Bigotry, Transphobia, and the BBC: They always tell on themselves

It is not a new insight to say that bigots always tell on themselves. The reasons they give for their bigotry never hold up to scrutiny, either in how they align with measurable reality, or in how they align with the actions of those bigots. For one glaring example, white supremacy in the United States has always leaned heavily on the idea of “protecting white women” from the violence and sexuality of non-white (usually black) men. At the same time, the people who lean so heavily on this narrative regularly deride the concept of rape culture, and are openly hostile toward efforts to hold white rapists accountable for their crimes. Regardless of what they might say, their actions indicate that they care more about non-white men being seen as a threat to white women than they are about the safety or wellbeing of those women. Because that justifies the policies and cultural norms that they want.

A similar pattern emerges when we look at anti-immigrant rhetoric, as is well illustrated in this Lonerbox video about the recent moral panic about “Muslim grooming gangs”:

For those who didn’t watch the video, the prevalence of the problem was grossly, deliberately inflated, and the term “grooming gang” was defined in such a way that it excluded the vast majority of sexual assault committed against children. Once again, the stated concern for the white victims of non-white assailants is not visible in their actions. What’s important to people like Carl Benjamin/Sargon of Akkad is that the group in question be seen as a threat, because that justifies bigoted laws and violence.

When the struggle for gay rights began to attract more attention, gay men were all accused of being pedophiles, and the narrative was that they had to be oppressed to protect the children. Even leaving aside the children being murdered around the world by the U.S. government, this lie was being told at the same time as the Roman Catholic Church was shuffling rapists around to protect and enable them, and other homophobic religious organizations had similar problems.

The goal wasn’t to protect children, it was to maintain bigotry and oppression. The children were just useful rhetorical tools.

It’s a story that repeats over and over again – bigotry against a group is justified with lies about the evils of that group, while the supposed victims are ignored.

And so we come to the BBC’s latest efforts at upholding the UK’s reputation as “TERF Island”.

The overall moral panic about trans people has never been about the supposed harm they do, because that harm doesn’t really exist. The same people who wail and wring their hands over the “danger” of trans women having access to toilets routinely ignore the much greater threats posed by cis men, and in the case of this article, by cis women. In their eagerness to paint trans women as rapists, the BBC chose to use an admitted rapist as a source, who then went on to call for trans people to be murdered.

Because bigots always tell on themselves. They find something “icky” and work backwards from that. They think they should have rights over another group and they work backward from that. The state of oppression, repression, and demographic hierarchy is the goal. It’s the “lifestyle” they want to protect. It’s where they feel safe from people and perspectives that scare them.

That’s not to say they don’t believe their own bullshit. I think most of them do believe it, but debunking a lie doesn’t tend to change anything, because the lie wasn’t the reason for their hatred – it was a justification to prevent you from calling them what they are, and to obstruct efforts at building a more just society.

Trans men are men. Trans women are women. Nonbinary people are valid.

And bigots lie to hide their bigotry.

The past is present: FBI bias against progressive politics continues to undermine the pretense of democracy in the U.S.

In the United States, we’re often taught about our own history in a way that makes it seem as though the people and events in question are all in the distant past. The good things changed us for the better, and the bad things also changed us for the better because we beat them. Because they’re in the past, you see. We just need to “move forward”.

And so people in positions of power commit crimes and atrocities, and the U.S. “moves forward” with rarely so much as a slap on the wrist.

The FBI has been a corrupt institution from the beginning, and while some people like to pretend that things like COINTELPRO are “in the past”, the reality is that with little change in personnel or policy, that intense bias remains intact. I want to be explicit – the government of the United States of America has, for generations now, spent huge amounts of taxpayer money surveilling, entrapping, killing, and undermining left-wing political movements and groups with the explicit goal of preventing the people from putting progressive politicians in office:

The flip side of this kind of political repression campaign is that they’re just fine with people on the far right, and while they do spend some resources on tracking right-wing extremism, there’s little evidence that their bias has gone anywhere. In fact, the FBI knew, well in advance of January 6 2021, that violence was being planned, and they did almost nothing to prevent it, or suggest that maybe Capitol Police shouldn’t be focused primarily on anti-Trump counterprotesters:

The United States has never been a democracy. You could argue that we’re closer than we used to be, but the reality is that the U.S. government remains deeply committed to capitalism over all other considerations, and they continue to use their resources both around the world and at home to destroy efforts at building something better.

The extremist ideology of endless growth and profits over human life needs to be rooted out of all institutions of power if we’re going to survive the warming climate and build a just and democratic society, and unfortunately we must expect them to fight back. The powerful have always used violence as their ultimate tool to maintain power, and as workers continue to organize and stand up for themselves, I’m very much afraid that there will be an effort to destroy what we’re trying to build, along with the people leading that movement. Hell, the FBI was even involved in furthering that goal in Brazil.

Keep your eyes open. It would be bad enough to have to deal with global warming and corporate power alone, but we will also have to deal with government institutions that have always preferred fascism to democracy.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Machine learning and complex information: How much of humanity has been affected by climate change?

A few years ago, I was working as a curriculum writer at a non-profit science education research company called TERC. The company has been around for a long time, but its central purpose, as I understand it, is to study how people teach and learn science of all sorts, with the goal of improving the process for both teachers and students. This means that while my job was to write lesson plans, readings, and so on, it was always as part of a larger research project. The difficulty with this sort of research is that if you’re trying to actually assess how well students understand the subject before and then after an attempt to teach it to them, you can’t just rely on an easily generated dataset like a multiple choice test. The best way to gauge a person’s understanding of a subject is to have them explain it, in their own words, to someone whose understanding is already good enough to assess the answer.

So how can you conduct data analysis on data that’s not in a simple numerical form?

You find a way to convert it.

For example, let’s take a basic question: What does the term “ecological mismatch” mean? Define it, and give an example.

For those who are unfamiliar, “ecological mismatch”, at least in the context of climate change, refers to a situation in which the seasonal patterns of different species that normally line up, cease to do so. For example, there are numerous bird species that breed in North America during the spring and summer, but fly south to South or Central America to avoid the cold winters. Why do they put in all the effort to make such a long trip? Why not just stay in the south? Because the explosion of insect and plant life in the northern spring provides an abundance of food far beyond the day to day in their more tropical “winter homes”.

The problem is that as the climate has warmed, spring has begun to come earlier to North America, and for those birds wintering around the equator, their evolved migratory instinct relies on Earth’s orbit around the sun, which is almost entirely unaffected by global warming. That means that their migration signal has stayed the same, but spring is coming earlier, so they arrive later in the season. The food supply that made this a successful behavior isn’t always there by the time they arrive. The timing is mismatched. This means the insects they’d normally eat have a population boom, as do the birds that don’t migrate as far. That in turn can affect plant populations, other insect populations, and so on.

So. We ask a class full of people to answer this question, and what we get is a mix of responses. Some are blank or completely wrong. Some get the definition mostly right, but the example wrong. Some get the example right and the definition wrong. Some get both right. Our goal, as researchers, is to convert this qualitative data into quantitative data, so that we can run it through equations, make graphs, and so on. One could simply go with “right” or “wrong”, but that’s going to give us an inaccurate picture. The students who are partly right do have some understanding of the subject. We could split it into three options – right, partially right, and wrong. That’s also not quite right, because it doesn’t tell us what they’re partly right about; so we split it into four – right, partly right (about the definition), partly right(about the example), and wrong. Now, with options 1, 2, 3, and 4, and a clear definition of each, we can go through everyone’s answer to the question, give it a number, and actually analyze the overall pattern of understanding.

And now we’re ready to teach the lesson.

Then, you give the same test after the lesson, break it down the same way, and compare the two to see how the overall level of understanding changed. Ideally, each student will be assigned a number so you can compare them to themselves, as well as looking at the group as a whole (the data should be anonymized as much as possible, both to protect people’s privacy in published data, and to prevent conscious or subconscious bias). There was also a long process of systematizing the instructions for evaluating these quizzes so that multiple qualified people would fairly reliably get the same results going through the same process. Remember: with research part of the goal is to ensure that strangers can reproduce what you did from your publication.

We generally didn’t do a quiz like this for a single lesson. The ideal was a full unit of about a week (longer if possible) to test what did or didn’t work, and the “after” quiz would be on the last day of the unit. Each quiz would have a mix of short- and long-answer questions, and once the framework for “coding” the tests was established, someone on the team would have to go through and code every test from every student, with checks on tough calls (you’d be amazed at how many ways there are to be almost right or partly wrong about a question like this), enter the numbers into a spreadsheet, and then we could start actually analyzing the data.

This is to answer a few relatively straightforward questions about how well students understand the subject matter we presented to them.

Now let’s get to the actual point of this article, and look at a different question – How much of the human population has been directly affected by climate change?

As before, we need to break the question down, so we know what answers we’re actually looking for. Obviously we need to define what it means to be affected by climate change. Going broadly, let’s say “forced to change behavior in some way (movement, spending, place of residence, etc.) by weather that would not have caused that change absent warming caused by humans”. That means we need to determine which weather phenomena count as “normal”, and which ones can be attributed to the rise in temperature. In many cases, that’s a matter not just of determining whether climate change influenced a given event, but how much of that event was due to higher global temperatures. Would the storm surge have breached the levees if sea levels were an inch lower? Would the storm have been as powerful if the planet was a degree cooler? Trying to figure this stuff out is very difficult and time-consuming, for those with the task of actually quantifying it.

And again, that’s just for one event, like a hurricane. We’re trying to see what patterns there are on a global scale, which means our best bet is to look at the answers that have already been given – the numerous publications on individual weather events, and how they affected people, and while all of these studies do have quantitative data, they’re often studying different things, using different methods, which means the numbers they get can also mean different things. Ideally, again, you would have a team of people who already know the subject matter very well, to analyze each publication and make sure the overall data analysis actually says what we think it does. If you’re being thorough, that means having a team examining over 100,000 studies of many different weather events, and generating a dataset that will give us results we can trust.

It’s a monumental amount of work – possibly more work than could reasonably be done by a group of experts.

So some folks trained computers to do it for them.

Increasing evidence suggests that climate change impacts are already observed around the world. Global environmental assessments face challenges to appraise the growing literature. Here we use the language model BERT to identify and classify studies on observed climate impacts, producing a comprehensive machine-learning-assisted evidence map. We estimate that 102,160 (64,958–164,274) publications document a broad range of observed impacts. By combining our spatially resolved database with grid-cell-level human-attributable changes in temperature and precipitation, we infer that attributable anthropogenic impacts may be occurring across 80% of the world’s land area, where 85% of the population reside. Our results reveal a substantial ‘attribution gap’ as robust levels of evidence for potentially attributable impacts are twice as prevalent in high-income than in low-income countries. While gaps remain on confidently attributabing climate impacts at the regional and sectoral level, this database illustrates the potential current impact of anthropogenic climate change across the globe.

The debut of the remarkable new word “attributabing” not withstanding, this approach to meta-analysis could end up being hugely useful in helping people in general keep up with the massive collective effort known as “science”. There are millions of scientific papers published every year, from people all over the planet. Our collective knowledge is such that it’s impossible for any person to read the current research on all but the tiniest fraction of it, and yet we need to have at least some general grasp of these issues if we want to have any control over our future as a species. Our capacity to understand what’s happening around us and respond accordingly is one of our greatest strengths as a species, but climate change is happening at a scale that’s a bit outside what we can easily wrap our minds around. That’s probably part of why we’ve gone so long without treating global warming as the crisis it is.

From a Washington Post article on the study:

In the United States, climate disasters have already caused at least 388 deaths and more than $100 billion in damage this year, according to analyses from The Washington Post and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Yet despite a pledge to halve emissions by the end of the decade, congressional Democrats are struggling to pass a pair of bills that would provide hundreds of billions of dollars for renewable energy, electric vehicles and programs that would help communities adapt to a changing climate.

The contrast between the scope of climate disasters and the scale of global ambition is top of mind for hundreds of protesters who have descended on Washington this week to demand an end to fossil fuel use.

“How can you say that we are in this climate emergency and be going around and saying we’re at this red point … and at the same time be giving away land for additional oil and gas infrastructure?” said Joye Braun, a community organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network and a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe who rallied in Washington this week.

The activists, many of them from Indigenous communities that have been harmed by global warming, risked arrest as they remained on the sidewalk outside the White House after police ordered them to clear the area.

The new research in Nature adds to a growing body of evidence that climate change is already disrupting human life on a global scale. Scientists are increasingly able to attribute events like heat waves and hurricanes to human actions. In August, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change devoted an entire chapter to the extreme weather consequences of a warming world.

The study’s conclusion that 85 percent of humanity is experiencing climate impacts may sound high. But it’s “probably an underestimation,” said Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study.

The study looked at average temperature and precipitation changes, rather than the most extreme impacts, for which Otto says there is even more evidence of climate change’s role.

“It is likely that nearly everyone in the world now experiences changes in extreme weather as a result of human greenhouse gas emissions,” she said.

The human toll of these events has become impossible to ignore. This summer, hundreds of people in the Pacific Northwest died after unprecedented heat baked the usually temperate region. More than 1 million people in Madagascar are at risk of starvation as a historic drought morphs into a climate-induced famine. Catastrophic flooding caused New Yorkers to drown in their own homes, while flash flooding has inundated refugee camps in South Sudan.

In a letter released Monday, some 450 organizations representing 45 million health-care workers called attention to the way rising temperatures have increased the risk of many health issues, including breathing problems, mental illness and insect-borne diseases. One of the papers analyzed for the Nature study, for example, found that deaths from heart disease had risen in areas experiencing hotter conditions.

“The climate crisis is the single biggest health threat facing humanity,” the health organizations’ letter said.

As Braun points out in the quote above, the feeble “climate response” plans of most governments become a sick joke when put next to continued expansion of fossil fuel extraction, and the unwillingness of groups like the Democratic Party to do more than just say they care about the issue. It’s hard to tell if it’s malice or delusion, but in either case, it’s a problem, and it feels like they’re hoping people will just continue to underestimate the scale of what’s happening. Things like this new research could help us make a more compelling case for the change we need, by making it harder to wave the problem away. That said, the resources going into understanding what’s happening around the world aren’t much better distributed than wealth has been in this era of colonialism and neoliberalism:

Yet in many of the places that stand to suffer most from climate change, Callaghan and his colleagues found a deficit of research on what temperature and precipitation shifts could mean for people’s daily lives. The researchers identified fewer than 10,000 studies looking at climate change’s effect on Africa, and about half as many focused on South America. By contrast, roughly 30,000 published papers examined climate impacts in North America.

In poorer countries, the researchers say, roughly a quarter of people live in areas where there have been few impact studies, despite strong evidence that they are experiencing changes in temperature and precipitation patterns. In wealthier countries, that figure stands at only 3 percent.

“But it indicates that we’re not studying enough,” Callaghan said, “not that there isn’t anything happening.”

Otto attributes this discrepancy, known as an “attribution gap,” to a lack of capacity and funding for research in poor countries, as well as researchers’ tendency to reflect the priorities of wealthy nations.

In South Sudan, for example, efforts to understand flooding have been stymied by conflict and the difficulty of collecting weather data in the world’s youngest country.

Liz Stephens, an associate professor in climate risks and resilience at the University of Reading, wrote in an email that the Global Flood Awareness System from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service is “notoriously bad” at forecasting flooding in the White Nile and Blue Nile river basins. Without good data, scientists can’t easily say what places are likely to be deluged or warn when a disaster is about to hit. Officials may be caught off guard by weather events. Vulnerable people are less able to get out of harm’s way.

South Sudanese officials say half a million people — about 4 percent of the country’s population — have been displaced by the floods.

But the “attribution gap” makes machine-learning-based analyses like Callaghan’s all the more valuable, Otto said. These programs can help identify climate impacts even in places where there are not enough scientists studying them.

“It seems a very useful way … to understand better what climate change is costing us today in a global way that is more bottom-up,” Otto said.

A September study in Nature found that 60 percent of Earth’s oil and fossil methane gas and 90 percent of coal must remain in the ground for the world to have a chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — a threshold that scientists say would spare humanity the most disastrous climate impacts.

Increasingly, groups are calling on President Biden to restrict fossil fuel production outright.

On Wednesday, a coalition of more than 380 groups filed a legal petition demanding that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers stop issuing permits for new fossil fuel infrastructure projects. Two days later, hundreds of scientists submitted an open letter asking Biden to do the same.

“The reality of our situation is now so dire that only a rapid phase-out of fossil fuel extraction and combustion can fend off the worst consequences of the climate crisis,” they wrote.

In response to Monday’s protests, however, American Petroleum Institute spokeswoman Megan Bloomgren said curbing the country’s energy options would harm the economy and national security. “American energy is produced under some of the highest environmental standards in the world,” she said.

In other words, they have no intention of changing course.

The difficulty in studying climate change in regions currently suffering from things like war or the effects of climate change, is one part of why it’s so important to stop the imperialist policies of the United States in particular, and wealthy countries in general – the pattern for the last century and beyond has been for powerful nations to subject the less powerful ones to debt, invasions, coups, assassinations, death squads, and more, all in the name of securing the “interests” of a tiny ruling class. This is what drives the obscenely high emissions of the U.S. war machine, and the overthrow of regimes – like that of the Brazilian Workers Party, or the Bolivian Movement for Socialism – that are committed to both eliminating poverty and finding a way for us to live that doesn’t destroy the ecosystems on which we rely.

We can’t adapt to what’s happening if we don’t know what’s happening, and if we’re still focused on narrowminded ideas like profit and nationalism, we won’t have the resources to study the problem, let alone prepare for what’s coming.

If we want to avoid an unprecedented tide of death, we’re going to need truly revolutionary change in our political and economic systems. The alternative could well be extinction.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and due to my immigration status in Ireland this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

So people are talking about conservative brains again…

This is a topic I find simultaneously fascinating and annoying. There is some evidence that conservatives and progressives- as defined in the U.S. – have differences in brain function that match differences in thought and behavior. Basically, conservatives seem to have a stronger threat response, and the related portions of the brain tend to be a bit bigger. According to the scientist in the video clip below, conservatives are also less likely to respond to strong emotional reactions with the kind of self-assessment that might help them spot misinformation designed to provoke those strong reactions. We don’t know if brain differences cause conservative thinking, or if the patterns of conservative thinking cause the brain differences.

I want to note that the language I’m using IS biased – I am quite certain that conservatives are wrong about the things on which we disagree, and I’m also reasonably certain that most of my readers are not conservative. I am writing from my own perspective on this, but one could just as easily switch this around and talk about “liberals” having a less developed amygdala or overdeveloped prefrontal cortex.

I think it’s good to know this stuff about ourselves as a species, and some of what Azarian says about how to deal with that is fine. I think he’s right about needing to put more effort into encouraging self-assessment and introspection as a way to build up the parts of the brain that might temper a threat response with what Terry Pratchett might call “second thoughts” – a meta-assessment of not just the thing that created the initial emotional reaction, but also of the reaction itself.

Where he loses me is when he starts talking about focusing on the things we agree about, rather than our differences, and using that as a starting point to have us all getting along, and uniting humanity under a materialistic understanding of reality. My objection is not because of the goal. I am firmly convinced that material analysis of our circumstances is vitally important, and the lack of that on the political/religious right is a serious problem.

But.

There’s an anecdote I saw a while back about a neuroscientist who was studying chicken brains, found that they don’t deal with smell the way we do, and concluded that chickens don’t have nostrils. This was rebutted by chicken farmers, who pointed out that a lifetime of working with chickens had left them quite certain that chickens do, in fact, have nostrils. The neuroscientist had focused entirely on the chickens’ brains, and hadn’t looked at the entire creature.

I couldn’t find where I initially read that account, and at this point I think it may well be false, or I’m mis-remembering it, but it gets at a reasonably common problem among those who have put in the effort to become experts in a particular specialization. It seems that becoming an expert – especially in a field known to be “difficult” – sometimes leads people to believe their expertise covers subjects in which they are not specialists.

In this case, I think that Azarian’s “plan” is hampered by an ignorance of sociology and politics.

To begin with, I think it’s strange that he talks as if getting everyone to agree on how the world works is a new idea. It’s also strange to me that he believes we can change how people think by applying a Bayesian system, as though the people whose minds he want to change are going to happily go through HIS process, unlike every previous attempt at something similar. He’s right about the problems caused by overstating certainty, but he seems to ignore the way right-wing propagandists have exploited the honest assessments of uncertainty that are the norm in scientific literature (evolution and climate science being possibly the most famous examples). He also seems to have no idea about the material factors in society that lead to misinformation campaigns designed specifically to confuse and obscure not just the truth, but also our processes for determining the truth. In a lot of ways, this feels like someone saying “We need to solve climate change by replacing fossil fuels with a mix of nuclear and renewable energy”, and then acting like the work is done.

It would be nice if everyone took a rational approach to analyzing every situation and claim, but that’s an end goal, not a plan for getting there. This makes Azarian just another voice in the chorus of people convinced that they could save the world if only everyone agreed with them.

But I think it’s actually a bit worse than that. Azarian says we should focus on our areas of agreement to avoid the emotional chain reactions that come with confrontation and disagreement. Again, this feels like a very surface-level analysis. Yes – we all get along better when we all suppress those parts of ourselves that cause conflict. And no – that has never been a viable path to changing people’s opinions or thought patterns. To begin with, if your primary approach to change relies on changing how hundreds of millions of people think, then the best-case scenario has your process of change taking several generations to really take effect. Humans don’t live in “the long term”. We can and should make plans for the long term, and work for the long term, but we’re stuck living in the present. Saying that the solution is to focus on areas of agreement also means that people who are being hurt by the way society works today should shut up about it for the sake of getting along.

This is as irrational an expectation as saying that people will always react calmly and thoughtfully when you tell them they’re wrong.

Take the example of Schrödinger’s Douchebag; that guy who will say something that sounds bigoted, and then decide whether they meant it based on the reaction of the group. If anyone pushes back, “it was just a joke!”, and if no one does, then everyone agrees it’s true. If you also push back on the idea that their bigotry is “just a joke”, then you’re the one causing conflict, because you can’t take a joke.

The fact is that there are people who like the world as it is, and they tend to be people who have a lot of power and material wealth. This is where you get twisted narratives like this one, demonstrated by Stephen King:

This is all wrong. The bill that Sinema and Manchin are obstructing is already a compromise – it’s already less than 70%, and the two “moderates” who are blocking everything are the ones refusing to accept anything less than 100% of what they want. For weeks now people have been blaming progressives for what’s going on. More recent tweets indicate that King may have gained a better understanding about what’s happening, but it’s not just an accident that he came to tweet that – it’s a deliberately false narrative of a kind that comes up every time U.S. progressives actually fight for something they want. Failing to concede to all right-wing demands is consistently framed as starting trouble and being unreasonable, and without real confrontation, what we get is movement to the right on economics and political power, over and over again.

This notion that we can just convert conservatives to rationality and material analysis by helping them reason through things is not a new one. What stands out in my mind is a sort of “Logic Bro” power fantasy found in the fanfiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. The basic premise is “what if Petunia had become a college professor and married another college professor, and they both raised Harry as a scientific child prodigy?”, and basically uses the shallowness of J.K. Rowling’s worldbuilding to allow Harry to perform feats of science-inspired magic and cleverness that astound and baffle all the greatest wizards, while he also uses the titular “methods of rationality” to reason Draco Malfoy out of his bigotry. Full disclosure, I enjoyed this story when I first read it. I also find it mostly unreadable now, but there’s something catchy about the idea that if we could just get the people we disagree with to just sit down and walk through everything with us, they’d see that of course they couldn’t be right.

I’m fond of saying that our brains are basically meat computers vulnerable to some level of reprogramming by anyone with access to our senses, including ourselves. Changing minds via one-on-one exploration of ideas is absolutely possible, if both parties are approaching the project in good faith. Changing minds on a larger scale through media is also possible.

But that’s not the same as changing how society works, or how power is exercised. It also doesn’t account for those – like fascists – who are less interested in what is or is not true than they are in the assertion of power over others. Unfortunately, all the reasonableness and non-violence in the world won’t help much if someone wants everyone who believes what you do dead, and they have the power to make it happen.

There is no silver bullet here. There’s no “weird trick” or “scientific technique” that will unite humanity under a common purpose. Worse, Azarian’s idea of focusing on a “common enemy”, even one as abstract as climate change or poverty, strikes me as downright irresponsible.

First, agreeing on climate change as a common enemy is unlikely to happen so long as the capitalists funding misinformation and obstruction retain the power to do so. They have no reason to change their minds, because the way things are is working just great, as far as they’re concerned. In the words of Rex Tillerson, their philosophy is “we’ll adapt to that”, so let’s keep drilling.

Second, and more importantly, agreeing on common problems and common enemies is a very dangerous approach. For example – fascists and socialists in the early 20th century agreed that capitalism wasn’t working, and that the people in charge were doing things wrong, and focused on the wrong goals.

Common enemy, common problem.

The solution was the difference that mattered. Socialists wanted to find a way to democratize the economy, and fascists wanted to return to a nonexistent golden age, and murder the bad people who were making the bad things happen. For all the Nazis actively pursued privatization and further empowerment of capitalists, their version of agreeing that capitalism had a problem can be found in the works of Gottfried Feder, whose work “Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft“, or “Breaking Interest Bondage” advocated against the “collection” of capital (particularly through charging interest), as different from “creation” of capital which was done by fine, upstanding German workers and businessmen.

This was just a repurposed version of the same kind of antisemitism found in “A Merchant of Venice”, and meshed very well with the broader Nazi movement to blame all the world’s woes on a global Jewish Conspiracy. It was also Feder’s justification for seizing the property of Jewish Germans.

If your focus is on finding agreement, and especially if you ignore issues of social justice and injustice, then what you have in Weimar Germany is a left that hates capitalism, and a right that hates capitalism – they agree on a problem! And in observing that, you are no closer to achieving any form of universal understanding. Having a “common enemy” is useless if one group wants to radically change how society works to reduce our contribution to the problem, and another group wants to murder people who’re different until the problem goes away.

Let’s break it down further – we know that climate change is going to cause food shortages. It’s already hurting agriculture, and that’s only going to get worse as the temperature rises. My solution would be to invest heavily in weather-proof food production on a global scale, without regard for profit. Things like edible algae and bacterial cultures (usually sold in powder/flour form) aren’t necessarily the most delicious food, but they are something that can act as a backstop on famine. Further, having such facilities in every part of the world means that even if several areas are hit by  problems that shut down both conventional agriculture and food factories – wildfires, storms, war, etc. – it’s far more likely that the rest of the world will have the resources to both feed themselves and to provide food to those in need.

What’s the fascist solution? We’ve already seen some of it. When refugees came north from Guatemala fleeing both violence and drought, they wanted not just a wall that would stop the refugees, they wanted that wall electrified, and they talked about the refugees as an invasion that should be met with military force. The fascist solution is to kill people so there will be more food to go around for those who remain. This is both wholly unacceptable, and entirely useless for solving the problem.

Uniting against a common enemy is all well and good when that enemy is a group of people who are attacking. Despite the rabid anti-communism in the U.S. government (remember – the “Allied Powers” invaded Russia in 1918 in an attempt to prevent the Bolsheviks from holding power), the Americans joined with the U.S.S.R. to defeat the Nazis. The problem is, that unity only lasts as long as the enemy, and it only works if it’s an actual enemy who can be defeated through force of arms. Insofar as that applies to climate change, who’s the enemy?

I’ve been clear that I think the enemy is the capitalists who are working to maintain the system that keeps them in power. My solution is to take their power away as soon as possible, so that they can’t spread misinformation and buy politicians to prevent action on climate change that might hurt their profits. My preference is to do that nonviolently, but I’m not particularly optimistic; history has shown that capitalists generally prefer murder to losing their wealth. The fascist solution is to give all that power to an authoritarian, so he (and it always does seem to be a “he”) can “do what must be done”, which invariably means “do violence to the right people”.

To be clear, I do not think that Bobby Azarian is a fascist. I think that his work on brain differences is good, and useful. His thoughts on how provoking genuine self-analysis can “strengthen” the relevant parts of the brain are also good and useful. What’s lacking is a deeper understanding of how human thought manifests as behavior within a society. Even that, by itself, is not that big of a problem – specialization is a good thing overall – but in developing his “solution” to the problem of conservative thought, I think he has shown the failure of his own system – he thinks his analysis is good enough to be presented as a solution, when in reality he’s missing data at the “input” end, and he doesn’t even seem to know those data exist to be analyzed.

If you like my work, please share it around. I’d also ask that you sign up to support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Even as little as one dollar per month helps a great deal with there’s a crowd of folks doing it, and my immigration status is such that I can’t get conventional wage labor, so this is my only means of income, and it’s not enough to make ends meet right now. That said, you’re having your own trouble making ends meet, I do not want your money and I still welcome you as a reader. Thanks for reading, and take care of yourselves and each other.

How rich nations take their wealth from poorer nations

I’ve recently run into a number of people who aren’t aware of the fact that the prosperity of rich countries and the illusion of a “good” economic system experienced there is funded by poor countries. Getting people in wealthy nations to understand that dynamic is, in my opinion, important for building the global solidarity we’ll need to survive climate change and the death throes of Neoliberal capitalism. I’m going to try to post various articles on topics like that more regularly, just to help increase the circulation of ideas that need to spread. In that spirit, this Guardian article from 2017 is worth your time:

What they discovered is that the flow of money from rich countries to poor countries pales in comparison to the flow that runs in the other direction.
In 2012, the last year of recorded data, developing countries received a total of $1.3tn, including all aid, investment, and income from abroad. But that same year some $3.3tn flowed out of them. In other words, developing countries sent $2tn more to the rest of the world than they received. If we look at all years since 1980, these net outflows add up to an eye-popping total of $16.3tn – that’s how much money has been drained out of the global south over the past few decades. To get a sense for the scale of this, $16.3tn is roughly the GDP of the United States

What this means is that the usual development narrative has it backwards. Aid is effectively flowing in reverse. Rich countries aren’t developing poor countries; poor countries are developing rich ones.

What do these large outflows consist of? Well, some of it is payments on debt. Developing countries have forked out over $4.2tn in interest payments alone since 1980 – a direct cash transfer to big banks in New York and London, on a scale that dwarfs the aid that they received during the same period. Another big contributor is the income that foreigners make on their investments in developing countries and then repatriate back home. Think of all the profits that BP extracts from Nigeria’s oil reserves, for example, or that Anglo-American pulls out of South Africa’s gold mines.
But by far the biggest chunk of outflows has to do with unrecorded – and usually illicit – capital flight. GFI calculates that developing countries have lost a total of $13.4tn through unrecorded capital flight since 1980.

Most of these unrecorded outflows take place through the international trade system. Basically, corporations – foreign and domestic alike – report false prices on their trade invoices in order to spirit money out of developing countries directly into tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions, a practice known as “trade misinvoicing”. Usually the goal is to evade taxes, but sometimes this practice is used to launder money or circumvent capital controls. In 2012, developing countries lost $700bn through trade misinvoicing, which outstripped aid receipts that year by a factor of five.

Multinational companies also steal money from developing countries through “same-invoice faking”, shifting profits illegally between their own subsidiaries by mutually faking trade invoice prices on both sides. For example, a subsidiary in Nigeria might dodge local taxes by shifting money to a related subsidiary in the British Virgin Islands, where the tax rate is effectively zero and where stolen funds can’t be traced.
GFI doesn’t include same-invoice faking in its headline figures because it is very difficult to detect, but they estimate that it amounts to another $700bn per year. And these figures only cover theft through trade in goods. If we add theft through trade in services to the mix, it brings total net resource outflows to about $3tn per year.

That’s 24 times more than the aid budget. In other words, for every $1 of aid that developing countries receive, they lose $24 in net outflows. These outflows strip developing countries of an important source of revenue and finance for development. The GFI report finds that increasingly large net outflows have caused economic growth rates in developing countries to decline, and are directly responsible for falling living standards.

The article goes on to discuss solutions, but I think one of the biggest mental hurdles that people in predominantly white, wealthy nations need to get over, is the notion that poverty is due to some moral failing by poor people, both at a national scale, and at a global scale. We need to work together to deal with climate change, or the death toll will completely eclipse the worst atrocities in history. That means we need to let go of ideas about who “deserves” what – though to be clear, reparations are definitely owed – and focus more on using the resources we have as a species to deal with our needs as a species, including our need for a healthy global ecosystem and a stable climate.

We can’t afford to keep listening to the whines of the wealthy who think they deserve to keep their power, no matter the damage it does. Trying to maintain this system of global inequality will drive us to extinction.

Fatphobia in culture, and its effects: Some thoughts and a video you should watch

I was bullied for my weight growing up, though looking at pictures from back then I wasn’t particularly fat – just fatter than a lot of my classmates. The primary effect of that treatment was that I did my best to avoid exerting myself where other people could see me. I was lucky to find groups that DIDN’T do that shit for the most part, both in my youth circus and in the wilderness/naturalist program at my high school, but it never really went away. I don’t know that I would have worked out more had I been left alone about that issue – I certainly DID work out when I was in settings where I knew it wouldn’t come up – but overall when someone mocked me for my weight, doing something physical with my body was the last thing I wanted to do. Rowling’s descriptions of fat people doing things, as highlighted in the video below, are a good illustration of how I saw myself when other people forced me to think about my body.

I also don’t remember how I felt about the cruelty in JK Rowling’s writing. I enjoyed the books at the time, and I think the grotesque caricature named Dudley Dursley didn’t hit ME to hard because my reaction was “at least I’m not that bad”. A huge number of problems in our society seem to come down to the inability of some people to see their fellow humans as people, rather than scenery or props. Writing like Rowling’s encourages that perspective, and as many have now pointed out, it’s far from limited to the fat characters in her books.

Obviously there’s a lot more to societal treatment of fat people than just Rowling’s writing, and fortunately Ok2BeFat has a lot of content, not just about the societal aspects of fatness, but also the science. This is work that needs doing, and she does a good job with it, so support her on patreon if you can.

Climate grief and perceptions of time

If you haven’t watched Arrival, I recommend you do so before reading this. It’s unlike any other first contact movie I’m aware of, and it’s worth experiencing un-spoiled. I’ll add that it is not, in any sense, a horror or action movie.

We are now caught in the storm of climate change. We have entered an age of endless recovery, and because of that, we need to make major changes to how we run things as part of our efforts to recover from disasters. It’s common for the process of rebuilding to include measures taken to reduce the damage next time a disaster occurs – it’s why we see different architecture evolve in places that are more vulnerable to things like earthquakes, for example. But with the climate warming at an accelerating rate, we cannot afford to be reactive. The scientific method can act like a strobe light on a stormy sea, giving us glimpses of the ever-shifting future. It’s not enough for us to plot out every wave that will hit our ship, but it will show us where the big swells and troughs are, and help us steer into them in a way that will reduce our chances of capsizing.

-Grim Reaping: Climate change and agriculture

In the movie Arrival, the main character Louise learns a non-linear alien language. In doing so, her understanding of time changes, as does her ability to perceive time, as it relates to her own life. Rather than living her life as a sequence of events, and the memories of those events, she begins to live all moments in her life simultaneously, experiencing them as they connect to each other. As she held her husband for the first time, she could remember all the other times she would hold him in the future, as well as the eventual failure of their relationship.

In the first moments of the movie, we hear Louise as narrator, speaking to her daughter as we watch a montage of Hannah’s birth, life, and childhood death of a rare and incurable disease. As the plot progresses, we realize that all the flashbacks Louise is having of her daughter’s life are actually glimpses forward in time. Before she even started a romantic relationship with Hannah’s father, Louise already remembered the entirety of Hannah’s life, and the heartbreak of losing her, and of losing the husband who blamed her for not trying to change the future and spare them all the pain.

While it’s never explicitly stated, I think the movie implies that the future is actually set. It doesn’t seem likely that Louise had the option of not having Hannah, and losing her. It was grief she knew was coming. At the same time, she also had all the memories of Hannah’s life – not just the pain of loss, but the joy of raising and loving a child. All the happiness and sorrow of a human life, laid out in advance.

The scientific method can act like a strobe light on a stormy sea, giving us glimpses of the ever-shifting future. It’s not enough for us to plot out every wave that will hit our ship, but it will show us where the big swells and troughs are, and help us steer into them in a way that will reduce our chances of capsizing. Unlike Louise, we can’t access our own futures to inform our present actions. Instead we just have those glimpses – clear enough to know what’s coming on a large scale, and obscure enough that many can shore up their denial by focusing on what we don’t know, to avoid confronting what we do.

When we do look at what we know, it’s hard to see much beyond the death. Arrival starts with the tragedy of a mother losing her daughter. Bad times stand out to us. In society as it exists, much of what we do involves avoiding bad experiences, and seeking good ones. The highs and the lows stand out to us, but when we learn of potential suffering in our future, it captures our attention, and we try to avoid it. That’s true when we see a rattlesnake on the trail ahead, and it’s true when we see the horrors of climate change on the horizon.

And with something like climate change, confronting reality also means accepting that at this point, there’s almost no chance that we can avoid tragedy on a scale that’s difficult to process.

You’re driving through your home town, and then, for just a minute, you can see the familiar landscape stripped barren by drought and famine, or engulfed in flames like the images we’ve seen from the United States, and Canada, and Greece, and so many other places. Can you grieve for people who haven’t died? I suppose that’s nothing new. What else do you call it when you fear the death of someone you love? When your brain conjures the image of life without them?

But that’s just worrying. It’s our imaginations creating something that could happen – we know it happens to other people “all the time”, but there’s no particular reason to think that it will. We calm those fears with the reminder that it happens to other people, at least until it does happen to us. We all know death is coming for us, sooner or later. We generally go through life ignoring that, because we can’t change it. Worrying about it too much can consume us.

I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.
When’s it gonna get me?
In my sleep, Seven feet ahead of me?
If I see it comin’ do I run or do I let it be?
–Hamilton: My shot

Death is certain. We take steps to come to terms with that fact. We work to prepare ourselves and each other for every time we witness the end of a life – and all of us will witness that in one way or another.

Climate change is killing people now. It will kill a great many more within our lifetimes. It’s very possible that by the end of my life, the human population will be reduced by hundreds of millions due to heat, famine, and other climate-driven catastrophes. I can’t see their faces but I can see enough to know that they are dying and I can’t stop it. I can’t even see enough to know whether I will be among their number, though I’d like not to be.

I want to keep watch, and to see if that strobe will show me a glimpse of hope before I lose the ability to experience. Even if I don’t, well – I’ll live till then, and do what I can to provide that hope for someone else. Is that all we can do? Keep ourselves going by telling ourselves that there’s a good future out there, that we just can’t see yet?

Maybe.

Have you lost someone you love? Have you lost a pet you’ve had for years? Have you ended a relationship that used to give you joy? The pain can be unbearable. In the middle of it, it’s hard to notice anything else. But the pain at the end isn’t all there is to life, and it’s not all there is to death. Raksha, my dog, is going to die soon. It’s not that she has a set prognosis or anything, it’s that she’s 14 years old, has arthritis, and can’t see well. In general, 15 years is the upper limit for dogs like her. A couple years ago Tegan and I decided that the primary consideration was giving her as good a life as we can in the time she has left. Inflicting the pain of invasive treatments wouldn’t be worth the extra couple months it might buy, especially since we can’t explain what’s happening to her.

It’s going to suck when it happens. I try not to think about it.

Do I regret the 14 years I’ve spent living with her? No. Will I? Maybe sometimes, but I wouldn’t be who I am without having had her in my life. In the end, it’s not about the end, it’s about everything else.

The future looks bleak. If humanity makes it through to the other side of this nightmare we’ve crafted for ourselves, I doubt it will be in my lifetime. Even so, I’ll keep fighting to bring the world I want to create closer to me, and in the meantime, seek happiness around me as I go.

Due to my immigration status, this is my only form of income for the foreseeable future, and it’s currently not enough to make ends meet. If you like the work I do, please share it around, and please consider supporting me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. It costs as little as $1 per month (though more is appreciated), and gets you access to a little bit of extra content, and early access to some things like my climate-related short stories.

Christianity, Rapture Theology, and the American Empire

Hopefully this isn’t news to most of my readers, but the United States is the heart of a global pseudo-empire that uses its military, diplomatic, and economic power primarily to safeguard the economic interests of its ruling class. That said, the use of that power is not solely driven by material concerns of wealth and power. This also should not be a surprise to anyone, but Christianity – specifically a version of evangelical Protestantism, also plays a large role in U.S. foreign policy – particularly in the Middle East.

Any material analysis of the U.S. empire and its foreign and domestic policies will be incomplete without an understanding of the bizarre rapture theology that holds sway with most U.S. conservatives. This set of religious beliefs – not supported by biblical text – is key to understanding things like the antisemitism behind some U.S. support for the aggressive policies of the country Israel, and why there’s so much money from these branches of Christianity going to get Jewish people to move there. It’s a complicated subject that requires a mix of material historical analysis, scriptural analysis, and cultural analysis.

Because this belief is held by so many at the core of the U.S. empire, and because it’s held by so many in the halls of power (it’s why Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem), understanding this set of beliefs is important for those within the military reach of that empire, which would be everyone. This is a belief system that is actively working to bring about the end of the world.

This is a long video, but for good reason. I recommend listening to it while doing your dishes or gaming or something like that, if you don’t want to just sit through it, but this is important stuff to understand, and I’ve yet to see a better breakdown of it than this one from Renegade Cut:

 

U.S. immigration policy is deliberately cruel under both major parties. This must change.

Disturbing photos and video from the U.S.-Mexico border show Haitian refugees being attacked by Border Patrol agents on horses with whips. At the same time, the Biden administration is deporting people back to Haiti, even as that country faces a massive natural disaster and political upheaval on top of the generations of brutal economic repression from colonial powers.

It’s particularly nice of that one agent to announce to the world that this is exactly what it looks like. White supremacy has always played a major role in U.S. immigration law, That has been true under Democratic rule, and under Republican rule. We should be standing in solidarity with these refugees, and welcoming them, not greeting them with whips and insults.

These atrocities will not stop until U.S. policy is based on what’s good for humanity, and not what’s good for a tiny ruling class. None of our “leaders” are willing to confront reality, and as climate change continues to displace people, these atrocities will get worse.

Our ruling class continues to make the choice depressingly clear: Socialism, or barbarism

Food for thought on the structure of change

Periodically there’s a flurry of discussion about ways people can help with a movement beyond being on the front lines. A lot of it goes into organizing and logistical work, but some also goes into much less involved forms of participation, even if it’s just wearing a button or something.

I don’t know how much of this is a description of what tends to happen, vs what is “needed” for a movement to be successful, but either way, I think it’s a pattern that anyone fighting for change should at least consider and account for. At the end of the day, those of us fighting for a better world have to rely on collective power, which means our chances of success go up the more people we have on board.

If Beau’s spear analogy describes a reliable pattern – and it seems like it is to me – then I think that the goal should be getting the shaft lined up behind the spearhead. BLM has done a pretty good job of that, showcasing the brutality and dishonesty of the police in a way that’s been increasingly difficult to wave away. That’s something we’d do well to think about when it comes to our own activism and communication.