Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

Global fertility and the climate crisis

Foreign Affairs has an interesting article on “The Age of Depopulation: Surviving a World Gone Gray“.

It describes several hypotheses for explaining the reduced fertility rates and falling populations almost all over the world, but emphasizes that women simply voluntarily don’t want to have as many children:

Pritchett determined that there is an almost one-to-one correspondence around the world between national fertility levels and the number of babies women say they want to have. This finding underscored the central role of volition—of human agency—in fertility patterns.

Personally, I wonder if the ecological crisis is a major background psychological cause. To everyone who is paying attention, the unambiguous message from scientists and policy experts is that we are destroying our own civilization and the capacity of the Earth to support us through our selfish and short-sighted determination to turn burning hydrocarbons into dollars. Even when it comes to my own life, I am profoundly afraid that prosperous, open, and advanced societies will cease to exist as the ecological basis for our entire civilization collapses. I think there is a decent chance – if I live until 2060 or so – that the young people in that time will look at photos of the produce sections in our supermarkets and be unwilling to accept that they were ever real: that we had so much bounty, such tremendous gifts from nature, and we squandered it all because we allowed psychopaths to rule us. It’s even worse than that in democratic societies: we demanded that psychopaths rule us, because we are unwilling to accept the truth of our situation.

Having children when you expect the future to be chaos demands an even greater act of faith from prospective parents. I would say that if we do want more children (which is questionable) we need to stop acting as though the future is something which we can and should destroy for the sake of our near-term ease and convenience.

Related:

US security assurances and nuclear weapon proliferation

Although France has historically been the only case of an insurance hedger opting for an independent deterrent, there is no guarantee it will be the last. Under President Trump’s leadership, significant doubts about America’s commitment to both Europe and East Asia led to growing concerns that the United States may not indefinitely remain a reliable and credible provider of extended deterrence—concerns that may remain long after the Trump administration as allies fear abandonment temptations could one day return to the White House. Burden-sharing disputes with NATO, Japan, and South Korea, and efforts to reduce America’s conventional footprint—a key indicator of its commitment to its allies—have led to questions in Germany about whether it requires a substitute to American extended deterrence, and similar discussions at least privately in Japan and South Korea among some domestic constituencies. Doubts about the reliability of America’s commitment to extended deterrence came to a boil under President Trump, who was at times perceived by allies such as South Korea as being willing to throw partners under the bus in pursuit of hisown policy objectives, such as a deal with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. The experience has the potential to revive debates about independent deterrents in America’s long-time allies—and not just for instrumental reasons to elicit stronger reassurance from Washington to hedge against future incarnations of Trumpism that seeks to retrench America’s commitments back home.

Narang, Vipin. Seeking the Bomb: Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation. Princeton University Press, 2022. p. 298

Related:

Conformity versus competence

[I]n most hierarchies, super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence.

Ordinary incompetence, as we have seen, is no cause for dismissal: it is simply a bar to promotion. Super-competence often leads to dismissal, because it disrupts the hierarchy, and thereby violates the first commandment of hierarchal life: the hierarchy must be preserved.

…

Employees in the two extreme classes—the super-competent and the super-incompetent—are alike subject to dismissal. They are usually fired soon after being hired, for the same reason: that they tend to disrupt the hierarchy.

Peter, Laurence J. and Hull, Raymond. The Peter Principle. Buccaneer Books, 1969. p. 45-6

Related: Whose agenda are you devoted to?

Monbiot on alienation and politics

When politics, bereft of relevant stories, cannot connect with the lives of those it claims to represent, it contributes to the dominant condition of our age: alienation.

Alienation means many things. Among them are people’s loss of control over the work they do; their loss of connection with community and society; their loss of trust in political institutions and in the future; their loss of a sense of meaning and power over their own lives; and a convergence of these fissures into psychic rupture. In the political sphere, alienation leads to disengagement, and disengagement opens the way for demagogues.

Monbiot, George. Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. Verso, 2017. p. 54

AI image generation and the credibility of photos

When AI-assisted photo manipulation is easy to do and hard to detect, the credibility of photos as evidence is diminished:

No one on Earth today has ever lived in a world where photographs were not the linchpin of social consensus — for as long as any of us has been here, photographs proved something happened. Consider all the ways in which the assumed veracity of a photograph has, previously, validated the truth of your experiences. The preexisting ding in the fender of your rental car. The leak in your ceiling. The arrival of a package. An actual, non-AI-generated cockroach in your takeout. When wildfires encroach upon your residential neighborhood, how do you communicate to friends and acquaintances the thickness of the smoke outside?

…

For the most part, the average image created by these AI tools will, in and of itself, be pretty harmless — an extra tree in a backdrop, an alligator in a pizzeria, a silly costume interposed over a cat. In aggregate, the deluge upends how we treat the concept of the photo entirely, and that in itself has tremendous repercussions. Consider, for instance, that the last decade has seen extraordinary social upheaval in the United States sparked by grainy videos of police brutality. Where the authorities obscured or concealed reality, these videos told the truth.

Perhaps we will see a backlash against the trend where every camera is also a computer that tweaks the image to ‘improve’ it. For example, there could be cameras that generate a hash from the unedited image and retains it, allowing any subsequent manipulation to be identified.

Related:

Group bike rides build community

I have been getting a lot of satisfaction lately from group bike rides. Community emerges naturally when people ride bikes in groups. The contrast underscores how automobile culture is a death cult: every driver gets their own sarcophagus for the living to move them through places while keeping the driver sealed apart. The driver is isolated from nature, from community, and from life at a human scale. They begin to live at a car scale where our instincts and experiences no longer bind us to our neighbours. The car is built to move at 60, 80, 100 km per hour, and to be indifferent to anything it might need to kill to do so.

Group bike rides provide a tangible vision for an idealized future without private cars. That’s a world where people who take the same routes and live in the same neighbourhoods know each other and talk: where they are neighbours. That’s a world with flower fairy girls on lavishly decorated cruiser bikes, and with guys in motorcycle helmets and body armour riding on zippy electric unicycles.

On a bike in the city, you live with the constant awareness of being killed. When riding alone, the great majority of my attention is always directed to nearby drivers and what abrupt, dangerous, or illegal thing they may do next. For drivers in the city, they may live with a mild awareness that their every careless action threatens to kill others, but they are distracted by bluetooth calls and streaming media, alienated from their fellow residents by socially atomized affluence, and shielded by public opinion and a legal system where killing someone with your car through simple carelessness is a minor and unimportant oversight which ought not to impede your happy motoring.

Lonely, frustrated, angry, and despairing

Lately, I have been feeling dejected and wildly alienated from the rest of humanity. It seems like basically nobody wants to avoid catastrophic climate change. Among those who purport to care, the superficiality the commitment is quickly revealed when they prioritize other objectives ahead of avoiding climate disaster. Government agencies work to defend the status quo: at best, they pretend to take action in order to avoid doing anything that would really make a difference. At worst, governments are the armed wing of the fossil fuel industry itself. Every country with fossil fuel reserves is rushing to develop more production. Even climate change activists care more, in practice, for imposing their social and economic preferences on society than about abolishing fossil fuels.

At times over the last 18 years, working on climate change has felt like a lonely journey but at least one where eventually the world will come around. As each year goes by now, it seems more that humanity is content to fly our plane straight into the ground, while the passengers cheer as they set ever-higher speed records and the captain assures everyone over the intercom that our present course ensures a happy arrival at a welcoming destination.

Everyone is still developing fossil fuels

As my recent blackboard talk emphasized, climate stability means fossil fuel abolition. Arguments to the contrary are cynical mechanisms to keep the petro profits coming, regardless of the consequences for the climate.

Unfortunately, despite endless talk about ‘net zero’ and ‘ensuring’ climate stability, essentially everybody is still chasing fossil fuels:

Remember: it takes decades for the full effects of our greenhouse gas pollution to be fully manifest. That means much worse is still to come, even if we start making the right choices, and a nightmare looms if we persist with our current approaches.

Mobilizing structures in the UBC pro-Palestine encampment

Interesting from a social movement perspective:

The UBC encampment for Palestine has been going strong since April 29. Working as a horizontal organizational structure, the encampment is a leaderless, non-hierarchical space where everyone is equal. We have groups in charge of different tents related to the daily operation of the camp, including food, safety, supply, medicine, art, and library. General meetings are held as frequently as possible and are the only platform to decide the goals of the encampment. It is a process of direct democracy where everyone’s voice is heard and considered, with final decisions being made based on majority votes.

Everyone who shows up to this camp is intelligent, kind, and capable of doing great things, however, we are humans, and deep down, we all seek a sense of belonging. This whole encampment is like a community, and within it, each tent is part of the group. However, it did not always feel like a cohesive community. Before the camp reached this structure, it was run by multiple “invisible” hierarchies.

Initially, there were instances where outgoing white, cisgender, and conventionally-attractive men were automatically assumed to be smart, reliable, and worthy to make decisions, while non-conforming and marginalized individuals had to work harder to be acknowledged. I don’t think this was done purposely, but can be attributed to the mixture of pressure at the encampment and the unconscious biases ingrained in colonial ideologies. The constant struggle to have all our voices heard caused tension in the supposedly democratic structure, as well as relationship mistrust in the camp. This was not what I and a lot of comrades expected from this space, where solidarity with Palestinians against colonization demands democratic practice and decentralized decision-making.

As a young, gender-non-conforming person of color, my voice was often overshadowed in favour of white, cisgender campers. We took time to acknowledge and address these biases and hierarchical structures and we came up with alternative ways to ensure every voice was heard. I believe our camp is being managed in a more inclusive way, moving toward good causes, rather than replicating oppressive systems.

Personally, I think the progressive obsession with the identities of their messengers is counterproductive to effective political organizing. A person’s ideas are good or bad based on their content, not the demographic characteristics or group identity of the speaker. Viewing people as legitimate or illegitimate participants because of arbitrary features of their identity turns them from active thinking agents to mere group representatives. Also, this sort of privileging and de-privileging puts feelings of purity and moral superiority ahead of the question of whether the activism is having any broader societal effect.