Sunday, November 20, 2022

Good Riddance To Humanity

 


As I said in big post about my book readings for 2021 and 2022, I was reading David Suzuki's and The Big Picture.  It's from 2009.  He's describing crises building in 2009 and now it's 2022 and we not only haven't mitigated our behaviour, but we're actually behaving worse.  And there are still idiots denying the reality of global warming and yammering about how expensive it would be to cater to the delusions of global warming fear mongers.

Rain forest depletion.  Mass extinctions.  Massive droughts.  Shrinking glaciers.  Methane bubbles.  Pakistan under water.


Then there's the COVID-19 pandemic.  Stupid assholes from the left and right sides of the political spectrum have decided that since governments lie and pharmaceutical companies do too that the pandemic is a fraud.  It's a "PLAN-demic."  The virus is just the common flu that was invented in a bio-weapons lab by the Chinese to destabilize the West (which is why the Chinese government released it in China first).  Or, the virus (that is no more dangerous than the common flu) was invented in a bio-weapons lab by Anthony Fauci so that he could get rich by not killing everybody.

Nothing really happened!  All those deaths in the old folks' home; all the over-crowded emergency rooms; all the cancelled surgeries; all the burned-out hospital workers; all the scenes of mass death in India; ... all business as usual.  It's a hoax goddammit!  Didn't you know that when John D. Rockefeller sat down with the House of Rothschild and Woodrow Wilson and Margaret Sanger to discuss their long-term plan to smash capitalism and human freedom, it was decided that, after Climate Science, the best place for activists to worm away the vitals of society from the inside was in public health management.

That's why EVERY hospital administration and EVERY local public health official is IN ON THE SCAM!!!  It is a vast, terrifying conspiracy.  Lots of moving parts.  Lots of "crisis actors."

Apparently that is the logic of a significant number of people.  The sort who think they sound intelligent when they say: "I would rather die of COVID than live in fear of it."  Yes genius.  Dying from not protecting yourself from something that you knew could kill you really puts you in your best light.  Too bad you can only die once.  I'd like to see you drive a car without brakes down a hill with no seat-belt on.  Then I'd like you to walk naked through a bear-infested forest smeared with honey.

Apparently wearing a mask over your nose and mouth ["Duh! The nose TOO???"] during a pandemic featuring a respiratory virus is a major infringement on one's freedom.  Gad!  It's just so fucking stupid!!!


Then there's the absolutely inexcusable rah-rahhing for World War III and a nuclear holocaust by shit-heads astonishingly captured by the USA's ridiculous narrative for the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Apparently mad-men with one of the world's two largest collections of nuclear weapons can be safely ignored when they say: "Don't make that large country right on my border a member of your military alliance against me!"  Apparently, right before they're going to rebuild the Czarist Empire, mad-men with gigantic arsenals of nuclear weapons say; "Look!  Let's sign this agreement whereby I agree to respect the Ukraine's autonomy if you'll guarantee it's neutrality."

Apparently the country that launches coups in Honduras, Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador, Haiti, and which destroyed Iraq, Syria and Libya [killing millions], and which is helping the corrupt, misogynist, obscurantist regime in Saudi Arabia conduct a genocide in Yemen, is just passionate about the lives and the freedom of Ukrainians that have been endangered by this UNPROVOKED Russian attack!

This is GOOD vs. EVIL, RIGHT vs. WRONG.

Humanity is too stupid to survive.  We don't deserve to.



Wednesday, November 2, 2022

Squandering Hegemony (Walden Bello Edition)

 


Recently I wrote a couple of posts about how the Anglo-American hegemony established after World War II has been in steep decline in recent years. (1 & 2)  Over at CounterPunch the always worthwhile Walden Bello provides us with a similar analysis:

But what overdetermines the current crisis of the hegemon is that it is not just economic but also ideological and political.

The British Marxist Paul Mason has argued that with the triumph of neoliberalism and financialization in the global North, solidarity and a sense of community based on economic class and a shared middle class lifestyle among workers was replaced by an individualized identity as consumers, as market players in a society of seemingly shared prosperity but where rising income was increasingly replaced by rising debt as the mechanism of economic pacification.

Having exchanged their class identity for that of consumers in the market, their loss of even the latter owing to the 2008-2009 crisis left them ideologically vulnerable, particularly when it came to their commitment to the liberal democratic belief in universal equality. Even before the financial crisis, many workers had already been feeling psychologically threatened by the gains of the movements for racial and gender justice, and their descent into economic insecurity was the final step in their rightward radicalization.

What the volatile combination of economic crisis, ideological vulnerability, and Donald Trump has done is to make legitimate if not respectable an anti-democratic core belief that has been transmitted generationally, communally, and subversively. This is White Supremacy, which is now informally the ruling ideology of the Republican Party.

Finally, to the political crisis. I don’t think there would be many who would object to our characterizing American liberal democracy as being in crisis. 

...

To repeat, what distinguishes the crisis of the hegemon today from the 1980s is the fatal combination of severe economic dislocation, deep ideological disaffection, and profound political instability. Global hegemony is difficult to exercise if, in addition to falling behind on the economic front, the hegemon is also nearing civil war and a significant sector of the society has lost faith in the liberal democratic ideology that legitimizes its global economic primacy.

That is where the United States is today.

So, how does it feel to be a member of a society in decline?  Did you subscribe to the moronic "Russiagate" conspiracy theory?  Do you shrug your shoulders at Liberal/Democratic assaults on constitutional rights while shrikeing about Conservative/Republican ones?  Do you believe the absurd official narrative about Russia in the Ukraine?  Are you a shameless hypocrite?

Then you are contributing to your own society's decline.