scenario is inevitable, but both are possible...
6/30/16, 6:13 AM
averagejoe said...
6/30/16, 6:13 AM
Alex Blaidd said...
Firstly though I'm sorry that you voicing a different opinion on Clinton has potentially led to the loss of an old friend, that's very sad. I'm hoping that your old friend will regain his/her maturity. Though from the Brexit I'm now fully aware of how divided and bitter people - including families and old friendships - can become as a result of politics. That's been a stark realisation which has and will take some time to process. This is the biggest political event of my life so far and I have much to reflect upon - in order to learn before the next Big One.
I wouldn't disagree with a single point above in your post. 100% agreement from me. My take on all this can be summed up as, round one to UKIP. As you say the Remain campaign was beyond dire and entirely reminiscent of the Scotland ref. - surely that should've taught them that fear, fear, fear alongside promising more of the same, doesn't work anymore? You've highlighted on this blog however more than a few times the senility of our ruling elites. And as someone highlights above - Scotland voting to leave, doesn't make them any more internationalist than the rest of the country - it just spells the end of the UK the coming future.
Have you seen the news today that Boris is not going to run and Michael Gove is? I think that Boris is keeping himself for later down the line, and perhaps has realised that whoever does exercise article 50, may well realise that it's a 'poisoned chalice' as it's being called.
My opinion is that UKIP are the real winners here and I expect them to be making a serious case for government in 5 years time. I think in the election this year, if there is one, they will gain a serious amount of votes, largely from Labour, but not enough yet to make much impact. What happens if they could get a referendum on Proportional Representation - that would lead to the perfect situation for them to take office in 5 years time. I expect to see a PM Farage in the future. Labour, with their coup against Corbyn seem destined to go back to being New Labour, and that will be the end of them. They'll never win like that again. Corbyn is sufficiently anti-establishment and anti-EU that he could still work out, if they gave him some proper media training and a better campaign manager.
What Brexit has shown to me is that there is a lot of finger pointing going on by all aspects of society, the privileged and the non-priveleged. But then when a civilisation is slowly collapsing, I guess it's to be expected, as no-one wants to point their finger at the real 'enemy.' My only concern about Brexit is that I think it will speed up the hollowing out of our economy and infrastructure, now that the Tories will have even more allowance to push their neo-lib/neo-con agenda. For all its ills, the EU did protect against some of the measures that the British gov want to take. I'm expecting more fracking, more nuclear power plants, more GM, the end of the NHS, higher unemployment etc. Now for those working class who are already suffering, then they'll justifiably say it was all going to happen anyway. Though those leavers who now think that everything is going to get better I can't see that as being likely. It even looks like immigration won't change much...
6/30/16, 6:14 AM
Dr. Mark Woodworth said...
Proud to see that the Brits actually voted Brexit. Horrified to hear of EU elite wanting to create an Army, belittle the thinking of ordinary people, and seek to install a tecnocracy. All whilst their central banks prop up their fading economy.
6/30/16, 6:17 AM
Unknown said...
6/30/16, 6:22 AM
Andrew said...
As other commentators have mentioned, what happens next is chilling. Either Brexit never happens or is watered down to the point of irrelevance, which will lead to a ferocious outpouring of anger, or the economic consequences will be significant leading to hardship across society, with a following outpouring of anger. The stage is set for a genuine demagogue, either Farage or someone else. Brexit was a blank screen upon which people could project their fear, their rage, their hopes. It is almost impossible to meet those demands.
Our political class has fallen to bits. Senility and denial rule the airwaves. It is not a pleasant feeling.
Finally Toynbee said this: "the true hall-mark of the proletarian is neither poverty nor humble birth, but a consciousness - and the resentment that this consciousness inspires - of being disinherited from his ancestral place in society." We are all proletarians now.
6/30/16, 6:25 AM
latheChuck said...
Without an easily exploited undocumented work force, employers would not be forced to choose between providing illegal employment and corporate survival. Their goods, whether lettuce, landscaping, or bricklaying, would rise in cost, either assuming a larger share of the economy, or declining in consumption. We can adjust. At some point, young US citizens may learn the virtue of uncomfortable labor. (In the 1970s, I stooped (literally) to pick cucumbers as a teenager, and I was proud of my sweat.) And, not seeing that as a good long-term career, I mastered electrical engineering. (Even then, it seemed like a strategy to make the Dark Ages just a little less dark for myself and my friends. As JMG said up the comments a bit, I've been expecting this crisis for all of my adult life.)
Putin promised/threatened to restore Russia to "the Dictatorship of the Law". http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2012/02/28-putin-law-partlett
I'm not saying that I'd vote for Putin, or even that he's lived up to his promises of 4 years ago, but as campaign slogans go, I like THAT one!
As we've seen over the last week, "uncertainty" is bad for business. The Rule of Law creates certainty (unless the law can be changed overnight, by a Congress thrown into panic by threats of a Treasury Secretary). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Economic_Stabilization_Act_of_2008
6/30/16, 6:29 AM
David, by the lake said...
And that Trump for President sign is still along the roadside on my drive into work. I believe the polls have Clinton leading in WI, but I am not so sure that her hold is all that solid outside of the deep blue of Dane County (i.e. Madison) and perhaps Milwaukee. We shall see. I must admit that I fear the foreign policy implications of a Clinton presidency and the very possible TLG-like results. Better to climb down the cliff with some amount of control than to leap and/or be pushed off it.
6/30/16, 6:33 AM
Alex Blaidd said...
6/30/16, 6:38 AM
Jason B said...
Because, what do you call it when: the planet continues to be denuded of its natural resources; global population continues to rise along with sea level; global temperatures spikes;
And, on the domestic front: police continue to terrorize mainly poor people and people of color; the populace grows increasingly dissatisfied; the government spies on those people; unemployment numbers skyrocket; and all the while neither of the primary political parties presidential candidates see any of this as their problem.
Instead, they are concerned with a) immigrants from our neighboring country b) terrorists from their cousin religion six thousand miles away c) trade agreements that benefit or harm big business d) laws that protect the smattering few American workers who remain (I am so far from convinced that Trump gives a crap about American workers).
It seems to me we are at the tipping point of global catastrophe and of world war. Trump and Clinton are two sides of the same coin. I called that coin fascism, but is there any need to define it? It just is! I claim the candidacies are meaningless because neither has any intention of dealing with the problems laid out in your blog, or those I mention above. They are too busy fomenting war...trying to win at all costs.. I cannot imagine seeing either candidate any other way.
The idea that Trump supporters are ignoring the pundits seems off, too. I imagine on Fox News, it's beat HRC at all costs, while on CNN, it's that evil Trump and maybe HRC IS a bit slimy. He gets a lot of airtime. He's bashed in the newspapers nonstop. So, while I hear what you're saying about Trumpees ignoring what the consensus tells them to do, they are also paying heed and playing along.
They have chosen to vote for the boogy man because, well, I'm still not quite convinced its for any other reason than they are frustrated with the status quo and really xenophobic. It seems you are underestimating this last fact. Is any of it really that significant?
6/30/16, 6:53 AM
The North Coast said...
The only reason to support this man at all, is because the alternative is so loathsome, and is a proven supporter of the policies that have destroyed the population of this country. I really don't believe he will be the least bit disruptive, but will fall right into line behind his Wall Street paymasters, to whom he is already signalling fealty.
Whoever prevails, this country probably too far along the road it set out on in the early 70s, when we ended the gold standard so we could more easily tell ourselves lies about our money and our true financial condition by inflation and debt creation. We know where that road ends.
6/30/16, 6:54 AM
Martin Larner said...
Good article, although I'd hoped to hear your views on the attack on Jeremy Corbyn, particularly from within his own party and the elite media and PR firms that many "Blairite" Neoliberal MPs are connected to.
Since he first stood for the Opposition Party Leadership, the combined efforts of the Establishment Consensus has done everything within their power to ridicule, misrepresent and undermine him.
The reason seems to me is that they're all terrified of a Leader which might actually act in the interests of the public and economy in general rather than a handful of affluent vested interests. They are literally terrified and in contempt of real democracy, hence all the immediate calls to throw the Referendum result under the bus along with the large population they've already chucked there.
I have these discussions on Facebook with well meaning people who are so brainwashed by the tactics of the Media and PR industry, that they mistake a sustained and organised smear campaign for an accurate portrayal of Corbyn and what he has done in the past year or so and what he represents. It's quite frightening to see this machine in action, yet Corbyn continues to evoke spontaneous rallies of 1000s of people in support of his leadership, while the Parliamentary Party, most of whom voted in favour of large scale cuts and austerity, insist he must go.
Unlike Trump, whom I would never vote for, and unlike even Sanders, who had no intention of reigning in US Global Militarism, Corbyn has an unimpeachable 30 year track record of principled fighting for the interests of ordinary citizens in the UK. Not a surprise that the Establishment despises such an incorruptible man.
6/30/16, 7:04 AM
latheChuck said...
6/30/16, 7:06 AM
. said...
So, for example, those voting leave were often accused of nostalgia – of wanting to go back to a rose-tinted past that was less open to the world. So the ‘racists’ are seen as sinning against Progress, not just some rational system of ethics.
And xenophobia is seen as the instinctive condition of humanity and instincts are highly suspect because they belong to our caveman past (they just ignore xenophilia for this purpose) and our sort of biological selves.
Those shouting racism indiscriminately also often reject the idea of resource limits. So they’ll say that Britain can support any number of people if only technology was used better, or if only the economic and political system were different. So for them the idea of limiting freedom of movement is part of a bigger rejection of the value of limits. History is seen as moving in the direction of ever fewer limits and more freedom.
And, part of it might be to do with identity. In The Past people are seen as having narrow parochial senses of identity. All of history is conflated into a kind of Dark Age/Middle Ages feudalism. So the direction of history is seen as being towards an ever expanding sense of identity.
New Age ideas of identifying with all of humanity, or all of life on earth, above all other identities, often come in here. This kind of constant expansion and removal of barriers/ boundaries to one’s identity is understood to be Love. It’s kind of a mix up of what might be spiritual realities with material and social realities. An imposition of heaven onto earth. So anyone who limits their sense of identity, even only in certain contexts, is seen as representing Hate.
I often see the idea that difference must not become division. Ostensibly this is for the rational reason that division weakens the working class. But the emotions of it tell me it goes deeper than that. It’s like a theological monotheistic thing – God as One, reality seen as a Unity, is heaven, and God as multiplicity, division, limit, is hell, is a prison. Like Carcer. Although it’s odd that the allegedly unified past is seen as hell. I’m not sure I’ve quite worked this out!
On the bright side, some respected people within the relatively small Left Leave campaign in the UK are coming out to say basically that the wage class were right all this time, we were wrong, they’re owed an apology. Some are even producing nice statistical evidence and graphs to prove it. They’re still largely saying that the solution is to create a strong trade union movement rather than put limits on immigration but it’s a good sign.
I’m considering stepping right out of political involvement. I’ve been denounced and placed in the Farage camp. Given that people are openly speculating about whether killing Farage would be like going back in time to kill baby Hitler, I really think it’s headed for violence at some scale out there. At the least, there are those who would take it upon themselves to make sure I lost my job. I’d blame it on my inability to be Gandhi-like in changing the political narrative, and that’s certainly something I haven’t got yet, but I’m watching far more politically skilled people being lined up for the firing squad so it may be only partly that. Getting out of the way of what’s coming might be the only sensible thing to do right now. Sorry for the long post!
Mallow.
6/30/16, 7:07 AM
Robert Honeybourne said...
I think this video summarises the situation in comedic form. There have been a series of these ever since Boris compared the EU domination of Europe to Hitlers plans
https://youtu.be/j3y1QbkloLs
Robert
6/30/16, 7:11 AM
Ivan Lukic said...
I think this post proves your point:
https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2016/06/27/brexit-imigration-and-exploitation/
6/30/16, 7:21 AM
Nancy Sutton said...
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2016/06/30/et1-economic-theory-of-the-top-1/
6/30/16, 7:38 AM
234567 said...
I don't think it matters much who is driving the bus of the elites, and Trump, Clinto, Farage, Cameron, Corbyn... they are all of the elite. At this juncture, the only people who can invest in stocks are the elites due to currency arbitrage and HFT - they have everyone's pensions and will use them. This is likely to be the straw that breaks the camels back for the upper middle classes, specifically the Boomers.
The thing is, collapse is baked into the cake at this point - stocks, bonds, hedge funds etc along with massive government debt have pretty well been in the cake pan and risen quite high at this point. Looking at the energy industry, we are seeing the crushing of the infrastructure in oil, coal and mining in general due to the masses being unable to buy anything other than necessities - when mortgages begin to be walked away from due to no work the ranks of 'nothing to lose' will balloon.
The truth is, that the .01% live in enclaves already, insulated from us commoners. These enclaves abound in the Beltway and around London, and California and Seattle and many other places. They aren't in Wales or in Scotland or in Nebraska or Oklahoma - there are areas around these .01% enclaves where the .5% supporters live as well, along with large numbers of the 99% who are on the dole. It is a volatile mix.
Even rural has it's obvious issues. My taxes went from $80/yr to $400/yr since I built a permanent dwelling on the property. If I had purchased two RV's then they could not tax me for them, other than registration for the vehicles. Thus government has mandated (intentionally of not) what will happen at the farm. You can see this in the burgeoning RV park industry here in Texas, where they fill-up as fast as you build them due to the excessively high property taxes in this state. Why pay mortgage of $100/mn and taxes of $600-800/mn when you can rent a space in a VERY NICE RV park for $350/mn and no taxes?
There are now over 15 of these RV parks on the route to my farm, and there were 3 of them 5 years ago...
My QUESTION IS: How can one ferret out the psychopaths and sociopaths (the 'empathy-free' that comprise the political class) in order for things to function without eventually breaking down in this same fashion? Disputes will still happen, even little wars - but how do you reign in the aberrations who seem to always lead us into foolishness?
Balkanization would seem to be preferable and doable for most large nations (China excepted, as they are on a different historical path). Democracy that is small enough to hold governance accountable (minimizing bureaucrats and maximizing self-reliance) may be able to function. Our experiment with democracy is young yet.
Thoughts welcome, as I am popping corn, watching the show and not voting. I have no candidates AT ANY LEVEL that are anything but professional-grade and thus pre-corrupt or massively compromised. It is my right NOT to vote, for now...
6/30/16, 7:38 AM
Friction Shift said...
If I may be permitted a prediction, the sclerotic elites in the UK will probably maneuver around the Leave vote and figure out a way to ignore the referendum, keeping Britain in the EU. Or at least they'll try.
I am reminded of the huge protests that occurred worldwide in the leadup to the United States' invasion of Iraq. The Bush-Cheney neocons watched, and their reaction was "Yeah, whatever."
6/30/16, 7:42 AM
Paulo said...
So true. The article and referenced austerity measures reminded me of a past workplace. I was a pilot/manager for a speciality air service. My boss (owner) felt we should be getting more 'happy efforts' from the pilots. We were all paid salary which remained the same year round, despite drop off in revenues during the winter. We had benefits, profit sharing, and a method for pension investments. It provided stability for all, we had no turnover in staff, and the customers appreciated seeing the same faces. We were very succesful and profitable. Profitable!! Anyway, one day he gave everyone a letter stating how he was contemplating base pay and mileage for our pay structure, (piece work). It was a return to the past, big time. Now, I always liked incentive pay because it rewarded the go-getters, which I was proudly one. However, it also promoted pushing weather, risky decision making, and more work for fewer people. Crashes. I remember wincing when I read the letter, knowing full well what would happen.
Only one pilot went to the owner and complained personally...spoke his objections. (He was a long-time friend) He was pissed. Several contacted me with a request to intercede on their behalf, (which I did). But instead of lighting a fire of motivation to keep mileage pay just on paper, it had the opposite effect. The 'little things' stopped being done. When the weather turned tough pilots just turned around to base. If they were asked to divert and pick up additional passengers at another location, suddenly the weather was dodgy, or the water was too rough to land, etc. In short, it simply had the opposite effect in all ways. What was most pervasive was the silence. In the past there would be open discussion and constructive ideas shared about daily operations and future plans. There was engagement. When trust was broken everyone retreated to their own agenda. When before we had almost no staff turnover, over the next few years all pilots except one left and moved on. The company is now a hollow shell of its former past, (20 years later). The owner is the only pilot left, with one part-timer. His family works in the office and the hangar. One bookkeeper remains from a once vibrant office staff. When the exodus started we had 30+ staff. Now, there are just 3 working, with one being part-time. They no longer receive applications or resumes from pilots. (We used to get hundreds per year). A few years after I left damage was done to an aircraft through hard landings. The owner decided the best way to find out what happened was administering a 'lie detector test' to find the culprit. (Honest to God). It got worse from then on. (Yes, pilots actually took the test, but they quit soon after). They never did find out 'who' damaged the aircraft, because there wasn't one person to find. It was simply the result of using the wrong machine for the job, which the owner would not admit. As he was never wrong, staff no longer bothered trying to contribute insights about daily operations. They just went through the motions, and eventually gave up.
The main result has been that after moving on everyone has done better over the long term. Everyone. Occasionally we get together over coffee or drinks and share some laughs about the owner. I'm sure it is similar in the political arena with political insiders. Afterall, google 'Sarah Palin Jokes' and you are informed there are 450,000 results.
6/30/16, 7:47 AM
Dandy said...
6/30/16, 8:00 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
6/30/16, 8:02 AM
Spanish fly said...
Maybe I must be less pedantic.
Remainers campaign has been a continuous emotional blackmail, errr,just blackmail. Same day that we woke up with Brexit win news, I watched in TV a bad TV film. The stroyline was: A low-middle class man in his 40s needs easy money and starts working for a gang. when he realizes that he is putting at risk his family and own life, he tries to resign his job, but...As one of his pals says: "You can't simply renounce to this job. They use you until you are worn out"
Another cliché in film noir is the stereotypical "advice" (=threat) from gangster boss to bad minions or extorted victims: "If you keep on misbeheaving...your children/wife/store would be in trouble?
I don't believe so much in synchronicity, buy maye there is a joking goblin within TV programming.
EUrocrats has been beheaving in Brexit matter as have been doing it previously: bullying, scaring and contempting their rivals.
Oh, what a pity! This time gangster strategies have not worked. I a am in SCHADENFREUDE mood...I like that german word, and I like more even to use it when I think in Mrs. Merkel and german banksters gang.
From my position as citizen of a "brusselissed" country as one of the members of PIGS, I envy that damn Brits. I dislike Farage's anglo-British chauvinism (I symphatize quite more with Scottish patriots...) but UKIP jingoism is the lesser of two evils.
No one represesntative party in my country has proposed a referendum as happened in UK. It's sacrilege even to the "communist" Podemos party (they are too busy proposing subsidies for everybody and PC hysteria these leftists for worrying about low and middle class economic decay, thanks to Brussels imperative welfare cuttings).).
Yesterday I heard on radio that our sleepy prime minister or "president" had adviced british brexiters that they must be shoulder to shoulder within EU, following Spain's example. "through good times and bad times".
Yeah! Nice shot, Mr. Rajoy!
What a joke! Our neocon version of politics are a tireless source of deadpan jokes.
UK and Spain dismantled their big factories a long time ago, but british have a good portion of financial banking cake. Oh, UK also is a bigger militar power than pathetic spanish Army, a nuclear power by itself. If drunkards and hooligans are scared by Brexit or by "advices"(threats) to UK sovreignty...they should easily find another beach cleaner and cheaper that spanish ones.
Oh, oh, I'm afraid that after second elections in 6 months, there won't be a new and strong government in the short term, so we are seeing Marmot Day repetition. And Merkel's minions at Brussels maybe are losing their patience with all this silly and futile negotiation for making a new government (slavish to Brussels, aka German banksters, of course).
In another sample of humour festival a talking head commentig all this in a TV pundits program said that "Now, UK is weak, so we can claim the Gibraltar's return to Spain". I heard some canned laughing voices, so I'm afraid I should report that strange matter with my psychiatric. Or maybe is that pundit who should go to the madhouse, who nows?
Oh, by the way, I empathyzed a bit with Donatien Alphonse (marquis de Sade) in his less disgusting tastes, enjoying the great fall of Remainers leaders, Humpty Dumpty style. Frack off preposterous fool Cameron and old-fashioned leftie Corbyn.
6/30/16, 8:03 AM
Rebecca Brown said...
Thanks for another cogent post. The response among my "liberal" friends has been just as you described, and I've lost a few for remarking that categorizing half the voters of a country as racist and stupid is short-sighted and wrong.
I had the dubious pleasure of watching a few minutes of CNN this morning and getting to hear Obama describe Trump and all of his supporters as xenophobic and nativist. They then cut to clips of Trump's recent economic speech, and you know what? As much as I hate to admit it because I detest the man, he's the only politician I've heard talking about the economy in years who made any sense.
Regarding the poster above who asked about proof jobs have been lost and wages have declined, even without the impact of outsourcing, many businesses in Alabama where I'm from have hired illegal labor at just above slave wages for years instead of employees. These businesses range from cleaning services to restaurants to agricultural processors and farmers. One occasionally gets busted and gets slapped on the wrist and goes right back to it. Many companies that hire U.S. workers now only take on "independent contractors" so they don't have to pay benefits or taxes and pay lower salaries to boot.
6/30/16, 8:03 AM
Eric S. said...
One other aspect of the conversation worth brief comment: I’ve been noticing the initial stirrings of the backlash against the environmental movement that you hinted at here. If that becomes mainstream, it would be huge… Despite all the problems with environmentalism as it currently exists, it has had a history of producing some things that have made our predicament slightly less bad than it could be… While CO2 is still wreaking havoc on our atmosphere, emissions regulations have at least made air breathable and taken us away from the days when pollution was so rampant that it gave us the peppered moth story that graces science textbooks to this day, and innovations such as the public lands system of national parks and forests have made small steps towards keeping at least some landmass safe from exploitation and development (and of course even that led to a militia occupation that ended in a shootout earlier last year). None of that is enough to keep civilization toppling consequences from coming about, but a public opinion backlash that not only barred further work towards sustainability (as happened in the 1980s) but rolled back on the modest regulations and protections that survived the ‘80s at a crucial time like the one we’re living in now seems like it would be a huge development… one that would make an already bleak situation even worse. How long could something like that last, and how much more damage could it do than what’s already being done? Would it be one last hurrah for the ethos of industrialism? Or would it be something more complete and long lasting, of the sort that would prevent the emergence of a more sustainable society to emerge in some future time, and force a reassessment of our species’ chances? Scary thought…
6/30/16, 8:10 AM
Matt said...
Re: Switzerland, that statement seems to be the diametric opposite of the truth: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/migration-outlook_switzerland-has-highest-number-of-immigrants/41145410
I'm not saying that Switzerland is anything to emulate, by the way. It is likely to face an intensely rough ride, isn't it, when the financialisation bubble bursts?
6/30/16, 8:20 AM
Spanish fly said...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99bbRIeK6SI
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Disclaimer: I am not mocking to every German people, I bet that low and middle class working people are not "enjoying" at all Merkels politics: Wellcome refugees, wellcome cheaper workforce!
However, here in the South we are eating more poo than Northern EU people.
------------------------------------------------
http://www.e-faro.info/Imagenes/CHISTES/WChmes02/Acudits2011/111211.rajoy.Merkel.despacho.sientate.casco.prusiano.jpg
"I like Germany, Angie".
"I'm glad to see you. Please, sit down".
6/30/16, 8:20 AM
Matt said...
http://www.cream-migration.org/publ_uploads/CDP_22_13.pdf
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Documents/workingpapers/2015/swp574.pdf
6/30/16, 8:24 AM
Peter VE said...
In my state of Rhode Island, a Democrat named Gina Raimondo was elected Governor in 2014. Her main qualification was overseeing, as Treasurer, the shift of millions of dollars in state pension funds from retirees (in the form of COLAs) to Wall Street (in the form of Hedge Fund fees). The State is run by politicians who have a (D) after their name, but have progressed further down the road to "necrosuophiliac cravings" than most. The entire state Democratic Party apparatus lined up solidly for Ms. Clinton, but Sanders won 54-46. More tellingly, the late Robert Healey got 22% of the vote for Governor in 2014. He'd been a longtime gadfly, and previously nearly won the Lt. Governorship on a platform of eliminating the office. In his race for Governor, he spent a grand total of $37. Meanwhile, our legislature just passed a budget with per capita spending of $8,900. Next door Massachusetts, which has better public services and better schools, spends $5,400 per capita.
I'm trying to figure a path to collapse to Lakeland, where I grew up. I would still need to make an income at my profession (architecture), where I have built up a local practice that isn't likely to follow me. The most important part is that I'm already making friends in the old Rust Belt town I have in mind.
6/30/16, 8:31 AM
Bob said...
6/30/16, 8:57 AM
Donald Hargraves said...
6/30/16, 9:01 AM
Lee said...
Don't poke the bear. (See Dmitri Orlov's take on this.)
I also have concerns about corruption in the US military. I got out 50 years ago and it was corrupt and incredibly inefficient then. I doubt that it has gotten any better.
No reply required and thanks again.
6/30/16, 9:08 AM
mgalimba said...
Thanks for the link to the Liberal Redneck, love it! And for your always insightful counterpoint!
6/30/16, 9:28 AM
JimBobRazrBk said...
6/30/16, 9:30 AM
Joe Roberts said...
Great analysis. There's something so deeply, fundamentally depressing to me abut the idea of a Britain gone off the rails. To me it's akin to finding out that your practical and dependable father has, in late middle age, started abusing heroin or is keeping teenagers tied up in his basement. Like most Americans, I think, I have a primarily subconscious belief that Britain will always be the wise parent. The trains may not always run on time; the sun may have set on the empire; but the Brits, I think we generally believed, would stay basically sober and sane (even when frequently drunk).
Perhaps it's all an exaggeration (certainly it's idealization) -- there's no objective truth about what "going of the rails" means, after all -- but I feel a bit like a wayward twenty-something who thought he could at least always depend on his parents for structure and sanity as a last resort, and has now found out that even they have gone mad.
6/30/16, 9:33 AM
Ramaraj said...
I read in the news that many in the younger affluent urban class are blaming the older generation for voting for Brexit. They are being mocked for 'not liking the new, modern multicultural world and wanting to retreat into their stupid, racist, bigoted '. The elderly were being insulted for being 'ignorant, stupid and selfish.' One person said, "Perhaps there should be a maximum voting age".
I have noticed that this ageism is widely prevalent among the young urban class. I have had several elderly relatives lament to me that their children don't really listen to any advice. What's more, the elderly people feel that they are completely useless for the society despite having years of hard earned experience and wisdom. The retort to any advice is usually like, "My life, my choice, so you don't interfere." or, "I am educated, so I don't need any advice.".
Of course there is the typical teenage rebellion, but this one seems to continue well past the late 20s. The young generation
i personally feel that they have a lot to contribute to pulling us through the hard times ahead, simply because they have lived through it already (In most of the third world, I won't know about America and the west.)
Is this part of the fatal disconnect with the past and reality that affects civilizations in the late stage? Is it just individualism?
Ramaraj
6/30/16, 9:34 AM
onething said...
If the internal proletariat are about to reject the values of the elite that could be very good, as the main value that runs this Babylon called America is money, with nothing in second place. As to the environment, I'm skeptical that the real elites care much. The real value is trashing the environment, so perhaps we can reject that as well. Also, exploiting the environment and exploiting the masses are just two facets of the same value, which is greed for... money.
Now I'm reading Cosmos and Psyche, and it makes a rather airtight case for astrological influences upon the world, so I'd be interested to know where we are in the cycle of Uranus / Pluto. That's as far as I've gotten in the book and this particular pair are relevant to times like these, but no doubt there are others as well.
6/30/16, 9:46 AM
Ramaraj said...
Robots don't consume any goods or services, so demand will fall, which will lead to another round of job cuts and automations, and so on. This may be the start of a death spiral of negative feedback between demand destruction and economic output that you have covered in this blog.
The establishmnt elites are insisting that progress of technology is inevitable, and people losing jobs to technology will just find other jobs. As you have said earlier, this is of course not what actually happens. And the clueless are repeating the same things that caused the problem. It is certainly going to explode messily soon, particularly in India, China and the other countries that supply goods and services to most of the west.
My question is, do you foresee the political upheaval currently happening doing anything to interfere with this downward spiral? How far do you think we are from the Mikkelson manufacturing plants of Atlantic Republic? Do we have to go further downward in the Hubbert's energy curve for the idea to get serious consideration in mainstream thought?
6/30/16, 10:01 AM
LewisLucanBooks said...
6/30/16, 10:24 AM
Brian Kaller said...
Thank you -- I've been saying some of the same things, and wrote a piece about it in the American Conservative. The good news is this vote has set off a storm of serious soul-searching among the politically active set here; I hope they will learn some lessons from this.
You'll also be interested to know that articles are already appearing about the USA de-centralising:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/an-american-brexit/
Cynically, I expect some business elites would propose that just to have less regulation, of course, but the fact that so many people are taking such suggestions seriously means we could be getting closer to your Twilight's Last Gleaming scenario. I hope we can avoid it.
6/30/16, 10:49 AM
Troy Jones said...
Also, quite apart from that, "evidence" alone is not enough to guide the direction of government: for example, should government try to pursue "income equality" as a policy or not, and if so, to what degree? Evidence can answer the question of whether particular government policies are effective in that regard, but the answer to the question of whether to pursue such policies in the first place can only come from values and opinion, not objective evidence.
I don't know if the Brexit vote specifically is what occasioned Tyson to join the chorus of wealthy elites calling for an end to democracy, but it seems likely.
6/30/16, 10:53 AM
Golocyte Golo said...
I'd like to point out Peter Hitchens----whom many British readers will have an opinion on, but who is almost unknown to American readers (as opposed to his late brother Christopher Hitchens). He describes himself as "Right-Wing Labor," which he says hasn't existed in his country since the 50's (at the latest) in any organized fashion. Basic policy proscriptions would be social conservatism, "Little England" non-interventionist nationalism, and basic left-wing economic policy (strong NHS and labor laws, nationalization of transportation services).
Here is his blog, and here is an interview transcript and here is a very amusing video interview.
In the USA, a home-grown, All-American model would be the Teddy Roosevelt wing of the Republican party, which no longer exists. This wing of the party (and the Bull Moose splitoff) espoused strong workers rights, universal health care, environmental conservation, Trust-Busting and anti-money regulation, strict regulation of money in politics (including registration of lobbyists), universal education, a muscular small-voice-big-stick foreign policy, privileging of conservative & traditional family forms, and an unwavering espousal of American Exceptionalism.
If I may impose modern engrams onto old style politics, I'd throw in border protection (yes a wall), strong anti-drug laws along with legalization of marijuana, and devoted work-training programs for ghettoized youth and anti-urban-blight construction programs (maybe something like the "Free Trade Zones" of east Asia).
This may all sound like a horrible chimera to modern ears, but I'd point out that the current American party platforms would sound like horrible chimeras to most people from 70 or 100 years ago.
I think a Right-Wing Progressive platform like this would be immensely popular today and would sweep away most serious opposition.
6/30/16, 11:04 AM
Lucretia Heart said...
Have you seen this?
https://theintercept.com/2016/06/25/brexit-is-only-the-latest-proof-of-the-insularity-and-failure-of-western-establishment-institutions/
It seems that there is a LITTLE scrutiny put on elites by a few. Someone may have already pointed this out to you, but if you haven't seen it, its worth a look.
6/30/16, 11:05 AM
Chloe said...
I did miss the discussions about Switzerland and Japan (I was in a bit of a hurry earlier) and I do agree that it's possible to limit immigration without becoming an authoritarian state (there's a case to be made that both Switzerland and Japan are relatively isolationist, though not to the extent that it's necessarily a bad thing) and was perhaps being a bit facetious… But there's a difference between keeping immigration levels low/slowly tapering them off and slashing them sharply, not so much for political reasons but because many economic systems and networks are set up to assume high levels of immigration in lieu of a growing population (or, y'know, a no-growth model) - the NHS and the universities in particular rely heavily on incoming staff and students. The politicians we've got at the moment might not worry too much about *their* opinions, but they will still listen to the pet economists who tell them that cutting immigration is a bad thing, and I'd be surprised to see the Tories or Labour make more than friendly noises towards it while they still, clearly, fail to recognise the threat that UKIP poses - regardless of whatever deal is made with the EU, since a good chunk of migrants to the UK comes from outside it. I'm also taking into account things like the Syrian refugee crisis; such situations are liable to become more common and it's very difficult to keep people out if they're desperate and determined enough.
For immigration to drop sharply would take at the least a very determined government, in opposition to the entirety of the media, about half the population and almost the entirety of the current elite which, senile it may be, isn't quite doddery enough to give up power yet. The EU referendum was only a very narrow win for Brexit which may yet be reversed or, more likely, reversed in all but name if we join the EEA, and I don't think the disillusioned half of the population - lacking any advantage *but* numbers - is in a position to enact any kind of popular revolution; the details of the UK voting system would make it very difficult for UKIP to sweep the board even with a relative landslide, given the remaining entrenchment of Labour in some areas and - more so - the Tories in others. The Tories might actually have more luck cutting immigration sharply if they really tried, but in any case I think it's unlikely. A slow drop over the next couple of decades? Perhaps. A dramatic cut within the next five years? Not so much.
I'd be very surprised to see a true authoritarian regime come to power in the near future. It's not that we aren't in a bad enough state - we're not in the right *kind* of bad state (though I may be speaking from my own privileged position of life in Scotland). I really hope it's not one of those jokes that comes back to bite me…
6/30/16, 11:14 AM
Andrew Roth said...
This fellow inadvertently offered a neat vignette of his own sheltered, clueless privilege over the weekend when he posted a series of photos on Facebook under the hashtag #yachtlife. He probably assumes that he's safely surrounded by other affluent people, or maybe that the objections of the poors don't count. He knows full well that my own circumstances have deteriorated quite badly since graduation, so there's definitely some arrogance at play. If he talked to the people I've met on farm crews in the Willamette Valley (in towns roughly as poor as Cumberland), he'd be floored by how poor and backwards they are. Cottage Grove and McMinnville are not towns where a prep can expect to get his way by strutting around like he owns the place. Their citizens would admire him for having rented a yacht. It's different around Philadelphia, and that's one of the things about Philly that I miss least.
The yuppie project needs to be brought to an end and its vectors bodily driven into the forested shadows, as they were during the Great Depression. In other words, it's time to make American tactful again.
6/30/16, 11:23 AM
bicosse said...
Now I see that the neoliberal, debt-deflationary policies of the EU are actually stoking conflict, but I had hoped that the coming crisis might just possibly lead to reform and that Britain might be part of that process. Perhaps Brexit will now shock the senile Euro-elites to their senses - but I rather doubt it.
With regard to immigration control and racism, it seems to me that the left equates the two because border control privileges 'old-stock' citizens over newcomers. Clearly this is true, but it ignores the extent to which moral concepts such as anti-racism and human rights have purchase only insofar as there is an effective state committed to enforcing some kind of justice, however imperfect. No use protesting that my human rights are being abused if I live in Syria or Somalia. Yet for a state to be effective it must control its borders, or else it risks being overrun by invaders or repudiated by its own people(s) - which seems to be happening now to the European superstate.
Personally I like multicultural city life, I married an African migrant, my daughter is mixed-race. I volunteer at a night shelter for destitute refugees and migrants. But I do this because I see hospitality to the stranger and the destitute as a moral obligation, a Christian work of mercy, not because I believe that the state can realistically abolish borders.
Thank you for your perceptive American comment on UK/European affairs. We certainly live in interesting times!
6/30/16, 11:28 AM
onething said...
2. Modify existing law that inhibits the sale of health insurance across state lines. As long as the plan purchased complies with state requirements, any vendor ought to be able to offer insurance in any state. By allowing full competition in this market, insurance costs will go down and consumer satisfaction will go up.
5. Require price transparency from all healthcare providers, especially doctors and healthcare organizations like clinics and hospitals. Individuals should be able to shop to find the best prices for procedures, exams or any other medical-related procedure.
7. Remove barriers to entry into free markets for drug providers that offer safe, reliable and cheaper products. Congress will need the courage to step away from the special interests and do what is right for America. Though the pharmaceutical industry is in the private sector, drug companies provide a public service. Allowing consumers access to imported, safe and dependable drugs from overseas will bring more options to consumers.
6/30/16, 11:31 AM
Ricardo Rolo said...
While I can't talk exactly about how stuff is in the UK, that got in the EEC in 1973, I am old enough to have witnessed my own country entry in the then EEC in 1986 and I have seen with my own eyes the not so subtle changes that were introduced in the education of toddlers. First of all , it was stated in no uncertain terms that history before the EEC was to be taught in very broad ( and IMHO completely wrong ) brushes to general students and second, and most importantly, the story of the EEC/EC/EU was to be taught in terms that can only be called a theogony:
In the beggining, the peoples of Europe lived in primitive political arragements called nations and warred incessantly against each other. Then after a particularly destructive war, there were some iluminated souls that decided that the only way of stopping this was to make a border free commercial union. That union, because it was all good and nice, atracted more members and then the obvious next step would be ( or ended up being, depending of this being before or after 1992 ) a political union to end all wars. And obviously, because the EEC/EC/EU is a good thing, it obviously had to grow up and get even more integrated...
( Continues ... )
6/30/16, 11:44 AM
Ricardo Rolo said...
I'm pretty sure that, for readers of this blog, is quite clear what they did here: they present the history of the EEC/EC/EU as Progress and as you know Progress is God ( and Bill Gates/Elon Musk/Idiot of the week is his prophet, I guess ), so you can't fight it ... and let's not let little facts like people leaving the EEC ( like Greenland did in 1985 ), people refusing by referendum to enter the EC ( like Norway did in 1991 IIRC and Switzerland has done not that long ago ) or the fact that the EEC/EC/EU has been leaving some countries on the door because "they are too big , too strong and too Muslim "( Turkey , if you haven't guessed already ) get in the way of the narrative of EU. EU is Progress , Progress is God and denying the EU evergrowth is denying God, and we know what in this corner of the world they like to do to people that deny the oficial religion ...
And that probably explains the reactions of most people around the EU talking heads: most of them are young enough to have been indoctrinated fully in this idea of the growth of EU being something akin to the laws of nature and they are genuinely shocked to see something that for them is akin to see water flowing up and can only see the people that are against it as residues of the brutish old peoples of Europe that lived in primitive nations and warred incessantly against each other ( hence the ubiquous "racist", "nazi" and "fascist" insults being thrown around: because only a pre WW II jerk could want not not be in the EU ) and that alone is probably enough to explain the rather inflamed tones that, say, Juncker has been adressing the British since Sunday ( or the rather infatile proposal to remove English as a official language of the EU, like if English was not a official language of other EU member... )
Note, I'm not telling that there are not some cold calculating heads behind all of this ( I , for myself, fully expect that the UK elite will try to stall things for some years and call other referendum when enough old people dies to turn the result around ), but I think this is a good example of what the well born people do when their Progress idol gets slapped in the face by the unwashed. Expect more of this in the future, unfortunately ...
6/30/16, 11:46 AM
susan said...
Thank you so much for continuing to write such astute and well-informed articles. I'll continue sending new readers your way.
6/30/16, 11:59 AM
Gottfried Wilhelm Melvin Hicks-Leibniz said...
In 2014, 35.4% of the permanent resident population aged 15 or over in Switzerland, i.e. 2,445,000 persons, had a migration background. A third of this population (855,000) have Swiss citizenship. Four fifths of persons with a migration background are themselves immigrants (first generation foreigners and native-born and naturalised Swiss citizens), whereas one fifth were born in Switzerland (second generation foreigners, Swiss citizens since birth and naturalised Swiss citizens). [Source; http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/en/index/themen/01/07/blank/key/06.html]
In German, but a nice pie chart at the bottom of page comparing second generation foreigners to rest of Europe. With more than 60%, Switzerland has the most relative to others. [Source; http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/de/index/themen/01/07/blank/key/04.html]
It is precisely because of such facts, that the SVP (Swiss People's Party) has increased its appeal amongst the rural and working class - which is another example of global Trumpism. In comparison to Trump, the father of this party (Blocher) is also a billionaire industrialist who also owns a major media outlet.
Even HuffPo (sorry no other good english sources) did a piece comparing Blocher to Trump - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/global-risk-insights/switzerland-trump-christoph-blocher-_b_9517190.html
Both Blocher and the SVP have long complained that the political class does not heed the will of the people and that said will (via referenda) should be the first and last arbiter of legislation. Switzerland’s political system allows for anyone to bring an issue to referendum if they garner 100,000 signatures within 18 months.
The SVP has used this to repeatedly launch divisive initiatives capitalizing on fear. Alongside the SVP’s platform points, domestic and international critics have in particular noted the explosive campaign material used by the SVP to stoke voter fears.
6/30/16, 12:21 PM
Gottfried Wilhelm Melvin Hicks-Leibniz said...
Here's a short lecture he gave earlier this month (under 11 minutes):
Mark Blyth--Are the Populists Threatening Democracy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2VUFjSWN2w
TL;DL(isten)
see: Betteridge's law of headlines
6/30/16, 12:46 PM
Gottfried Wilhelm Melvin Hicks-Leibniz said...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2016/06/30/claim-that-jet-stream-crossing-equator-is-climate-emergency-is-utter-nonsense/
Sam Lillo, who is working on his PhD in meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, said the cross-equator flow evolved from twin areas of high pressure on either side of the equator while a parade of atmospheric waves in the Southern Hemisphere had pushed the subtropical (which is distinct from the mid-latitude or polar jet stream that Scribbler and Beckwith are discussing) jet stream northward, allowing the link to occur. “None of this is unusual,” he said. “There isn’t a wall at the equator separating the two hemispheres, and air is free to flow from one side to the other.”
Scribbler had cited a tweet from Lillo to support his argument of a strengthened equator-to-pole connection, but Lillo countered that the tweet referred to some unusual behavior of a phenomenon known as the QBO or Quasi-Biennial Oscillation, which is “a separate story” from the cross-equator flow. The QBO, he said, is an oscillation in equatorial stratospheric winds, which has been “out of phase.” He chalked up the weird QBO behavior to natural variability “even though I’m an advocate for identifying connections to human-caused climate change.”
Unfortunately, the thoroughly specious claims of Scribbler and Beckwith have gone viral, getting picked up Raw Story, Reddit and Inhabitat.
Such information viewed through the lens of a non-specialist may come across as both credible and alarming but damages the reputation of the science when ultimately shown to be flawed.
6/30/16, 12:54 PM
Christophe said...
6/30/16, 1:26 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
Silver doesn't have Johnson or Stein with any significant chance of winning any state.
6/30/16, 1:56 PM
alex carter said...
And, also, surprise surprise, I had to fill in the "race box" just like on any official form.
We'll be very lucky if all JMG's theoretical Fascist party shows itself by neat, young, cheerful people in green shirts and black work pants cleaning up the parks. I'm thinking more in the line of demonstrations where the participants not only are prepared for the possibility of violence but count on it because they plan to perpetuate it.
And I think it will be because of a large number of people, from the various levels of the working class, will have become Fed Up. The lack of jobs, the having to fill in a Race Box, having it decided for you how you can vote and whether you can vote, these things all add in with a large number of others.
6/30/16, 2:25 PM
Clay Dennis said...
My discovery on peoples view on Trump or Br-exit has a lot to do with their view of the future, in addition to Class. Obviously these two are intertwined, but it seems likely that in addition to the wounds that the working class has suffered under neoliberalism they have also subconsciously absorbed a stunted doomer worldview. Even though they are spoon-fed 24-7 that the sparkly future is coming and will make them all as rich and glamorous as the Kardashians or Lebron James they are beginning to realize that it is a downhill road and they are being rolled down the hill first. This is why the two very different groups that are against both "Remain" and Hillary are the downtrodden working class and the intellectual doomer/revolutionary crowd. Both groups believe that the civilization they know is on a downhill slide and big change is good, or kicking the elites down the hill first to create a softer landing is also good. This is what is striking about people that I know without exception, those who believe the status quo can continue are aghast at Trump or Bernie or Brexit and those who think the world is going to heck in a hand-basket are glad for anything that upsets the dominant paradigm.
6/30/16, 2:33 PM
John Roth said...
Keep your eye pealed. Clinton has just appeared with Elizabeth Warren, According to one source, she’s been told, in no uncertain terms by the Wall Street people who’ve been funding her election, “Us or Warren.” Wall Street will not back her if she picks Warren as her running mate. See http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/06/elizabeth_warren_would_be_more_than_a_vp_pick.html
@David Carter
It doesn’t matter that only 27% of the people who live in the British Isles voted for BrExit. The null hypothesis is that the ones that did not vote would have voted in the same proportion as the ones that did. That’s not necessarily the case, but the reason it’s called a null hypothesis is that you need actual data to support a different reading.
@Mean Mr. Mustard
A minor nit: While I don’t know about Blair, Bush had a plan for Iraq once he’d liberated it from Hussain. It wouldn’t have worked, but he didn’t know that. It got blocked with all the foreign fighters who immediately arrived with “kick the Americans out” in mind.
@Dandy
When you say “she negotiated the TPP” you’re making a classic mistake. The TPP was negotiated by a number of bureaucrats in the Office of the US Trade Representative. She was undoubtedly in on a number of high level talks, but then so were a number of other politicians whose hands are equally dirty. In any case, a lot of the negotiations happened after she left office.
The last president who had the intellectual horsepower to actually read and understand most of what went on was probably Jimmy Carter. He supposedly acted as his own Chief of Staff.
@Rebecca
I heard about that speech. I’m not sure how his staff managed to get him to read off the teleprompter without extemporizing, but by all accounts he had a great speechwriter. The “transcript” had over a hundred footnotes. That’s Trump? Not.
@Ramaraj
You’re looking at a specific part of the 80-year historical cycle. In the US, the two generations at issue are called the Boomers (old) and the Millenials (young); I don’t know what the names are in Britain, although I’ve heard the same labels. It’s a four generation cycle, and what’s happened in the past turns of the cycle is that the elder generation (the Boomers, etc.) wind up with an impoverished old age while their children reject everything they stood for.
@Onething
There are … reasons … why the 80-year historical cycle is synchronizing across much of the world. The exoteric reason is WW II, which reset the clock for a lot of the countries that were most impacted by it.
The Uranus cycle is 84 years, and it crossed the Vernal Equinox a few years ago beginning a new change cycle. Pluto is presently in the middle of Capricorn. The US will have its Pluto return sometime in the mid 20s.
A number of years ago I did a workup of Pluto against the 80-year cycle as presented in Strauss and Howe’s Generations. It was interesting, but I decided not to publish it. It involved three different national charts, one of which is highly speculative (the one for Great Britain back in medieval times).
6/30/16, 2:38 PM
Unknown said...
I want to participate in discussion this week, I hope.
Last night I walked out of a poetry reading that was taking place in an art museum. The speaker started a clapping sing along, which included great lines like "F*** America in the a**" and so on. I cursed and left. These were primarily students, and I've long been stunned at how eagerly liberals are at playing into Trump's strengths. I.e. calling him "Voldemort" as non-ironical attempt at disparaging him. Hmm, why would they refer to a children's book, willingly making themselves the children in the room when discussing Trump??
Anyway, I have had to think long and hard. fwiw, I intend to support Trump candidacy for the sole reason that I think he is the only candidate for miles around that has any likelihood of reversing and maybe even improving relations with Russia. Everyone else seems to want to relive the 1980 Olympic Hockey games/Rocky's triumph over Ivan Drago. My opinion is that this is the most important issue for the next 10-20 years. It is an admittedly nakedly political decision, no morality, as there is no candidate preaching a platform of retropia and willing drawdown as a global power, this is the lesser of evils in my view.
Thanks.
6/30/16, 2:41 PM
[email protected] said...
the brexit result has truly shaken the British and European elites.
Influenced by your writings over the last few years, I predicted a Leave victory in early January 2016 in my blog (see link) as the working and middle classes have taken a beating from the Great Recession and the impact of mass immigration on public services, jobs and housing.
Like you, I think that Trump should be able to win the presidency on this wave of anger which is impacting the world.
We live in interesting times...
https://forecastingintelligence.wordpress.com/
6/30/16, 2:46 PM
TJ said...
6/30/16, 2:48 PM
Yellow Submarine said...
6/30/16, 2:57 PM
Mark Northfield said...
Apologies for the length of this. There is just so much to say here. I hope you don't mind me doing so. I'll post it in two parts.
You make some good points (as ever) about the dangers of a divided society, but it is always difficult trying to understand another culture from the outside. This is one of the main reasons I like reading your blog: it helps me understand the US beyond the mainstream headlines we see. As a UK resident, I do feel you've used too many broad brush strokes in this latest article. There are some important nuances missed and also some outright omissions in your narrative which are essential to understanding the situation.
First off, I would urge you to read this: https://flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/looking-behind-the-brexit-anger/
The leave vote was won not only by poorer, ex-industrial, Labour voting areas, but also by large swathes of non-metropolitan Tory voting England, some of which are pretty affluent on the whole. What unites these very different groups is a push-back against the economic AND social changes of the past 30-40 years. The pithy slogan 'take back control' held an emotional appeal to turn the clock back that the Remain camp couldn't counter effectively, however implausible it might be to implement in the manner that the Leave campaign suggested would be possible, and without perhaps breaking up the UK in the process.
Stirring this emotional soup is an overwhelmingly (sometimes viciously) right-wing press, perfectly able to promote snobbery and consumerism, while also demonising 'the other' (whoever that might be, but frequently immigrants) and hating anything at all to do with Europe. UK governments tremble at their malign power in a way that the EU simply didn't, as Rupert Murdoch succinctly pointed out in an oft repeated quote.
Immigration simply wasn't a major issue in the UK pre-2004. What changed was the expansion of the EU eastward that year to take in former Soviet bloc countries, and the decision of the New Labour government not to put in temporary restrictions on migration from these countries as most others in the EU did. The result was a massive net influx over the following years, mainly Polish, who had very limited options of where else to go. This was a terrible error of judgement on the part of the UK government. (But it's worth noting that approximately half of our net immigration is non-EU; we already have 'control' which we choose not to apply.)
This influx exacerbated what was already an old problem: lack of affordable housing. The early 80s saw council housing sold off and not replaced, because government decided the market would see to it. The market didn't, because there was more profit in not doing so. Similarly, public services struggled post 2008 when austerity politics decided it was only the financial system that could be rescued, despite us having our own currency and central bank.
But I think it is doubtful the Leave vote have won without the intervention of ex-mayor of London, Boris Johnson. He is the only UK politician referred to on first name terms by the media, and is disarmingly charismatic in a buffoonish fashion. His decision to support Leave was crucial in its appeal to voters who find other politicians a turn off.
That said, it has long been known that he covets the job of prime minister and some suspected that his conversion might not be altogether genuine. With his usual rhetorical flourish in the final TV debate he declared last Thursday would be 'independence day'. A week later, his prime ministerial ambitions lie in tatters at the hands of fellow campaigner Michael Gove, but the suspicion remains that he never really wanted to win, that he never wanted the poisoned chalice that a Leave victory has now ensured the job will be. Theresa May at least stands half a chance of sailing those choppy waters, having quietly been in the Remain camp.
(continues in next comment)
6/30/16, 3:00 PM
Yellow Submarine said...
My favorite of his comments was at the end when he said: 'As I tell my American friends, the Hamptons is not a defensible position. The Hamptons is a very rich area on Long Island that lie along a low-lying beach. It's very hard to defend a low-lying beach. Eventually people will come for you'.
The Hamptons are what the Sea Peoples, the Vikings and the Elizabethan Sea Dogs would have called a "target rich environment"!
6/30/16, 3:01 PM
Mark Northfield said...
The Lib Dems didn't surge in the 2010 election. They gained a small amount of vote share and lost five MPs, but they happened to find themselves holding the balance of power. The parliamentary arithmetic only worked for coalition with the Tories, and combining that with a longing for office, their fate was sealed. But in the current scenario with Labour in existential crisis, who knows what the future holds. They may yet rise again.
They were plenty on the Remain side (such as the Greens) who campaigned on a 'remain and reform' platform, recognising that serious problems within the EU need addressing. This was the Labour leader's position also, if not many of his mutinous Blair-era MPs. Certainly my vote was not on the basis of contentment with the status quo - far from it - but because I figure that trade and close cooperation in the single market are surer ways to preserve peace and stability in Europe than the alternative. The history of Europe is a very bloody one.
I get frustrated with heated and unjustified rhetoric, whichever side it comes from. There has been far too much all round, and the atmosphere feels hideously toxic. I know a few people who voted Leave and while we don't agree on that, they are still very much my friends.
However, I must say that UKIP's leader positively revels in toxicity for political ends: proud to be openly insulting of others (as in the EU parliament this week), happy to rubbish climate science, shameless in his use of an image of Syrian refugees to stoke fear in people. He is a national embarrassment, in my opinion. Their one MP (an ex Tory, Douglas Carswell) is much more considered and has openly criticised Farage several times. But now having achieved their raison d'etre, it remains to be seen if the party continues to receive electoral support in future. I'm not convinced they will.
Right now, nothing feels solid. But the Tories will regroup as long as the wealthy are with us; that is primarily why they exist. Who will oppose them in future remains to be seen.
6/30/16, 3:01 PM
Yellow Submarine said...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLCb1cGROAw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1ewRNSfyiI
I think this man has a great future ahead of him...
6/30/16, 3:16 PM
Grebulocities said...
What happened is that two of the more alarmist bloggers misidentified the subtropical jets as the polar jets, and thought that the polar jets had merged, which would be truly insane. One of them is actually a grad student and should have known better, but then again I'm an atmospheric science grad student who just barely scraped through the relevant meteorology class this past semester. The reason I barely passed is that my research is on aerosols and atmospheric chemistry, and like all fields these days we're balkanized, so that aerosol people rarely know much about meteorology. Sometimes even the climatologists and the meteorologists don't know enough about each other's respective fields and make embarrassing errors like this one. I can see myself making that mistake and can imagine my meteorology prof's reaction if I were to blog about it and it made the rounds on the internet!
Here's a Washington Post article. I can vouch that their information is real: it's not just some attempt to pave over something the mainstream doesn't want to address.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2016/06/30/claim-that-jet-stream-crossing-equator-is-climate-emergency-is-utter-nonsense/
6/30/16, 3:19 PM
pygmycory said...
Matt, thanks for the info.
It roughly agrees with what I had already found. Namely, there appears to be a small negative impact on lower-skilled native workers, though usually not a non-measureable effect on the average wage. Some studies find this effect, others don't. There also appears to be upward pressure on housing prices that puts pressure on local people for quite a while after an immigration boom. However, that aspect is poorly studied if at all.
This suggests to me that
a)it is possible JMG may be overstating his case somewhat
b)confounding factors are confusing matters
c)conventional pundits are ignoring the evidence for an effect because they don't care about low-wage workers
d)most of these studies were done in decent economic times. There may be a larger effect during depressions. This is becoming less of a factor now than it was, just because anything done using data post 2008 was done in less-than ideal times.
e)rises in housing costs may be a significant way in which immigration affects less-wealthy people. This also matches my personal experience growing up in and leaving Vancouver.
My best guess is that there is a small effect on low wage workers that is hard to detect due to confounding factors such as automation and offshoring of jobs that are causing major worsening of the labor market for non-elite workers. Rising housing costs are usually ignored in these studies. If they are factored in, you might get a much more obvious impact.
Here's the best article I found:
http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/09-013_15702a45-fbc3-44d7-be52-477123ee58d0.pdf
One of the articles Matt pointed to is very relevant.
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Documents/workingpapers/2015/swp574.pdf
6/30/16, 3:22 PM
Clay Dennis said...
With regard to your comment above about Hillary ending up in a short dogfight with Putin. I was aghast at the report put out last week that 50 or more mid-level staffers in the state department had signed a letter encouraging Obama to use air power to bomb Assad and his forces and force regime change. Not much surprises me any more, but if this was true ( and not just a gimmick to appease the Saudi's) than we are further down the path of elite senility than I thought. I am not sure if these people are so clueless that they don't know the Russians are parked in Syria with a small air force and several Battalions of S-400 anti-aircraft missile batteries. Do they think Putin parked what are widely regarded as the most advanced and effective anti-aircraft system in the world ( until the S-500 is deployed) , at Assads doorstep to fend off attacks from the ISS air force. Did they miss the message of the Russian Cruise missiles launched from previously unknown trawlers in the Caspian to accurately hit targets over a thousand miles away. They are either clueless or they have drunk too deeply of the American Exceptionalism Koolaid and think we can defeat them as easily as the Libyans.
I think that with this kind of thinking coming out of the State department, which is the area of government the Hillary has had the most influence on, there can be no doubt which of the candidates poses the most geopolitical danger.
6/30/16, 3:40 PM
rapier said...
I am sure it will all be a muddied mess but who is to bet against the global elites of liquid modernity. Where have the lost the past 8 years? Name one place.
6/30/16, 4:13 PM
Brian said...
For them, the EU offers a wider range of opportunity for their kids, and with Brexit they see the chance for their kids to live and work anywhere within the union disappearing and they're mad as hell about it.
6/30/16, 4:18 PM
João Cláudio Fontes said...
Why haven't the destituted masses identified with Sanders most then ...?
Like in the 30's , the "normotic" masses seem to be indeed being driven by and to the fascist affluent "saviours of the land" ... any doubt Trump has a fascist discourse ...?And the UKIP ? Or other right-wing parties in Europe ? or some extreme right wing politicians here in Brazil who are leading a coup d'étát agaisnt our Labour's elected president ...?
When (neo)liberal democracy fails , like is failing now as the IMF itself admitted recently , the real affluent people , the "1%" , have no pain in their consciousness to call in the fascist dogs .
And that's what's happening , again ...
6/30/16, 4:23 PM
Sven Eriksen said...
"The generation born with Pluto in Scorpio sextile to Neptune in Capricorn has begun turning 30. [...] That combo is so potent and mysterious it is downright scary."
Oh, I know. Just the other day I was plotting world domination while enjoying my birthday cake...
@JMG
You are really cutting close to the bone this week. A really splendid analysis. I found myself staying awake till the middle of the night just to read it as soon as it was posted. This week's events made me want to contemplate what happens within the self as the delusion of control (as outlined in your post bearing that name) shatters. I came to the conclusion that the ego simply cannot handle it, and in order to avoid melting into a puddle of green goo it escapes into its own house of mirrors where it tries to repair itself by cuddling the fantasies of its own innate superiority over that which it failed to control. A couple of hours later your post came up, and I was both amused that the mirror house symbolism had occurred to you as well, and at the same time I was somewhat stunned to learn someone had actually built an actual structure within which to act this out...
6/30/16, 4:30 PM
Mary said...
Crossover has been observed several times in the last few years. I even have vague memories of it hitting the news a few years back. From an actual meteorologist:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2016/06/climate-system-scientist-claims-jet-stream-crossing-the-equator-is-unprecedented/
June 29th, 2016 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
Paul Beckwith has a masters degree in laser optics, which he has somehow parlayed into being a “Climate System Scientist” to spread alarmism about the climate system...
....There is frequently cross-equatorial flow at jet stream altitudes, and that flow can connect up with a subtropical jet stream. But it has always happened, and always will happen, with or without the help of humans. Sometimes the flows connect up with each other and make it look like a larger flow structure is causing the jet stream to flow from one hemisphere to the other, but it’s in no way unprecedented.
6/30/16, 5:05 PM
Alexandra said...
Granted, that was written over a year ago, but if that is the “model” economy that EU member nations outside the German core are supposed to look forward to, I’d say Brexit is just the tip of the iceberg.
6/30/16, 5:16 PM
Justin said...
Generational backlash is something I think about a lot both as something that people my age (I'm 27) might both be exposed to and commit in the future - after all, people are going to be mad once it becomes apparent that the Baby Boomers basically burned through an entire planet's worth of resources in 80 years. Of course, by the time I expect that sort of stuff to start, I'll have been doing something similar for 30 years - although I've "been good" for the last 3 years or so. I would be interested to read JMG's thoughts on the matter.
Militant leftist-statist movements have always been carried out by young people who have been convinced (rightly or wrongly) that society owes them something and they can take it by force. Most of the killers in Cambodia were 10-15 years old - I'm not saying that anything quite so horrific is likely to happen in the Western world, but who knows where things will go in the next few years.
6/30/16, 5:26 PM
sgage said...
"A couple of hours later your post came up, and I was both amused that the mirror house symbolism had occurred to you as well, and at the same time I was somewhat stunned to learn someone had actually built an actual structure within which to act this out.."
I have for a long time (since the 1970's) thought that the progressive immersion of mankind into more and more technology of its own design, at the expense of experiencing Nature and the Real World, was in fact building a house of mirrors - indeed, that seems to me to be the program of Progress. Another expression I like to use that really puts off my techie friends and relatives is 'control freakery'. But it seems so clear to me that that is what is going on...
Secondly, I have always thought that living in a house of mirrors would certainly lead to such a detachment from reality that it would inevitably lead to psychosis.
As far as I can tell, culturally, here we are.
6/30/16, 5:39 PM
Justin said...
Many heads of zaibatsus and other important Japanese entities can trace their lineage back to feudal Japan. It's a phenomenally stable country, and although the future carrying capacity will likely be in the 5-10 million range (IIRC at the height of the Edo period there was about 30 million due to climate change and pollution, I do hope they can keep being Japanese for centuries to come.
It's kind of weird to think of being part of a millennium-old ethnostate while being of mixed European heritage and being a 2nd generation Canadian. I have to admit the idea of having a continuous culture stretching back 50 generations is appealing in these times.
6/30/16, 5:46 PM
alex carter said...
I AM **NOW** AFFILIATED WITH A PARTY.....
So, I will, at least theoretically, be able to vote for President, assuming what I put into the necessary Race Box is something the people working in the registration office is something they don't mind.
I say this because, being white in Hawaii, where I grew up and lived as a young adult, means it taking months on end to get your car registered, means application papers "round filed" if trying to strive above your station by going to college, etc. It's not that bad in California but these factors are still present to some degree - I've certainly run into obstructionism in attending college or trying to, and it "not being allowed" in the Census of 1990s for me to be white, living where I was. After filling in a race they didn't want to see on the form, I was actually sent a sort of "correction form" by the US census, in which I filled in again that I was white, and put a few lil' swastikas just to drive the point home (nothing like an ancient Indian and Native American symbol to do that!) and the end result, frankly, was probably that Census-wise, I ceased to exist.
The latest Ted Rall cartoon probably sums it up.
http://www.rall.com
6/30/16, 6:13 PM
Bob Brown said...
I think you nailed it. Do you think it is possible to get the average person to care about the environment? Or has the hypocrisy of the elites on environmental issues so muddied things that they will throw the baby out with the bath water when the time comes. I guess history says that they will.
A story for the space bat wings book at:
https://investingwithnature.com/
I've posted once before but in case it was missed.
Thanks,
Bob
6/30/16, 6:56 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
I've also found myself comparing the way that the elite has reacted to Brexit to be a temper tantrum.... Needless to say lots of people are unhappy about it.
In addition, I will still have and use internet, so I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm "declaring independence" from it, as I likely will still use it at least once a day for email and such.... I expect it to be a change, but I will have to seriously rework my life to fully get away from it. My plan now is to cut use to a minimum, see how that goes, and then figure out ways to cut it further. I will still follow this blog up until the print version comes out though, I view having a sane discussion essential.
Finally, question about the print version: will you publish the comments people send in? Printing all of these will be rather difficult (although perhaps you'll get fewer comments), but at the same time, the community we're building here seems like a good one, especially those of us who follow you into the world of print. The back and forth will be far slower, but I'm not sure that's really a flaw, patience is a useful skill/virtue to have.
6/30/16, 7:19 PM
Myriad said...
I have to admit this one's kind of out there. I decided to take a run directly at the deindustrial genre's most over-used trope, the School Lesson, and worked in some gaming clichés (and/or parody of same) as well. And in honor of Joel Caris, there's asteroid mining too. :)
6/30/16, 8:02 PM
Gaianne said...
Please accept to your current Space Bats story contest my offering:
Picnic in the Strawberry Moon
on the blog Moon of Bronze
http://moonofbronze.blogspot.com/
--Gaianne
6/30/16, 9:10 PM
Mark Luterra said...
You may be right. We may be better off if the support of the angry internal proletariat goes to a narcissistic strategist with no real personal causes rather than to one with deep-seated anger and hatred that arises from within their ranks. I'm also frankly amazed that Trump's supporters buy into the idea that he is "one of them" when his entire history is of changing positions and alliances to stay on top. I'm still holding out hope for our generation's equivalent of FDR: someone who is not afraid to discuss the real problems and who has some good ideas about how to go about solving them in a way that unites more than it divides.
6/30/16, 9:28 PM
denis beckmann said...
6/30/16, 9:47 PM
Nancy Sutton said...
Ah, yes... Shelley was right so long ago.. "We are many, they are few"
And the blatant vote/election rigging, most recently by Republicans, and now by the DNC, is a clear indication, to me, that the 'few' are feeling the heat of real democracy. (Unfortunately, being seemingly sociopathic, if they are really threatened, we might have 'induced' panic, [see 'Operation Northwoods, smallpox blankets, Great Depression II, and the numerous agent provocateur and false flag operations in history, etc] ).
Re: your no-longer friend, you can imagine the jaws dropping when I shared, at our Dem primary caucus, that I would vote for Trump over Hillary, saying I'm with Susan Sarandon..who commented on MSM (!) that Bernie's 'revolution' was needed yesterday, and Trump might bring it on quicker than more Clinton BAU. By 2020, enough voters may have seen the light and will vote for Elizabeth Warren (Bernie's twin) ... hopefully, this will be the case even if Hillary is elected.
Re: neocon Hillary, she appointed, as Undersecretary for Asia and Europe, Victoria Nuland, the wife of Robert Kagan, co-author of the PNAC paper. And she admires Henry Kissinger... what more needs to be said. Oh yes... she's announced she'll let Bill 'handle' the economy.... OMG.
6/30/16, 10:34 PM
Nancy Sutton said...
6/30/16, 10:54 PM
John Michael Greer said...
DiSc, well, you know your country a lot better than I do. I had simply read that one of your main Euroskeptic politicians was calling for a referendum.
Scotlyn, that's hilarious, in a wry sort of way. I'll have to try to find that.
Robert, oh, granted. When you cast a vote, you never know if it's going to end up helping you or not. All I addressed in my post was what the forgotten Britons were trying to do, not what they will or won't achieve.
SunErgoSum, no argument. If you ever come over to this side of the pond, I can show you some former industrial cities that will look agonizingly familiar to you -- and you already know how our politics and yours mirror one another.
Scotlyn, hmm! The Federation is a useful metaphor, provided one challenges the core assumptions of the fiction -- and notes that the Prime Directive, like so many contemporary ideals, is purely window dressing. As for barbarism, you, me, and Conan...
Sébastien, thank you for asking! Twilight's Last Gleaming can be bought from the publisher here, with free worldwide delivery -- and yes, they take Euros.
Yossi, it's going to take a long time and a lot of hard work before any issue in today's world can expect a fair and intelligent debate. One of those things...
Matt, of course there are more dimensions than the one I spelled out! The thing I wanted to bring up is that a very, very large issue was being dodged by many of those (not all, but many) who supported remaining in the EU.
Ursachi, the weird thing is that the identical self-defeating approach pervades modern politics. Nobody ever presents a positive vision any more. It's always a choice between a miserable business-as-usual and something even worse. The first movement that figures out how to break out of that bizarre fixation on stating every conflict as awful vs. even worse is probably going to rule the world.
Don, the latest Rasmussen poll has Trump leading Clinton by four percentage points. I think you're in for a surprise -- but of course we'll both just have to wait and see...
Andy, thanks for the correction.
Bryan, exactly. The vote wasn't about the abstraction "Europe," it was about the specific, highly intrusive and corrupt European Union that actually exists. A great many people in the Remain side tried (and are still trying) to confuse the two.
MigrantWorker, thank you. I'm impressed that the Polish community in Britain, as you say, isn't interested in being assigned the role of victim. As I consider the situation here in the US, that's really refreshing.
6/30/16, 11:13 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Matthew, got it -- you're in the contest. If you can put through a comment marked "not for posting" with your email address, I'll be able to contact you if your story is selected.
Patricia, I'm pretty sure the US would respond by threatening nuclear war. From there, everything depends on moment-by-moment decisions on the part of the heads of state and their militaries. In my novel Twilight's Last Gleaming, nuclear war was avoided after three terrifying days on the brink, but the consequences of US defeat (in this case, by China in a proxy war in East Africa) led to severe civil unrest, economic and social collapse, a runaway constitutional convention and the dissolution of the US. That's not the only outcome, though I think it was a plausible one in the terms sketched out in the novel.
Tony, oh, granted -- again, the issue I was trying to raise was why so many people voted for Brexit, not whether they would get what they expected.
John, and that's the big question. If Germany does try to maintain the Eurozone by force, it's going to find out why counterinsurgency warfare sucks, and the long term consequences will almost certainly be very, very grim. On the other hand, by many accounts the German military is barely able to function these days, so any such attempt might end with a humiliating defeat. (There's a near-future thriller for you: Germany responds to Italeave by sending in the troops, only to have the Bundeswehr defeated on the plains of northern Italy by a hastily assembled popular army using light trucks for transport and shoulder-mounted antitank and antiaircraft weapons supplied by, ahem, I'm sure I couldn't say which un-Germanophile major power...)
Jason, I look forward to the first of a long series of annual conferences of the Association of Civilizational Dysfunction Analysts (ACDA), perhaps in some pleasant Cornish tourist spot!
Hereward, thank you! That earns tonight's gold star with tumtum leaves, as well as a good laugh.
Bill, the polls I've read show that Trump does very poorly among African-American voters and better than Clinton among other minorities. See the poll cited earlier for an example -- if you scroll down about two thirds of the way, you'll find these words: "Clinton continues to hold a wide lead among blacks. Trump leads among whites and other minority voters." (Emphasis added.) That's far from the first poll I've seen that has made that observation, by the way.
Averagejoe, I'm impressed by Corbyn. One of the best ways to assess a person, in my experience, is to find out who his or her enemies are, and the Blairite "New Labour" MPs are people I'd be honored to have as enemies -- so I'm definitely on Corbyn's side, at least as a distant well-wisher. If he wins the party election -- and I gather his support among Labour party members remains undiminished -- I hope he can clean house at Westminster and get a backbench that supports the same things that Labour's constituents support, rather than pursuing the consensus of the affluent.
Alex, no argument there. I'm thinking of one of the many funny articles about the referendum in the Daily Mash, demanding that Brexit voters sit down and contemplate the fact that they made Nigel Farage very, very happy.
6/30/16, 11:40 PM
Cortes said...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/30/tesla-autopilot-death-self-driving-car-elon-musk
7/1/16, 12:05 AM
John Michael Greer said...
Unknown, thank you. I see it tolerably often also -- I write like an academic but look like an aging hippie in clothes from secondhand stores, so it's always entertaining to watch certain people do a doubletake and completely redefine me the first time they actually meet me.
Andrew, excellent! That moment of self-knowledge, when you find yourself in the middle of the narrative -- and not necessarily in the place you'd have chosen to find yourself -- is a crucial one.
Lathechuck, exactly. The rule of law is crucial for any sort of stable society, and it's especially important today, when everybody thinks they ought to be able to ignore it when that suits their purposes.
David, good for you. I hope it works out well.
Alex, exactly. It's useful to remember that all this is just a temporary flurry of incidents in the course of the Long Descent.
Jason, why do you want to lump all those things together into a single word? Split them out, find the fissures and fractures between them, and there's a good chance that you can direct your efforts toward one or another and, through hard work, make things actively better. The world's many problems have no single solution, and of course some things aren't problems at all but predicaments, and thus have no solutions at all -- but there are always better and worse adaptations. Choose something and get to work on it; that's the only antidote to despair.
North Coast, I certainly don't consider Trump a good person or a trustworthy one, and I think I've made amply clear that he was never my first choice. All I'm saying is that he's probably going to win, because his opponent has tied herself to the sinking ship of business as usual, and that this might be a good thing, because his opponent is arguably a good deal worse than he is.
Martin, I'll have to read much more about British politics before I venture any kind of detailed discussion of the bar fight going on in the Labour Party just now. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, I respect Corbyn a great deal, and one reason is that the MPs who are trying to unseat him are people I'd be proud to have as enemies. Anyone who's hated so much by such people must have many good qualities!
LatheChuck, I'm frankly not enough of a meteorologist to be sure of what I'm seeing.
.Mallow, that may well be a large part of it, and that suggests in turn some of the ways it might be undercut. By all means lie low; more roundabout methods of shaping the dialogue may be needed for a while.
Robert, Ivan, and Nancy, many thanks for the links!
234567, I don't think it's all that useful to assume that some identifiable set of people (e.g., "sociopaths") are to blame. Human beings will never achieve a system of government that is better than they are, and quite frankly, there's a sociopath in all of us. (One of the reasons I don't find that kind of labeling useful is that it can assist people in distracting themselves from their own dubious actions.) We are what we are, and that being the case, the best we can do is take something that seems to work and try to adapt it in ways that will make it work a little better -- we hope.
Friction Shift, no doubt they'll try. That's one of the reasons I consider Nigel Farage a likely prime minister in the future, because if the elites refuse to do what the voters tell them to do, the voters will do whatever it takes to make that happen.
7/1/16, 12:20 AM
Unknown said...
The author, Thierry Meyssan, "considers that nothing can now prevent the collapse of the system. However, he points out, what is at stake is not the European Union itself, but the institutions which enable the domination of the world by the United States, and the integrity of the United States themselves."
His take is different to yours, but he winds up at a destination you have predicted, the breakup of the USA.
Interesting.
And a climate data point, here in Tasmania we have our first plover chicks on the ground, well over a month early!
Cheers
eagle eye
7/1/16, 12:35 AM
Phil Knight said...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/19/texas-secession-movement-brexit-eu-referendum
7/1/16, 1:25 AM
drhooves said...
Looking forward to the release of "Dark Age America", and trying to determine some of the major milestones coming up - for all of us, regardless of what end of the political spectrum we might want to see be successful...
7/1/16, 1:33 AM
Dau Branchazel said...
Check this article for starters:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-01/hate-crime-reports-surge-in-britain-after-brexit-vote-to-leave/7559946?WT.mc_id=newsmail
This is kick back against a specific class of unwanted immigrants. And I truly fear the worst is yet to come. Consider those African- americans in Twilight's Last Gleaming who upon seeing the celebrations in the south, and hearing some of the old patriotic songs being sung, shrink off into the night, quietly discomfited by the resurgent confederate vibes. Well drop Britannia Rules The Waves into that story and I think it paints a sadly succinct picture of what we're seeing in Britain. The dissolution of the union seems nigh.
7/1/16, 2:04 AM
Sébastien Louchart said...
I figured out Karnac Books was proposing free worldwide delivery soon after I commented here. Needless to say, I put my order at once. And I paid with sterling pounds. A hat tip to Brits I think :)
I've read your recent comment about the Bundeswehr. Back almost 20 years ago, I got to have intensive training exercises with BW units in Germany at large scale. I was a private at this time, serving one year as a volunteer in the french armed forces in Germany. I remember having noticed some kind of real laid-back attitude from german officers and rank and file as well. Besides, their stuff was superior to ours by and large. It's not that they lacked discipline but they weren't committed to operations. I've then been discussing the issue with some junior officers from my batallion and they said to me the Bundeswehr has no capability, moral or technical whatsoever to launch any overseas operations. For historical reasons, they somehow lack the motivation for it. Moreover, it seems that without the sheer U.S. manpower in Germany, the german armed forces could barely withstand any conventional warfare invasion. I quit the army long ago but I kept some contact. The situation seems to have worsened beyond the Rhine regarding military capacity. My mind is that the German military is plagued by the same defects that plague the US's only on a smaller scale. Note that the situation of french military is not better, though.
7/1/16, 2:34 AM
MP said...
I've noted to some of my more lefty friends that supporting a non-democratic government just because they do what you like (at the moment) is a surefire recipe for long-term disaster. We have to be able to make the arguments and run the politics for good working conditions and environmental protections in our own country. They don't want to have to fight. But these things are natural rights - these are rights fought for and won. And all the better to have people in the country agreeing that this is how they want to live. JMG, as you noted, the UK had done it before. Lordy, lord. Generalisation alert: The left is filled with bloodless weenies who would rather depend on faceless non-elected technocrats because they get what they want without having to work hard for it. But what happens when those technocrats decide to run things a different way? The PIIGS can tell you...
7/1/16, 2:36 AM
MP said...
With all this going on here in the UK - I was wondering if there were people in the London area that would like to meet up sometime. Sort of an ADR-support group. And if we are so minded perhaps we can move to joining the Green Wizards Association (Robert's Rules of Order included)! I've set up an email address: adrguild (dot) london (at) gmail (dot) com
7/1/16, 2:36 AM
Katrin M said...
Imagine, you go back about 25 years time. A new political party emerges that, miraculously, promotes the politics that you personally favour. Let's call the party 'MyFlavour' Party. Miraculously, 'MyFlavour' Party proves moderately popular. It gains some MPs and also MEPs. Other European countries also have the 'MyFlavour' Party which gains popularity europe-wide, but not so much that it could take over from the established parties. But they also send quite a few MEPs to Brussels and europe-wide alliances are forged. Then there is the economic crisis of 2008. 'MyFlavour' Party makes all the right noises and starts winning some general elections all over Europe, also in your country. 'MyFlavour' Party holds a substantial amount of power within the institution of the EU.
Would you complain about the EU, being a power-grapping entity, entrenched in an harmful ideology?
Jason Heppenstall
You have specialist knowledge on the EU monetary policy. You should, if you have not already, write to the First Minister of Scotland and voice your concerns. She might well need in the coming months. You should consider that as you patriotic duty. And, I am not facetious.
For all those UK voters who used the EU- referendum as a protest vote for the lack of localism:
Alan Banks, multimillionaire sponsor of UKIP stated that he is setting up a new party to replace UKIP. Nigel Farage is not welcome. (Guardian 29 June 2016, OMG I am tremling so much typing – guardian - that I nearly spilled my instant bought from Morrisons).
My bet is that Farage will be blamed for the nastier parts of the leave campaign. Anyhow, the purpose of this new party is to unite the Leave movement and take over as official opposition to the ruling Conservative Party. When I last had a cursory look at the UKIP Wales manifesto, giving more power to local structures, such as town councils, was promised. So, here is an immense opportunity to join a brand new, ambitious political party and shape their manifesto to your liking.
7/1/16, 4:33 AM
Nigwil said...
'A Note to My Friends Who Voted Leave'
https://medium.com/extra-extra/a-note-to-my-friends-who-voted-leave-85b8c169b0ce#.8353tjaq3
..wherein the author attempts to lay out the error of the Exiters ways, and to make it quite clear that they are to be held to account for any mess which results. He actually completely misses the point that the voters have had enough of all the alleged 'advantages' of modern economic theory and its clearly inadequate execution.
Well, 'inadequate' enough for 52% of voters to express their dissatisfaction in a pretty unambiguous way.
The benefits he cites all support the 'upper classes', while, as you note, the disbenefits he presents are already being felt by the 52%. In fact it is amusing that his list of 'disbenefits' is quite trivial compared to many of the discomforts already endured by his audience - showing his complete disconnect with the lot of the ordinary people. It is quite understandable that the 52% have a) nothing to loose, and b) would quite chuffed to see some 'suit' being obliged to live the same life as they must live.
Its definitely a bit of a Black Swan this isn't it, as who would have guessed that this event would have put the pistol to the head of business as usual, and pulled the trigger!
7/1/16, 4:36 AM
bedroom-magick said...
I'm interested what you think about scotaldn, which appeared to vote overwhelmingly in favor of the EU. In the surface it would seem as if this runs against your argument. But maybe its a case that for scotalnd, voting in the EU represents a vote against cameron and the 'business as usual' politics?
Also - 60 thousand new people have signed up to the labour party here in the last few days. No one knows exactly what their intentions are but there is some speculation its actually to oust Corbyn. Hope not
7/1/16, 5:29 AM
Jason B said...
7/1/16, 6:43 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/donald-trump-hispanic-voters-223845
No suggestion that he is anywhere close to Clinton, just discussion about how far behind he really is (70/30 or 85/15?). The wording of that quote you cite is unclear; they might be saying ((Trump leads among whites)+(Trump leads among other minorities)) or (Trump leads among (whites+other minorities)). Considering latinos are generally a small portion of the sample in these polls, and hence have a very large sampling error if you try to look at them in isolation, I suspect it is the latter.
As for Rasmussen showing Trump up +4, three other polls released on the same day show him down by -4, -4, and -10. In 2012 Rasmussen statistically turned out to be biassed about +5 in the Republican direction compared to actual voting results. There's a lot of variation in how pollsters reach their respondents and what "likely voter" model they use, and they each tend to have a particular systemic bias. And the "likely voter" model for 2016 might have especially big problems, considering the large number of people frustrated that either Sanders is NOT their party's nominee or that Trump IS their nominee. It is really unclear whether Trump has drawn in more or fewer general election voters than he has alienated. And unclear whether Trump will motivate more democratic voters than Clinton will alienate.
It's such a strange time...
7/1/16, 6:56 AM
Phil Harris said...
… and for all across the pond.
There are two significant news items from Britland this week. ;-)
Firstly, England lost an important European football match to Iceland.
(There is no British team; never has been.)
Secondly, The Royal Air Force (which presently has a UK remit) just took delivery of what seems to be its first F-35.
“It never rains but it pours” as we say here usually during Tennis tournaments or harvesting schedules.
best
Phil H
7/1/16, 6:59 AM
Nastarana said...
I also note that the former governor supports a non-interventionist foreign policy, including in the ME, which ought to appeal to a war weary American public. I suspect that much might depend on the competence and willingness to not go for the bland of the third parties this year.
7/1/16, 7:34 AM
Ben Johnson said...
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/driver-killed-in-self-driving-car-accident-for-first-time/
In the article they cite the number 130 million miles traveled by autopilot cars with no fatalities. Which I suppose is fine, as long as everyone drives them on closed test tracks.
7/1/16, 8:14 AM
Matt said...
I say: "Where's Shane when you need him?" ;^)
Toodle Pip!
Matt
7/1/16, 8:24 AM
David, by the lake said...
7/1/16, 8:44 AM
MigrantWorker said...
I think this has to do with the specifics of the Polish psyche. We have no problem with declaring ourselves victims - but God forbid others branding us as one! ;)
That, and we have an unwelcome advantage of already having lived, well within our living memory, under a regime disconnected from the population. So moral panics like the one over Brexit just don't have much appeal to us.
MigrantWorker
7/1/16, 9:26 AM
wa1kij said...
7/1/16, 9:41 AM
Unknown said...
Why this split in policies? This can easily be explained by looking at the composition of the European Parliament over the years (the EP has limited power, but it does mirror the composition of the national Parliaments and governments quite closely, so it's useful data and easier to consult). Ever since it exists, the conservative/centrist alliance has been the largest fraction, with the social democratic fraction as runner up, and together they usually have a majority. So that's how Europe votes and which parties and policies they support. And that is reflected in the policies the EU has implemented over the years: about 2/3 neoliberal with 1/3 social democrat elements. A political institution is a tool, and this tool has been used for the goals of those in power.
Therefore, without the EU, European policies wouldn't be any less neoliberal. In fact, they probably would be more neoliberal since smaller entities have to compete more harshly for the favours of capital. The EU already has slapped corporate giants like Google and Microsoft with fines. Do you think that's an option for, say, Slovakia or Portugal?
So the most productive strategy to change the status quo is to obtain power in the EU and use it as a tool, for goals that can't be realized as isolated country.
Lastly, the association of xenophobia with the leave camp shouldn't be so casually brushed off as a rhetorical device used by the remain camp. The leave camp's elite enthusiastically employed anti-immigrant sentiment in their platform. While I agree that there are large disenfranchised population groups who are understandably protesting against the status quo, that does not mean that we should let an elite blame foreigners (be it immigrants or EU) for everything, because that will not improve the situation, only make it worse (and conveniently direct attention away from the elite in power). Already racist violence has peaked after the referendum: regardless of whether their frustration is justified or not, too many people are taking it as permission to get violent already. I cannot in good conscience overlook that.
-Mox
7/1/16, 9:43 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
Polls are not precise, but neither are they worthless
7/1/16, 10:15 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
(ducking rotten tomatoes...)
7/1/16, 10:20 AM
Yellow Submarine said...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/01/loretta-lynch-and-bill-clinton-just-made-hillarys-email-problems-even-worse/
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/30/opinions/bill-clinton-loretta-lynch-meeting-opinion-callan/
http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/30/exclusive-was-bill-clinton-plea-bargaining-with-the-attorney-general/
This is one of the reasons why I think Trump will win and win big. It's not just that so many of the senile elites are incompetent and crooked as hell, its the fact that the Clintons and their cronies (Lynch was appointed US Attorney for Washington D.C. by Bill Clinton prior to being promoted by Obama to AG and this isn't the first Clinton scandal she's been implicated in) keep handing Trump so much ammunition. As the say goes, when you find yourself in a hole, the first rule is to stop digging...
7/1/16, 10:32 AM
Sven Eriksen said...
Yes, I think you are right.
I tend to view the process by which humanity increasingly isolates itself within an artificially created environment of its own making as and outward reflection of an inner process in which the mind descends a downward spiral into a mirror house of its own dysfuctional abstractions. I think the underlying motivation behind the descent is the belief that through doing so the ego can preserve itself through sustaining the delusion of control. The delusion shatters at the moment when it becomes too painfully impossible to ignore that That Which Must Be Controlled has a life and consciousness of its own and will not merely react mechanically to the manipulations levelled at in a way that supports the agenda of the manipulator (examples range all the way from Gaia herself to voters who voted in their own interest rather than acting in accordance with the narratives they were being fed), and that as I said earlier the standard ego repair procedure is to degenerate into further delusions of one's own innate superiority, which is what all that screaming about racist idiot xenophobic nazi f***tards is supposed to accomplish.
It doesn't work, of course, and given that it is the realization that the Other has a life and consciousness of its own that shatters the delusion, I'd say that goes a long way to explain why the history of thought in what is arguably the most dysfynctional, abstract and control-obsessed civilization in recorded history can be neatly summarized as the "war against consciousness".
As you said, culturally here we are. Though I believe that when you call it psychotic, you are grossly understating the matter.
Then again, just because they're all doing it, doesn't mean you and I need to, does it? ;-)
Cheers,
S.
7/1/16, 10:32 AM
MawKernewek said...
If there is a 'race box' on any form, or 'ethnicity' as they usually call it over here, I now have a personal policy of filling in "Human".
7/1/16, 10:51 AM
Christophe said...
What an amazing encapsulation of so many of your posts over the years. I think there is much more to be teased out of the idea that all our efforts and choices, individually and collectively, are always towards adapting to our changing circumstances. That idea seems like a pretty powerful protection spell against ensorcellment by utopian beliefs like Progress and Globalism.
How you responded to a confusing post that highlighted all the problems we face is equally amazing. Hearing the despair in the closing line "Is any of it really that significant?", you responded with compassion like a guide who has been in that dark fog and knows the way out.
I would love to become as open to others and their differing opinions as you are. So far, I still find differing opinions threatening to my own and often resort to argument rather than compassion and guidance. Thanks for guiding us all by the example of your thoughtful responses.
Also, amid the endless post-mortem of the Brexit vote, Glenn Greenwald has penned a thorough and insightful article. Some of his ideas and vocabulary could easily have come from your blog posts.
https://theintercept.com/2016/06/25/brexit-is-only-the-latest-proof-of-the-insularity-and-failure-of-western-establishment-institutions/
7/1/16, 11:01 AM
Bob Patterson said...
7/1/16, 11:18 AM
alison said...
I voted leave myself as did many of my friends and neighbours and we all resent the idea that ev1 who voted leave is over 50, uneducated/stupid and an out and out racist. The majority I know who voted out are well educated intelligent people, many of whom spent time teasing out truth from lies, from both sides of the debate and made their decision.
Yes a minority of racists and bigots jumped on the leave bandwagon, but that is no where near the whole story despite what the MSM would like to portray.
I have a few interesting points to make, many leavers were less bothered about numbers of immigrants and more about the fact there is no control of who can emigrate based on skill sets and criminal records from within the EU. But many were worried that so many countries within the EU are in effect "bankrupt" and the whole thing looks set to implode in the near future.
There was also much concern about the waste of money within the EU system for example 300 mil a year to move back and forth between strasburg and brussels as no one can agree to keep it in one place.
Many older people I have spoken to felt they were betrayed in the 70's and they voted for a basic trade agreement NOTHING ELSE and the rest had been inflicted on them by lying politicians. There was a genuine feeling of "putting things right" for their kids and grandkids, which is ironic given the media portrayal of youngsters feeling betrayed by the older generation.
The mainstream parties in the UK had long used the EU as "the big bad" to blame stuff on, like not being able to cut tax on power bills or remove tax on womens sanitary products (mens razers being tax free oddly, how is shaving more essential than them? Then they are shocked when people don't believe them telling us the EU is actually a good thing.
On thurs morning I went shopping and there was alot of smiling happy people and a general feeling the people had done something for themselves for once, its not something I have ever experienced before tbh and I believe if those in the south of the country (majority remain voters) try to water the brexit down or keep the country in by the back door so to speak they could have massive protests and even riots in the centre and north of England the feelings are that strong.
7/1/16, 12:21 PM
Robert said...
After all, who exactly was it that walked into Walmart and bought all of the cheap imported goods on the shelves? It's not as if there was some grand conspiracy to cover up the fact that Walmart was basically forcing its' suppliers to offshore jobs to countries with cheaper labor and lax environmental regulations. I remember reading about this trend in the early nineties in the tiny local paper of the Appalachian town I grew up in.
Then there is NAFTA. A friend of mine runs what passes for a large cattle operation in the region of Appalachia that I previously mentioned. He has repeatedly told me that it was all but impossible to find a farmer any where in the country that was opposed to NAFTA when it was being considered. According to him, they were all convinced they were going to get rich selling agricultural goods to Mexico. He also says that it wasn't hard to find information that suggested the most likely result of burying all the small farmers in Mexico with cheap corn from the US was a massive immigration push to the north.
Finally, I don't understand how exactly Trump is any meaningful way different from any other politician of the last forty plus years. As far as I can tell, he selling the same fairy dust--unending prosperity and growth--that practically every major party politician in the world has been peddling for the last century. Again going back to the area where I grew up in Appalachia, Trump has been telling anyone who will listen that if elected he will personally revive the Central Appalachian coal industry. How exactly he plans to do this is apparently a mystery, as he never gives any particulars. Yet, his promises are dead on arrival unless he has some magical powers that allow him to alter the geology of the region (the best coal seams were mined years ago and what's left can't be mined profitably).
7/1/16, 12:32 PM
superpeasant said...
However, the main force for Brexit at the top is from extreme neo-liberal right-wingers; both politicians and the ultra-rich free-marketeers who are financing UKIP. There have been lots of false promises that leaving the EU will 'free up' £350m per week, which, instead of going to Brussels, they would use to support our National Health Service. As soon as the vote was over they admitted that the £350 was a lie and in fact many of those pressing for Brexit want to privatise the NHS. Of course the interesting outcome is going to occur when 'the masses' realise that their neo-liberal 'partners' have cheated them and that their lives are going to be made even harder.
Yes, the EU has become a neo-liberal organisation, but that influence has very largely come from post-Thatcher London. Continental Europe has traditionally been much more socially cohesive and community minded with relatively high taxation. It is the influence of Thatcher/Reaganism which has changed it, so it is a bit unfair for Britons to blame that on the EU.
7/1/16, 1:15 PM
onething said...
"To go along with the theme of the elites rising up because the unwashed masses refuse to do as they demand, yesterday Neil DeGrasse Tyson floated the idea of replacing democracy with a one-world government whose sole mandate would be "all policy shall be based on the weight of evidence". "
Geez, I was expecting for capitalism itself to come into severe criticism in the near future, but I was not expecting the elites to openly mock democracy. And the weird thing is, they are not royals so under what sort of natural right to rule will they try to convince society?
Ah, but Tyson simply wants his group to be in charge. So, it's a religious takeover. I guess they can fight with the Christian right for that privilege!
7/1/16, 1:47 PM
superpeasant said...
7/1/16, 1:50 PM
Kevin said...
I suppose I could just let it go and allow my friend to enjoy his happy delusions, but that doesn't really satisfy me. He was tremendously stoked about the idea of driving to Whole Foods and tanking up on solar power, in which I detect what Mr, Kunstler aptly calls the master wish, that of driving to Walmart forever. I suspect that Musk has developed to a superlative degree the art of telling people things they want to hear. It's a delusional bubble that simply screams to be popped.
7/1/16, 2:01 PM
latefall said...
@JMG, John, Sébastien
I would greatly say a few things on this topic, and certainly some more on Dr. Schäuble (which will have to wait until profanity is allowed). He is explicitly on record for being an enemy of democracy (even before the Greek show started). It is long overdue that he is let go. Before he became chief enforcer of the exterior, he held the post for the interior, and was instrumental in coining the term "Stasi 2.0". As tools go he is one of the decidedly blunter variant.
Unfortunately I don't have too much time right now, so I let others start speaking for me:
https://youtu.be/szIGZVrSAyc?t=2764
Let me just float another tiny nutshell: The EU was one of the things that kept the Washington Consensus from completely overrunning Europe. At the same time it came with concentration of power in higher echelons, which were naturally targeted by all sort of competing elites - leading to a huge mess, and gridlock when addressing issues such as Greek vs German competitiveness, or Germany's unflinching devotion to export at all costs (helped along as much by internal elites as by Anglo "free market" influence - much to the chagrin of France).
The German armed forces are another interesting story, for which I can recommend https://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.fr (small wars journal author, ex-airforce, economic background), or the translated buzz around "Armee im Aufbruch: Zur Gedankenwelt junger Offiziere in den Kampftruppen der Bundeswehr" (the title is in marked contrast to much of the discussion). Unfortunately I don't think there are many English language articles because the narratives don't exactly jive well.
7/1/16, 2:20 PM
Varun Bhaskar said...
I just finished an article on the Brexit, I'll be posting it tomorrow.
What I find awesome is that the British, the self-same jerks who built the current system of wealth pumps, are the ones to strike what is probably the most important blow against it in the last half century. I have no idea if they'll succeed, the propaganda backlash against them is already in full swing. Polls are being published showing a large number of people who regret vote, who would change their mind if given another change, and etc...I feel like the EU is preparing one of its famous coups by democracy, but I think they'll probably bite off more than they can chew with the Brits.
I have a personal toast that I like to do during India's independence day. "To the British, the biggest bunch of ba*tards, to ever ba*tard themselves an empire. May they prosper until the sun sets eternal, far far away from us."
As for polling, I'm learning to ignore it. There are too many flaws in the field of statistics, I believe Tom Lewis had a good post about it some time ago. I'm going with my gut, and my gut tells me to be afraid. Let's all hope for the best.
Regards,
Varun
7/1/16, 2:47 PM
Matthias Gralle said...
First, an acquaintance of mine, a German young man married to a British woman and whom I have always known as kind and sweet-mannered, posted on Facebook "New Guiness World Record: Largest intelligence test ever #remain #ukreferendum". This is possibly the most succinct statement possible of the condescending attitude towards Leave voters.
Second, before Poland entered the EU, a considerable part of the German population was worried about "swarms" of cheap Polish labourers. Germany and several other EU members negotiated a gradual opening of the labour market to the new EU members, and by the time the transition period was over and the labour market was completely free, Poland was doing so well that in fact some Germans now prefer working in Poland. Labour preferred to immediately and completely open the UK labour market to the new members.
Now to the question I have. The UK has been in deep economic trouble since 2008, with unskilled labour taking the hardest hits, as far as I know. Nevertheless, large numbers of refugees camp at Calais, constantly trying to cross the Channel by all means possible. Also, as far as I know, Eastern European migrants still prefer working in the UK to working in Germany or other relatively well-off EU members. The minimum hourly wage in the UK (as far as I could find out), is GBP 7,50 and therefore (at least until Brexit) considerably higher than in Germany. I seem to be missing some piece of the puzzle. How does the economic pain and high unemployment in the UK combine with a labour market that is so attractive to immigrants? Are living expenses so much higher in the UK?
7/1/16, 3:51 PM
Cortes Kid said...
I think you'll appreciate the story line even though it is at the edges of the contest criteria, being about a simultaneous collapse/progress scenario. I have allowed for a solar amplification technology (palladium-based LENR) that greatly extends solar's versatility but isn't a cure-all for our energy predicament. Richard Heinberg's recent quote, "The ability to harness energy creates wealth and confers social power," nicely illustrates one of the central ideas of this very short story.
I wish I'd had more time, but supporting a family takes approximately 98% of my energy!
If I missed this one, I'll just have to try again.
Thanks for the great essays--I hope to comment much more.
Paul.
7/1/16, 4:15 PM
zach bender said...
7/1/16, 4:31 PM
Gabriela Augusto said...
7/1/16, 4:41 PM
alex carter said...
Do you want neo-Nazis? Because this is how you get neo-Nazis.
This article pretty much describes my childhood in Hawaii, except it wasn't just within the school, it was everywhere.
And yes even the neo-Nazis let me down, since they seemed to be mostly interested in fighting each other rather than doing what I thought any group of their type ought to be doing: Helping little old ladies cross the street, cleaning up highways, donating blood, etc. As JMG describes, the neat young people cleaning up the park, smiling with freshly-brushed teeth.
You only get that when you get a group that's not a tiny fringe, but one that has some real size and that starts to edge into the mainstream.
And when "elite" schools in the heard of Liberaldom* start to teach white kids that they're second-rate, and they come home and tell their parents, and their parents give out the usual mealy-mouthed platitudes, living as they do in a nostalgic world where black people still aren't served at the Woolworth's lunch counter, well, these kids grow up, you see ...
*and here let me vent a recent disappointment with liberaldom. I listen to Alan Colms on the radio a fair amount, and last night a caller mentioned Rosa Luxemburg and Alan had no idea who she was. Even Rush Limbaugh, kept in a dark cave somewhere and fed news clippings and Slurm, knows who Rosa Luxemburg was. I'm sort of coming around to the theory that Alam Colms is simply paid to act the part of a "liberal radio talk show host" and in reality it's all about the paycheck.
7/1/16, 5:45 PM
alex carter said...
A very good article on the elusive and media-shy "The Hipcrime Vocab" - read him while you can, he seems to be hiding further and further back in the gorse, if they have gorse in Wisconsin.
Basically, brexit seems to have been voted for by those who have been screwed over by industrialism and internationalism. Maybe some elites, but largely the working class.
7/1/16, 5:48 PM
Rod Barrett said...
I have 'pushed' it on to a few friends, maybe some will read it, I don't know.
I have also left an email to the general in-box of the LibDems in response to their 'spam' and will cc Labour too.
Dear whoever is the best/most willing person to reply,
I replied to an email from Tim Farron without realising it was a dead address, also got a similar email from Mr Ashdown not long after. I’ve un subscribed from the robot mailing list but will correspond with real people. My reply was:-
Tim,
The xenophobic aspect of the exit campaign had nothing to do with my decision to vote leave. It is worrying to be on the same side as Nigel Farage, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson.
I voted leave because I believe that the EU is evolving into an un-democratic authoritarian instrument of capital and that the non-elite (middle and working class perhaps) are suffering across all of the EU as a result.
I don’t know how I ended up on some ‘Remain’ mailing lists. I used to be sympathetic to the LibDems (never a supporter though) but you burnt your boats with me by going into government with the Tories.
I hope the Leave majority will act as a catalyst for the development of a beneficial relationship between the UK and the rest of the world based on respect of sovereignty and mutual interests. There are some interesting domestic issues that have been illuminated by this referendum. The result will also have profound consequences across Europe where sizeable factions are against the current direction the EU is going.
Let’s hope that Jeremy Corbyn grows some balls and takes advantage of the vacuum, or can play John the Baptist to the yet unknown JC. There, I’ve given myself away
Yours sincerely,
Rod Barrett.
In humour, I offer you Johnathan Pie:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_2841396845&feature=iv&src_vid=jGC5S3ag1q0&v=UPWNh28AzRc The pre-amble is a bit lame but please persist to the rant content.
I was just letting this lie until I read an article referenced from here https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2016/07/01/post-brexit-uk-camerlot-revealed-as-out-of-touch-so-liberal-press-goes-out-of-mind/ in the comments to this http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/outside-hall-of-mirrors.html
The latter piece articulated so much (to me anyway) about the current state of affairs that I am relaying it. I got on your mailing list through whatever, and this is my response. Please do not treat it as spam.
Yours sincerely,
Rod Barrett.
Sorry that I don't know how to highlight the 'nesting' in this comment. I would have prefered to email it but can't find an adress.
Rod Barrett.
7/1/16, 7:14 PM
jessi thompson said...
PS don't write in Mickey Mouse, it's illegal. My cousin got in trouble for that.
7/1/16, 7:29 PM
Dau Branchazel said...
There used to be firebombings in Perth against Chinese restaurants instead of against mosques.
Yes, since Howard was in power the the rhetoric against Muslims has ramped up, and even Pauline Hanson has gone from yapping on about the Asianistaion of Australia to the Islamisation of Australia. There has been a shift in who the predominat hatred has been directed at.
I think this is due not just to simple dog-whistling, though that has played a part, but also to the fact that since the first gulf war, Australia has been at war in the Middle East, and before that, our "enemies" were predominantly in Asia. China is still perceived as an enemy, and hence there is anti-Chinese sentiment as well. There is more to it. There is the fact that Chinese business are often state-owned so when they buy up land, it is a sovereignty issue, particularly for Indigenous people, one of whom specifically called me once to discuss the matter because the time I spent in China and Hong Kong as an activist.
And I wasn't just saying that jobs was the only issue at stake, though even Dutton and Hanson use that concept directly if you have been paying attention. What I'm saying is that racism is playing a role in these matters. A big role. Racism didn't die with the advent of multiculturalism in Australia. And you could attribute even more of the blame to the shock jocks and media for repeating things like illegals, or reserving the word terrorist for people who do dumb violent things and claim its on behalf of Islam.
7/1/16, 7:34 PM
Unknown said...
@Ramaraj--If the older generation are immigrants and the youth are native born, this is normal. The younger generation has grown up in literally a different world, so they don't think the wisdom and experience of their elders applies.
You get the most respect for the advice of elders in societies where things change slowly.
7/1/16, 7:46 PM
Justin said...
For instance, here in Canada, it's pretty normal to call someone racist and xenophobic for questioning the virtues of unchecked property speculation and purchasing by Asian buyers who obtained their riches through questionable means - never mind that there's a Chinese millionaire for every ten Canadians - better hope they all don't come here, or they will literally own us. One should remember that populist hatred of Jews in Nazi Germany (and nearly everywhere else in Europe at one time or another) was certainly irrational, excessive and reprehensible, but not exactly created in a vacuum.
Eventually if enough normal thoughts and ideas are declared racist, people will simply decide that they're racists and that's OK.
7/1/16, 7:55 PM
Unknown said...
Regarding the US election--
National polls don't count for much as the President isn't elected directly. Only state by state breakdowns of popular vote are predictive. The workings of the Electoral College make it difficult though not impossible for a close election to be thrown into the House; Bush v. Gore wasn't and that was nearly a dead heat.
The Bill Clinton administration was the only period in decades when both the employment rate and average income of African Americans went up. Hasn't happened before or since, including under Obama. It's no wonder that AAs preferred Mrs. Clinton to Sanders. If AAs vote for Trump in any significant numbers, that would be an indication of massive political unrest, as they are the most reliable voting bloc for both loyalty and turnout in general elections that the Democratic Party has.
Telephone polls skew older and richer because younger people either don't have land lines or screen their calls. I'm continually pestered by phone surveyors and I always cut them off because I don't want people I don't know making money off my opinions, nor do I want to be taken as representative of some large demographic that didn't select me to speak for them. Also, people are no longer flattered to be asked their opinion; they know what the deal is and they lie. I think a lot of pollsters are heading for a Dewey Beats Truman moment.
7/1/16, 8:26 PM
jessi thompson said...
7/1/16, 8:32 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Dandy, I'm inclined to agree.
Bill, a valid point.
Spanish Fly, the thought of a rewrite of de Sade as "120 Days of EU" is charming in the extreme! Thank you.
Rebecca, the contrast between establishment talking heads indulging in namecalling and Trump talking about substantive issues is one we're likely to see over and over again. I wonder if the talking heads will ever figure out that they're quite literally recruiting new Trump voters every time they do that.
Eric, that's why I think the class issue is the elephant in the room. Everybody's willing to talk about the problems of globalization, sure, but not when it's a matter of what globalization is doing to those ruddy peasants in England's or America's rust belt. The issue with environmental protection is similar -- have you noticed that every significant policy being pushed by the mainstream greens imposes costs on the working classes and funnels benefits to the affluent? I'll be doing a post on this down the road a bit.
Matt, thanks for the correction. I seem to have been misinformed.
Peter VE, making a living is always the challenge in moving to the Rust Belt. If you can figure out how to parlay your architectural skills into a career that doesn't depend on locality, that's probably your best bet. I hope it works out!
Bob, sure. Try this essay from the moderate-right magazine The National Interest, which compares the foreign and military policy stances of the two presumptive candidates. It's rather aggressively pro-Trump -- The National Interest has no time for neocons like Clinton -- but the points it makes are by and large valid.
Donald, artists and writers who go for the large markets live or die by the voice of the conventional wisdom, which as already noted, favors the influence of the affluent. For such people, to go against the consensus is to commit professional suicide -- they could kiss off publishing contracts with big London book firms, recording or distribution with the big names, etc. One of the reasons I publish with small and medium presses is that I prefer the independence that gives me; another reason, of course, is that by and large the big boys won't touch the ideas I discuss with a ten-foot pole.
7/1/16, 9:30 PM
John Michael Greer said...
JimBob, your theory makes a great deal of sense. Thank you.
Joe, I don't mind a correction at all. As for Britain, remember that the entire industrial world has run off the rails at this point!
Ramaraj, it's not just individualism. It's a lethal blindness to the hard-earned lessons of the past, and will be paid for in blood.
Onething, nah, not the values that the affluent actually hold -- what the poor and working classes reject are the values the affluent claim to hold, such as racial tolerance and environmentalism, because those values are consistently used as excuses to dump more costs onto the lower rungs of the social ladder and send more benefits to the higher rungs.
Ramaraj, I don't expect to see it end well at all. China and India both need to expand their domestic markets for their manufactures, and yet both countries are bringing in automation, which causes jobs to be lost and thus contracts the domestic markets. Until something shakes the grip of the myth of progress on the minds of the people in charge, that sort of babbling idiocy is inevitable.
Lewis, I won't argue.
Brian, good to hear. One of the few things that could head off a real mess just now is if a significant fraction of the affluent extracted their heads from a certain biologically unlikely orifice and noticed that the rest of the population has just about lost patience with being treated like dirt by their soi-disant betters.
Troy, can you get me a link for Tyson's rant? I'm rubbing my hands together with glee, contemplating a post...
Golocyte, if somebody occupies the middle ground (other than fascists), there isn't an unoccupied middle ground for them to exploit, now is there? Of course it's always possible for ordinary politicians to move into that space; it's when they don't that the folks with armbands and jackboots get power.
Lucretia, I did indeed. It's been heartening to see a few voices of reason!
Chloe, well, we'll see. It's actually quite easy to keep even desperate and determined people from engaging in mass migration: you require proof of legal residency in order to get a job or receive any social benefits, any employer that hires illegal migrants gets slapped with crippling fines, and migrants who are caught are promptly deported. Since there are many different places migrants can go, those countries that enforce such policies will be largely left alone.
Andrew, I used to get that kind of guff quite often before I got a couple of books in print -- once you're a published writer, even if you don't make a lot of money, a lot of status-conscious people back down. Sneering arrogance has been trendy among the well-to-do for a good long time -- and I could get behind a movement to Make America Tactful Again!
7/1/16, 10:09 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Onething, true enough.
Ricardo, that's fascinating. What you're saying, if I may summarize, is that the EU has mandated a level of propaganda in education comparable to that in the Soviet Union. I figured a long time ago that the people who used to work for Pravda and Izvestia in the Soviet era now work for the US media, but I hadn't realized that another cadre of Soviet propagandists got hired by the EU... ;-)
Susan, thank you! I'll know that change is in the air when THE HAMPTONS ARE NOT A DEFENSIBLE POSITION starts showing up on bumper stickers...
Gottfried, thanks for the corrections.
Alex, it could certainly be a bunch of working class toughs in Army surplus gear -- that's basically what the SA was in the 1920s.
Clay, the one difference between my experience and yours is that from what I've seen, it's not so much whether people think the status quo can survive, but whether they think it should survive -- with or without cosmetic reforms, to be sure.
Unknown, exactly! Schoolyard taunts, temper tantrums, and the kneejerk vilification of anybody who disagrees with even the smallest detail of their version of the conventional wisdom do not impress anyone who hasn't drunk their koolaid. The more of that we see on the Left, the less trouble Trump will have winning the election.
Lordberia3, now to see where it goes next.
TJ, you must have met a different subset of Trump supporters than I have. I wonder, have you sat down and had a conversation with these people, or are you simply labeling them as racists et al. because they say things you've been taught to equate with racism?
Submarine, thanks for the link.
Mark, yes, but all of that is beside the central point I was trying to make, which is that the affluent defined the terms of the debate over the EU in such a way as to exclude the interests of the working class and the poor, and then threw a temper tantrum of namecalling and abuse when a very significant fraction of the working class and the poor didn't do as they were told, because they have lost track of the fact that the working class and the poor have their own needs and interests, which they will fight to uphold if necessary. Of course the situation is more complex than I can fit into a single essay, even a longish one, but what I've heard from other readers in Britain leads me to think that the point made in the essay is more or less correct.
Grebulocities, many thanks. I'll know better than to pay attention to certain bloggers in the future.
Clay, exactly. That dissenting letter from the State Department is basically advocating a shooting war between the US and Russia. I don't think it's ever occurred to any of the signatories that the decision to go to war has to include serious consideration of what happens if we lose.
7/1/16, 10:46 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Brian, my point exactly. Children born in Brixton or Sunderland don't go junketing around the continent, you know; that privilege is reserved for the affluent.
João Cláudio, but of course. Julius Caesar came from a rich senatorial family, too, but he seized and held power by championing the interests of the Roman masses against his own class, which is why he was murdered by a gang of patricians.
Sven, thank you! The prevalence of the delusion of control in the minds of the current dominant minority is really hard to miss these days.
Mary, so noted.
Alexandra, that's certainly a classic example! Thank you.
Alex, that cartoon is great -- and yes, it pretty much sums it up.
Bob, I'm planning on a post devoted to how the environmental movement got coopted by the privileged, and will address what can be done there. Got your story, for which many thanks. If you could put through a comment marked "not for posting" with your email address and the name(s) you'd like on the author's byline, that'd be great if your story makes the cut.
WB, I'll have to talk to the publishers about that. I suspect they'd be interested in letters to the editor!
Myriad, got it -- you're in the contest. Drop me a comment marked not for posting with your current email address, and we can proceed!
Gaianne, got it -- you're in.
Mark, er, FDR was an incredibly divisive figure in his time; a very large number of Americans hated his guts. Being divisive was crucial then and it's crucial now, because the people who currently hold power are adept at calling on people to "unite" on terms that favor the status quo. Refusing to unite with them, and giving the rest of the population a voice of their own, was essential to FDR's achievement. Will Trump do that? Heck of a good question, but he certainly has a better chance of doing so than his current rival.
Denis, I hope your elections overturn the status quo!
Nancy, well, we'll see.
7/1/16, 11:04 PM
Alex Blaidd said...
7/2/16, 1:32 AM
latheChuck said...
I think the title (which is just the surname of the featured family) is a hoot! For anyone unfamiliar with anatomy, your "mandible" is your lower jawbone. It's what you use for talking, and for eating, and I suppose both of these activities are important to the book. Maybe the author could have named them "The Craniums", but then they would have had to behave differently, using a different part of their anatomy instead.
(Almost entirely off-topic: I put up a head of red cabbage as two quarts of sauerkraut a couple of weeks ago, and have learned to love the results. It's nutritious food preservation with neither the processing energy of canning nor the preserving energy of refrigeration. Might be important some day.)
7/2/16, 4:01 AM
Hubertus Hauger said...
My speciality is history instead of the present. And all societies I recall use to have that pattern of the elite being overhelmd by revolt. Either the French king at the fringe of the French revolution, or the Chinese emperors repeatedly, the times before one dynasty fell, the Teotihuacanian priest caste before Teotihuaca was devastating their temples and not long after abandoning that city-state forever, the Eastern Island primal tribe being massacred and the statuebuilding stopped completely. All where swept away at that time, when the commoners realized, the elite was failing in good leading, or leading at all.
To me that seems to bring up nowadays mostly fascist movements. Here people can gather, under the pretence of solidarity, clarity and receiving benefits again. In a vague promise to get goods and work from wherever. In particular I fear, what the right wing socialist did, likewise their left wing counterpart too, that it might likely be, that the defeated elite plus scapecoat minorities shall be disposed of their possessions and existence altogether.
With Revolution destruction is imminent! And revolution seems inevitable, as voluntary reforms and change, the majority of people try to unavoid.
7/2/16, 5:54 AM
william fairchild said...
If one is honest, it must be conceded, IMO, that the Donald has stirred the pot of racism, misogony, and xenohobia. Mexican rapists, the "Mexican" (Indianan) judge, Meghan Kelly bleeding out of her eyes and her "whatever" and the Muslim ban are primary examples. If he were of Engish heritage, he might be quite at home in the EDL.
This is quite dangerous. If scarcity and deprivation and insecurity (terrorism) reach intolerable levels, it is possible we could again see strange fruit dangling from Mulberry trees.
Having said that, you are correct that you can't paint Trump supporters, or Leave voters, with the broad brush of "racist". There are class issues that are truly driving this train. And class is not up for discussion, as you pointed out in your essay on Trump. When the media or the pundit class use the phrase "blue collar voter" the subtext is "stupid rube". There is enormous resentment against the elites, of both parties, in bo th countries. The strongest Leave vote came from Northern England and Wales, the British rust belt.
This should be a warning, not only to Labour, but to the Dems. It is possible that Trump will tap into the anti-globalist, working class vote in MI, OH, PA, WI and flip them. But for the Chicago Machine, he would have a shot at IL. HRC will win Cook County and East St Louis. She will most likely lose all other counties in IL. Downstate she will take a shellacing. Mitsubishi just closed in Bloomington. Decatur lost Firestone and ADM has shrunk. Springfield lost Pillsbury and Fiat/Allis years ago. The only big manufacturer left is Bunn O Matic. Springfield now depends on govt jobs (a dicey prospect in the Rauner era) and medical jobs (best have an expensive degree).
If HRC were smart, she would have channeled Sanders and returned the Dems to their FDR roots. Alas, she is a neoliberal economically, and a neocon in foreign matters. So she will try and sell the status quo in a change year and attempt to cobble together a coalition on millenials, LGBT, limousine liberals, suburban women, and minorities.
Some good books on the class issue: The Road to Wigan Pier, Rainbow Pie, Whats the Matter with Kansas, and I have heard good things about White Trash, though I haven't read that one yet, its new.
7/2/16, 7:43 AM
David, by the lake said...
Is it just me or are you also seeing an anti-media meme developing on the Dem side? It is a surreal kind of experience, as the "liberal media" claim has been such an entrenched component of Republican politics for so long. The commentariat chatter re the Lynch-Clinton (Bill) meet-up is what provoked this thought. I keep seeing things like "the media keep pushing this, but no one cares," and "the media couldn't finds its [donkey] with both hands," etc.
7/2/16, 7:59 AM
thymia10 said...
7/2/16, 8:05 AM
Cortes said...
https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2016/jul/02/angela-eagle-anger-rises-in-her-wallasey-constituency-corbyn-labour
7/2/16, 8:33 AM
Shane W said...
7/2/16, 9:25 AM
Ed-M said...
Well I'm quite late in this thread (256 comments now I'll have to copy and read them) so I'll put in my US$0.02.
Yes, the elites - both left and right - do appear to be in a hall of mirrors. It's kind of sad to see the left floundering as it is, unable to connect with the working and lower middle classes. Of course both you and I know what exactly the reasons ARE for their floundering!
On Brexit - like you, I do believe it's more than just a fear of immigration (one that was ginned up by the scandalous Murdoch press; after the Murdoch emails scandals, why is that scoundrel still in business in that country???) and I'm not sure fear has anything to do with it. More like compassion fatigue for the immigrants; the feeling is, "Look, we can't take care of our own, why should we continue to let a limitless, unrestricted swarm in? THe ones we got are hardly doing us any good, statistics to the contrary." And it's true all over Europe.
And who will I vote for POTUS in the general election? Certainly not Hillary and definitely not Trump. She may yet be undone by her emails: USAG Loretta Lynch has decided to affirm however the FBI decides to pursue this, or not. And Donald? I don't trust him as far as I can throw him. I just have this ugly feeling that after being elected he's going to weltch on all his promises to the working and lower middle classes and align his decisions with the Washington Consensus policies.
PS On last week's assignment, I have a few to pick from. Anything by Ayn Rand or Ann Coulter, or Liberal Fascists.
7/2/16, 10:35 AM
me myself and i said...
@jmg. my apologies if this is a repeat & it has already gone through in earlier form. I concur with grebulocities comment above. The "unprecedented" cross equatorial flow isn't. Google cross equatorial flow and you'll find papers with illustrious names such as Hoskins, Wheeler, Yang, kiladis... etc on precedents going back decades (That is, the papers go back decades. The precedents no doubt go back millions of years) Warning: The papers tend to be pretty dense, and most seem to have some sort of sleep-inducing enchantment on them. IMHO, sensationalist blogs like the one referenced are feeding right into the hands of the deniers, as their inaccuracies are revealed and more level-headed types are ignored. I do have to admit I agree with the bloggers in part, though. Personally, I think climate change is a severe enough predicament that all this stuff about Brexit and the u.s. election is fleas arguing over control of their patch of a feverish, convulsing dog. And yes, the jets streams (particularly in the north) are showing behavior outside what has passed for normal in recent history. But it there's nothing particularly odd about last week's cross equatorial burst.
@grebulocities: where are you? I ask because i not too many years ago finished up my atmo phd and I'd be pleased to find there's actually another jmg reader in this town (or anywhere in Texas, even!) (tho i recall from a comment (last week?) that another reader recently bought 20 acres somewhere in the state. Welcome and good luck, person with japanese-sounding username that i can't recall right now!). my university has a huge focus on atmo chem, and i suffered the reverse of your problem: I (used to) very much enjoy atmospheric dynamics and barely passed the required chemistry courses! Not currently a practicing scientist, having semi-voluntarily collapsed to the level of hourly wage-earner. Finishing the dissertation very nearly finished me and i still have a gag reflex any time i hear the words "rossby waves". ;-)
Apologies to all for the typos and poor capitalization. Typing this on an ipad touch screen which seems to randomly do odd things.
REALLY looking forward to the print edition of your blog, jmg. Will happily pay some of my hard-earned $ for it. Speaking of $, next paycheck I'm ordering another copy of star's reach to give to a new aquaintance He says he's never heard of you, but we got to talking a bit & I think he'll be one of your regulars soon. His name happens to be Trey, and his comment when i told him the book is set in a post-collapse america 400 years from now was "it is going to collapse a lot sooner than that".
7/2/16, 11:29 AM
Yellow Submarine said...
It does indeed seem that it’s Trump who wins when it comes to substance. Look at this recent speech in New Hampshire, where he brings up many of the same topics you have. When it comes to substance, Trump completely blows Hillary out of the water, in no small part because Hillary has nothing to offer ordinary Americans but four to eight more years of the same ruinous policies that have devastated the American economy and destroyed the lives of huge numbers of people in America and around the world. If you listen to his recent speeches, it’s pretty obvious that Trump is not the ignorant no-nothing that his enemies in the Dempublican and Republicrat parties like to claim he is, but a very smart and well informed leader.
He discusses the destruction of the wage class and how the policies of the last few decades have taken power out of the hands of workers and put it in the hands of giant corporations and wealthy special interest groups. He points out the devastating effect that the last Clinton administrations policies has had on the wage class, thanks to NAFTA, the WTO and other neoliberal economic policies and institutions implemented by Slick Willie and his cronies and continued unabated during all four terms of the Dubyobama administration. He even notes how the average incomes of American workers has been going down, thanks to neoliberal economic policies.
He also emphasizes that he not against foreign trade or in favor of isolationism, but that trade deals need to protect the interests of the American people and America’s economy and industrial base, not further pad the bank accounts of the transnational elites.
Oh, and here is a retired Secret Service agent who was one of Bill Clinton’s former bodyguards discussing what he thinks was really going on during that private meeting between Slick Willie and Loretta Lynch. Suffice to say I would not be in the least bit surprised if his assessment turns out to be right on the money, especially given the long and sordid history of the Clintons. Crooked Hillary indeed.
7/2/16, 1:00 PM
Myriad said...
7/2/16, 3:18 PM
Unknown said...
The counting may take over a week as the preference flows are sorted out in the closer seats, but if those close seats follow the pattern the government will be returned without a majority in both houses, and they will have to learn how to negotiate and compromise in order to get any of their agenda up.
Given the scorn and ridicule poured upon those independent reps in both houses by the government prior to the election and during the campaign, they will need a lot of luck.
Just watching the media circus picking over the entrails and the tone is best summed up by one pretend journalist whose comment was to the effect that the voters 'risked instability to send a message to the governement and now they will get it in spades'. The general tone seems to be condescending and patronising, as if we voters should be punished for not allowing the neolibera;l agenda to be imposed. The "trickle down economic theory was openly preached by govt liberal commentators, and the govt was promoting a $50 billion dollar tax cut for business, $30 billion of which would have been immediately offshored by transnationals.
What has been noticeable in all the media commentary is a lack of focus on the debate about the actual ability of the few real policies put forward to deliver their stated outcome and whether that outcome would provide any benefit at all for the majority of people in the country.
What has become clearer is that there is a growing mood that is supportive of competent independent representation. Not a ground swell, but certainly something that can be worked with.
7/2/16, 4:26 PM
Mr Plod said...
And here's another version of the story playing out in Australia, America's Deputy Sheriff.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/jul/03/even-if-turnbull-wins-he-loses-and-even-if-shorten-loses-he-wins
7/2/16, 6:41 PM
Kevin Cobley said...
For economic growth to occur it requires population growth. The demographic future of all European countries is a large group of the population aging, transitioning to non working lifestyles, spending far less. The vast majority of all population groups will only bother to earn to a level which supports their desired lifestyle. These two factors suggest that there is an upper limit to growth supported by a fixed population, that limit with Europe's structure is likely to be zero or less. Therefore growth and the survivability of the banking system is totally dependent on population growth, that's why Merkel opened the doors in Germany.
The UK banking system will fail very quickly without population growth.
In Australia we have politicians "protecting the borders" with extreme means, dumping a few thousand of boat people on offshore atoll prisons, whilst allowing over 250,000 people to fly in annually. The policy of both political parties is for a big Australia of 45 million in 25 years with an economy based on housebuilding and real-estate speculation, Australian politicians are no different to Merkel attempting to keep "growth going" (Malcolm Turnbull's official election policy)by expanding the population. All of these groups of politicians are instructed by their actuaries the requirements of the systems they are managing, the system requires growth to remain functional.
7/2/16, 7:27 PM
Unknown said...
@alex carter--I've lived in California most of my life. Voter registration rules vary from state to state. Some states make it very convenient to vote. Some make it difficult. California is in the middle. If you stay put, registering and voting is pretty convenient but if you move a lot, it's not.
Here are the basic requirements as I understand them. I hope this isn't Too Long; Didn't Read, but I want to be comprehensive. Anybody not in CA can skip this.
1. In order to vote, you have to be registered. In some states, you can register to vote on election day. Not in California. You have to be already registered something like a month (from memory; I didn't look it up) in advance.
2. When you register, besides your name and address, the application will ask you whether you want to be registered with a particular political party, and whether you want to be a permanent absentee voter. See below 5 and 6 for the consequences of filling out the form one way or the other. You can get the form at the DMV, and probably at some local government office, and sometimes there are people out on the street registering voters.
3. If you move to a new address, you are supposed to register again at your new address. If you do not, the registrar will send your election information to your old address. You might also have problems casting your ballot.
4. If you don't vote in the general election every four years, or maybe it's if you miss two general elections in a row, you may get purged from the rolls and have to register again.
5. If you asked to be a permanent absentee voter, you will get a blank ballot in the mail for all elections you are eligible to vote in. To vote absentee, you fill out the ballot at home and either mail it in, or drop it off at a polling place on election day. If you only want to vote absentee once in awhile, (like if you know you will be out of town on election day) you can request an absentee ballot just for that election, but you have make the request in advance so they have time to mail it to you. There's no downside to being permanent absentee so I am registered that way even though the polling place is one block from where I live.
6. If you stated a party preference when you registered, you will automatically receive primary ballots with that party's candidates on them as well as the nonpartisan offices and propositions. If you don't state a party preference, you will be registered as No Party Preference and your primary ballot will not list any party's candidates. That is the general rule--only voters who stated a party preference when they registered get to vote in that party's primary--but there is an exception.
Each party sets its own rules about who gets to vote in their primaries. Most of the California parties only allow their own registered members to vote in primaries. The Democrats allowed NPPs to vote in the recent primary, but the law says that if you weren't a registered Democrat, you had to ask in advance for the Democratic ballot. If you were registered NPP and just showed up on election day wanting to vote in a primary you were SOL. My county's registrar of voters mailed out a letter to me and all the NPP voters about two months before the primary. It included a form to fill out and mail in if I wanted the Democratic ballot. I read the letter, filled out the request (less than five minutes), mailed it, and the registrar mailed me the Democratic primary ballot. You may have gotten a letter like that and thought it was junk mail, or maybe your county registrar isn't as efficient as mine.
7. IIRC, the race question on the form has a Decline to State choice on it. It's not the census; they have no legal authority to make you answer.
7/2/16, 9:42 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Unknown Eagle Eye, interesting. Many thanks for the link.
Phil K., yep -- but it deserves watching.
Drhooves, thank you.
Dau, again, I see that as a consequence rather than a cause. When the conventional wisdom insists that anyone who objects to unrestricted immigration is a racist, and a lot of people have good reason to object to unrestricted immigration, yes, some of them are going to adopt racist ideas -- or will simply direct some of their ire at the immigrants as well as the politicians who let them in.
Sébastien, I get the impression that once the US collapses, as it will, Europe will be ripe for the plucking. The only question is who gets to pluck it...
MP, it may be a generalization, but it's a generalization that corresponds to my own experience rather closely...
Katrin, I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm as opposed to my views being rammed undemocratically down the collective throat of Europe as to anyone else's. That's a pragmatic objection, by the way: the only thing having my policies adopted by the EU would do is to guarantee that when the EU collapses, as it will, my policies will be dismissed for many decades to come.
Nigwil, many thanks for the link! What a classic bit of privileged sniveling...
Bedroom-Magick, I've always tended to think that the Scots enthusiasm for the EU is driven by the hope of using the EU as a counterweight to England, as -- for good and sufficient historical reasons -- no self-respecting Scot trusts the English as far as they could throw Balmoral Castle.
Bill, it's certainly a strange time. The point I wanted to make by way of the poll, though, is that Trump is well within striking range of Clinton at this point, and his support isn't as lily-white as the media likes to claim. (I'd expect to see a lot of support coming his way from Asian-Americans and from Hispanic Americans who immigrated legally, or whose families have been here for several generations -- both of these groups tend to conservatism.) But again, we'll see what actually happens.
Phil H., I wonder if the RAF will be honest when they discover what an overpriced piece of junk they've just purchased.
Ben, funny! Yep -- and it was an even better bit of gallows humor that the victim was watching a Harry Potter movie when his car accelerated straight under a semi trailer and decapitated him. Nearly Headless Techbro...
David, of course. If you want those to happen, you need to organize around them.
7/2/16, 10:52 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Wa1kij, well, yes. I wonder how much a certain corporation had to fork over this time...
Unknown Mox, nonetheless, there's a significant difference between a government you can vote out of office and a supranational bureaucracy that is subject to no checks and no balances. The backlash against neoliberalism has much more access to the levers of power in a nation that has control of its own destiny than in a nation that's subject to edicts from Brussels against which there is no appeal.
Submarine, yes, I've been watching that. Really, whatever happens at this point is red meat for the Trump campaign; if there's an indictment, that's going to be a massive problem for Clinton, and if not, Trump's people can insist that there's a coverup.
Christophe, you're welcome and thank you. If someone is willing to come here and express an opinion in a courteous manner, I figure it's worth a few minutes of my time to respond accordingly.
Bob, I've heard of it -- I hope it wakes some people up.
Alison, thank you for the report from the trenches! I hope that you and the other people who were feeling cheerful that morning will put the lesson to good use, and make yourselves heard over and over again in the corridors of political power.
Robert, so? The thing that makes Trump a magnet for the disaffected is that he's nearly the only person in politics who's thrown aside the neoliberal consensus that's ground so many wage earning Americans into the ground. You don't have to like him, or believe that his supporters are innocent victims, to recognize that his campaign marks a sea change in American politics.
Superpeasant, not so fast. The EU has been mandating the neoliberal policies most responsible for the destitution of the British working class -- free movement of people and capital -- and, as already noted, most benefits of EU membership go to the affluent while most of the costs land hardest on working people and the poor. That makes rejecting the EU a reasonable move for the masses who voted for it. Some rich Tories supported it, others opposed it, and the majority of the affluent were (and remain) staunch supporters of the EU; the bulk of the votes that pushed Brexit past the finish line came precisely from those working class people whose interests have been treated as irrelevant by a three-party consensus in Westminster. As for climate change denial, I'll be talking in an upcoming post on how and why the environmental movement destroyed itself by becoming a shill for the interests of the affluent. More on this as we proceed...
Kevin, Musk has figured out that the best way to make money in today's America is to figure out every possible way to batten on government subsidies while selling stockholders and the public on an assortment of glossy fantasies borrowed from old science fiction magazines. It's a shrewd move, and I expect people to start piling messianic fantasies on Musk as things go more and more obviously pear-shaped.
Latefall, many thanks for the data points!
Varun, since the British have had more experience with wealth pumps than anybody else, it doesn't surprise me at all that they would be first to object when the business end of the wealth pump gets turned on them!
7/2/16, 11:16 PM
alex carter said...
This was on AM radio (KGO) tonight; so lots of people are abuzz about it right now.
Unknown (Deborah Bender) - I don't believe I saw a "decline to state" option on the voter registration form, so I just checked off "White (non-hispanic)". It's not that big a deal; I just mentioned it to show those reading this who are not in the US that race is an ever-present factor, a sort of "weather", we deal with all the time here and this is why we talk about it so much.
Myriad - looks like it's time to start shopping for a new email addy...
7/3/16, 12:59 AM
Hubertus Hauger said...
You and others come and say, you see. That is a bad thing. It malfunctions. This shan´t be! If Tesla´s statistic is correct, I see here, how strongly we humans see things emotionally, instead of factually. Numbers are a really hard thing, to crasp reality. Most people don’t use that a lot in their daily life. Me included.
So might be, that there comes a hype of, look how helpless we are in the grip if robots. Let us keep things in our own hand and so be powerful, instead of robots taking control. But that’s just another reality bias.
7/3/16, 2:18 AM
Jon Kutassy said...
I'm a new reader of your site, well on & off for over a year. This is my first comment and I apologise if it's not as thoughtful or eloquent as all of your previous commenters but here goes.
I voted Leave. For many reasons. Some fanciful, some real.
I took the warnings of dire financial consequences and shrugged them off - yes we might be worse off as a whole but I have begun to have an unhealthy dislike for bankers, multinationals (even though I'm employed by one) and assume that even the experts are in their employ. Project Fear was so continuous that I almost became insensitive to it.
I'd just finished reading Rob O'Grady's "150 Strong" and of course all your Retrotopia posts and concluded that letting government creep further away from those that it governs is a bad thing. Perhaps we can turn it round. We at least stand a chance whilst we can still change the government. Maybe I'm still being naive.
Part of me wants the EU collapse entirely. Even though I'm not ready for it to. I was disappointed the Greeks capitulated last year. Perhaps Brexit will be the start of the collapse. Looking at it I half expect the vote to be ignored and we will Remain despite the outcome.
Anyhow I guess the point of this comment is to thank you for your insights, to acknowledge that you and others like you have influenced my thinking (such as it is) and to say how much I'm enjoying Retrotopia and look forward each Wednesday to the next instalment. Its annoying that interruptions like Referendums delay them!
Jon
7/3/16, 3:44 AM
Phil Knight said...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/opinion/sunday/the-myth-of-cosmopolitanism.html?_r=3
7/3/16, 4:00 AM
David, by the lake said...
Completely OT, so I understand if you don't put this through, but wanted to report an interesting observation from the field. On PoliticalWire, one of the sites I regularly read, there are frequently survey questions in the sidebar on various topics. I occasionally participate. This time, I ran across a question that I was unable to answer due to the fact that my answer wasn't among the choices.
The question read, "What do you think the Earth's human population will be in 100 years?" The choices were 1) 6-7 billion, 2) 7-10 billion, 3) 10-15 billion, and 4) more than 15 billion. No selection available for a decline.
Not surprising, I suppose, but still, it is fascinating to observe data points re our complete dismissal of any future that doesn't conform to our vision of progress. (Of course, I wonder how progressive it would be to double the demand upon an already resource-constrained planet, but perhaps that's just me.)
7/3/16, 5:45 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
7/3/16, 6:12 AM
Herbert Pagg said...
http://linkis.com/www.good.is/articles/2MduO
Given he's in the same league as Musk (no doubt Obama would love to listen to Mr Florida at a TED talk) I see it as a sign there are some strides towards improvement
(as a side note, your ideas remind me much of the Canadian John Ralston Saul's "The Collapse of Globalism" (2005). He predicts one of the two originators of 'globalization' (UK and USA ) will implode in a self-destructive manner. Seems to be happening in the old kingdom right now, in a few years time we'll now if there's a united Ireland and independent Scotland, Wales and England.)
7/3/16, 6:46 AM
Nancy Sutton said...
The Battle in Seattle, Occupy Wall Street, Brexit ... and ? Imperfect all, but the trend is heartening... no? How soon can we replace 'globalization' with a 'colonization' meme, and have another 'revolution' (not to mention that our Colonial Scrip was very successful 'debt free money')?
In his last book, I think Tony Judt explained the recent failure of the 'left' by it's turn from economic (class) issues to 'identity' (cultural) issues (btw, Gloria Steinhem worked for the CIA) .... so looking forward to your essay on the 'elephant' that must not be named. Perhaps you'll mention 'fair' vs 'maximum' profit, and maybe the 'invisible' worm at the very, very core ... debt-money, which feeds the elephant. Most likely not, but if any thorny knot desperately needs the superb clarity of your exposition...
7/3/16, 7:45 AM
Hubertus Hauger said...
7/3/16, 9:11 AM
Owen said...
Someone will note that Sanders' and Trump's policies have more in common than not. Someone will get the bright idea of merging them, copy Trump's tactics that he pioneered and take the rest of this century.
7/3/16, 9:16 AM
L said...
Thank you for providing this quality take on Brexit and allowing the discussion of it in the comments over the last few weeks. Having voted Leave, and having probably 80% of my friends and acquaintances (at least, the ones I know from university or from an affluent background) voting Remain and insisting on talking about it in the manner you described above, this blog provided an important mental counterbalance for me to the incessant talk of how terrible everything would be that took place for about the first week after the vote.
The most egregious example I saw was an acquaintance posting on Facebook that anyone who voted leave should unfriend him and then hang themselves. I did neither, since I believe that maintaining friendship with those who disagree with you is perfectly viable, though I admit that next time I see him, I shall be more wary of him than the previous times...
I posted a post of my own addressed generally to Remainers to the effect that I understood where they were coming from but would they mind treating the point of view of the Leavers with a bit more respect, phrased in the most gracious way I could think of (and my Sun sign is Libra), and I still got someone telling me they were p-ed off at me and that I was incredibly misguided for sharing the pro-Leave articles I'd been sharing before the referendum...
In any case, the thing for the UK to do now is to look to the future. I find that life after the referendum has not in fact been a catastrophe and has been rather approximately the same as life before the referendum, and I continue to believe that exiting the EU now on peaceful terms is the best choice for the UK's future. Hopefully the politicians will keep to the result of the referendum once the new Tory leader is selected- if they don't, I wouldn't expect the next attempt of the working class to make themselves heard to be quite so peaceful...
Thanks once again,
L.
7/3/16, 9:19 AM
Owen said...
I think Musk is somewhat more sinister - he's one of the few public faces of the Deep State. I think they're using Tesla as an R&D excuse to roll out stuff they've already developed. I think also in conjunction with the new fuel economy regulations, they've decided that transportation policy is going to be transitioning to electric powered cars from now on. Makes some sense, the era of cheap oil is over for sure.
7/3/16, 9:26 AM
Alex Blaidd said...
It's ironic because I left my hometown to go to London in my early twenties and thought I was leaving behind the 'small village, small mind'. I realise now how mistaken I was. There is nowhere on earth that is as small minded as London. But it's not just that, they live in a pure fantasy, and then consider themselves above everyone and thus think they opinion is better.
I can't wait to leave this Hall of Mirrors tomorrow and return to the real world. It's been a rather unsettling few days in many ways, but important. I really hope London would hold a vote of going independent - I know I'd vote for them to leave the UK!
7/3/16, 10:55 AM
Owen said...
Historically, Scotland has allied itself with France, much for that reason, IIRC. The Auld Alliance something something. I suppose that the EU stands as a proxy for France, but what if France splits with the EU? You might find Scotland getting less than enthusiastic over being in the Union. I can't imagine Scotland cozying up to the Germans, to put it mildly. But this is all just surmising - really need to ask a bunch of Scots what they think of it all. Do they still love France? What do they think of the Germans in the 21st century? I don't think you need to ask them about the Brits, that's for sure :P
7/3/16, 10:58 AM
Troy Jones said...
Neil deGrasse Tyson has not, so far as I know, developed his idea for a one-world government into a full article or essay yet. He floated the idea on Twitter a few days ago with a grand total of two tweets (that I can find-- I am not adept at finding stuff on Twitter), and a bunch of tech writers jumped on it and wrote long essays about the idea, some for and some against.
I think this link to a Twitter search will lead you to what people are saying about it... https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=rationalia
The name of Tyson's proposed new government would be #Rationalia (I like to imagine the hashtag as being part of its formal name, and I also like to imagine that the national dish would be K-rations, since what could be a more rational food than that? It's right there in the name! Not to mention personal taste is inherently irrational, anyway.). As mentioned, it would have a one-line constitution, which would read, "all policy is decided by the weight of evidence", full stop. Beyond that, nothing else has really been fleshed out, as far as I can find. I think he truly believes that that's all that's needed to fix the world.
Not surprisingly, some people have raised practical objections to #Rationalia, but the Tyson fanboys dismiss any concerns by saying there isn't any study that proves it wouldn't work. QED?
7/3/16, 11:16 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...
Too true. I hope they manage to maintain their resistance. The push back from the establishment and its collaborators is going to be vicious.
My perspective about the referendum is up.
http://bonesofourempire.blogspot.com/
I'm looking forward to reading what you have to say about the environmental movement, finding a way to reconnect the wage class with the environment is urgent.
Regards,
Varun
7/3/16, 12:02 PM
BoysMom said...
Back in the nineties, before his tv show, Mr. Trump wrote that he wanted to be President. Twenty years ago. In fact, digging into it a bit, apparently he was involved in the Reform Party's 2000 Presidential nomination process as a candidate for a brief time.
So why do people keep thinking he doesn't mean to be President? That he's running as some sort of foil for Mrs. Clinton? He's been a nomination candidate before. He's written about wanting to be President. He doesn't get credit for at least twenty years of watching his time and making his plan?
Probably that much discussed phone call was some sort of friendly heads up that Mr. Trump was running, (Mr. Clinton and Mr. Trump being golfing buddies) as the Clintons would presumably know what dirt Mr. Trump has on them, and could then make an educated choice as to whether they wanted it dragged out or not.
7/3/16, 12:44 PM
John Roth said...
Most, possibly all, of Trump's dozen books are ghostwritten. The ghostwriter for The America We Deserve (2000), Dave Shiflett, says in a recent article: "Mr. Trump and I made a pretty good team. He needed words, I needed money, and together we explored what he would do if he became president. I have long considered the resulting book my first published work of fiction."
Ghostwriting is so common that any book by a famous (or not so famous) politician or industrialist should be considered ghostwritten. The same goes for articles, speeches, op-ed pieces or similar. There are some exceptions: a retired politician etc. might very well have the time to write his or her own book. However, someone who writes enough to learn how to be readable doesn't have the time required to become a politician or industrialist, etc.
7/3/16, 5:10 PM
Joel Caris said...
Hoo boy, if you've managed to write a deindustrial scifi tale that legitimately works in asteroid mining without betraying the genre . . . well, I think I'm going to have to take a look. Careful, though--you might be throwing wrenches in my (recently updated) submission guidelines!
7/3/16, 7:04 PM
Kfish said...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/03/referendum-vote-leave-labour-people-have-spoken
Unfortunately, she's getting slaughtered in the comments.
7/3/16, 8:55 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Cortes Kid, thanks for your submission. I haven't yet done more than glance at the stack of stories; there were fewer entries for this competition than the last few -- not surprising, since it had so challenging a requirement! -- and if I don't have enough good stories without yours, I'll consider it. Otherwise, we'll see if it fits the requirements for the next contest; on the other hand, if you'd rather, you can forward it to Into the Ruins and see what Joel thinks of it.
Zach, what that shows is that the EU is no better than the current UK government; it's possible for the Brits to vote out their government, while there's no way for the citizens of EU countries to vote out the EU...
Gabriela, if all the EU has left to offer is fear, it's doomed. Fear of war will soon be balanced by fear of EU officialdom.
Alex, exactly. As I noted in last week's post, every social action has an equal and opposite reaction, and romantic racial nationalism is already emerging in response to the current liberal party line.
Rod, thank you! I hope they read it.
Jessi, I'd definitely encourage my readers to vote for the candidate they prefer, and ignore the apparatchiks who insist that a vote for anything outside the two party system is "wasted." Abraham Lincoln was a third party candidate -- the Democrats and the Whigs were the two established parties in 1860.
Unknown Deborah, it could be a Dewey Defeats Truman moment in several senses. I've heard from a lot of people -- close to three digits at this point -- who plan to vote for Trump but aren't telling any of their friends that fact, and I doubt they'd tell a pollster, either. But we'll see...
Hubertus, exactly. Our one hope is that the revolution could still happen by way of the ballot box, rather than roadside bombs and domestic insurgency.
William, Trump has deliberately flouted the canons of political correctness -- it's one of the ways he's signaling to the masses that he's on their side. Is it a cynical stirring of the pot? Quite possibly. You're right that Clinton's best shot at the presidency would have been to adopt Sanders' rhetoric of change; instead, she's cozying up to her fellow neoconservatives. If I were Trump's campaign manager I'd be drooling over the prospect of using Robert Kagan's endorsement of Clinton to paint Clinton as a clueless militarist itching to send American soldiers off to the Middle East to die; with a major foreign policy journal already publishing articles talking about Clinton's infatuation with war, it'd be a slam-dunk.
David, it's not just you. The inmates of the Hall of Mirrors are responding to bad news by ordering the messenger to be shot.
Thymia10, thank you. Yes, it's going to be a good time to curl up with a bowl of popcorn!
Cortes, thanks for the link. It'll be fascinating to see how that plays out.
7/3/16, 10:29 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Ed-M, I don't know that I'd trust Trump myself. What interests me about him, and what makes me think he's most likely our next president, is that he's been willing to speak the unspeakable, and talk about the world in terms that reflect the experience of ordinary Americans. Whatever Trump himself does, that genie is not going back into the bottle.
Me etc., yes, half a dozen other people have already pointed that out. Your friend is quite right, of course, that the US will collapse in a lot less than 400 years, which is why, in Trey sunna Gwen's time, the collapse is a distant memory.
Submarine, Trump is a very clever man. Notice how he's gone from a nomination strategy aimed at targeting and flattening each of his potential rivals to a general election strategy aimed at defining himself as the only alternative to a hopelessly unsatisfactory business as usual. I'm sure the attack-dog stuff will come into play -- as I suggested in my post, I expect that beginning in early September -- but he's leading in by making a positive case for himself that will appeal to a very large number of American voters. That's not something Clinton seems to be able to do, and I suspect it's going to cost her heavily.
Unknown in Oz, do they call that a "hung parliament" down under? A British friend of mine commented in 2010, when the general election returned a parliament with no party in the majority, that the only way she'd accept a hung parliament is if it involved a public hanging. ;-)
Mr. Plod, thanks for the link! There definitely seems to be a trend...
Kevin, and as Kenneth Boulding said, the only people who believe in limitless growth on a finite planet are madmen and economists.
Hubertus, and how many of those miles were driven on safe testing tracks?
Jon, you're welcome and thank you! The next post will be an installment of the Retrotopia narrative, I promise.
Phil, thank you! That's a very cogent essay -- I bet the author gets pelted with insults by his peers.
David, exactly. The future we actually face is one that has been defined out of existence by the conventional wisdom of our time.
Herbert, interesting. Yes, he's started to notice -- but it hasn't occurred to him that the prosperity of the "creative class" has been paid for by the immiseration of everyone else, and that the changes that have to be made include a lot of things he and his affluent friends aren't going to like one bit.
Nancy, as I've mentioned before, to my mind debt is a symptom rather than a cause. It's simply a way of managing the tokens we use to distribute real wealth, and the dysfunction of our debt-based token system is a consequence of the broader dysfunction of our relationship to the real, i.e., natural world.
Hubertus, are they suicidal, or are they voting to harm someone else's interests rather than their own?
7/3/16, 10:49 PM
John Michael Greer said...
L, thank you! I wonder, is it time for someone in Britain to set up a moderated internet forum for Leave voters to share such stories and remind one another that it's not just them, their Remain friends really are acting like complete prats? It would have to be thoroughly moderated, as in nothing gets posted without moderator approval, because you'd face a world-class pratstorm otherwise.
Owen, ahem. And where are they going to get all the electricity, to say nothing of the vast amounts of lithium, to replace gasoline cars with electric cars? Ain't gonna happen. Musk has simply figured out that he can gorge at the public trough by pretending to offer a solution.
Alex, that doesn't surprise me at all. I gather that Londoners have some similarity to New Yorkers, who have a similar reputation here...
Owen, I could definitely see a post-UK Scotland and a post-EU France reestablishing the Auld Alliance!
Troy, many thanks. I used my search engine fu and managed to find a couple of articles with screen shots of the original twit -- er, tweet. I think I now have exhibit A for a post about how a scientific education produces people who are incompetent at politics -- a point that could have been learned a long time ago by watching the cascading failures of climate change activism. Stay tuned...
Varun, convincing the wage class that environmentalism isn't simply one more excuse for giving to the rich and taking from the poor -- that's a tall order, and it may take generations. More on this in a later post.
BoysMom, I'm quite certain it's because people are trying to convince themselves that he isn't really running -- because it's started to sink in that if he is really running, he's got a very good shot at the White House. It's been entertaining to me to watch the number of evasions people will go into to try to run away from the thought of President Trump.
Kfish, I'm sure that's exactly what she was expecting. The thing is, she said the unacceptable -- she pointed out that the Leave campaign won, and won fairly, by making a better case to the majority of the voters -- and a lot of Remain voters will never forgive her for that. (On the other hand, I bet she does really well in the next general election.)
7/3/16, 11:19 PM
Jo said...
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/jul/04/pauline-hanson-takes-centre-stage-again-but-this-time-we-should-listen-not-lampoon
JMG, my 20 year old daughter incautiously expressed confusion over what was happening with Brexit, so I read her your entire post aloud and we stopped for discussion many times. It was an excellent parenting moment, so thank you:)
7/4/16, 1:23 AM
Unknown said...
Unknown in Oz, do they call that a "hung parliament" down under? A British friend of mine commented in 2010, when the general election returned a parliament with no party in the majority, that the only way she'd accept a hung parliament is if it involved a public hanging. ;-)
Yep, they do indeed call it a hung parliament, and I am absolutely certain there are a sizable number of Aussies right now that would supply rope and manpower if the opportunity presented itself, if only as punishment for having to listen to 8 very long weeks of moronic 3 word slogans and empty promises of cash for mates business interests. The comments attached to articles about the right wing politicians on online news sources demonstrate without doubt that the themes you have been exploring about the cluelessness of the elites and the rising anger of the working class are spot on target. Anyone wanting a classic example of the working class response could do no better than this: https://www.facebook.com/AndrewNikolic4Bass/posts/1049667678435077, or this for a clueless elite response and working class feedback: http://www.themercury.com.au/news/politics/federal-election-eric-abetz-backs-hierarchy-after-amigos-swept/news-story/ff9c4405718ab8490b75d85b29ef8c5e
It will be a very brave leader that refuses to try and make a minority government work, because if there is one thing Blind Freddy knows, it is that Australians hate election advertising with something far more than a passion.
Looking forward to Retropia, the sanity is sorely needed here.
Best regards
eagle eye
7/4/16, 3:09 AM
Katrin M said...
I have been thinking about that and I have come to the following, so far:
The people who are now the most deprived in the UK live in areas where once large industrial and manufacturing companies provided the majority of jobs, for example coal mining in the South of Wales. In the heyday of coal mining in that area, the population in this area increased dramatically. Although, jobs were available, the majority of people were not particularly affluent.
When the large industries and manufacturers started to disappear, the people lost their main provider of jobs and these jobs were not replaced locally. Large numbers of people were settled in communities with their family obligations. Home ownership in the UK is high and house prices rose drastically at the end of the 1990s. Moving from a deprived area, where houses are worth less to a an area that profited from the service economy with high house prices is difficult. The rental market has never been attractive and has also become very expensive. Many council houses were sold off by local authorities in the 1990s.
The benefit system for unemployed people is not flexible and does not give enough security to families to take up temporary or insecure work and move around at the same time.
The UK economy is mainly about services now. The service jobs are in finance (high pay) to hotel, cleaning offices and care work (low pay). The low end service jobs don't pay enough to sustain a family plus rent/mortgage and for the earner to even live in very modest accommodation while working away.I never heard of any government schemes that would help working class people to take up temporary low end service jobs without losing their economic security. Even, if people take up low paid jobs locally, they would find it hard to make ends meet without tax credits from the state (which have been constantly curtailed by the current government in the name of austerity).
There are plenty low end service jobs and European immigrants are better placed to take advantage of that, either because they are young without families to support, because they are prepared to live in more cramped accommodation or because they can leave their children at home with grandparents without losing their place in their home country.
If anyone knows better, please correct me.
7/4/16, 3:29 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Oh my, the jet stream story was rather alarming. It is nice to know that it has been debunked by credible people. Fortunately the scientist who introduced the concept appears to be in error - as noted by several commenters here.
However, the story itself is interesting as it appears to have gained momentum and has displayed one of the problems with science itself. That problem is: a lack of a code of ethics.
As a member of the public and not a member of the scientific community it is a quite difficult problem to be faced with alarming pronouncements such as that one about the jet stream, from what appear to be credible sources, only to discover that pronouncement may in fact be hyperbole and puff - or in error!
The problem for the public then becomes one of the perception of credibility within the scientific community itself and I reckon this is a very thorny issue that the scientific community are unwilling or unable to grapple with. You see, sometimes perception can be treated as reality by us humans. I mean historically you could look at witch hunts and trials and see that perception problem in action.
On an altogether different note, we had a federal election down here over the weekend with a rather unusual result. A number of independents have gained seats in the House of Representatives (no small feat in itself) and the results for the Senate (which is state based) have yet to be released but by all accounts appear to be rather diverse. The governments down here appear to be very unused to minority governments, they also appear to dislike compromise and co-operation and the eventual results will be quite interesting. Any bills have to be passed through both houses of parliament before then getting royal ascent and becoming law.
You may not be aware, but voting is compulsory down here for the population and there is a big turn out on the election day. I wonder whether we may yet discover how little the politicians shape our day to day life as they render themselves ineffective? I don’t really know the answer to that question, but we may yet find out!
Interesting times.
PS: I hope that you and all your US readers have a lovely 4th July celebration!
Cheers
Chris
7/4/16, 4:47 AM
FLwolverine said...
7/4/16, 5:28 AM
latheChuck said...
On the prevalence of ghost-written political speech: Of course, the ghost-writer needs to have a good grasp of what the "famous-person-author" (FPA) wants to see written, but I wonder... could a really good ghost-writer with his/her own agenda put
words into the FPA's mouth, which actually turn into
ideas in the FPA's head, and then into
policies expressed through the FPA's authority?
Hmm.... so, listen up. Here's what we do... Find yourself as many likely future ghost-writers as you can, and get them reading TADR! A small twist of the rudder may steer the ship into a better direction.
By the way, as the summer solstice has just passed, I have used it as a marker to continue my practice of tipping TADR "$1 per week" (despite the sabbatical!). I encourage others to do the same. $26/solstice is, for me, a convenient amount on a convenient schedule.
7/4/16, 5:36 AM
Owen said...
I don't think Trump's problem will be winning the election, I think his problem will be staying alive. Even Reagan had a few attempts made on his life by "lone" gunmen. And I'm hearing disturbing rumors that the Republicans are still going to attempt to shove him aside at the convention. One wouldn't think they would be that dumb, but I don't put that beyond their um, abilities.
What reforms did Reagan manage to push through? As I recall, somewhere between diddly and squat, IMHO. The real people who run the country basically had their way, using his ideology when it suited them and isolating him when it didn't.
Unless you flush a good chunk of congressrodents out the door, they're all still on the status quo payroll, and they will enthusiastically oppose everything Trump wants to do, unless it benefits their paymasters.
Maybe they're smart enough to change and survive, these career Republicans and Democrats? There are serious doubts in my mind about that.
7/4/16, 7:14 AM
Owen said...
They don't have to replace all the cars, just make cars cheaper to run for those who can still afford them. Energy isn't going away, it's just going to get more expensive.
I'm not an oil patch guy, so I don't know what the price points are where electricity is cheaper to generate and distribute than gasoline, but if I can see those lines crossing at some point, I'm sure others are already in the planning stages.
I'd say that people who can feed at the government trough (and they just don't let anyone feed there) have political connections whether public or hidden. I'm just saying maybe you might want to entertain the notion that Musk is politically connected in ways that aren't obvious.
7/4/16, 7:22 AM
Scotlyn said...
Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America's First Immigrants, by Joanna Brooks, http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16128892-why-we-left who has used ballads to connect to the histories that weren't written down, of British people resisting the destruction of forests, and the enclosures of land for profit, and other ecological disasters that heralded the commodification of everything and everyone that charted our course to capitalism from the British Isles, and also set many British people - the boat people of the 1600's - on the road to the Americas.
I could easily imagine this era and its struggles depicted in a more ecologically aware version of Robin Hood, with the forest of Sherwood itself as the main protagonist.
If you study many of the resistance movements around the world, ecological themes are more common than you'd think. And such struggles resonate.
A historical fiction contest?
7/4/16, 7:38 AM
Myriad said...
@Joel Caris: Well, I don't suppose the asteroid mining is in there in quite a "legitimate" way, as (this is no spoiler) it occurs in my story only as part of a simulation of a projected future. As nonetheless a "feature" of the story, the asteroid mining (not to mention the interstellar travel) does appear to flout your submission guidelines, but there's no need to reconsider the guidelines on that basis. It's an oddball story, and may need some work anyhow (or not be any good at all!)
It's been interesting seeing how various submissions have addressed the "no collapse" requirement of the challenge. Most seem to depict the course of a slow and/or regionally variable decline (the latter, almost always from the point of view of the more deindustrialized society or region). This is understandable—otherwise, how is the story deindustrial at all? On the other hand, a slow regionally variable decline (aka long descent) is exactly the kind of scenario JMG has always anticipated and focused on, and we still describe it as a collapse. So when is it not a collapse? Perhaps when it's instead a deliberate dismantling, ahead of immediate necessity. In other words, something decided upon—which some of the submissions touch on, I tried to touch on, Retrotopia touches on, and I think the genre should and shall explore further.
7/4/16, 7:38 AM
Scotlyn said...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/upshot/exit-polls-and-why-the-primary-was-not-stolen-from-bernie-sanders.html?_r=0#permid=18963606
The key quote is not in the body of the article, but the comment left by Carl Zeitz, which I hope the gentleman won't mind me quoting in full (as a number of others have done, most often to urge Sander's supporters and others to "learn the song of progress").
QUOTE
Sanders and I were born within months of one another and within miles and of one another. He grew up on the left, I grew up on the farther left, taking away learned lessons of that folly convinced that the principal political vehicle in this country for progress is the Democratic Party, not "socialism".
Every Democratic president since FDR sought, but failed to obtain, a universal health care system -- a single payer system. But they have made progress toward it, most recently the ACA (Obamacare).
You can't just show up at age 74 when you had 50 years to do it and become a member of the party that fought and fights for Civil Rights; that gave the nation Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Title 9 in Education, ERISA, the NLRB, the FDA, the FDIC: the entire panoply nearly of progress in this nation in the past 80 years: No you can't just show up and accuse it and teach young people with no sense of history or knowledge of progress that it is some evil instrument out to get them.
Sanders is at this point a bitter, angry old fool, preaching to a choir that has not yet learned to sing the song of progress; an embittered man on a crusade to nowhere, driven by ego, searching for the next camera, the next interview.
It is time he learned grace lest he fall from it, concede the nomination -- and start telling those young people that everything he told them should happen only can if Hillary Clinton gets to be president and name the next five Supreme Court justices.
UNQUOTE
7/4/16, 7:44 AM
Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...
Small public-service announcement: the drama now unfolding around Article 50 and the challenge from Mishcon de Reya is being well analyzed by "Jack of Kent" (jurist David Allen Green, among other things an instructing solicitor in a recent successful appeals case which putatively upholds freedom of Twitter-expression). Mr Green is blogging at http://jackofkent.com/. Whatever comes out of Mishcon de Reya, we can at any rate take this as an opportunity to learn more about law, including British constitutional law.
I would like also to take this opportunity to thank, fervently, the good person (whoever it was) who drew the ADR readership's notice to a book entitled Our Corrupt Legal System, by Australian jurist Evan Whitton - admittedly, not in a Brexit context, and by now maybe two or three weeks ago, rather than just a few days ago. I managed to get this book in PDF. A quick glance suggests the book will be an eye-opener. I used, for instance, smugly to think that the Anglo adversarial courtroom system is preferable to the Continental investigative-judiciary courtroom system. Now, in light of Mr Whitton's book, I will have to look at this question carefully.
Hastily,
admiring the wigs from a safe distance, from the humble public-seating rows,
Tom
(Estonian diaspora, currently just north of Toronto, in Canada)
http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com
Toomas(dot)Karmo(at)gmail(dot)com
7/4/16, 8:00 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
7/4/16, 8:20 AM
Doug Manners said...
https://flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/looking-behind-the-brexit-anger/
7/4/16, 9:09 AM
Katrin M said...
thank you for publishing your blog 'Nails in the Coffin'. It explains things very clearly. Having read some comment sections on articles in Brexit in the UK media, I did not come across any that referred to neoliberalism and the need to overthrow it. Maybe someone else has? An elite pushing nationalism onto people who have limited options, looks, sadly, more likely.
Matthias Gralle
Small point of interest: Just listening to a report on BBC Radio 4 about seasonal workers picking fruit. They are mostly for Eastern Europe and, of course, are afraid to lose the right to come to the UK . The fruit farm owner said that they are very much needed, but he expects that in 50 years time the fruit picking process should be more mechanised, with drones etc. Then it goes on about the jobs not being attractive enough for UK people.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07hwm5n (or look in http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07hwm5n – fruit picker not in the description).
Well, in 50 years , it might be the time when the internal and external proletariat will find a common cause..
JMG
I trust that you have the personal integrity and moral strength to stick to your principles, unfortunately there seem to be very few who do the same, especially when getting into positions of power.
7/4/16, 9:09 AM
Doug Manners said...
7/4/16, 9:16 AM
Tidlösa said...
A week later the official line has changed, and now seems to be something like "Cheer up, it may never happen". Apparently, nothing bad can happen to the EU, so why worry about the future? Complete complacency.
Except for the small Liberal Party (like the Liberal Democrats in UK) which in response to Brexit calls for *more* EU influence over Sweden, in a situation where every other party at least pretends to call for less. The Liberals doesn´t seem unduly worried that the latest opinion poll gives them less than 4% of the vote, meaning they risk loosing every single seat in Parliament!
The Hall of Mirrors is an interesting place...
7/4/16, 10:00 AM
Nastarana said...
Dear Kevin Cobley, does Australia have enough water to support the projected population growth?
7/4/16, 11:18 AM
. said...
7/4/16, 1:41 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Electric cars as they are today appear to me to be an expensive toy. The batteries are hideously expensive and very heavy. The only reason cars look like they do today is because a tank of fuel contains so much concentrated energy. Batteries cannot replace that. If an electric car looked like a go-kart, and was very light weight - maybe...
Hi Eagle eye,
That was very funny! ;-)!
Cheers
Chris
7/4/16, 2:16 PM
Shane W said...
7/4/16, 3:41 PM
Kfish said...
7/4/16, 4:44 PM
Unknown said...
@Nastarena-- Rich women have always been able to procure abortions. During the 1920s-1950s, when abortion was illegal in every state, many middle class women knew (or could find out) which local doctor would perform abortions and keep his mouth shut, and they went to him. I know this both through general reading and family history.
The women who did not have access to medical abortion when it was illegal were the poor and unmarried girls from "good families" who didn't want to face the consequences of telling their parents that they were pregnant. The choices for the married poor were risk your life or have an additional child to feed and clothe. The choices for the single girls were risk your life or drop out of school, go to a home for unwed mothers and give the baby up to a closed adoption. The Florence Crittenden Home for unwed mothers was still operating when I was in high school.
These days the majority of abortions are performed on married women. The stigma on unwed motherhood has largely disappeared. You can credit or blame feminism for some of that. But poor women do want abortions sometimes, and they ought to be able to have them without risking their lives, just like the middle and upper classes. I don't see that as an elitist position. It is part of the general campaign of Second Wave Feminism to give every woman control over her own sex life, just like men.
7/4/16, 5:29 PM
Matthias Gralle said...
Thank you, I was supposing something along those lines, but wanted to hear from somebody who lived there. I also heard that in some areas the young, single, able-bodied locals have mostly left, so only immigrants (can) take the hard manual jobs.
7/4/16, 6:02 PM
Unknown said...
Cherokee, You should have heard Eric Abetz on local ABC radio this morning explaining why it was all the fault of everybody else. Priceless beyond belief. I got to work with tears of laughter rolling down my face, and left the radio on while I got into my wet weather gear. By the time I was dressed my boss had tears rolling down his face as well and we kept laughing every time the announcer replayed the more deluded bits over and over again through the morning. I hope they have it recorded and release it as a pod cast along with all the other rants and excuses. It will sell like hot cakes.
And another data point, an op ed piece in the local rag about defense spending. The comments are worth a read as well.
http://www.themercury.com.au/news/opinion/talking-point-no-explanation-for-why-nation-gearing-for-war/news-story/19659bc03b73101eacfffffe6431f19d
7/5/16, 1:02 AM
Unknown said...
Among my circle of fellow supervisors there was a tongue in cheek response to the ott oh&s bull s... enforced by the Australian nanny state.
it goes thus: serious accidents kill stupid people and are therefore good for the gene pool.
Driving a car on autopilot certainly fits. Humanity is better off.
eagle eye
7/5/16, 3:47 AM
Owen said...
What those propagandists fail to mention is that the hard manual labor doesn't pay enough to justify it. And the only people that it actually makes business sense to take that deal are people with insanely low cost bases - ie. Mexicans and E. Europeans. And they basically take the money and send it home or run home with it.
You pay people what the job is really worth, and they'll do it.
Same thing with the old song and dance routine "We have a shortage of technical talent". No they don't. They have a shortage of CHEAP technical talent. And what these employers really want to do is drive wages down so they can make labor more pliable (and management's job easier) and make more money. But cynically, they're more than happy breaking even as long as they can keep the door shut in their corner office and not have to worry about labor getting uppity or walking out on them.
You know what? I'm sick and tired of hearing this propaganda. Go boil your head and that goes for all of you repeating it too.
7/5/16, 7:57 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...
I agree that your tactics will be useful for undoing the damage done to the ideal of environmentalism, but I'm not so sure it'll be easy. The damage done to the environmental movement by the jet-set environmentalists is really bad. I think there are three themes that can rebind people to the environment are nature as defensive barrier (as in retrotopia), nature as a gift from the divine, and nature as the gift we give our children.
Katrin,
Thank you. I've only read two articles that talked about Brexit as a blow against neoliberalism, both written by or for environmentalists.
http://deepgreenresistance.uk/resistance/indirect/lobbying/deep-green-resistance-uk-brexit/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/24/why-british-environmentalists-should-vote-for-brexit
I too would like to see some ideology other than nationalism used against the imperial order, but I don't know what other ideology would work. Can nationalism be cosmopolitan and secular? I think so, there are certainly plenty of historical examples.
Much like environmentalism, many of the better ideals of the political left are now too closely associated with the regressive left. As nationalism rises I see it as all too possible that we'll lose many of the ideals simply because they are now associated with the privileged classes.
Regards,
Varun
7/5/16, 9:05 AM
John Roth said...
My understanding is that’s exactly what happened. There was another article I found that said, right out, that Trump figured out what he thought by reading the book.
@Owen
Yeah, Michael said there would be assassination attempts on both candidates from both within and outside of their respective parties. They didn’t say whether they would succeed.
@Bill Pullam
Yep, it’s marketing hype. So is Musk’s hype about having real self-driving cars in two years. Everyone else in the industry thinks that 5 years is being hyper-aggressive. It’s also possibly legally dodgy, since the Department of Transportation has a spec (well, not quite that detailed) about what a real self-driving car would have to do.
7/5/16, 9:06 AM
Phil Knight said...
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/07/strange-death-liberal-politics
7/5/16, 10:28 AM
RPC said...
7/5/16, 10:47 AM
Unknown said...
Varun Bhaskar writes, "I too would like to see some ideology other than nationalism used against the imperial order, but I don't know what other ideology would work. Can nationalism be cosmopolitan and secular? I think so, there are certainly plenty of historical examples."
Varun, can you cite examples of nationalism that is cosmopolitan and secular? Are you perhaps thinking of India? France?
I think essential elements of a cosmopolitan and secular nationalism would include the idea of citizenship, equal justice under law, separation of church and state, economic arrangements that do not make one group's gain come at the expense of another group's loss, and social arrangements that enable the children of immigrants to become citizens and full participants in society. Whatever is revered as a common tie or symbol of the nation has to be something that all citizens can participate in. In the US version, the elements of national unity have been devotion to the Constitution, a common language, economic opportunity, and to a lesser extent the land itself.
Nationalisms based on blood, religion or generations of residence in the same place cannot be cosmopolitan. I am not saying they don't deserve to exist. Small countries like Iceland and Finland that are not bothering anybody else have a right to be as cosmopolitan or not as they want to, as long as the rest of us have some place to call home.
7/5/16, 11:40 AM
zach bender said...
https://www.bankstreet.edu/campus-beyond/news/2016/07/03/a-letter-to-the-community/444/
7/5/16, 1:38 PM
Scotlyn said...
My point is those HIStories (if not always written down) do exist and are available for imaginative reworking to suit our present needs.
And Robin Hood - restoring balance between rich and poor - a narrative wellspring?
7/5/16, 1:45 PM
Emmanuel Goldstein said...
7/5/16, 1:59 PM
Ed-M said...
One thing I forgot to mention in my previous post, is that at the end you have three flocks of black birds -- black swans, to be precise -- land in England and soon in Europe and the United States. You know, you could have included the title of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" into the title, such as: "Outside the Hall of Mirrors -- The Birds."
PS I'm presently reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and I've found something within that offended me! Something to do with his praise for the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Looks like I might not have to read the rightist trash books I mentioned after all... unless I want to have the whole work offend me, or that sort of thing is part of the assignment. ;^)
7/5/16, 3:38 PM
Golocyte Golo said...
I think there was a miscommunication. I did not mean that moderate centrists and fascists might occupy the middle ground. I meant that there is still time for moderate centrists. It seemed to me that this was entirely in-line with your recent post on Burkean Conservatism. I gave two examples, one of which is closely related to the present news cycle and the topic of this post.
That example is Peter Hitchens' idea of a "Right-Wing Labor" party. He has repeatedly stated his view that the two main British parties represent no one,
and that the present troubles may possibly lead to their destruction, in which case room would be made for new parties to emerge that actually represent the divisions in the UK. I think his ideas are worth serious consideration.
My second example, from America's past, was the TR wing of the Republican party, circa 1900-1910. Such a party MIGHT have taken off if, say, Woodrow Wilson had not simultaneously re-aligned the Democratic Party circa 1912, and cemented his leadership and his party's new alignments by successfully navigating the several crises of WWI.
In my view, the main problem to overcome is that America does not generate such personalities as Wilson, TR, or William Jennings Bryan anymore. Sorry to say that the septuagenarian Sanders hasn't the energy or the time to re-align a party like the Democrats, so dependent as they are on cash flows from the winners of the neoliberal world order.
7/5/16, 3:50 PM
Candace said...
I have no idea what I was actually expecting, but I really do feel like we're sinking deeper and deeper and there is no life raft
7/5/16, 6:14 PM
jessi thompson said...
7/5/16, 7:33 PM
Unknown said...
I've heard similar narratives to your BBC story about the fruit farms here in the US (just sub in illegal immigrants from the south). I suspect the jobs not being "attractive enough for UK people" is code for the employer is not willing to pay even minimum wage for the job.
-Joel
7/5/16, 7:39 PM
jessi thompson said...
7/5/16, 7:40 PM
jessi thompson said...
7/5/16, 7:44 PM
Owen said...
It does seem that the salary class is starting to become aware of how out of touch they are.
7/5/16, 8:49 PM
jean-vivien said...
in line with this closing week's theme, I'd like to say that here in France it also feels like the blackbirds are hoovering above our heads.
I will elaborate later on, but while dinosaurs are fighting on the ground, the flocks are waiting to come home to roost. Add to that the woes (climate, economy...) of the agricultural sector, and you have a time such as violent conflicts or revolutions are made of.
7/5/16, 11:48 PM
paularbair said...
Great post again, thanks.
I think that Brexit and the 'populist' surge across the West can be seen as symptoms of a crisis of complexity caused by rising biophysical constraints and characterized by diminishing returns of investments in societal complexity. We might have reached the point identified by Joseph Tainter where our standard way of solving the problems we face – i.e. investing in organizational and technical complexity – is yielding diminishing returns. As a consequence, more and more of our complex economic, technical, political and social systems are showings signs of stress, or even early signs of failure. As our capacity to invest in further complexity continues to get eroded by energy-related and other biophysical constraints, we should expect more stress to develop across the board, potentially leading to some sort of systemic breakdown and forced simplification. The growing popular revolts against globalisation, the EU, or multiculturalism are signs that Western societies are already struggling to uphold their level of complexity and are subject to strong forces that are pulling towards a break down to a lower complexity level (i.e. localized economies, national governance, homogeneous societies, etc.).
Overall, the Brexit vote and the way people have reacted to it is a good example of the way the stories we tell ourselves get to obscure what is really at play and at stake, i.e. the stories we choose to ignore.
https://paularbair.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/brexit-the-populist-surge-and-the-crisis-of-complexity/
7/6/16, 5:02 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
No need to reply.
I'm slowly running out of power here this year because the weather is just that grim and has been for days on end. Yesterday 0.5kWh and today 0.9kWh were generated by the 4.6kW PV array. Mate, anyone who reckons the future is based on renewables are smoking weed because I'm now reduced to replying to you on a laptop with only a single light on. At least the house and hot water is toasty warm due to the wood fire which is going strong. Actually I reckon a warm house is more important than a well lit house! :-)! Anyway, 1.57 inches has fallen here in the past 24 hours and I felt very sorry for the poor wombat I almost tripped over in the rain whilst I was checking the drains. It must have been hungry after so many days.
Hi Unknown,
Thanks for the heads up and I'll check it out and enjoy a good chuckle. On the triple J hack program a month or two back they had a couple of US pundits who work on the campaigns of the two big parties and they were equally clueless. Like they clearly had no idea at the sheer discontent. It never even occurred to them to change their policies.
Cheers
Chris
7/6/16, 5:35 AM
Mark Northfield said...
I understand your central point just fine, but I respectfully maintain that it's too simplistic for the UK situation to frame it as working class/poor vs affluent. Maybe that narrative fits the US situation better.
With a narrow margin of victory on such an important national decision, whichever side lost was going to feel hurt and angry by it: that's human nature. Farage had made a point of saying in advance that a narrow victory for remain would not be the end of the story and that he was ready to fight on if needs be. Not stipulating a minimum necessary margin for victory in the referendum legislation was probably a mistake, but I agree that trying to change the rules after the event would be an act of highly destructive bad faith. Only if there was a clear and sustained shift in public opinion could this result really be questioned, and that seems unlikely before the triggering of article 50.
Here's a piece of anecdotal evidence about 'polite society' which may interest you: my partner works in IT (for Hewlett Packard in Bracknell, Berkshire - relatively affluent southern England in London's commuter belt) and most of his office co-workers were vociferously pro-leave in such a way that he felt it unwise to express an opinion to the contrary. These are not the economically oppressed by any means; they work reasonably long hours but receive a well above average salary for it. Their motivation has far more to do with nationalist sentiment (I'm not saying this in itself is good or bad, but it's not always well-informed), stoked by anti-EU/anti-migrant rhetoric in most of the UK press over many years. As an aside, I find it interesting how this kind of rhetoric hasn't had the same impact in Scotland or Northern Ireland.
While I concur with the general thrust of your criticisms of neoliberalism and the inevitability of a pushback, the EU has mostly not imposed this on an unwilling UK. Rather, the UK has helped push the EU in this direction. Thatcher got the ball rolling in the 1980s with privatisation of public services, relaxing financial regulation and oversight, crushing the unions and heavy industry. She was out of power before the EU in its current form even existed.
(continues in separate comment...)
7/6/16, 6:39 AM
Mark Northfield said...
New Labour introduced the minimum wage (fiercely opposed by the Tories at the time) and kept spending up on public services, but otherwise trod the same neoliberal economic path seemingly out of fear of reliving the 1970s and being branded 'loony lefties' in the press if they didn't. They clambered merrily on the privatisation bandwagon, embraced the accounting trick of PFI, boasted of the light-touch regulation of banking, allowed HMRC to be taken over by the big accountancy firms, let zero-hours contracts proliferate and didn't address the lack of social housing. This is all a failure of our own parliament, not the EU.
And the housing is not a side issue, but a fundamental part of people's discontent in Britain today. While not enacting temporary EU immigration restrictions in the middle part of the last decade was certainly a mistake, the focus on the numbers coming here since then has diverted attention from this long-term failure of successive governments. Merely treating the symptom will not cure the malaise.
You wrote '...which can't provide adequate jobs, housing, or social services...', when it would be more accurate to say '...which has chosen not to provide...' those things. That is the crux of it. We have a tax gap of around £120billion per year. We have pumped £375billion of QE into the financial system, with more likely to follow. Government has the tools to provide jobs and investment in things that will benefit society and reduce inequality, but this is simply not in the Tories DNA.
One final point to note: the polls were not 'blindsided' - many were pointing to a Leave victory in the week or two before the vote.
I do want to emphasise that I find your writing consistently interesting and thought-provoking, and I respect your integrity as a writer, despite my disagreement with you here. I've never felt the need to reply at such length before, but the topic is one of great interest to me.
My hope now is that we can save the better aspects of EU legislation and finally address our many homegrown problems. My fear is that the exact opposite happens in a period of extreme economic uncertainty, that we become even more of a tax haven, and that Scotland's departure leaves us with a permanent right-wing 'Cowardly State' (to quote one Richard Murphy). Time will tell.
7/6/16, 6:39 AM
hawkzatar said...
Thank you JMG
Peace Hawk
paintednote.net
spiraloaflife.net
PS
Homework #1
John Bonswick- Irish religions
Homework #2- have not decided, but always felt the racist mood you speak of
7/6/16, 12:58 PM
The Seditionist said...
The problem with that argument in the US is that the people turned on Trump's populism are the ones who have been electing politicians who made the one-party neoliberal state possible. Up till Slick Willie, there was enough of a choice between the parties that it mattered. And the right wing haters of the neoliberal policies, again, are the ones who enabled it.
Too, as noted in the post, the problem is an elite who cares not at all for the masses. Wouldn't take to much to make the masses happy, but the Republicans are dead set against giving even a crumb -- and still get elected.
I fear the fools who could elect Trump -- but they're fools. Their beef is legitimate, but considering all they've done to make it possible.... And now maybe elect Trump who, at the end of the day is no solution... well, I've little sympathy for these people. Indeed, sympathy would be kind of suicidal.
7/6/16, 4:27 PM
Marvin Mots said...
Your introduction and use of "notational space" is a wonderful tool for understanding what has happened in technology development the last 50 years. This is extremely helpful to me. Thank you. Very few people understand or even agree with the fact that significant technological progress has been at a standstill for many years.
I have seen this phenomenon directly, working as a scientist in R&D in a few fields for 12 years, followed by work as a patent attorney in a variety of fields for another 20 years. Other older patent attorneys with a long time perspective that I have talked to have the same opinion. The real good (helpful inventions that improved our lives based on an improved, deeper understanding of reality) were mostly played out 50 to 100 years ago.
We live in reality that is understood by progressively more detailed theories of reality. It is not true that earlier science is superceded and made irrelevant by later science. Newtonian physics (and basic 100 year old chemistry) are useful and used to understand and intelligently interact with reality MOST of the time, even now. Later advances do NOT throw out or make irrelevant the earlier more basic science, but instead provide explanations and modalities of action for how to handle the 1% of instances where the old theories do not work. Gradually, we see the earliest theories used for the majority of intelligent interactions with reality, then later theories used for a small proportion of outliers, then the most recent advances needed and actually used to handle the rare cases where earlier theories do not work. This is the real fact of your notational space in how we are doing with applications of discoveries in reality. The space of understandable reality based on science HAS gotten smaller. The facts of science discovery and technology application over the years (as evidenced in the patent field) clearly show that your definition and use of notational space in the arts, clearly applies to science.
The golden age of science is over. Most patents in recent years (particulalry compared to 50-100 years ago are merely tricks to make people pay more for old technology dressed up in new packages (particularly seen in pharmaceuticals), or (particularly in the computer science area) new ways to trick and fool people and take away their privacy and money and time.
Of course, there are exceptions, particularly in the cancer therapy field, but generally we need to be honest and decide what technology we really need and avoid the nonsense of contrived advances, which more often than not serve the 0.01% and hurt the common man. Most of the important (ie. litigated) recent "advances," (the "internet of things" comes to mind) and new inventions for fooling the internet user serve the wealthy, connected and international enterprise but should be avoided by those who truly want a better life. That seems to be your main message. I recently walked away from my successful K-street patent law firm (which I founded about 10 years ago) because I am so disgusted with how the patent system is mostly used to control, fool and cajole people out of their money, without offering anything helpful in return. The age of basic discovery is mostly over and the age of consolidation (independent self-reliant communities generate everything they need, using no-cost technology and local energy/materials) is commencing....
I really am surprised by the quality of comments posted here and would like to meet others.
7/9/16, 1:41 AM
susancoyotesfan said...
7/10/16, 5:28 PM
Stephen cook said...
7/23/16, 3:33 AM
Beatrice Salmon-Hawk said...
7/23/16, 5:01 AM
Synthase said...
8/2/16, 2:22 AM
ursus262 said...
A situation that has occurred here in the UK sums it up exactly. A major sportswear retailer opens a warehouse on the site of a disused coal mine that had been closed years ago, and which put thousands out of work. What seems like a fresh start soon turned sour when the retailer's employment practices emerged. A Dickensian workhouse culture emerged with pay and conditions that were so appalling that most local people couldn't actually afford to live on what they were paying. The result? Some eighty percent of the workforce were brought in from abroad, mostly from Eastern Europe, because they were the only ones who would accept such conditions.
This is a typical example of something that causes such anger and such rage amongst working class people in the UK and no amount of schoolyard insults against them will mitigate against that; and I'm afraid that until we actually start discussing these root causes of our problems both here and across the Atlantic, then I fear civil unrest and something much, much worse.
8/6/16, 3:16 PM