The Lancet: Racism is a global public health hazard.

If you start to dig into the history of white supremacy, you start to realize that it’s still very much a part of the global political and economic system. It’s not the only force at work, of course, but it has left scars on both land and people, and it’s built into a great many aspects of how the world works. It’s not always something you can see, if you don’t have enough context for what’s in front of your eyes, but it’s there, and it continues to do real harm. There are, of course, people who are racist, and who cause harm deliberately for that reason, but it goes far beyond that.

White supremacy is a global public health problem. To some degree, we already knew that, right? Redlining – the racist housing policies that we’re told are in the past – continues to disproportionately expose communities of color to things like lead poisoning. Environmental racism is a known, global phenomenon, but I’m starting to think that we ought to view white supremacy as a sort of pollutant in its own right, or maybe a dangerous building material, like asbestos. The problem is that while the asbestos industry has definitely fought to keep making money (and keep exposing people to the stuff), the social infrastructure of white supremacy was designed to cause harm to people from the very beginning.

And for all many powerful people like to pretend racism isn’t a big problem, it turns out that it is a global public health crisis.

First, racism, xenophobia, and discrimination are fundamental determinants of health globally. The misclassification of race as a biological (rather than social) construct continues to compound health disparities. Four research papers show how discrimination leads to poorer health outcomes and quality of care. In a study of over 2 million pregnancies across 20 high-income and middle-income countries, neonatal death, stillbirth, and preterm delivery were more likely among babies born to Black, Hispanic, and south Asian women. Another shows how theft of land and destruction of traditional practices of Indigenous Brazilians are associated with adverse cardiometabolic outcomes. Among people diagnosed with brain tumours in the USA, Black patients were more likely to have recommendations against surgical resection, regardless of clinical, demographic, and socioeconomic factors, suggesting bias in clinical decision making. In Australia, everyday discrimination contributes to half the burden of psychological distress experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The logical conclusion is that racism and discrimination must be central concerns—for practitioners, researchers, and institutions—to advance health equity.

This issue also shows how systems intersect to perpetuate inequities. Racism converges with systems of oppression, including those based on age, gender, and socioeconomic status, to exacerbate or mitigate experiences of discrimination. The core problem is an inequality in power, historically rooted but still operating today. It shapes environments and opportunities. Specific recommendations for health include increasing cultural safety and diversity in the health-care workforce; co-designing with affected communities health-care systems that are more flexible, accessible, and welcoming; and strengthening Indigenous self-determination and land rights. A four-paper Series shows that social equity can be promoted best through interventions that target structures and systems, particularly through radical rights-based legal and political measures, led by affected communities. These are important lessons for health care, education, research, funding bodies, and government.

This report tries to quantify the material harm done by racism, and crucially draws attention to the fact that race is a social construct, and that pretending otherwise is itself harmful. It’s good to see research like this being done, and it’s good to see it being published in The Lancet. For all its mistakes, the journal is still well-respected, and I find it encouraging to see such a publication talking about the importance of self-determination, radical measures, and efforts led by affected communities.

As ever, this knowledge means little by itself. We already knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that racism, prejudice, and the infrastructure of white supremacy do ongoing harm, and that knowledge has not helped us stop it. What does make a difference is when people band together and use their collective power to demand change, or better yet to start making that change themselves. This is yet another example of justice delayed being justice denied. The way the British royal family clings to its stolen jewels may be the most glaring example of this, but the reality is that while the rich and powerful may be pay lip service to notions like justice and equality, they will do everything they can to obstruct both. Whether it was the broken promises to former slaves, the broken treaties with Native tribes, or the punitive debt imposed on newly “independent” colonies, justice has never been served, and that has compounded the harm, and re-inflicted the wounds on generation after generation. Do not trust to fairy tales about history having a moral arc – this will not stop unless we make it stop.

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Video: Timbah on Toast takes an empathetic and educational look at Ye, and bipolar disorder

A couple days ago, I called Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) a fascist, while talking about the company he’s been keeping lately. I’m comfortable saying that, because of the misinformation and hate that he’s spreading, and because of the people and ideas he’s empowering. He is, as the philosophers say, “doing fascism”. There’s no excusing that, and I think that he’s in a quagmire mostly of his own making, from which he’ll have trouble escaping. Because of his cultural stature, he’s someone whose actions we need to consider, at least from time to time, and in doing so, it seems like a good idea to know at least a little bit about bipolar disorder. It’s also something that’s just generally good to know about, because the odds are decent that there are people in your life who have to deal with that set of symptoms.

Timbah on Toast has done a number of excellent videos on different subjects, and in my very inexpert opinion, this one is worth watching as well. It gives an overview of what bipolar is and how it manifests, as well as a description of what it’s like for the person living through those manifestations. The video also talks about treatment, and about Ye specifically. The combination of wealth (Beau of the Fifth Column likes to call money “power coupons”), cultural influence, existing bigotry, and bad company seems to act like a bit of a perfect storm for driving Ye into these waters. That said, there’s one prediction that Timbah makes that I worry may be overly optimistic.

He correctly points out that the people who’ve been encouraging and enabling Ye lately don’t care about his wellbeing. He’s profitable for them, and for some, he’s a potential pathway to power. Where I fear Timbah may be going wrong, is in the prediction that when Ye goes into a depressive episode, having pushed away the people who cared about him, his current crowd will abandon him.

They might, I suppose, but looking at the situation, I’m reminded of the radicalization funnel that’s been guiding people towards the extreme right. For that, extreme low points are often an important part of the process. That’s when you can really convince someone that everyone else has abandoned them, and that only you, the fascist benefiting from his involvement, can be trusted to take care of him, and to guide him when he needs it. I don’t know if someone like Fuentes, Yiannapoulis, or Owens will be the one to do that, and I don’t know whether they’ll succeed if they try, but I think it is inevitable that someone in his current orbit is planning to take advantage. For all these are horrible people, they’re perfectly capable of being kind and caring when they think it will pay off. I don’t think it’ll be hard to convince Ye that nobody will forgive him, and that they’re the only ones he can rely on.

I could be wrong, obviously. I hope I’m wrong. I don’t know the man, and I know very little about him. With luck, he’ll extricate himself and go spend some time out of the spotlight. People do de-radicalize themselves all the time, when they have a way out, and it sure seems like someone of Ye’s stature has a number of options in that regard. Time will tell, I suppose, but regardless of how all this turns out, it’s a nasty situation.

Fascists have escalated to attacking infrastructure

Part of the reason I feel comfortable saying that fascists and other conservatives want the violence we’ve been seeing, is that they have been told, at every step of the way, what the result of their hateful rhetoric would be. It was true of the pro-life movement’s love of stochastic terrorism. It was true of the horrors we’ve seen since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade. It’s true of the current violence against LGBTQIA people.

Mass murder is the desired outcome. When I use terms like “genocide” for this, I mean it quite literally – they want queer people to stop existing.

In Abigail Thorne’s excellent video on the philosophy of Antifa, she says that while fascists can non-violently make themselves safe from anti-fascist activists by ceasing to “do fascism”, the targets of fascism cannot make themselves safe from fascists, because their mere existence is why they’re under attack. The only way to make the fascists happy is for them to stop existing.

This also means that as a fascist movement gains power and confidence, they will keep escalating attacks on the groups they’re scapegoating. You can’t claim that a group of people is causing the downfall of civilization forever, without doing something about it, and as we’ve seen, they’ve reached the stage where they’re openly saying, “if you don’t want to be murdered, follow my rules“.

The response to the Club Q shooting was an escalation. It marked the point at which many conservatives felt safe enough to shed the pretense of disapproval, and to openly support the violence. We’ve now had another escalation, in North Carolina:

Much of Moore County — more than 40,000 homes and businesses — remain without power following an attack to electrical substations. Authorities have confirmed that at least two substations were damaged by gunfire on Saturday night.

Damage assessments are still underway and estimates for the return of power to almost all of southern and central Moore remain uncertain. For now, Duke Energy has estimated restoration by 10 p.m. Sunday night, but that was before full estimates of the damage were available.

This coordinated attack coincides with rhetorical attacks on a drag show that was in one of the affected businesses, and has been followed, as with the Club Q shooting, by right-wing extremists making not-so-subtle implications:

Unsurprisingly, they claim that their god is responsible – who knew he used guns?

As usual, their “all-powerful” deity needs fanatical zealots to interpret and carry out its wishes.

I’ve talked before about how bigots are more than willing to hurt themselves and those they claim to care about, if it means hurting the people they hate more. In this case, shutting down one drag show was apparently worth cutting off power to tens of thousands of people, no matter how much harm that does to anyone else. The long history of blaming natural disasters on “the gays” has primed them to accept massive amounts of collateral damage in their war on most of humanity. If “God” is angry about the drag show, then he’s punishing everyone who lost power for not being bigoted enough towards that show, and towards the people who are OK with such things.

It will not stop here.

This shouldn’t be required for anyone to fight back, but it won’t stop with trans people either, or gay people, or any other group. Fascism is a pyramid scheme fueled by hatred – it always needs new targets. They are coming for queer people right now, and the only way they will stop is if we make sure they no longer have the power to keep going.

The exact mode of opposition is going to vary from place to place. Anti-fascist action tends to be locally organized, and tailored to the needs of the moment. It may be that cancelling an event is the best course of action in a given moment, to avoid an armed confrontation. It may be that groups like the John Brown Gun Club will run a security operation to defend an event. If you think things are safe where you are, and you want to help out somewhere else, follow local leadership.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution here, beyond the importance of collective action. Work with others. Do not assume the police are on your side (they aren’t). This is dangerous. People are getting killed, and the trend is towards more violence, not less. The people who’ve been warning about fascism have not been exaggerating or making stuff up – it is happening here, and without real, organized opposition, it will keep happening.

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I forgot Trump had another mask to take off…

I’ve had a bit of a political journey over the last five years. I have the cringe-inducing memory of telling an anarchist that “I’d vote for an anarchist for president”, to actually having enough understanding to know that I’ll be a bit embarrassed by that for the rest of my life. There’s a problem I’ve noticed, and I’m pretty sure it’s not just “a me problem” – it’s far to easy to assume that my journey of understanding mirrors that of other people who’ve lived through the same world events. I’ve debunked fossil fuel propaganda more times than I can count in the last decade, to the point where it feels as though everyone must have seen through the lies by now. I’ve learned about fascism as it has become more relevant in the world, to the point where it must be obvious to everyone what’s going on in the US right now.

And now I’m at the point where I realize that no, it really has just been me and some number of other people, who’ve gone from being some breed of liberal, with a mild curiosity about the loud folks carrying red and black flags at a protest, to being one of the weirdos who won’t shut up about fascism. The world has not accompanied me.

To be fair, a great deal of the world has accompanied me. I think a lot of the people – particularly on the right – who claim that Trump’s movement isn’t fascist are either lying, or so deep in denial that they may lack original thoughts on the matter entirely. And so, for all it has been glaringly obvious to many of us, some people will have trouble coping with Trump’s recent declaration that:

“A massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the constitution.”

At this point, I doubt Trump will lose much support over this. The “mask” he wore of respecting the constitution and rule of law was already paper-thin and so full of holes you could see the swastika peeking through even when the hot air wasn’t on full blast. There were so many holes I forgot the damned mask was even there. Some people may denounce this, but I think we should not trust the displays of shock from anyone who supported him and his lies up till this point. The goals of Trump and his movement have never been clearer, and as they continue their genocidal campaign against LGBTQIA people, they will probably be increasingly open in their efforts to establish fascist rule in the United States.

It may be that the GOP leadership will finally deign to rule Trump ineligible to hold the presidency, though I doubt it, but it’s been clear for a while that the world they want is the same as the world Trump wants. As I’ve said before, the GOP is a white supremacist, Christian fascist party, and they will not stop unless they are forced to.

Barbadian call for reparations targets a fortune built on slavery and murder

Whenever the subject of reparations for slavery and colonialism comes up, the objections are almost always framed to pit the “white working class” against those to whom reparations are owed. This is, of course, a dishonest framing, rooted in the lie of capitalist meritocracy. Those opposing reparations tend to believe (or claim to believe) that the atrocities in question are in the distant past, part of a different system from the one in which we live, and therefor entirely divorced from the fortunes and struggles of our era. The slave owners are all dead, so they say, and so any reparations would be paid for by people who had no role in maintaining or profiting from slavery. It’s an effective bit of propaganda, and like all such misinformation, it’s re-used over and over again, no matter how many times it’s debunked.

The reality is that the era of colonialism and chattel slavery was the foundation of capitalism as we understand it today, and the inequalities and injustices of that era were built into the infrastructure of our current economy. A number of major corporations that exist today profited off of chattel slavery, though some of those fortunes have been laundered by buyouts, mergers, and the like. More than that, since reparations were primarily paid to slave owners for the loss of “their property”, there are a great number of extant individual fortunes that also tie directly to those atrocities.

That can’t be too surprising, right? We live in a world where the Windsor family still holds the British crown, and the billions in resources that come with that, and other “noble” families, still retain vast fortunes, even if they’re not always directly involved in government. These are fortunes built on conquest, genocide, and slavery, but when the question of reparations comes up, suddenly we’re told that those demands are being made of the working class? It’s such obvious bullshit that you’d think it wouldn’t fly, and yet that same social infrastructure of white supremacy serves to lend undue credence to the lies.

Fortunately, some people are fighting back. A little over a year ago, Barbados ended its relationship with the British Monarchy. Now, they are suing to get back some of the wealth that was stolen from them by a powerful family within the former British Empire:

The government of Barbados is considering plans to make a wealthy Conservative MP the first individual to pay reparations for his ancestor’s pivotal role in slavery.

The Observer understands that Richard Drax, MP for South Dorset, recently travelled to the Caribbean island for a private meeting with the country’s prime minister, Mia Mottley. A report is now before Mottley’s cabinet laying out the next steps, which include legal action in the event that no agreement is reached with Drax.

Barbados became a republic a year ago after it removed Queen Elizabeth II as head of state.

The Drax family pioneered the plantation system in the 17th century and played a major role in the development of sugar and slavery across the Caribbean and the US.

Barbados MP Trevor Prescod, chairman of Barbados National Task Force on Reparations, part of the Caricom Reparations Commission, said the UN had declared slavery to be a crime against humanity: “If the issue cannot be resolved we would take legal action in the international courts. The case against the Drax family would be for hundreds of years of slavery, so it’s likely any damages would go well beyond the value of the land.”

Countries in the Caribbean community (Caricom) have been campaigning for the payment of reparations by former colonial powers and institutions which profited from slavery. This is the first time a family has been singled out.

This is wonderful. They’re taking it directly to the people who profited from the unpaid labor of the Barbadian people. I’m sure there will still be some who oppose this, of course (aside from the Drax family, whose opinions should be disregarded), but it’s impossible to argue that Drax has not benefited from his family’s history of theft and murder. I will happily accept the argument that Richard Drax should not be subjected to the kinds of punishment that might be due to his ancestors, but that does not mean that he has a legitimate claim to the wealth they took.

Among the plans being considered are that 17th-century Drax Hall is turned into an Afro-centric museum and that a large portion of the plantation is used for social housing for low-income Bajan families. There is also a recommendation that Richard Drax pays for some of the work.

David Comissiong, the Barbados ambassador to Caricom and deputy chairman of the task force, said that besides Drax, other families whose ancestors benefited from slavery are being considered including the British royal family: “It is now a matter that is before the government of Barbados. It is being dealt with at the highest level.

“Drax is fabulously wealthy today. The Drax family is the central family in the whole story of enslavement in Barbados. They are the architects of slavery-based sugar production. They have a deep historical responsibility. The process has only just begun and we trust that we will be able to negotiate. If that doesn’t work, there are other methods, including litigation.

“Other families are involved, though not as prominently as the Draxes. This reparations journey has begun. The matter is now for the cabinet of Barbados. It is in motion. It is being dealt with.”

Drax came under the spotlight in December 2020, after the Observer revealed he had not declared his inheritance of the 250-hectare (617 acres) Drax Hall plantation. He did so only after official documents surfaced which named him as the owner. He had inherited the plantation, valued at Bds$12.5m (£5.25m), from his father, Walter, in 2017.

Drax, 64, lives at the family’s mansion in Charborough Park, Dorset. He and his family are worth at least £150m and own 23.5 square miles in Dorset, and an estate and grouse moor in Yorkshire. The family also own 125 Dorset properties personally or through family trusts and a £4.5m holiday villa on nearby Sandbanks.

Drax’s ancestor, Sir James Drax, was one of the first Englishmen to colonise Barbados in the early 17th century. He part-owned at least two slave ships, the Samuel and the Hope.

The Drax family also owned a plantation in Jamaica, which they sold in the 19th century. When slavery was abolished across the British empire in 1833, the family received £4,293 12s 6d, a very large sum in 1836, in compensation for freeing 189 enslaved people.

Prescod added: “The Drax family had slave ships. They had agents in the African continent and kidnapped black African people to work on their plantations here in Barbados. I have no doubt that what would have motivated them was that they never perceived us to be equal to them, that we were human beings. They considered us as chattels.”

As we fight for a better world, it’s important that we push back against the all-too-common lie that history is “in the past”, and so not relevant to questions of justice going forward. I hope it’s obvious to you, dear reader, that justice has not been served when the family of slavers is still rich and powerful, while those they enslaved still deal with poverty and over-exploitation. It’s frankly disgusting that Drax still owns anything in Barbados, let alone the plantation where his family enslaved and tortured people.

I don’t know where this goes from here. The history of countries like Barbados trying to get justice is not particularly uplifting, and for all the British Empire is no more, England retains a disproportionate amount of global influence, as a result of its era of conquest. The same is true of all the colonial empires, including the United States. That will continue being an obstacle to justice for as long as those countries are governed by the same people and philosophies that created the problem in the first place.

I’ll try to keep an eye on this story, and I hope to see many more like it in the coming years. More than that, I hope to see success beyond simply seizing back the stolen land. I suppose there’s a chance I may be proven wrong about this, but I think that if these struggles for justice are to be successful, it will require the people living in the countries in question to apply organized political pressure to their own governments. That means organizing, of course, and pushing back against attempts by people like Drax to conflate their fortune with that of their country’s working class. It also means paying close attention to the people to whom reparations are owed. This struggle will probably need the help of white folks, but it does not need our “leadership”. Our role is to make sure that those who wish to keep their ill-gotten gains can’t rely on distance and racism to protect them from justice.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: The Continually Escalating Anti-LGBT Rhetoric

Jessie Gender is a good source of information on trans issues and Star Trek. She has done a number of deep dives into the propaganda and misinformation surrounding trans people and the movement for trans rights, and this video is no exception. The United States (and that country is not alone) is currently in the midst of a murderous campaign to erase queer people from existence. Obviously, I think there’s validity in pointing to hypocrisy, inconsistency, and projection from conservatives, but it’s far more important that those of us who support trans rights understand what’s happening. The violence we’ve seen is the goal of this rhetoric.

This will not go away by itself. Genocide is the right word for this project. The goal here is exterminationist mass murder, and it’s up to us to stand up to the fascists, and to take away their power to do what they’re doing. This video is a good breakdown of the whole situation, in my view, and worth your time.

Conservative projection: a rule to live by

By now it’s an overused trope: The conservative pundit or politician who rants the most about the evils of homosexuality will turn out to be either gay or bisexual. It’s happened so many times that you can rely on it being brought up in response to most homophobic rants, and it goes far, far beyond just that one issue. Likewise, the people who have been pushing us toward the genocide of trans people in the United States by claiming they’re “groomers” all seem to have a record of things like advocating for shit like child marriage, supporting people with a record of preying on children, or themselves being involved in the assault of children, or in covering up said assault.

When I was a kid, a classmate did a science fair presentation on the dangers of smoking. I didn’t know it at the time, but at that point she had been smoking cigarettes for a year or two already. I’m often struck by the immaturity of thought among conservatives, and this is no exception. They accuse others of their own crimes, because they think it helps hide said crimes. What’s worse, is that conservative “followers” seem to fall for the lie every single time. I don’t know of a way around this problem, short of just building the power we need to win, because it honestly seems that these people are incapable of learning this lesson.

I’m sure some of them genuinely care about children, in their reflexive, unthinking way, but when they participate in these moral panics, they fill the air with so much bullshit, it acts to obscure the real harm being done. Why is this energy not being aimed at, for example, those known to have associated with Jeffrey Epstein?

It seems like their hatred outweighs whatever actual concern they have, and they’re willing to hurt children if it also means hurting the people they hate.

 

Some More News: Moral Panics And How To Spot Them

I feel like this video is a good follow-up to Renegade Cut’s Halloween video that I posted earlier this month. Moral panics seem to be both a persistent phenomenon in human societies, and a valuable tool for unscrupulous, usually powerful, people. They’re used to distract from real problems, often at the cost of destroyed lives and livelihoods, and often to protect those aforementioned powerful people from accountability for their misdeeds. I also think it’s telling that, in the Tucker Carlson clip right near the beginning (you knew that fascist shit factory had to be involved here, right?), he equates losing your sex drive with losing your soul. That kind of breathless, hyperbolic ranting isn’t new, but it’s a big part of what’s driving the current moral panic(s), with white supremacist fascism as the goal.

Moral panics convince people of absurd stories that make little to no sense if you dig into them – absurdities, if you will – to hide something that’s ongoing by burying it in noise (say, throwing around the accusation of “grooming” so much that people tune it out when evidence of your own sketchy views or behavior arises). If it’s not that, then it’s to build support for new atrocities.

Absurdities, atrocities, and the murder-clowns of fascism

The fact that I’m writing this is, in itself, evidence that things are not going well in the United States. Nick Fuentes is a despicable fascist weirdo who, ideally, none of you would ever have heard about. He’s a holocaust denier, a white supremacist, calls openly for dictatorship, all that jazz. I’ve been aware of him for a while because a few youtubers I follow have talked about him on occasion, but he never seemed worth my writing about. In most ways, he’s still not worth writing about, except for the fact that he’s managed to attach himself to someone far more famous.

I think one thing I never realized about fascist leaders, growing up, was how deeply strange they all are. I suppose that’s partly my fault, given that they’re famous for murdering people over absurd lies, but I think some of it also has to do with the mythologizing of Nazis in U.S. media. They’re portrayed as relentlessly competent, caring only about efficiency and results, capable of great feats of engineering and blah blah blah. The reality is that many of their so-called accomplishments were little more than propaganda. The Autobahn, for example, existed before Hitler rose to power, and he just claimed credit for it.

If I had to guess why this propaganda persists in our society, I’d say it’s probably because of how close fascism is to capitalism in general, and neoliberalism in particular. I might have felt a need to explain that statement a decade ago, but now I feel I can just point to the GOP. They’re not much different from how they’ve been for my whole life, which is why they’ve been able to go so far, with so much support. Likewise, the Democrats aren’t much different from the Republicans, with their efforts to create the mass incarceration crisis, their opposition to universal healthcare, and their habit of going far harder against the left than the right. And that’s ignoring the decades of U.S. support for fascism abroad.

There’s just a little too much coziness there for anyone in power to want the public to have a clear idea who and what fascists are.

For those who are somehow unaware, Kanye West has started openly peddling anti-Semitic and other right-wing propaganda, and in turn has been warmly embraced by a succession of odious people. The two most recent are Milo Yiannopolis (also a fascist – has been filmed singing with saluting neo-Nazis, had a password referring to The Night of the Long Knives, and the list goes on), and Nick Fuentes.

The three of them just had dinner with Donald Trump, and while it apparently didn’t go well, Trump was supposedly very impressed with Fuentes. To me, that means that we’re likely to see more of that piece of shit, so it’s worth knowing who he is. I’m sharing two videos today, because I don’t particularly want to write about him, specifically, again. I feel that these do a good job of covering who he is, who he appeals to, and why it’s not good to have him closer to the halls of power.

I have a bit of a confession to make. During my time as a lurker around the periphery of the New Atheist movement, I frequently heard a Voltaire quote – perhaps you’re familiar:

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.

Until the last few years, I didn’t really get that. I knew that a great many horrible acts had been committed in the name of beliefs I considered absurd, but the same is true of good acts. I still think society would be better if religion was entirely removed from governance, but I think I now have a more complete idea of what that quote’s about. Fascism arose from liberal democracy, and both systems came centuries after Voltaire, but looking at what they believe right at this moment, I’ve gotten a bit more perspective on the scale of absurdity that’s available. These are deeply silly people, who will happily justify torture, murder, terrorism, and genocide.

Fascists are the killer clowns that keep showing up in pop culture. I don’t like the trope, because I’ve known a number of professional clowns in my life, and they’ve all been wonderful people, but I think it’s the best illustration of the problem. Trump, Fuentes, Yiannapolis, Kanye – fascists, including their leaders, tend to be deeply ridiculous people. In some ways, that’s their superpower, not just because it means they’re not taken seriously at first, but also because they seem to be fueled by humiliation. They attract ridicule to themselves like flies to a pile of shit, and they can’t handle even the smallest amount of it. They cannot function in a world where people make fun of them, so they want to murder everyone who does, rather than considering why they might come across that way.

They believe absurdities – more and more of them every year, it seems – and based on those absurdities, they want to murder or enslave most of humanity. As with everything else they do, it might be funny, if our political and economic system didn’t keep giving these people the power to ruin lives.

I don’t think Kanye will ever be president, but this does seem like a way into more “mainstream” politics for those who’ve attached themselves to him, as someone who will reliably get press attention. The GOP’s big divide isn’t between fascism and fash-adjacent neoliberalism, but between which brand of fascism they think will get them into power. By all accounts, Trump loves sycophants, and that seems to be consistent among authoritarians. For those of you who knew nothing about this douchebag when you started reading this post, I’m sorry to have inflicted him upon you. Unfortunately, it’s likely that he and other bozos like him will remain a mutual affliction for as long as fascism is viable in the United States.

 

“When a movement is selling an image of exceptionalism and strength, their design is to attract patrons who are unexceptional and weak.”

Data on the economic toll of heat waves underscore the need to prioritize climate justice.

A few days ago, I wrote about how the increasing damage from powerful hurricanes is on track to being more than the U.S. economy can absorb. Unfortunately, it’s not just hurricanes, and it’s not jut the U.S. Since the 1990s, the global economy has lost 16 trillion dollars due to the various effects of heat waves:

Geography professor Justin Mankin and doctoral candidate Christopher Callahan, Guarini ’23, combined newly available, in-depth economic data for regions worldwide with the average temperature for the hottest five-day period—a commonly used measurement of heat intensity—for each region in each year. They found that from 1992 to 2013, heat waves statistically coincided with variations in economic growth and that an estimated $16 trillion was lost to the effects of high temperatures on human health, productivity, and agricultural output.

The findings stress the immediate need for policies and technologies that protect people during the hottest days of the year, particularly in the tropics and the Global South where the world’s warmest and most economically vulnerable nations are located, the researchers report.

“Accelerating adaptation measures within the hottest period of each year would deliver economic benefits now,” says Callahan, who is the study’s first author. “The amount of money spent on adaptation measures should not be assessed just on the price tag of those measures, but relative to the cost of doing nothing. Our research identifies a substantial price tag to not doing anything.”

The study, “Globally Unequal Effect of Extreme Heat on Economic Growth,” is the among the first to specifically examine how heat waves affect economic output, says Mankin, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of geography. “No one has shown an independent fingerprint for extreme heat and the intensity of that heat’s impact on economic growth. The true costs of climate change are far higher than we’ve calculated so far.”

Dishonest actors sometimes point to deaths due to cold as a reason why we shouldn’t be worrying about climate change, but that argument ignores several factors. The first, of course, is that we are at the beginning of this warming event. While we can see a great deal of measurable change already, the sheer scale of what is happening makes it hard to remember that it’s actively getting worse. The second is that a lot of those deaths are due to the same economic system that has destabilized our climate. Lack of shelter, lack of adequate heat, and lack of adequate medical care all combine to make people far more vulnerable to all sorts of weather conditions, and the sad reality is that someone can die of hypothermia in pretty “warm” conditions.

Beyond that, there’s also the simple fact that we are a species that evolved on a cold planet. Our history has been hundreds of thousands of years of ice ages, and warmer inter-glacial periods, like the one we’ve been in for the last few millennia. We have many more tools for keeping ourselves warm than we have for cooling off. Deaths due to cold, would be pretty easy and cheap to prevent, but as a society we don’t value life very much.

And, of course, the statistics for cold deaths tend to focus on fairly wealthy countries that have harsh winters, and that choose to maintain a certain level of poverty, “for the economy. The growing problem of heatwaves is not only global, but is predictably hitting poorer countries harder:

“Our work shows that no place is well adapted to our current climate,” Mankin says. “The regions with the lowest incomes globally are the ones that suffer most from these extreme heat events. As climate change increases the magnitude of extreme heat, it’s a fair expectation that those costs will continue to accumulate.”

[…]

The study results underscore issues of climate justice and inequality, Mankin says. The economic costs of extreme heat—as well as the expense of adaptation—have been and will be disproportionately borne by the world’s poorest nations in the tropics and the Global South. Most of these countries have contributed the least to climate change.

The researchers found that while economic losses due to extreme heat events averaged 1.5% of gross domestic product per capita for the world’s wealthiest regions, low-income regions suffered a loss of 6.7% of GDP per capita.

Furthermore, the study revealed that to a certain point, wealthy subnational regions in Europe and North America—which are among the world’s biggest carbon emitters—could theoretically benefit economically by having periods of warmer days. The economies of other principal emitters such as China and India would be harmed by a greater intensity of extreme heat events given their regional baseline temperatures, the researchers found.

“We have a situation where the people causing global warming and changes in extreme heat have more resources to be resilient to those changes, and, in some rare cases, could benefit from it,” Mankin says. “It’s a massive international wealth transfer from the poorest countries in the world to the richest countries in the world through climate change—and that transfer needs to be reversed.”

 That last sentence could easily describe much of the last couple centuries of global politics and economics. It also follows what seems like an increasingly open hatred of anyone who’s struggling, and a belief that such people should be punished for their misfortune. It feels like a very superstitious, Calvinistic perspective – that those at the bottom are suffering because they deserve to be suffering, and therefor we should punish them for the sins they must have committed to be so cursed by God/The Free Market. That’s where we see people waving away a housing-first approach to homelessness, because of vague assertions about drug use or the preferences of people without adequate shelter, in my opinion. While it may not be unique to United States, it feels like a very USian outlook on life, and the flip side to the prosperity gospel that infuses that country’s culture.

And after a certain point, it’s hard not to see this as white supremacist eugenics at work in the climate denial movement, especially when you look at the other political projects funded by fossil fuel corporations and their owners.

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