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October 30, 2023

Abasement and self-respect in the liberal worldview

Posted by faustusnotes under off-topic ranting | Tags: , |
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An interesting thing is happening this week as Israel enacts its Hannibal Directive on the hostages taken by Hamas, and behaves against all understanding of common decency or the basic principles of international law. Representatives of powerful nations, in some cases the most powerful nation on earth, have been lining up to very loudly declare that there is nothing they can do, and to reaffirm in the blandest possible terms their complete inability to do anything to stop Israel. The most striking example of this is Joe Biden himself, who came away from a meeting with Netanyahu and, with a shrug, said that there was nothing he could do to stop Israel from killing the 10 Americans taken hostage, and it’s all very sad but there’s nothing else he can do.

In 2011 Joe Biden was Vice President when Barack Obama started a three month bombing campaign of Libya, estimated to have killed about 10,000 people, which fragmented the country and reduced it from one of the richest nations in Africa to a bombed out shell with an ongoing civil war where open-air slave markets are held in once-proud cities. This was done simply to support Libyan rebels against Gaddafi. But somehow there is nothing Obama can do to rein in his client state, whose prime minister is a US citizen and which receives about 15% of its annual defense funding from the USA.

It’s not credible, is it? It’s not that he can’t rein in Israel – he doesn’t want to. But he can’t say that, since the last 20 years of liberal interventionism have been built on a dishonest foundation of protecting human rights, and human rights concerns are now fundamental to how many Americans – especially young Biden voters – see America and its role abroad.

This puts states and significant public figures in a bind. Israel plays an essential role in the criminal extractive world order that maintains US dollar hegemony and the stolen wealth of the western European states, but in a modern liberal electorate they can’t admit that, so they need some other way to appease the very real – and good! – conscience of their electorate, while maintaining Israel’s freedom to brutally destroy the lives of its poorest residents. So they fall back on a public spectacle in which they replace their very real power with a performative self-abasement.

I mean, what country with self-respect allows a nation 3% its size, heavily dependent on foreign aid, surrounded by enemies, indebted to a colonial nation’s gift for its very existence, to tell it no, you have no say in the fate of 10 of your citizens who were abducted by criminals within our borders? No self-respecting leader would allow that to happen. The same is true of the shameful death of Rachel Corrie, an American citizen who was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer when she was trying to protect a Palestinian home, whose death is occasionally celebrated by Israeli soldiers who make pancakes with her face on them. If anything like this happened in one of the “shithole countries” that the US likes to “throw against the wall” every decade or so, there would be an immediate violent response. But when Israel does it suddenly there’s nothing that can be done! Suddenly America’s leaders, politicians, journalists and public figures hang their heads in shame and admit that they’re just weak little nobodies who have to let the Israeli Chads kick sand in their face.

Of course it is not only Israel and not only in times of crisis that this strange ritual abasement has to take place, and it isn’t just politicians who have to sometimes display a complete lack of self-respect. The most classic case is the decision by the British media to turn the UK’s most principled anti-racist politician, Jeremy Corbyn, into a nasty anti-semite who was going to cause Jews to “flee the country” if elected. Journalists across the country, political leaders, community figures, all spent a year penning columns and making speeches about this ridiculous idea, all in lock step with the idea that he was an anti-semite, without ever producing any evidence or addressing any of the many very clearly anti-semitic views of his opposite number in the Tory party. Isn’t it the job of journalists to report facts, or truth? Suddenly they lost this ability, and all of them together had to give up their professional self-respect and report complete drivel for a year. So too with the Uyghur genocide nonsense, which was made up out of whole cloth by a born-again christian who fantasizes about New York being destroyed in the rapture because it’s full of “bankers” (nudge-nudge wink-wink) and gays. Anyone who knows anything about China and has even a fragment of self-respect, integrity or honour knows this is a completely made-up lie, but for years now it has been repeated in every major media outlet without ever a single shred of evidence. The same thing happened with the Iraq war, compounded by the god-awful scenes of journalists and “pundits” and “public intellectuals” recanting and apologizing for their misleading coverage after the fact and giving us ridiculous “how was I supposed to know?” sob stories about Colin Powell’s transparently dishonest presentation at the UN (but he had powerpoint!) or the dumb 45 minutes story. These people didn’t even have the minimum level of self-respect to acknowledge their role as proxies for empire, and stand up for themselves as honest hacks. No, they abased themselves after the WMDs disappeared (remember “Friedman units”? But that loser is still out there peddling his poison!) and through this “difficult self-reflection” managed to keep their jobs and pretend they’d learnt lessons, just to repeat the same lies from the same liars about Chinese spy balloons or Uyghur genocide or how no, Nazis aren’t really Nazis if they’re Ukrainian.

This guy is the author of a book called “Jewish pride”?

Can you imagine having to degrade yourself like this every day? What a strange fetish to have. It could be described as a kind of Orwellian doublespeak I suppose, but doublespeak is primarily an intellectual dissonance, while this is also emotional. Consider the chorus of people reacting in horror and fear to protests in support of Palestine, or people chanting “from the river to the sea!” These people aren’t just abasing themselves in the world of ideas, such as when they repeat unquestioningly the claim that 40 babies were beheaded; they’re also abasing themselves emotionally, suggesting to the world that they are terrified of peaceful protesters, wetting their pants at the thought of ordinary people in the nations that brought us the Iraq war and the Libya shambles maybe not wanting this stuff done in their name anymore. Everyone who has been on an anti-war march knows exactly how peaceful they are; in fact there were large contingents of Jewish peace activists marching as Jews at these demonstrations, and nothing happened. Yet these smol beans have to pretend that they’re so terrified. Imagine being an adult man in the UK in 2023, scared of a peace march? Either you’re a brazen liar, or you have the self-respect of a particularly coddled house cat. This is doublefeel as well as doublespeak, the same abasement that has “gender critical” “feminists” (i.e. women who hate transgender women) being terrified of public bathrooms, and rushing to get men to protect them from anything that might look faintly like a man in a dress – probably leading to the harassment of other women. Somewhere in their dark hearts they know it’s not true, that men don’t need to pretend to be women to harass women, that the greatest danger to women is men they know, etc, but this honest assessment of the world isn’t going to help them destroy a hated minority, so they have to market it with fear instead, a fear so pathetic and unbelievable that the only way to sell it is to publicly abase yourself, to admit to a complete absence of self-respect.

This was a big thing in the aftermath of 9/11 as well, of course, with crazy reports of non-white people getting kicked off planes because their mathematics looked terroristy, or being racially profiled in their own neighbourhoods because of scared neighbours. This has, of course, always been the go-to US strategy for dealing with black people, but since the turn of the century this doublefeel has become a common part of public discourse. I’m scared; I’m feeling threatened; there are (to use the favourite phrase of “gender critical” “feminists”) “safeguarding issues”. Yes we really do think that homeless people need somewhere to shelter, but the children here will be scared – they should be put somewhere else (where? are you really scared of the poor, hungry and desperate?) Watch as journalists and politicians fall over themselves to criminalize and dehumanize asylum seekers, who could be “terrorists” or “Chinese spies” and who “just don’t fit in.” Remember when France had to ban 14 year old girls at school from wearing Hijab, because the revolutionary state that had survived 200 years and 2000 guillotines could be brought tumbling down by a teenage girl with covered hair?

This performative abasement is necessary because of the increasingly obvious contradictions in the structure of the liberal worldview. The fundamentals of what the liberal order demands of us – submission to the market, constant social competitiveness, social mobility instead of genuine equality, and the existence of winners and losers in every aspect of our social life – isn’t wanted by anyone except the people already at the top and benefiting from it. So the liberal democracies have attached genuine, important principles – like but not limited to sexual and gender equality, freedom of movement, an end to racial discrimination, freedom of association and expression – to their ideology as if these principles did not exist in any other worldview, and then beaten us relentlessly over the head with these principles at every turn, to distract us from the fundamentals, or – in their more honest moments – to try and convince us we can only have these valued social ideals as part of a package that includes exploitation and greed. But as the exploitation and greed becomes clearer, and the crises that our liberal order cannot fix become ever deeper and more obvious, and as concepts from outside the liberal viewpoint begin to be heard more clearly in our increasingly diverse media landscape, it becomes harder for liberal spokespeople to hide these contradictions. This is why congress people attacked Facebook after the 2016 election, and even more so have tried to ban Tiktok – Tiktok enables western young people to see life in countries outside the imperial core, which means they might see alternatives to the way their own social systems are structured and (worse still!) might begin to see those people as fully human, which would be a disaster for the exploitative international system that holds up the western countries and the in particular the wealth of their elites. These new forms of interaction and exchange of knowledge have enabled concepts like decolonization to enter mainstream social discussion – where in the 1990s you would see Che Guevara’s face on a t-shirt, now you can see his face in a Tiktok video with a quote, or some young woman doing her make-up while she explains why he was right. Words, ideas, alternative principles, information from outside the bubble, unfiltered by the guardians of the liberal order, being viewed by ordinary people at the same time as the climate crisis, the housing crisis, the banking crisis, the automation crisis and the covid crisis constantly show up how badly our masters are handling everything.

The answer then is denial, and as the contradictions grow the denial becomes more difficult, more pathetic and more transparently self-serving. The only solution, then, is this performative abasement. And on a deeper level, how can you have self-respect if you defend these things? When you go onto the media and have to repeat your condemnation of Hamas for something they did three weeks ago before you hem and haw about how stopping the things Israel is doing right now is complicated, you know deep in your dark heart that you’re doing dark deeds. Why aren’t you speaking up? People lose their jobs for that! Why is it left to people like Lowkey to speak the truth that we all know, and how embarassing is it for a journalist to be schooled publicly on these things by a rapper? What kind of man must Piers Morgan be, that he was willing to lose his job on morning tv rather than stop condemning Megan Markle for imagined crimes, but he can’t bring himself to condemn Israeli slaughter? Someone like that doesn’t have any self-respect, does he? If he did, he’d get a real job.

It’s sad of course when you see people you had hopes for, like Australia’s new PM Anthony Albanese or reasonably direct and honest journalists like Owen Jones have to humiliate themselves once they get within a sniff of any influence because the gatekeepers of power demand it. It’s depressing when the people we are depending on to actually fix things – people like Biden or Schultz, who we knew were never going to amount to much but who are the only people in place now to fix things now – fail to do anything, and fall back onto the same mantras of both-sides and it’s-complicated and but-the-economy. But it’s inevitable, because there is no reconciling the crises liberalism has to face with the fact that so many of them are a direct and immediate consequence of its underlying mechanics. In the face of that, you either tear the whole thing down – or the weight of the whole edifice will force you to your knees, begging and pleading and desperately trying to get people to understand these pathetic feelings that everyone knows aren’t real.

Liberalism is incompatible with self-respect and dignity, neither individually nor collectively. Its final vision is a sniveling journalist abasing themselves before the public over and over as they tell you that nothing can ever get better, and you’re just gonna have to stand there and bear witness to horror as the people they installed and they supported and they propagandized for destroy everything that is good and right in the world – and bursting into tears at how mean you are when you tell them it’s their fault.

 

October 18, 2023

Liberal Democracies Finally Let the Mask Slip

Posted by faustusnotes under Meat Life, off-topic ranting | Tags: , |
[3] Comments 

Have you noticed things seem to be getting a little worse in the developed world? Australia voting a resounding No on the weakest, most milquetoast concession to acknowledging and amending its colonial crimes, the Middle East’s Only Democracy(TM) going on a wild killing spree, unprecedented global heat at the same time as governments of the world’s richest nations are canceling basic infrastructure plans, reneging on carbon reduction commitments, and getting into weird culture war battles about how to define a woman? Things seeming a little desperate? It appears we have reached the stage just after the “and” in the famous phrase “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds”.

Canada’s Liberals Applaud a Nazi

The mask really slipped a few weeks ago when Ukraine’s president Zelensky visited Canada to beg for weapons. The war in Ukraine isn’t going well, and the much-vaunted wunderwaffen donated by the west – German tanks rolling into Eastern Europe for the first time in 80 years – have failed to advance the promised counter-offensive, though Ukraine’s leadership has made sure that the offensive achieves the US’s goal of fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian. With video of NATO’s supposedly superior “kit” (ugh) getting wasted on the battlefield proliferating, no progress in the war, and the US house getting skittish about signing more blank checks, Zelensky needed to shore up his support among his allies. After Zelensky’s speech to the Canadian parliament, an apparently well-meaning Canadian speaker introduced a 98 year old man who he told everyone “had fought for Ukrainian independence against the Soviet Union in world war 2”, with Liberal PM Trudeau leading Zelensky and the parliament in two rounds of standing ovations for this stalwart of freedom.

Apparently nobody bothered to think what kind of man might have “fought against the Soviet Union” for Ukraine in world war 2, and of course it turned out very quickly that the man in question was a member of the Waffen SS. Canada’s parliament somehow tricked a Jewish head of state (Zelensky is Jewish) into giving a standing ovation for an Actual Nazi, just because he fought the Soviet Union.

This is a kind of treason, of course: the Soviet Union were Canada’s allies in world war 2, fighting the Nazis, and suffered horrifying losses during their retreat from and recapture of Ukraine. Applauding someone who fought them makes a mockery of their sacrifice, shows the ignorance of all assembled towards their own history, conflates modern Russia with the Soviet Union (a common mistake among liberal apologists for our ridiculous support of Ukraine), and – most importantly – means applauding a nazi.

The 14th Waffen SS division of which Hunka was a member wasn’t an innocent bystander in the war either. They did partisan suppression duties in Poland and Ukraine, freeing up regular SS and Wehrmacht units to kill Soviet soldiers, and in some instances destroyed whole villages. They probably helped with round-ups of Jews, and of course by providing support services they freed up regular units of the SS in Ukraine to speed up their activities in the Holocaust. Himmler himself visited the unit, and said some pretty horrifying things indicating he knew full well where their racial solidarity lay. The knowledge of this unit’s activities isn’t dead in Ukraine, either, far from it – you might recognize their symbol on the Wikipedia page as a common symbol on Ukrainian soldiers uniforms, and in the year before the war started the unit was celebrated in Kyiv. It’s likely that in that horrific display of Nazi solidarity in the Canadian parliament Zelensky, at least, knew about the unit’s history, since it’s a matter of public celebration in certain sectors of Ukraine’s political class, including the people who surround Zelensky.

When Nazis aren’t Nazis

There’s a joke going around the internet that since the Ukraine war began western media have slid through stages of Nazi-denialism, from “there are no Nazis in Ukraine” to “Oh, there’s just a few” to “they aren’t so bad” to, finally “Being a Nazi isn’t always wrong anyway”. It appears we’ve reached stage 4, because within a few days Politico EU published an article arguing that being in the SS didn’t make you a Nazi. Now there’s a reversal on the Nuremberg Trials, eh! Then there was a lot of talk about well how could they have known that these guys fighting in Ukraine against the Soviet Union were Nazis, and he probably wasn’t a volunteer anyway (he was). Then it began to become clear that the Canadian government had courted these Nazis after the war, and a whole bunch of horror stories began to emerge about monuments to the Nazis in Edmonton, an endowment in this Nazi’s name to a Canadian university, and, well, a generally sordid past of encouraging these treacherous villains to contribute to culture and history in Ukraine.

It should be noted that Canadian scholarship on Ukraine was an important contributor to the development of the contested theory of the Holodomor, the idea that Stalin deliberately starved Ukraine. This idea was not new in Ukraine, but the word itself appears to date from the 1980s or 1990s, and it’s likely a fabrication of these Canadian Ukrainian scholars, many of whom were former Nazis. One person who has contributed to the popularization of this claim is Anne Applebaum, who is a regular contributor to liberal publications like the Atlantic and has been a vociferous proponent of the idea that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine. Her book Red Famine, which contributed to the popularization of this genocide myth, is no doubt heavily influenced by these Canadian-Ukrainian scholars, but she has been perfectly silent about the revelation that they were all Nazis. This body of recent work on the Holodomor feeds into a wider anti-semitic current, known as “double-genocide theory“, which holds that Stalin was as bad as Hitler and is often implicitly or explicitly cited as a justification for Ukrainian (and other countries’) support for the Nazis. This dangerous elevation of a high-school debate bro fetish to the level of serious legal and scholarly work is dangerous, particularly for anti-fascists in Eastern Europe, but it’s a surprise to see it bubbling to the surface in such a grotesque way in Canada.

Russians, of course, have no illusions about this double-genocide nonsense, the evils of Nazis or the nature and persistence of Ukrainian Nazism. Here is what Vassily Grossman had to say about the looming threat of Nazi collaboration in Ukraine in his famous book Stalingrad:

This is the background to the growth of Red Sector, the Azov battalion and the neo-Nazis who humiliated Zelensky in 2019 and forced Ukraine down the road to the war. This is the reason that to get to Baby Yar – the site of the infamous 1941 massacre – and the memorial erected there by the Soviet government, traveling from the Eastern side of Kyiv your quickest route will be along Stepan Bandera avenue. But all this history has been wiped from liberal memory in the west, in the post-war scramble to redefine the Soviet Union as the Enemy, and to rewrite the history of the war so that the allies’ relatively small contribution – and much smaller sacrifice – could be raised above the great and catastrophic suffering of the Soviet Union, obscure the allies’ failure to rescue the Jews, and airbrush the Soviet Union’s central role in saving Jews from the Holocaust out of our history. And how is that working out, now?

The West’s guilty conscience lashes out

Some simple facts about the West’s culpability for the Holocaust should be well known but are relatively underplayed in Western history lessons. From 1939 when the Nazis started the war to the middle of 1944 there is almost no evidence of significant resistance against the Nazis west of the Danube. In Poland and Ukraine yes, there is a well-known history of both collaboration and resistance, but go west and you see a bunch of complacent nations that were largely happy to be pinned under the Nazi boot, with the sacrifice of their Jewish populations considered a small price to pay for their relative peace after they were conquered. The Western nations also resisted refugees, taking only a small number of rich Jewish emigrees and even, famously, turning away shiploads of children. In contrast Jews fleeing east were welcomed into the Soviet Union, and it was the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz, discovered Treblinka, and rescued the Jews of Poland from Nazi violence. The West stood by and waited, taking far more interest in the recovery of their colonial possessions in Africa than in helping the desperate Jews of western Europe, and it was only when the Soviet Union began to roll over Europe itself that they suddenly conceived an urgent need to fight back against the Nazis. If Hitler had cut a deal with Poland to march his armies through for a direct attack on the Soviet Union in 1939, would the west even have bothered going to war with him? I suspect that they would not, and would have stood by while the fate of the Soviet Union’s Jewish population was determined.

This is a stain on Europe’s post-war liberal conscience, so how did they endeavour to wash out this stain? They handed one of their stolen colonial lands to the Zionist project, which immediately unleashed the Nakba on the people of Palestine and established an apartheid state on the shores of the mediterranean. Every time the people of Palestine attempted to peacefully resolve this conflict the Israeli state responded with violence and destruction, and so we find ourselves at the present state, where 2 million Palestinians languish in an open-air prison camp constructed with western money. When Hamas finally respond with a successful attack on Israel’s military, that blood-drenched state unleashes a wave of violence – first indiscriminately killing their own hostages, making up a 21st century blood-libel about beheaded babies, and then attempting to starve and bomb the population of Gaza into oblivion.

In response to this savagery the same liberal democracies and media outlets that were just two weeks ago giving a standing ovation to a confirmed Nazi, or defending that same action, or steadfastly looking away, suddenly rushed to condemn every unsubstantiated lie put out by the Israeli Defence Forces, and publicly announced their unconditional support for “the World’s Most Moral Army” as it enacts the first mass murder of the 21st century. They have nothing to say except “more!” as the IDF slaughters thousands of children, cuts off electricity from hospitals, and forces civilians to drinking from puddles. None of this is kept secret either – in contrast to the “genocide” of Uyghurs that the western media and intelligence agencies invented from whole cloth, and have presented to us constantly over the last 3 years without a shred of evidence, within minutes of the unfolding bombardment of Gaza our social media feeds are flooded with videos of dying children, bombed ambulances, buildings collapsed on civilians, reports of entire families wiped out. The Palestinian ambassador to the UK reports 6 of his own family killed; the Scottish first minister’s own mother-in-law is trapped in Gaza and he cannot even get a response to inquiries from the foreign office, while the media drill him on whether he has sufficiently condemned Hamas. Meanwhile France bans rallies in support of the Palestinian people, MSNBC bars its muslim anchors from reporting, a Muslim child is stabbed to death in the USA, and Germany stops a protest by Jewish opponents of the slaughter on the grounds it might be anti-Semitic.

This is the “liberal” response to the mass murder by starvation and bombing of 2 million muslims. Meanwhile liberal blogs – those bastions of interventionism back in the Iraq war days – remain stunningly silent. Balloon Juice, which has run a daily post on the invasion of Ukraine, headed with a graphic accusing “Ruzzians” of genocide, declared “there’s no there there” about the shameful Canadian ovation of a Nazi, and is in full support of the Israeli military. Lawyers, Guns and Money have barely mentioned it, and Crooked Timber have put up a single, weak post about how they don’t know what to say, which has degenerated into a condemnathon and some complaints about Jeremy Corbyn – the only politician of any note in the UK who was willing to publicly support the Palestinian people.

It’s often said that the single defining feature of liberalism is that liberals never, ever learn. They constantly watch the same things happening, hear the same lies from the same criminal gang, absorb the same excuses from the same people, and respond in the same way without any adaptation to the circumstances. We know that the Israeli Defence Forces lie – they lied about Shireen Abu Akleh, they lied about the Gaza Flotilla Raid, they lied about Rachel Corrie – but of course every person in the western media, political and public elite accepts everything they say without question, knowing it’s all a lie and knowing their history of killing children. Journalists, of course, don’t even have object permanence, but this singular property of liberal politicians and political commentators generally is that they cannot, under any circumstances, learn from what constantly surprises them, because if they developed any theory of the structural underpinnings of the social forces at work it would become simply impossible to remain a part of the liberal establishment.

Our failing economy

The last part of this collapse in the coherence of the western social order is our failing economy. We are constantly told – by political leadership, by economists, by journalists and by pundits and “think” tankers – that capitalism is the best system available to us, that capitalism has made us the richest people in the history of the world, that any other system would leave us impoverished and embittered. Yet at the same time they tell us that they have to cancel even the shortest high speed rail line because they can’t afford it; that university fees must remain too expensive for most people to attend without going into a lifetime of debt; that it is simply impossible for people to have affordable housing; and that paying you more than $7.25 an hour is beyond their power. You must remain poor, squatting in sub-standard housing surrounded by decaying infrastructure and scrabbling to get together enough money just to stay housed and pay off the exorbitant price of your university loans – all in the richest countries in the history of the world. Whose wealth? Whose benefit? They couldn’t even control a simple respiratory disease, you had to go back to work as soon as possible or the best, most efficient system of allocation of resources in the history of the universe would collapse around you; and they absolutely cannot afford to pay for you to get a booster vaccine if you’re under 50, because … well, because how could the 6th richest country in the world afford it?

And where did this money go? The USA spends a huge percentage of its income on weapons, is a thoroughly militarized society; the UK and France are nuclear powers. But together the entire economy of the NATO countries – some 500 million people, including most of the top 10 richest countries in the world – ran out of ammunition and weapons to give to Ukraine after just 600 days of war with a country having not even a third of their population. Where did all that money they took from you go? What were they spending it on, while they were telling you they can’t afford high speed rail, schools that don’t collapse, COVID protections, universal health coverage, gun control or a raise in the minimum wage? After 600 days they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, right down to munitions they promised they wouldn’t use because they’re borderline illegal (and won’t work in Ukraine anyway). And worse still the wonder-weapons they sent have all failed, proven to be worse than the cheapest material the Russians can throw at them. All the Leopard tanks are burnt out husks, the Challengers – “never defeated in battle” – abandoned on the side of the road next to ditches filled with the corpses of Ukrainian men, the Bradleys and Bushmasters and Marders all toast and the troops they were slated to carry forced to slog through the long grass where mines and drones are slaughtering them. That’s what your money was spent on, while you were being told 10% annual inflation was inevitable and no you can’t have a pay rise, and if you try striking we’ll make it illegal because the best system of allocating resources ever invented – the only one that works – can’t make food affordable and can’t produce enough ammunition to fight a small war in a distant country.

So, this is the promise of liberalism as we enter the third decade of the 21st century. No freedom of speech, no money for you and no investment in public services, and if you dare to speak up while we throw money into the mass murder of civilians living in the poorest place on earth we will throw you in jail. In America we’ll throw you in jail anyway, but not until we’ve stripped you of your assets without trial and only if you’re lucky enough not to get shot on arrest. In defense of this you need to stand by and watch – you must not speak, or you’ll lose your job! – as we commit warcrimes and cheer the bombing of hospitals and the starving of citizens and throw all our resources into defending a criminal, corrupt gang of Nazis as they grind an entire generation of men into meat, only to find those resources aren’t enough because our economies are running on empty.

But if you talk about any of this you’re a wild-eyed idealist, a “tankie” (who paradoxically doesn’t want to send German tanks into Eastern Europe!), an anti-semite, and – worst of all – naive, unable to understand that this is the only way things can be. Nothing can ever ever be better, and anyone who tries to make it better is a fool and a trouble-maker.

This is liberalism in the 21st century.

 

February 5, 2023

Do Journalists Understand Object Permanence? A case-study with a balloon

Posted by faustusnotes under China, Meat Life, off-topic ranting, Science | Tags: , |
[14] Comments 

If you haven’t been living under a rock since the beginning of February you’ll be aware that a Chinese “surveillance” balloon has drifted over the continental USA and even hovered over some dustbowl in the centre where the USA keeps its missiles. This has led to that weird kind of 24 hour cable news coverage that gets Americans hysterical, in which they cover a perfectly normal event as if it were a catastrophe, and get terrified of shadows. In this case the media were tracking the balloon across its entire path, defense experts were being interviewed, and every armchair expert on twitter was weighing in with their opinion of the real significance of the thing. An entire country sent into a state of unhinged uncertainty by a balloon. Ultimately Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, canceled a visit to the USA which the Americans (but not the Chinese) claimed was going to lead to high-level meetings.

Of course this is transparent nonsense. Nobody can control the path of a balloon, though some people tried to speculate that some moderate degree of control could be achieved by changing heights, and the balloon covered a track across the USA that is already widely covered by military and commercial satellites. Why would the country that has its own fancy-shmancy space station, a cloud of satellites powering its own mapping service, the world’s largest high-speed rail network, and a lander on the dark side of the moon, need to use a balloon to spy on the continental USA? And why would it particularly want to hover over a missile site that has been so extensively mapped by the USA’s “adversaries” that all activity there has to be done underground? And why would they risk this provocation on the eve of a supposedly historic visit by a senior US diplomat?

The balloon took its strange path just after the USA experienced a huge cold snap across much of the contiguous states, and just as the north east of the USA and Canada were expecting a secondary cold snap. These cold snaps are caused by the jet stream slowing and weakening, so that its path sags southward and cold air from the pole is allowed to escape across the continental USA. These jet-streams flow from west to east, and are the reason for example that a Canadian weather balloon ended up over Russia in 1998. Indeed, after the Chinese government finally noticed US panic they issued a statement that it was a weather balloon gone wild, which is completely consistent with its strange looping pathway. It drifted north east until it hit the jet stream, diverted eastward, and then was dragged down over the continental USA by the sagging jet stream that was simultaneously producing the coldest ever recorded temperatures in New Hampshire.

None of this obvious counter-evidence led the US media or various twitter commentators to question the Pentagon’s claims, which is unsurprising but depressing, because these claims were being aired by not just the same institution that brought us the invasion of Iraq, but the very same people. The current Pentagon press spokesman, Brig Gen Pat Ryder, who gave press conferences about the balloon, has a storied history of propaganda for the US military, and in particular was in charge of “strategic communications” for the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2004. He was the chief of propaganda for the most corrupt military occupation in history, and in particular he was in charge of “strategic communications” when the Abu Ghraib scandal happened. He was also in charge of public affairs for an air force wing during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, when one US airplane (not from his wing) blew up the Chinese embassy – something that required a bit of spin at the time! The guy currently providing information about this balloon to the press never saw a truth he wasn’t willing to hood and electric-shock to death. If this guy said the sky was blue you would need stick your head out the window and check. If he asked for the salt at dinner you’d best pass him the pepper, and if he claimed he wasn’t the father you wouldn’t need to waste money on a paternity test – you could be sure it was him. This man is a liar, he is paid to lie for his government, and he has spent at least some of his life lying to cover up some of the most corrupt and incompetent mistakes and crimes of the US military.

Why would you believe this man when he tells you that a balloon is being used for spying?

It gets worse, of course. On February 4th the US department of defense released a statement about the shooting down of the balloon (which cost at least $1 million, but finally gave the F-22 jet a confirmed air-to-air kill). In the statement they noted that

Chinese balloons briefly transited the continental United States at least three times during the prior administration

and of course the media and various idiots in the commentariat went wild about how “spy balloons” had been regularly sent over the USA. Media reported this as spy balloons entering US airspace, dropping all ambiguity, as did the usual talking heads on the internet. But note that the DoD statement nowhere says that they’re spy balloons – it leaves that for the media to do. It also states they “briefly transited” the USA. It is not physically possible for a balloon to “briefly transit” the continental USA from China unless it passes over the tip of Alaska – standard behavior for a weather balloon launched from China and blown out to sea, on occasions when the jetstream is functioning properly. But all of this nuance and the obvious implications were left out by commentators, who went off the deep end at the suggestion that balloons might have been used for spying and Trump just let them.

This is particularly ridiculous posturing, because it is also attempting to rewrite history to suggest that Trump – who led a trade war against China and sparked a wave of both official and unofficial retaliation against Chinese living in the USA – was somehow soft on China during his time in office. And it is also trying to conjure up some grand conspiracy in which the country that controls satellites, a space station, and half the marketshare of the world’s cellphones, is sending balloons it can’t control across the Pacific in the hope that one day one of them will just randomly luck onto a top secret site that they couldn’t photograph better from orbit. This is thoroughgoing nonsense. But it has the entire press pack and liberal intelligentsia doing the Pentagon’s propaganda work for it, and baying for blood. These people aren’t even paid, and they’re taking subtly misleading information from the most dishonest organization on earth – straight from the mouth of the man who was in charge of “strategic communications” during the Abu Ghraib scandal – and adding the extra panic the Pentagon wants, without even being directed to.

This is how we got the invasion of Iraq, the murder of a million Iraqis, the displacement of four million more, and the creation of ISIS: because the Pentagon lied to journalists, and journalists just repeated everything they were told as if it were god’s own truth. Josh Marshall (whose tweet is pictured above) wrote lots of essays about the Iraq war that he has scrubbed from his blog, so I can’t tell if he supported it or not, but it is clear he wrote extensively about it at the time, so if he has any sense he would be aware that the Pentagon lied us all into that atrocity. Is he aware that the people he is quoting now were lying to him then? Do other journalists reporting on this ever stop to think that maybe they shouldn’t listen to people who lie to them consistently?

No, they don’t. Journalists are like a baby playing peekaboo, or like Bart Simpson in Lisa’s cupcake experiment – they just can’t think that the same thing would happen twice, because they cannot, under any circumstances, analyze the structural factors driving the news they report on. They just keep reporting the things they are told and even if they are being told the same lies with the country name changed, by the same people, working for the same institution, they are unable or unwilling to question whether there is any level of trust they should assign to that person. Even if they know that the last time around these were shown to be lies, and they know who spouted those lies.

They just don’t have object permanence. And these babies are going to help the Pentagon lie us into a war with China.

 

November 23, 2022

How Much do SpaceX Rocket Launches Really Cost?

Posted by faustusnotes under Crime Fiction, Meat Life, Nerd Culture, off-topic ranting, Science, Science Fiction | Tags: , |
[12] Comments 

Recently in conversation with one of my players I was led to ponder whether or not SpaceX is revolutionizing space travel, and whether it has driven costs down to new record levels. My initial response was skeptical, but upon reflection I thought there should be data on this, and it should be possible to make some judgements about whether SpaceX is really doing what people claim. This post is an attempt to understand whether SpaceX rockets, in particular the Falcon 9, really are as cheap as people say, whether SpaceX has revolutionized space travel, and what we can expect in the future from this country or from rocketry in general. The key objectives are to:

  • Determine the truth of the claims about the cost of SpaceX rockets
  • Compare these claims with historical trends in rocket prices
  • Examine the role of reusable rockets in these trends

I hope by the end of this post to penetrate some of the hype around this company’s work, and understand a little more about the economics of space travel generally. A warning: this post is likely to be long, involves lots of dry figures, and is predicated on the assumption that Musk is a dishonest businessman.

Why do this?

First of all, why do this at all? Partly because it’s a rainy public holiday here and I have nothing better to do, but mostly because I think Elon Musk is an utter and complete fraud, who lies about all his companies’ activity, over-hypes his products, delivers dangerous, over-priced or poor quality goods, and wrecks the companies he runs. This is obvious for Tesla, Solar City and (now) Twitter, so it doesn’t seem unreasonable that the same would be true of SpaceX. But unlike Tesla and Twitter, SpaceX does seem to be delivering an actual usable product to high performance standards, so maybe its achievements buck the general Musk trend towards hyperbole and failure? However, on the flip side, Musk has spent a lot of time hyping his plans to go to Mars with SpaceX and everything about that project is obvious vapourware, hype and bullshit. The Youtube Common Sense Skeptic channel goes through this in great detail, showing how every aspect of everything Musk says about his Mars plans is completely and insanely untrue. So why should we assume the rest of his SpaceX plans are anything different? Remember, the first rule about liars is that if you know someone has lied repeatedly and consistently in the past, you should not trust anything they tell you now.

So actually I think it is possible SpaceX is burning money hand over fist, lying about the price of its launches and losing money on them. It’s a “disruptive start up” and it’s not uncommon for this kind of business to over-hype its product while burning through huge amounts of venture capital money. They do this either because they’re built on a completely unrealistic business model and refuse to admit it (Uber, Wework, and Theranos are examples of this); or they hope to smash regulatory hurdles to reduce costs and become profitable (AirBNB, Uber, Lyft); they’re straight-out fraud and hoping to burn through the money and no-one will notice (Theranos); they’re hoping to drive down the price so far that their competitors go bust and then they can ramp up prices before the venture capital runs out (Uber); they’re a business idea that depends on hype and people not noticing how awful the actual product is (AirBNB); or they’re hoping for a breakthrough that will suddenly render their business model profitable, or is the secret reason they’re doing it all (Uber’s self-driving taxi idea). It’s possible that this is what SpaceX is doing – keeping prices low and burning through venture capital in hopes of pushing out its opposition so that it can start charging monopoly rates, and/or hoping for a breakthrough in tech that will lower prices so much it can actually compete.

The history of rocket prices

Launching stuff into space doesn’t come cheap, and getting stuff up there is a big technological challenge. Humans have been launching rockets into space since 1957, and the general trend has been to see lower costs over time, with a noticeable hiccup in costs during the Space Shuttle era when the price of re-using the vehicle itself considerably inflated costs. Figure 1 shows the long-term pattern of prices for major rockets, and is divided into approximately four stages of development, characterised as Vanguard (when the first rockets were developed), Saturn V (when non-reusable rocket technology matured), Shuttle (when prices rose for the use of this orbital vehicle) and Falcon, when SpaceX started dropping prices. I took Figure 1 from a paper by Harry Jones, entitled The Recent Large Reduction in Space Launch Cost. I will recreate figure 1 with some changes later in this post.

Figure 1: Historical trend in rocket launch prices

Rocket launch prices are typically given in dollars per kg; figure 1 shows them in current 2018 prices (so early prices have been adjusted for inflation) but not, as far as I know, in purchase-power-parity prices (a few of the data points in the picture are from non-US sources; we’ll come back to that). Most rockets last for long periods of time, and the prices given in the figure are for the first launch date, not for example the last date, or tracking price over time. A good rule of thumb for a rocket launch is to assume it might cost about $10,000 per kg, and a typical rocket will launch 4000 – 20000 kg into space at a cost of between 50-200 million dollars. It’s not cheap to get shit up there!

But note the extremely low price of Falcon 9: it is listed as $2,700 per kg in Figure 1, which is enormously cheaper than the nearest competitor. Figure 2, which I took from a reddit post, shows different prices alongside the price of other rocket companies currently in operation – there are now a lot of startups in the commercial space industry, since Obama deregulated it in 2010, and these have been pushing their own prices down. In Figure 2 you can see a different set of figures for Falcon 9, with the reusable having a price of $4,133 per kg, and Falcon 9 divided into two kinds of launch (reusable and expendable). Figure 2 puts Falcon 9 prices to low earth orbit in a similar range to the Russian Proton M, or the US Vulcan rocket.

Figure 2: Launch prices for various rockets from a Reddit SpaceX forum

But as I will show, the prices listed in these figures are dishonest, and we will discuss the true price of launching Falcon 9. We will also analyze the data from Figure 1 in a little more detail, and see what we can learn from it.

Claims about SpaceX

The common claims made about how SpaceX has “revolutionized” space travel are available at booster sites like Space.com, which lists 8 mostly bullshit ways in which SpaceX has completely transformed space travel. For an example of bullshit consider their claim that it has made the uniforms fashionable … also note the uncritical reference to “German-American” rocket pioneer Werner von Braun (spoiler: he was a Nazi). In amongst the various nonsense we can find two main claims:

  1. SpaceX has reduced the cost of space travel, typically people giving unsourced claims that it has driven prices down, or using phrases that Musk himself constantly uses but clearly doesn’t understand like “by an order of magnitude”.
  2. SpaceX has developed completely new technology like reusable rockets which have both helped to push down the price of star travel and opened up new fields

Neither of these claims, as we will see, has any basis in reality. Incidentally, during this search for claims about SpaceX, I learnt that Musk claims to have spent 350 million dollars developing Falcon 9 and 750 million developing Falcon Heavy. I will use these numbers even though I don’t believe anything Musk says.

Methods

For this post I have performed three main analyses:

  • Analysis of SpaceX funding sources and costs
  • Analysis of SpaceX launch activity and prices
  • Analysis of the history of rocket launch prices

Here I briefly describe the methods I used for each of these analyses.

SpaceX Funding and costs

SpaceX obtains funding from launching rockets, Starlink subscriptions, government contracts, and venture capital. For launch prices I used the stated prices on the SpaceX website and associated forums, generally given at 62 million for a new Falcon 9 rocket and 50 million for a recycled one. Data on Starlink subscriptions I obtained from a website called nextbigfuture, for what that’s worth. I obtained contract information from a search on the govconwire.com website, which lists contracts and funding. Venture capital information I obtained from crunchbase.com. I put this data in mostly for 2017 onward (government contracts), 2010 onward (launches), 2016 onward (Starlink) and 2002 onward (venture capital). Note that some contract data is for “potential” contracts, which may vary in detail on delivery, but I wasn’t able to work out exactly how and when the money was delivered. For some obvious future contracts I did not include them as a funding source, but my numbers on government contracts are definitely shaky because of this.

For costs I used information on the total number of Starlink satellites launched from Wikipedia, cost of a satellite from nextbigfuture, and vague reports on Falcon 9 launch costs sourced around the web – about 50 million dollars for a launch of a new rocket, and 15 million for a reused rocket (these figures are attributed to Musk in interviews but seem dodgy to me). I used google to get the total number of current employees and their average salary (11,000 or so, at an average salary of $90,000) and assumed on-costs of 30%.

Note that SpaceX is not a public company and it is difficult to identify exactly how much money it has or is using. I do not know if it pays dividends on the shares it sold, what its rental or real estate costs are, how much money it is burning in fines and compensation, and any interest repayments on loans. This is only a blog post, after all!

SpaceX launch activity and prices

I obtained Falcon 9 launch data from Kaggle, though I think it’s just a scrape from the Wikipedia website. This data contains the date of the launch, the booster used, the client, the payload and its weight, whether the booster was new or used, and the result of both the launch itself and the attempt to recycle the booster. A small number of launches were classified launches for US government defense contractors, with no information on the weight or type of payload.

I also visited the SpaceX website and put in data on small payloads for their Rideshare plan, which confirmed that for all payload weights up to 800kg SpaceX charges $6000/kg, much higher than the sticker price and generally consistent with the prices in Figure 2 for other mature competitors. Not quite revolutionary is it …

Once I downloaded this data and did some unpleasant work importing it to Stata I produced some basic summaries of the data, such as mean payload weights, maximum weights, proportion of flights that were government contracts, etc. I also calculated a price/kg for each flight based on the sticker price of 62 million for a new rocket or 50 million for a recycled one, and also attempted to identify rockets that were new on launch and were not recycled (these would be “expendable” rockets).

Analysis of the history of rocket prices

I imported data from the Jones paper (it is provided in the Appendix) and added some additional information: I categorized rockets as communist or non-communist, and added some additional data for Falcon 9 launches based on the analysis of launch prices to give some more reasonable numbers for these launch prices. I deleted Falcon Heavy (which I don’t have launch data on and which seems largely to be vapourware at the moment) and made a fake data point for Communist launches in 2018 (these are still happening – China has a whole communist space station now!).

I then fitted a regression model of natural log of launch price per kg by year, with a term for communist/non-communist, generated the predicted values of price per kg from this model, and plotted curves for communist and non-communist launches. I plotted these against the observed price data and added Falcon 9 data separately. I ran the models and plotted for launches after 1961, because the first 4 years of the rocket program were, obviously, slightly special.

This gives a reproduction of Figure 1 with a little more detailed statistical analysis, with very different implications.

Results

The first thing I want to say before we get into details is that the sticker price everyone reports for Falcon 9, of $2700 / kg to launch into low earth orbit, is a lie, or at least very dishonest. This is taken from the SpaceX website description of Falcon 9, which states that it has a payload of 22,800 kg, and the common price of 62 million dollars for a launch of a new rocket. This is dishonest because it gives the payload for a fully expendable Falcon 9 rocket, but this rocket does not exist. No Falcon 9 is intended to be fully expendable, and if such a rocket existed it would need a separate production line to the current Falcon 9s in use. Reusable rockets need to be more robust and stronger than expendable ones, which means they have a different frame and fairings. This discussion of reusability makes clear that up to 40% of the payload can be lost in a reusable rocket due to the need to have a stronger structure and to keep some fuel for re-entry. You can’t just build a reusable rocket and use it as if it were expendable! This is backed up by the data – in 165 flights on which I have data, no flight ever flew at full payload, but there are multiple flights at a maximum value of 16,250 kg. The true maximum payload of the Falcon 9 rocket is 16,250 kg, not 22,800kg, and it will never fly at this value. In case you doubt me, note that all the max payload flights were Starlink deliveries, and it is just inconceivable that SpaceX would never use the full payload of their rockets to deliver their own satellites to orbit. The hard limit on a Falcon 9 rocket is 16,250kg, and the website is lying.

As we will see, this sticker price is also dishonest because in reality the rockets only ever fly fully laden when they are delivering Starlink satellites, and often the price paid by commercial buyers is much higher than 62 million. We will explore this below.

SpaceX funding and costs

SpaceX has been burning through money at a staggering rate. Here are my estimates of its income streams:

  • Approximately $7.5 billion in venture capital since 2017
  • Approximately $15 billion in government contracts since 2016
  • Approximately $3 billion in commerical launch fees since 2016
  • Approximately $3.75 billion in Starlink subscriptions since 2016

This amounts to about $4.8 billion in income per year. Its annual costs over the same period appear to be about $3.7 billion if we assume a recycled rocket costs 15 million to launch, a new rocket 50 million, and a starlink satellite costs $250,000 to build.

From this we should assume that SpaceX is making $1 billion per year in profit, if it has no dividend payment, interest or other expenses. Obviously this isn’t true (someone probably has to buy some stationery!) and maybe its other operating costs overrun this spare billion. But I think the story is likely dire. Why is SpaceX raising venture capital worth a billion a year if it is also getting enormous amounts of money in government contracts? I would suggest it is because it is losing money hand over fist on launches, which actually cost a half billion more than Musk is letting on, and/or rocket development (particularly Falcon Heavy and the Starship project) are costing an enormous amount more than he has let on.

Let’s also note that more than half of SpaceX’s revenue is government contracts. Without those government contracts, it would be dead in the water. Note that some of these contracts cover specific launch tasks, and almost always pay much more per launch than the SpaceX sticker price. For example, the Heliosphere contract pays 109 million to launch a satellite for NASA in 2024, while the cargo resupply mission to the ISS covers 32 flights for $14 billion (about $400 million per flight). Nobody in NASA seems to believe that the cost of a single mission is a mere $50 million!

SpaceX launch costs

The data on SpaceX launches covers Falcon 9 launches from 2002 to mid-2022, for a total of 165 launches. Of these 45 (26.5%) are aerospace/military contracts, and 52 (30.6%) are SpaceX flights, mostly delivering starlink satellites to low earth orbit (LEO) were they can vandalize the night sky in service of a poor-quality internet supply. Most of the flights (80.6%) used recycled boosters, and only in 12 flights (7.1%) was a new rocket used with no attempt to recover the booster – these 12 flights are the only ones that potentially used an “expendable” rocket. Of these 12 flights, seven were to GTO, which has a sticker payload of 8,300 kg. The maximum payload in those 7 flights was only 5600 kg, well below the sticker payload.

In fact most flights of the Falcon 9 have been far below its maximum payload. Figure 3 shows the mean, median, minimum and maximum payload by orbital destination for the 153 launches on which this data is available. No GTO flight has reached the sticker payload of 8300 kg, and the largest payload for LEO is 16250kg (all these flights were starlink deliveries, when the incentive and opportunity to use the maximum payload was greatest). Note the LEO(ISS) weights – these are deliveries to the International Space Station. Under the contract linked above, these flights are being paid for at somewhere between 100 and 400 million dollars per flight, giving a ludicrously high cost of – on average – between $20,000 and $85,000 per kg. This is potentially more expensive than the space shuttle, depending on the content and nature of the contract.

Figure 3: Mean, median, minimum and maximum payload weights by orbital destination, Falcon 9 flights to mid-2022

Figure 4 converts the values in Figure 3 to price/kg, assuming a price of $62 million for a new rocket or $50 million for a reusable rocket and ignoring higher prices for NASA or NRO contracts. These are to the best of my ability to tell the minimum price charged by SpaceX – in reality it is probably charging a lot more. For example on 30th June 2021 a Falcon 9 was launched that carried 88 rideshare payloads – this probably cost $6000/kg, judging from the website, and so the whole flight could have cost as much as $98 million. Even then, this figure is low compared to some of the low earth orbit launches, which could have cost as much as $360,000 per kg.

Figure 4: Mean, median, minimum and maximum price per kg, in thousands of dollars, for Falcon 9 launches to 2022

Figure 4 makes very clear that the sticker or theoretical price of rocket launches has almost no relationship to the actual costs, which can be much larger depending on the type of cargo shipped and the nature of the orbit it is sent to. This should be borne in mind in the next section.

Analysis of the history of launch prices

Figure 5 shows the price/kg of rocket launches from 1962 to 2018, with launches coloured blue for non-communist and red for communist states. Corresponding lines of best fit from the regression model are shown in the same colour, and some indicative Falcon 9 launch prices are plotted at the end in green. For indicative Falcon 9 prices I chose a) the median LEO price of $3210/kg; b) the optimum true LEO price of $3030/kg; c) a likely ISS supply price of $7,880/kg based on a $134 million contract; and d) the dishonest website price everyone quotes of $2,700/kg. We could also include $6000/kg, which is cited on the website for rideshares, but I forgot to, and can’t be bothered making this figure again.

Figure 5: Historical launch prices and modeled trends for communist and non-communist states, 1962 – 2018

As can be seen, the Falcon 9 optimum and some of its median launch costs are on the curve for communist systems, while the optimum ISS launch contract price lies just above the historical trend for US rockets. In fact, the predicted price for 2022 for the US system would be about $6000/kg, which is exactly the rideshare price that SpaceX cites on their website.

So in fact, far from revolutionizing the cost of launching rockets, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is exactly consistent with the long-term historical decline in prices observed for launches from the US or its allies (mostly Japan). SpaceX have done nothing to advance the price of launches except to be there, commercializing a mature technology.

Conclusion

The final conclusion of all of this is that SpaceX are lying about the price to launch stuff into space on their rockets, and the media are uncritically repeating their fabricated price without checking its validity, comparing it with other prices available on the SpaceX website, comparing it with the prices that would be implied by SpaceX’s government contracts, or looking at the evidence from actual SpaceX flight data. The true price of launching stuff into space on a SpaceX rocket is likely more like $6,000/kg, more than twice the number they are citing.

Furthermore, this price is not a revolutionary drop in the cost of launching, and is in fact entirely consistent with the historical trend in US rocket launch prices. The best prices Falcon X manages to achieve are also not unusual, being simply normal prices for a Chinese or Russian rocket. The claim that SpaceX is doing anything special to drive down rocket prices is just more Muskrat hype, with no basis in reality at all.

It is also clear that reusability has not driven down the price of launches. Reusability incurs a payload penalty, since the rocket needs to be stronger and some fuel needs to be reserved for re-entry. Reusability is also not a radical new idea: the space shuttle’s booster rockets were reusable, and SpaceX’s sole advance on this 1980s technology has been to land them on a barge rather than beside one. This likely speeds up the time to return them to use, and slightly reduces the penalty incurred for robustness (since the rockets don’t need to resist the crash into the water) but it also significantly increases the amount of reserve fuel needed for re-entry. In fact United Launch Alliance (ULA), a SpaceX competitor, analysed reusability and found that it does not necessarily deliver much cost benefit for these reasons. There are formulae for the calculation of how many re-uses are needed for a recyclable rocket to be cheaper than an expendable one, available at the documents linked in this discussion board, and they suggest that in general it only reduces costs in the long-run by about 5%. So no, SpaceX has not revolutionized anything in this regard either.

So in conclusion, SpaceX is not revolutionizing space travel, it has not driven prices down at all relative to the long-term trend, launches with SpaceX cost considerably more than their PR suggests, and SpaceX is essentially a low-quality internet service provider with a side-hustle in military contracting, being heavily propped up by murky venture capital. Elon Musk is not, and never will be, anything except a scammer, and in future decades people will look back on how he was viewed in this period with confusion, scorn and disbelief.

 

August 20, 2022

Of the Crooked Timber of liberalism, no straight thing will ever be made

Posted by faustusnotes under Meat Life, off-topic ranting | Tags: , |
[37] Comments 

I wrote a comment under this post at the left-wing academic blog, Crooked Timber, and it was deleted during pre-approval. This has been happening a lot recently, so this time I saved it and present it here, with some additional discussion below:

I guess JohnQ hasn’t heard of the insect apocalypse, or thinks it’s a good thing. It’s weird he thinks that pesticide use is down since he supports GMOs that are specifically intended to allow increased use of herbicides. There isn’t any evidence that their use is going down anyway, this is just wishful thinking. Furthermore, dismissing deforestation in low-income countries as due to “the need for firewood” is really something else. Did you really mean to reduce the entire structure of post-colonial appropriation of ecosystem services in poor countries to “they use too much firewood”??

There is a democratic pathway out of this disaster but enabling it requires choices that aren’t easy reading for the liberal left. That pathway was on clear display in the UK between 2015-2019, and the response of the liberal left was to move heaven and earth to destroy it – first by the action of Starmer and his clique of class traitors in undermining the 2017 election, and then when that failed to dislodge radical democracy from the labour party, enlisting the entire liberal left elite (from octopus Cohen in the Guardian to various enablers in the US blogosphere) to destroy the project with a fake campaign of “anti-semitism”, which allowed an actual anti-semite to win a crushing victory for capital in 2019 and usher in the greatest impoverishment of the British working class in generations. A simple search of past posts at CT will show where its liberal left members stood on this – one of them continued to support Starmer after the revelations of his treachery. 

If we want a democratic path out of this we are going to need the liberal left to accept that their ideas have failed, and the campaign to deradicalize leftism in western democracies has hollowed it out and led to a 30-year long string of defeats, while the right has consistently grown more and more radical. This is going to involve throwing away some of the most cherished ideas of the centrists and the liberal left, like “free speech” and “british values” and also it’s going to require recognizing that liberalism has always served as the intellectual and political handmaiden of fascism. It’s going to require a proper commitment to decolonization, recognition that the western left has been complicit in the colonial project, and along with that a far greater tolerance of “authoritarian” and “illiberal” regimes, along with a recognition that the entire concept of “authoritarian” is an empty nonsense intended to hold back national liberation and progressive movements.  This is going to require recognition that fascism is an entirely western political movement that is constantly at risk of returning, it wasn’t put to bed at the end of world war 2 and it is our duty as leftists to oppose it everywhere and stridently. This means fantasies like those sometimes put forward here and elsewhere that Trump wasn’t special, or that Ukraine is a liberal democracy, need to be ruthlessly dealt with. We don’t have time for liberal wet dreams anymore. 

This is also going to require that the liberal left and its elite allies in media, academia and politics recognize some hard truths about their own disconnection from the realities of political struggle. This can start with a recognition that the entire discipline of economics is a failed joke that exists solely to support the propagandistic needs of capital. We can follow that with a hard look at exactly which political and organizing principles much of the western left has thrown out because of the taint of leftism associated with them rather than any real intellectual or ideological problem with them – e.g. nationalization, which should absolutely be at the centre of every political program in the west, proudly and with force, along with unionism. Pacifism – both locally and internationally – needs to go in the bin. The idea that we can sell out some small parts of our movement to win hearts and minds in “the mainstream” needs to go – trans women is the current vogue for under-bussing in the UK, but they’ve already thrown the entire cis female community in the US under the bus so they can slightly increase their chances of winning a couple of milquetoast senate seats. It’s going to require that the elite left and its remaining institutions – the Guardian, the left wing university departments and organizations that remain – recognize that all the best ideas and action are in the gritty, embarrassing corners of our society, amongst environmentalists and uncool allotment-working grandpas and not the suits and spivs of the Blairite movement.

It’s also going to require a return to the cynicism about western media, intelligence and military sources that we had before and after the Iraq war. They’re lying to you – about everything. This means that you need to reject all their narratives, not just the ones that are politically convenient. This is going to mean asking some hard questions about your own complicity in the ridiculous, facile, and openly far right propaganda campaigns of the past 10 years that too many liberals have supported. That means being full-throated in support of Palestine, putting a Yemen flag in your Twitter profile pic in place of the blue-and-yellow, and listening to the voices of ordinary people in low and middle income countries, not whatever fashionable cipher or white representative the western media have currently chosen to parade about.

I don’t see any of this happening anytime soon, and we’re running out of time. If we don’t re-energize a real left there will be no democracy of any kind within a decade, and no pathway – democratic or not – out of this ecological crisis. But as a first step to that rejuvenation it would be nice to see it start with a few mea culpas here.

The collapse of Crooked Timber (CT) over the past 7 years from a relatively well-subscribed, combative and intellectually engaged blog to a liberal vanity project that serves primarily to recycle Economist talking points and American mainstream propaganda is a microcosm for the collapse of left-liberal thought in the west more generally. The liberal order has completely failed, and while right-wing liberals have largely accepted this and shifted so far to the right that they’re indistinguishable from the fascists who are going to eat them, there remains a rump of “centrists” and leftist liberals who haven’t got the message yet, and somehow think that a political system of moderate leftist democracy with mildly regulated capitalism, coupled to the “rules-based international order” is going to save us from the catastrophes that are coming. It isn’t, and while these left-liberals fiddle with electoral politics through the machinery of empty suits like Starmer’s labour, vapid clown shows like the Liberal Democrats, or hollowed out fund-raising machines like the US Democratic Party, the world is shambling faster and faster towards the inevitable mid-game crisis of full-blown environmental collapse coupled with the demise of late-stage capitalism. The material conditions in which democratic countries attempt to manage their politics are not getting any easier from here, and from now until we find a radical solution to our problems every year of your life is going to be the best year of the rest of it. In the face of this we can see what left liberals and their scammy political parties are doing: nothing, coupled with useless propaganda.

So it is that on the same day that the Uvalde mass shooting occurred Matt Yglesias tweeted out some pro-American bullshit about how America is the greatest country on earth; or on the same month that we learnt about Keir Starmer’s treachery the authors at CT were admitting they voted for him as leader and would do so again; or in another week of multi-thousand COVID deaths in the USA the democrat-appointed leader of the CDC’s covid response proudly stated that he wanted to privatize vaccine provision and testing as soon as possible; or as we learn as many as two thirds of Britons face fuel poverty this winter the Starmer-led “Labour” party refuses to consider nationalizing the bandits that are driving the British population into poverty. We have resource economists like John Quiggin of CT still breezily confident that technology plus free markets will avert climate change disaster even as half of the world is struggling to deal with actually-existing climate change disaster – and dismissing deforestation in poor countries as “too much firewood” (see above my point about leftists having to grapple with their role in the colonial project!)

Ordinary people can see this and are voting with their feet. The UK Labour party recently revealed it lost some 90,000 members after its betrayal of Corbyn and is now millions of pounds in the red, which puts it even more in hock to the corporate donors who wanted Corbyn out. UK unions are considering removing funding from that same party while a wave of strikes rolls across the country, and union leaders demand Labour return to its roots, but Starmer bans his frontbench from being seen near them. The gulf between the beliefs and aspirations of left-liberal public intellectuals, political leaders and organizations grows wider and wider, while the political leadership that represents this political tendency tries to convince itself that it can assemble winning electoral coalitions from the shrinking number of ordinary people who can still convince themselves that this is working – in the face of obvious evidence that it isn’t, and can’t, and most people know it.

The political endpoint of this will be fascism. We can see it in the USA, where this tendency is at its most advanced: ordinary voters have checked out in the face of the Democratic party’s ridiculous oblivious optimism, refusing to engage with either the party itself or the ballot box, as the Republican party carefully and consistently dismantles democracy everywhere it can. There is some hope that the Democratic Party – on the back of a wave of cruelty unleashed on women by the outlawing of abortion – will recover a bare majority of seats in the Senate this Autumn (though they may lose the House!) but no sign that they’ll do anything remotely useful with them, because they value the “institutions” of liberalism far more than the actual political goals they claim to pursue. After they fail to capitalize on even that small gain (or can’t, if they lose the House), and with their liberal blindness paralyzing them in 2024, what hope that they will retain the White House or that they will survive the fascist uprising that follows a Dem victory? And what hope that in the face of Starmer’s prevarications in the UK, the Tories will lose the next election? We can already see that the strategy for UK Labour is going to be a continued rightward shift, that will fail to satisfy anyone and alienate everyone who cares about our future, while the Tories continue to advocate openly fascist ideas. In order to prevent climate disaster we need an active, strong and committed left wing political leadership in every major western economy within the next 5 to 10 years, even sooner in the case of the USA, but we’re going to see nothing short of fascism.

This is the end of the liberal project. It’s not going to win anything anymore, and when it does it will achieve nothing of any good anyway, because there is nothing left within its ideology that is able to stand up to the pressures of these times. We need a return to radical leftist democratic parties, or there will be no democracy left. So no, CT, there is no democratic pathway to civilization survival, until we all give up on the petty little daydreams of liberalism and return to a real left-wing politics that prioritizes the needs of ordinary people over glib liberal shibboleths.

UPDATE (2022/8/25): There is some doubt being expressed in comments as to whether this is a real issue outside of some anonymous commenters on CT, so I present here a screenshot of a tweet from Andrew Harrop, general secretary of the Fabian Society, an important left-wing organization in the UK that forms the intellectual underpinnings of the labour party there. It is a simple, categorial dismissal of a bill strike in the UK, not on the basis that it wouldn’t work, but that it is simply too radical for ordinary British people. There are serious concerns being expressed by some left-wing people about the dangers of acting on the Enough is Enough campaign’s suggestions, but that is not Harrop’s concern. No, his concern is that a payment strike is “far left” politics that ordinary British people wouldn’t be able to support. See how far British left-wing politics has been enervated by this kind of liberal drivel!

 

July 2, 2020

What the Early HIV Response Can Teach us About Masks and COVID-19 Policy

Posted by faustusnotes under Health, Japan, off-topic ranting, Science | Tags: , |
[10] Comments 

Today’s looming disaster

Where I live in Japan mask-wearing is now pretty much universal – almost no one goes out in public and to see someone without a mask on in public is a kind of shock. The economy reopened after lockdown, in Tokyo, on 23rd May, on which date the number of cases had dropped to 5. Today the Tokyo Governor’s office released the daily update on COVID-19 (pictured above), and we have now returned to 107 cases, with the 7-day smoothed average hitting 65. Depending on how charitable you’re feeling that’s either a 21-fold or 13-fold increase in cases in 5-6 weeks. At its most charitable then we can say that cases have been doubling every 7 days. Today’s peak of 107 cases comes pretty much 5 days after the Tokyo government allowed bars and night clubs to reopen. All of the personal measures we have been asked to adopt – maintaining social distancing, wearing masks in public, and reducing our social interactions, have amounted to a hill of beans. In particular I think mask-wearing has been a completely useless strategy, and worse than that, I think the misguided possibility that widespread mask use will prevent transmission has led many countries to take unnecessary and stupid risks with reopening their economies. This is particularly tragic in the case of Tokyo, because Japan had a very good early response to the epidemic and Tokyo was down to just 5 cases when the government ended the lockdown early. One or two more weeks of actually effective strategies would have ended the epidemic in Japan but instead the government chose to begin reopening the economy early and rely on personal behavior change to prevent its spread.

This was a disaster, and anyone who understands public health should have seen how disastrous this idea is. Infectious diseases are never stopped by individual behavioral change or personal responsibility: they are only ever affected by social changes and policy. We know this from 40 years of responding to HIV, and in this blog post I want to explain how the terrible failures of the early response to HIV should have served as a warning about relying on barrier methods and personal responsibility for preventing the spread of the disease. What is happening in America was entirely predictable based on 70 years of public health knowledge, and it’s a depressing indictment of public health policy-makers that they did not do more to stop it.

The narrative of mask use and economic reopening

First let us examine the history of moves to reopen economies from lockdown and the heavy dependence on mask use to achieve this reopening. Some academics at Stanford University recommended mask use as a way to prevent further shutdowns after reopening in late April. In an April 22 news report the governor of Louisiana made clear that mask use was a key part of his reopening strategy:

It’s just like opening a door for them, or saying good morning or whatever it’s being kind and being courteous, and when others wear masks they protect you. So we’re all in this together. When we all wear masks we’ll effectively protect one another which is why I’m calling upon Louisiana to mask-up.

The governor of Georgia suggested mask use could help with reopening that state in mid-May. The governing.com website lists individual state’s reopening plans and makes clear that almost every state mandated, requested or advised face covering and mask use as a form of protection in sites that were considered high risk but were now slated for reopening. For example California has moved to Stage 2 of its resilience roadmap, and recommends

Crowded settings increase your risk of exposure to COVID-19. Wear a face covering or cloth mask, stay 6 feet away from others, avoid touching your face, and wash your hands when you get home.

Rather than limit access to crowded settings, the government simply advises people to cover themselves and take individual actions to protect themselves and others.

On 1st July Louisiana saw 2083 cases, a five-fold increase on the number it saw on April 22nd; Georgia saw 2,946, probably a 4-fold increase on mid-May; and California saw 6,497, a 3-fold increase over the number it saw when it moved to stage 2 of its “resilience roadmap”. All these states are now at the inflection point of a major upward surge in cases. All the personal responsibility and individual actions they advised to prevent the spread of the virus have done very little to protect their citizens from this epidemic.

The scientific evidence for masks and social distancing

On 1st June the Lancet published a systematic review of the evidence for face masks as a protection against coronaviruses. It found only 3 studies with quantifiable evidence of the effect of masks in non-health-care settings, and pooling the results of these studies found a 44% reduction in risk, which is shown in the figure above. While mask use in health care settings has a very large protective effect (70% reduction in infection, with a narrow range of effect from 57 – 78%), it is nowhere near as effective in non-healthcare settings, and there is little evidence to support it. This is why at the time of writing the CDC still does not suggest there is any evidence for the effectiveness of surgical masks, and why the WHO was unwilling to recommend their use during the early stages of the epidemic.

Why is there so little evidence and why would masks not work in public when they’re so effective in hospitals? The lack of evidence is because most countries don’t use masks in any disease-prevention way in public, and so it is very hard to conduct studies. The lack of effectiveness probably arises from the fact we aren’t trained to use them: we don’t know how to take them off properly or even which side to place on our face, we don’t treat them as single-use items, we often don’t carry spare ones so we need to lower them in public to eat and drink and then raise them again, they get damp and become ineffective because we wear them too long, we wear the wrong masks for settings with high infection risk, and we don’t combine their use with the regular, intensive and disciplined hand hygiene that medical personnel use. I have recently spent a week in hospital during lockdown for surgery, and the aggressive and disciplined pursuit of hand hygiene was noticeable and completely different to community life. If you don’t know how to use a mask and don’t practice proper hand hygiene it is not much use. Here are some examples of mask use I have seen in Japan, when commuting or wandering my suburb (in a mask):

  • A man pulling his mask down on the train so he can pick his nose and wipe it on the poles people hold
  • People wearing their mask pulled down so their nose is uncovered (so common)
  • People folding their mask up and putting it in their pocket or a bag
  • People putting their mask on a table or other unwashed surface and then putting it back on again
  • People putting their mask on backwards
  • People taking their mask off to use a shared microphone in a public meeting
  • People wearing masks to karaoke and taking them off to sing

It is of course also impossible to maintain social distance on commuter trains in Japan. I have also noticed that everyone complains that when they wear a mask their breath steams up their glasses, which means constantly fiddling with the mask and wearing it too loose. If your breath is getting out of your mask rather than through it, you are not protecting anyone and you aren’t protected.

Even if masks were 90-100% effective though, we still know that a strategy of mask wearing will not work. We know this because we tried the exact same strategy for HIV and failed.

The failure of barrier methods for HIV prevention

HIV first entered western consciousness in the early 1980s. It was initially identified in men who have sex with men (MSM) in America but the pandemic really took off in heterosexual people in sub-Saharan Africa, probably because it was already widespread by the 1980s. The first treatment was introduced in 1987 but the first really effective treatments, highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), were only introduced in 1997. In the early 2000s HAART was discovered to reduce the transmissibility of HIV, meaning that people taking HAART were less likely to pass the infection to others even if they were having unprotected sex. This discovery came at about the same time as George W Bush introduced PEPFAR, a massive program of HIV testing and treatment in sub-Saharan Africa, and this widespread testing plus availability of a treatment that could render people non-infectious led to some gains in the battle against HIV.

Now that HAART is available the fight against HIV is almost exclusively based on testing and treatment, but until the mid 1990s the only effective strategy we had for prevention was condom use. Condoms are 90-100% effective in preventing the spread of HIV, and we ran aggressive condom promotion and distribution schemes in the 1980s and 1990s to encourage safer sex and prevention of HIV. Despite dumping huge amounts of money and resources into these programs in the 1980s and 1990s HIV continued to spread rapidly in both heterosexual communities in Africa and MSM and some other at-risk communities in the rest of the world. Condom promotion strategies did not work to prevent the spread of HIV even though we knew that they were highly effective tools for prevention. Barrier methods were all we had – our entire strategy was based on behavioral change and personal actions – and it failed miserably.

The same is also true of all the other STIs: gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis are all still widespread in heterosexual and MSM communities despite the sure knowledge that they are easily prevented by condoms. Indeed, these diseases are much more prevalent in communities that have easy access to condoms but poor access to testing and rapid treatment, such as indigenous populations in Australia or very poor communities in the USA. It is the structural factors of access to testing and treatment that determine the spread of these diseases, not the ability of individuals to take individual action to protect themselves or others.

Why is this possible? How did this program fail so monumentally when the individual preventive action it was based on is so well known to be highly effective? The reason is that sex is a social act, and social acts are mediated by complex social forces that it is difficult for us to navigate and control on our own. When people have sex they choose to flout social rules, they don’t always plan ahead, they are sometimes under the influence of drugs or alcohol or in a rush or not quite sure of exactly what is safe. Power relations are common in sex and can lead to people not being able or willing to negotiate condom use. Just as masks interfere with the ease and enjoyment of basic social interactions, so condoms interfere with the ease and enjoyment of sex, and people sometimes choose not to use them for this and other personal reasons. People also often make judgments about who and what is “safe”, and make these decisions with partial information in very emotionally fraught circumstances. And of course if you want children – a fundamental consequence of and reason for this social interaction – you can’t wear a condom. And so HIV spreads.

There are communities where condom distribution has worked but this is rare. It was probably partially successful among MSM in Australia, but probably because the campaign to use protection and beat HIV was explicitly tied in with the campaign for rights for MSM. It has been successful among sex workers, but this is because sex workers have no social incentive not to use condoms and have powerful tools at their disposal to enforce their own protection, and this is only true in some communities of sex workers who are strongly protected by cultural, social and legal norms that give them the social power to control their sexual interactions. There are many communities of sex workers in the world who cannot negotiate condom use precisely because these structural factors are aligned against their personal protective choices.

In contrast, we can identify a group of people who are at very high risk of HIV but have very low rates and among whom outbreaks of HIV are quickly identified and shut down: porn actors. Porn actors have large amounts of completely unprotected and often high-risk sex with multiple partners regularly, but have low risk of HIV. This is because they work in an industry with rigorous, regular testing policies that ensure that HIV cases are caught before they can become widespread. This is an example of how high-risk behavior can be safe if it is regularly tested and treated, but low risk behavior (for example among heterosexual people in Africa) can be dangerous if it is forced to rely on personal protective actions without the support of a health infrastructure.

Against infectious diseases, social and policy actions are always more powerful than individual actions, because infectious diseases are a consequence of our social interactions, not our personal decisions.

The difference between strategies and individual actions

Public health strategies obviously always rely on individual actions: we need people to report symptoms, to attend clinics for medical care, to comply with test and trace strategies, and to cooperate with the health system. Many of these actions can be guaranteed to happen under the right circumstances because they benefit the individual: if you can afford care, getting care is good for you, so you are likely to do it. But any policy which requires people to do the right thing in a burdensome way runs up against a huge problem: many people do not want to, or are not able to, do the right thing. This is why states have to mandate seatbelt wearing and introduce random breath testing to prevent drunk driving: the action they request of individuals is burdensome and unpleasant, so people won’t do it if they aren’t forced. The same is true of mask-wearing and social distancing, which is fundamentally against all of our social and cultural norms and obviously, objectively makes social interactions worse. Any policy based on requiring (or expecting) people to perform these actions is bound to fail, especially if no one is trained in how to do these actions safely and is not receiving the correct equipment. The policy is particularly likely to fail because the people who don’t conform will spread their virus in ways that people who are conforming cannot see and prevent (such as touching surfaces that mask-wearers touch).

A good public health strategy needs to take into account what people are willing and able to do, and not assume everyone will act correctly and in good faith. A policy which plans to increase risk in other ways – by reopening the economy – while relying on people doing these difficult and unpleasant individual actions to offset the risk is guaranteed to fail. And as we see in America, and now increasingly in Japan, that is exactly what has happened.

What does this say about the future of COVID-19 policy

There is only one safe and reliable way to control this epidemic: lockdown your cities until there are 0 cases, then reopen slowly and carefully with immediate and aggressive lockdowns as soon as outbreaks happen. Coupled with rigorous control of national (and sometimes sub-national) borders, this will ensure that states can get to 0 cases and stay there with minimal future risk. If every country proceeds on this basis we can slowly reconnect countries that have eliminated the virus, and reopen the global economy. But so long as governments think they can reopen the economy provided that individual citizens take reasonable actions to protect themselves in the presence of remnant cases, the epidemic will restart and countries will continually bounce between lockdown and tragic, fatal reopening. This does not mean that you should not wear a mask – as we saw above, they probably have some mild protective effect. But you should not – and your government should not expect you to – use it as the only defense against this virus just so that economies can reopen. In the face of a virus this transmissible and deadly, there is no way your individual actions will make any difference. We need to work together through collective action to destroy this thing. Until a vaccine comes along, our individual effort is meaningless: we rely on policy and social action to end this scourge. Whenever a government asks you to wear a mask to protect yourself and your friends, that government is asking you to take the blame for its failures. Don’t let it happen. Demand real collective action to end this epidemic and restart our lives.

 

 

December 20, 2019

Two Strategies for Getting out of Britain if you’re Young and Scared

Posted by faustusnotes under Education, Japan, Meat Life, off-topic ranting | Tags: |
1 Comment 

The future of British youth

Are you young, British, and scared about where your country is headed? Want to get out before it all goes down? Are you worried about what’s going to happen after you leave the EU, and expect everything to come crashing down? Don’t think that the healthcare situation is going to get better or even stay as bad as it is? Come from an ethnic minority and are getting increasingly uncomfortable about how non-white British are being treated? Are you poor and doubt you’ll ever be able to get into a good university and make a decent career, but don’t want to be stuck in an Amazon warehouse the rest of your life because working class work no longer pays in the UK? Did you have a future plan that involved living and working in Europe, and now you need a completely new plan?

Do you need to get out? This post outlines two strategies for a simple and easy way to get out of the UK, for people aged 16-21 who are either finishing high school or finishing university, and not sure what to do next. If you’re confident that even if Labour win the next presidential election things still aren’t going to get better, you might want to consider one of these two strategies. Both involve leaving the UK for Japan, and this post is to tell you how.

Strategy 1: English Teacher

Lots of young people don’t know about this, but there are lots of private English teaching companies in Japan that are always looking for staff from native English speaking countries to work in them. To get a job at an English teaching company in Japan you need three basic qualifications: you need to be a native speaker, you need a bachelor’s degree, and you should still be in possession of a face[1]. Most of the big English teaching companies do recruitment tours in the UK, but they usually also have open recruitment on their websites. You can find them pretty easily on google. For a company like Aeon you will go to a day-long recruitment seminar that doubles as an interview, and usually you’ll get a job offer as a result. You just need to turn up looking presentable, act like you care, and be willing to work with kids. You do not need to be able to speak Japanese or have any knowledge of Japanese culture (though knowing more about Japan than “manga!” and “geisha!” would be helpful probably).

Once you get the job the English teaching company will place you in a random city in Japan, pay for your airfare, and organize an apartment for you. This may be a share house or it may be a one room. You’ll get paid probably 200-250k yen per month (about 1500 – 2000 GBP[2]) and will have to pay taxes and health insurance from that. Health insurance is affordable, and it covers everything – and unlike the NHS, there are no waiting times to get into most straightforward treatments, doctors are same day without an appointment, and your kids won’t get their pneumonia treatments on the floor. It starts from the day you arrive in the country. Usually the company will help you set up bank account, phone etc., so even if you don’t speak Japanese you’ll be good to go. Once you arrive and get settled you can save a bit of money and after a few months you’ll be in a position to move somewhere you like, or change companies to a better one. If you speak Japanese because you were lucky enough to study it at high school you can maybe shift to a better job. But the key thing is you’ve landed in civilization, and you’ll be safe.

The salary isn’t great but it’s enough to save money if you don’t do dumb-arsed things, and you will be able to make occasional short trips in Asia on that salary. Japan is not an expensive country and especially if you aren’t in Tokyo or Osaka it’s a super cheap place to live. The working conditions at teaching companies aren’t great (typically some evening and weekend work, and your days off may not be guaranteed to be Saturday and Sunday) but they don’t have at-will firing over here and even though you’re foreign you have all the employment rights of a local, including unemployment benefits after a minimum period of time in the job. English teachers are generally considered to be the lowest of the low among foreigners living in Japan, for reasons you’ll understand within minutes of meeting your colleagues, but it’s better to be the lowest of the low in Japan than to be poor in modern Britain. So do it!

If you’re a high school student this option isn’t open to you (these companies require a bachelor’s degree) but you can aim for it: they don’t care where your degree is from so you can attend any university in the UK and still get accepted when you graduate. See my special notes for high school students below.

There are also similar companies in China and Korea (see my notes on other Asian countries below). There is also an Assistant Language Teacher program where you work in schools, which is apparently a little more demanding to get into. Google is your best friend here!

Strategy 2: Japan government scholarship

The Japanese government runs a large scholarship program for students from overseas, called the Japan Government Scholarship, also known as the MEXT scholarship or Monbusho scholarship. This is available for all education levels: undergraduate, masters or PhD. You apply through your embassy (the US website is here) about now. The scholarship pays your university fees, a monthly living allowance, and a return airfare. You can apply for this for your undergraduate studies, so you apply from high school and go straight to university study in Japan. Unless you are planning on studying certain topics (e.g. Japanese literature) you don’t need to be able to speak or read Japanese: they set a Japanese test during the application process but this is used to determine what level of training you need, not to screen you out. The amazing thing about MEXT scholarships is that they’re not very competitive – not many people know about them and not many people want to move to study in Japan – so even if you don’t have a stellar record you still have a chance. Also they don’t discriminate on race or economic background, as far as I know, and it’s a straight-up merit-based application. The allowance is not great – I think about 100k yen for undergrads and about 150k for postgrads – but you’ll get subsidized uni accommodation and won’t pay tax, so it’s perfectly viable. If you go for Masters you need to find a supervisor who teaches in English and isn’t an arsehole – this is a big challenge – but you can do it if you try. One big benefit of the MEXT scholarship at postgrad is you get a year as a “research student” during which you don’t study in the department you’ve chosen but instead just learn Japanese. You can get really good at Japanese this way if you pay attention. Another great thing is that once you’re in the MEXT program it’s easier to go to the next step – so you can go from undergraduate to masters to PhD. Theoretically you could go from 1st year undergraduate to the end of a post-doc on Japan government money, which would put you in Japan for 11 years and probably stand you in a good position for a permanent faculty position, which are like hens’ teeth in many western countries but quite common here. Also, if you do undergraduate study here you have a very good chance of being able to get a job in a Japanese company when you graduate, probably quite a good one, and build a career here.

The application period is usually about now so get busy!

An example: Oliver Greenstar’s Education and Career Path

As an example of the Monbusho scholarship in action, let me describe the career trajectory of the guy who plays Oliver Greenstar in my Coriolis campaign. Oliver studied in a relatively well-respected university in the UK, and came to Japan on a MEXT scholarship to do his masters at a prestigious university here. He spent a year as a research student, studying Japanese full time, before entering the master’s program. Despite being viciously bullied by his professor near the end of the degree he passed, published his master’s thesis, and obtained a job at a prestigious Japanese bank (one of the big ones). After his year of Japanese study his Japanese was good enough to do the interviews and applications in Japanese, and to work entirely in Japanese. He worked there for about two years before the work got boring, and then jumped ship to an international consultancy where his educational background, English and Japanese are in demand. He’s dating a nice girl from another part of Asia and living his best life in Tokyo. Basically he got into the international consultancy business without having to take any education loans, and got a second language skill as part of the deal. As a consultant for one of the big international companies he’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes, but hey, he’s not in Bojo’s Britain so at least he’ll be able to face the firing in squad in good health.

Special notes for high school students

Note that if you’re finishing high school you can target all of these strategies now. Apply for the MEXT scholarship and if you don’t get it, go to a local university. Target one where you can study an Asian language, either Chinese, Korean or Japanese. Then apply for MEXT again at the end of your undergraduate, and if you don’t get it apply for an English-teaching company in whatever country you studied the language for. You can use this English teaching job as a base to find a job in whatever field you actually want to work, because you’ve got four years of language training under your belt and so should be able to speak the local language reasonably well. If this falls through you’re still okay because no matter how shit your degree was at that local polytechnic, a second language is a skill you can take to the bank. You can probably then find an okay job in a UK company targeting that country. This means you’re still trapped in a failing state, but at least your attempt to get out didn’t doom you to work at Brighton pier.

Remember, if you get the MEXT scholarship you’re going to graduate from university with no debt, proficient in a second language, and with a full career path in Japan likely right there in front of you.

Notes on other Asian countries

Most Asian countries have the English-teaching option available – for sure you can get to China or Korea if you don’t want to go to Japan, and they all have approximately the same requirements. All three countries now have functioning health insurance systems and decent public services. Obviously there are some issues about personal freedom in China and once the UK becomes a US vassal state you may find your British citizenship puts you a little danger there. Other countries like Thailand, Vietnam etc. also have English-teaching jobs but I’m not sure about the pay and conditions – you might find you can’t save money in these countries and it becomes a kind of trap. I don’t know. But any of the high-income Asian countries are good places to teach English.

China also offers scholarships for overseas students through the CSC. The Chinese education system is very good and if you get a degree at a good Chinese university you’re probably getting a better education than you’d expect in any British uni. I don’t know if the CSC offers scholarships to Brits or what the long-term consequences of that will be for your career in either country, but it could be worth investigating. You might also want to consider Singapore, which has excellent universities, but I have no idea how it works.

A note on the long-term risks of English teaching

You can make a life time career as an English teacher in Japan but it won’t be well paid and you’ll remain permanently lower middle class, which is not a big deal over here (Japan is an equitable country) but also not the best working life to pursue. But most importantly, if you spend more than a few years as an English teacher straight out of uni, your employability in your home country will take a nose dive, because you have no skills or experience relevant to a real job. So you need to make an exit plan if you want to return to the west. One option is to get an English as a second language (ESL) masters (you can do this online) and try to move into teaching English at uni, which pays slightly more and has a bit more prestige, but is a slightly riskier career (it can mean a permanent career as an adjunct, which is tough). Another option is to try and jump ship to a real company using whatever skills you’ve got but this can take time and may not lead you to a good place. If your Japanese is good you can maybe shift to being a standard office worker, but if you have no Japanese you need to bear in mind that English teaching is a trap if you do it for more than a few years. Bear in mind that Japan is aging fast, the pool of available workers is dropping in size, and as time goes on opportunities for foreigners here (even foreigners with weak language skills) are only going to grow. Also contrary to what you’ve heard (see below) Japan is becoming more and more open and welcoming to foreigners, even under supposedly militarist Prime Minister Abe, so things will just get easier as time passes. It’s worth risking for a year or two to try and build an escape plan, and if it doesn’t work out what have you lost? Just be ready to jump out if you see that trap closing before it’s too late.

Why Japan?

I’m recommending this escape plan because I know Japan: I live here and I know it’s a good place to live. You’ve probably heard that it’s expensive, treats foreigners badly and is very inward-looking. None of this is true. You’re not going to experience much racism at all, if you’re a woman you’re not going to get sexually assaulted on the train, and it’s not an expensive place to live. Rent is affordable even in Tokyo on an English teacher’s wage, your health insurance is fixed at a small proportion of your salary and is always affordable, food is good and cheap, and you can live a good life here even on low wages.

If you live in Japan you will be safe, you will be healthy, and you’ll be able to build a life for yourself even on a low income. If you want to live here long term you’ll need to learn the language (which is boring and bothersome to do); you may find that as a foreigner you are not going to be able to ascend to the peak of your career here no matter what it is. It may be hard for you to buy a place here either because your low salary precludes saving a lot of money for a deposit, or the bank won’t loan you money if you don’t have permanent residency. You won’t be able to afford to go back to the UK a lot unless you get out of the English teaching trade, and you will be restricted to short visits to nearby Asian countries. You’ll probably have to work hard and if you choose the wrong company after university (or the wrong post-graduate supervisor) you’ll be bullied and overworked. These are risks of moving here! But you’ll definitely have healthcare, your country won’t be collapsing around you, if you’re a woman you can walk safely at night no matter what time or how deserted the streets, and no matter what you earn people will show you the respect you deserve as a human being. And the government is not going crazy, nor will it.

So if you’re young and scared and worried about your future in Britain, and you really want to get out, consider these two strategies, and get out while you still can.

[Note: I wrote this a few months ago for Americans worried about what’s happening there, but in light of the coming Brexit storm I thought young Brits might want the same advice. I’ve copy-pasted that advice, added the example, and changed the bitchy asides to suit the political climate of your benighted isles].

fn1: Actually I’m not sure if they care about whether you have a face. But just to be sure, apply now before some lunatic gets a chance to stab you in the face.

fn2: or 30000GBP after Brexit works its magic on the pound

 

December 17, 2019

Labour did not Lose Because of Remain Seats

Posted by faustusnotes under Meat Life, off-topic ranting, Science | Tags: , , |
[3] Comments 

Some commentators on Twitter and in the media are saying that Labour lost the 2019 General Election because it lost too many votes to remain parties, and that failure to retain support from remainers was the problem. Angry Labour activists on Twitter have been listing off the remain seats that were lost, and saying that a strong remain strategy would have saved the party.

This is completely wrong, and I will show this using data from the 2019 election and the 2016 referendum.

Methods

First I used the dataset of constituency-level results I assembled over the weekend, which contains results for 339 constituencies, semi-randomly sampled from the list of all constituencies on the BBC election site and linked to leave voting data from the 2016 EU referendum. The detailed methodology for assembling this dataset is given here. I then assembled a separate data set of only the seats Labour lost, using this handy (but not quite alphabetical) guide from the Metro newspaper. I merged these with EU referendum data.

Using the full constituency data set, I created a logistic regression model of probability of retaining a seat against constituency leave vote, for all the seats that were held by Labour at the 2017 election. I plotted the predicted probability of losing a seat against the proportion of the population in that seat. Then, I conducted a crosstabs and chi-squared test for the seats held by Labour in 2017, showing the probability of losing a seat in 2019 by whether or not it was a leave-voting constituency. I defined a “leave-voting constituency” as any constituency voting above the median leave vote (which was 53.55).

Next, using the data set of the 59 constituencies Labour lost, I calculated the mean vote in this set of constituencies, and the proportion of constituencies that were leave-voting constituencies. I compared this with data for all Labour held seats that were not lost in the 2019 election.

Results

In my constituency data set there were 142 seats held by Labour in the 2017 election, of which 30 (21%) were lost in the 2019 election. Figure 1 shows the cross tabulation of leave seats with seats Labour held in 2019[1].

Figure 1: (Hideously ugly) cross tabulation of Labour-held seats by whether those seats voted leave

As can be seen, 92% of remain seats were held, compared to 66% of leave seats. This is extremely statistically significant (chi-squared statistic 14.35, p<0.001). That’s a nasty sign that the main risk of losing a seat was that it was a leave seat, not a remain seat.

We can show this explicitly using logistic regression. Figure 2 shows the predicted probability of a seat being held by Labour in 2019, plotted against the proportion of the seat that voted to leave in the EU referendum. The red dots on this figure indicate whether it was held by Labour in 2019: red dots on the top of the figure are seats retained, plotted at the value of their leave vote; red dots at the bottom are seats that were lost, plotted at the value of their leave vote.

Figure 2: Probability of losing a seat in 2019 by leave vote

This model was highly significant, and showed that every 1% point in the leave vote reduced the odds of Labour holding the seat by 7%. Note that this figure includes Scotland, so the results might be slightly different if only England were considered, but even the strongest remain-voting seat that was lost – even were it in Scotland – is well above the remain vote of some seats that were held. This model shows that at the extreme end of the leave spectrum, up above 60% of the electorate voting for leave, the probability that Labour retained the seat dropped to around 50%. That’s terrible!

My constituency data set contains only 142 Labour seats, and 30 seats that were lost, but actually 59 seats were lost. Since my data set is semi-random, there is a small chance that it will misrepresent the results. So I checked with the dataset of all seats that were lost. This data set contains 59 seats. Here are some basic facts about this data set, and comparisons with the constituency data set and the full list of Labour-held seats:

  • Labour lost 14 remain-voting seats (24% of all seats lost) and 45 leave-voting seats (76%). This is very similar to my crosstabs, where 24 of 30 seats lost (80%) were leave
  • The average leave vote in the 59 seats that were lost was 57.7%, slightly above the median, ranging from 31.2 – 71.4%.
  • In contrast, the average leave vote in the 112 seats in my constituency data set that Labour held was 48.8%, ranging from 20.5 – 72.8%
  • The average leave vote in all seats held by Labour going into this election was 51.1%, ranging from 20.5 – 72.8%

This is clear statistical evidence that Labour went into this election having a slightly remain-leaning set of constituencies, primarily lost leave-voting constituencies, and emerged from the election even more remain-focused than when it went in.

Conclusion

Labour did not lose this election because of a large swing in votes to the remain parties. It did not lose a large number of remain-voting seats, but was decimated in the leave-voting areas. Labour held on to all of its most heavily remain-focused seats. In attempting to appeal to both leavers and remainers, Labour managed to retain most of the remainers and lose a lot more leavers. Labour emerged from this election even more remain-focused than it was when it went in[2]. There are some very simple reasons for this:

  • The swing to the Tories and away from Labour was much bigger in leave-voting seats
  • The Brexit party was only active in Labour-held seats, and got its largest vote share in the strongly leave seats
  • The swing to the Lib Dems was much less closely related to the leave vote than was the swing away from Labour (see my last blog post, Figure 4)
  • The intensity of the relationship between leave voting and swinging to Lib Dems was lower in Labour-held seats than Tory-held seats (see my last blog post, Figure 4)

In trying to please both sides of the Brexit divide, Labour failed to satisfy the leavers. Pro-brexit Labour voters were simply much, much more committed to Brexit than pro-remain Labour voters were to remain, and so Labour lost the leave areas. There are lots of remainers out there who want to claim that remain is wot did it, but they are simply wrong. I’m super pro-remain myself, but the data makes it very clear: British Labour voters want to leave, and they were willing to pack in their allegiance to the Labour movement to get that done. Whatever you might think of their politics, that is the simple hard fact of the electorates Labour represented.

It’s worth noting that in 2017 Corbyn campaigned on Brexit. The Labour manifesto explicitly accepted Brexit and said Labour would negotiate and leave. At that election Labour won a historically high share for a party in opposition, a higher share of the vote in fact than Blair won in 2005 (when he retained government). In that election they came within a bees’ dick of winning government, and in that period before Corbyn accepted the compromise of a second referendum two Tory PMs left, and Johnson only held onto government by the skin of his teeth (recall there was talk of a unity government). Blair and Cameron have both shown it’s possible to hold government with 35% of the vote, so it’s perfectly possible that had Corbyn gone into this election on a leave platform he would have seen a much smaller swing against him, and could have won it. We don’t know, but on the basis of all the evidence here it seems like the second referendum policy was a disaster for Labour.

This gives two clear lessons for Labour to take in over the next few years and as they choose a new leader:

  1. Labour’s policies and Corbyn were not the primary problem, and dropping them is not going to help. Obviously Corbyn is going to go, it’s traditional, but the manifesto’s policies were not the problem. The Labour right is going to push for the party to throw the Corbyn years down the memory hole (in today’s Guardian we have Suzanne Moore begging for a vet to “sedate” the Corbyn supporters!), because they are and have always been intent on fighting these genuinely left wing policies. Ignore them, and stick to the real Labour platform that will really help the country as it recovers from the horrors of this Tory leadership
  2. Labour – and the British left generally – have to get over Brexit. There is no option left to remain, and no chance it will ever happen now. The Labour right want to claim that Corbyn doesn’t understand working class voters but his original policy – of full-throated Lexit – was much more in tune with what ordinary working class Labour supporters want than anything that the Blairist rump have to say. The debate now for Labour has to be about the type of Brexit, and how to make it work. This means fighting Johnson’s bullshit deal, but on the basis that they can make a better one – obviously this doesn’t matter now but it is the job of the opposition to hold the government to account, and they should do so from the clear perspective of their voters, that Brexit has to happen. This is going to be hard for some of the urban remainers from the south and east, but that’s life if you’re a politician. Further talk of remain just has to end

For 20 years the EU was a thorn in the Tory side, constantly causing them trouble. Cameron ripped that thorn out with this referendum, and although May spent some time botching the healing process Johnson has patched up the damage and squeezed out the last remainer pus from the Tory body politic. If Labour don’t face the reality of Brexit and what it did to this party at the 2019 election, then the issue will fester for them – as it did over so many years for the Tories – and hold them back just as it did the Tories. It is time for Britain to move on from Brexit, and for the Labour movement to accept the reality of the disaster that is coming. Once people realize how Johnson’s Brexit has screwed them, they will turn to Labour – and Labour needs to be ready with a transformative, genuinely left wing agenda in order to recapture its heartland and do what is right for working people. Corbyn was right about Brexit, right about the policies Britain needs, and after he is gone he will still be right about what has to be done. Don’t repudiate those lessons, and in the process destroy the movement.

fn1: My apologies for pasting this as a picture directly copied from Stata, instead of making a nice pretty table – I hate it when people do this but it’s late and I hate making tables in html. Stata offers an option to copy as html but it doesn’t work. Sorry!

fn2: This final conclusion is shakey because it depends on my constituency data set, and I don’t know if it would still be true once all the remaining Labour-held seats are entered into the dataset. I think it will, but there’s a chance the final data set will end up the same level of leaviness as the 2017 constituencies, statistically speaking. But this conclusion is not a very important one anyway, so it doesn’t matter if it isn’t held up by the full dataset.

 

August 5, 2019

The London G20 Protest and the Hong Kong Riots: Watching the Western Media Shame Themselves Again

Posted by faustusnotes under China, Crime Fiction, Meat Life, off-topic ranting | Tags: |
[26] Comments 

The rule of law …

On 1st April this year the first protest march against the Hong Kong extradition law was held in Wan Chai. Ten years ago on that same day, 1st April, the London Metropolitan police murdered Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper vendor, at the G20 protest in London. They killed him on film, in front of thousands of citizens, by pushing him onto his face from behind and beating him with a baton. They then refused to help him, denied that they had done it, and refused to accept any responsibility until the film of the event was released. The day after his death the police attacked peaceful protestors at a candelight vigil to remember him, also on film. They lied about his death for days and found a corrupt coroner to do an autopsy, in a scandalous miscarriage of justice that took a year to be undone. Finally, after a second autopsy and an inquiry the police officer who killed him, PC Harwood, was found not guilty of manslaughter, and eventually dismissed from the police force. He was never convicted of any crime, and neither were the police who assaulted mourners at the vigil for Tomlinson. For weeks after the event the police and their friends in media organizations like the Sun, Daily Mail and the Telegraph maintained that demonstrators had prevented ambulance officers from reaching Tomlinson, when in fact the police had refused to provide first aid and the only help Tomlinson received was from protestors.

At the G20 protest in London – which lasted for 4 days – the police used aggressive “kettling” procedures, police dogs and horse charges. A total of 180 protestors were injured. While PC Harwood and the police who assaulted the mourners were never convicted of any crime, one demonstrator was sentenced to two years in prison for throwing a chair through a bank window.

Today in Wan Chai the protests against the Hong Kong extradition law continue, as they have done almost continuously since the events began on 1st April. During this four months no one has been killed, although the police have fired rubber bullets, tear gas and pepper spray at the protestors. Police in London 10 years ago also used batons and pepper spray, along with horses and kettling tactics. What have the Hong Kong protestors done, and how does it compare with the G20 protest?

  • They sprayed the Chinese for “chink” (支那) on the walls of the Beijing Liaison office, knowing full well that in mainland China this is a vicious racial slur
  • They broke into the legislative building and trashed it
  • They have repeatedly torn down the Chinese flag and replaced it with the former Hong Kong colonial flag, a reminder of a time when China was humiliated by a foreign power
  • They graffitied the graves of important historical figures in Hong Kong history with racial slurs
  • They attacked mainland Chinese people and chanted “go back” at them
  • They occupied the airport and railway stations, disrupting major transport hubs and interfering with the business of ordinary Hong Kong people, and deliberately disrupting the business of mainland traders near the border
  • They forced mainlanders to hand over their phones to demonstrators to prove they weren’t filming them

How many of those things did the G20 protestors do? And how many of those things did you see reported in the western press? I’ll wager you saw none of it, but if you read today’s feed on the Guardian about the demonstrations you will see all manner of cute little tidbits about all the peaceful and happy things the demonstrators are doing, told with a breathless tone as if it’s just a day out in the park and the first time the reporters have ever seen a demonstration. Breathless reports about how the demonstrators are cheered by passing citizens and told to “add oil”, reports of them using cute codewords to alert teams to raise umbrellas, pictures of decorated barriers, uncritical reporting of rival demonstrators as “triads”, reports from the airport of protest banners saying they can handle tear gas, talking about flash mob tactics with an approving tone and cute exclamation marks … it could almost be a picnic!

You didn’t see any of that style of reporting back in the G20 protests in London. There was no breathless tone of approval, no reports on the cute things that everyone does at demonstrations to defuse tension, pass the time or relieve boredom. Western reports did not describe protest tactics with approval at how smart and organized they were, or talk about which passersby approved (they only reported disapproval). When protesters at the G20 wore masks to hide themselves from police cameras or pepper spray they were described as thugs or maligned as “black bloc”, not seen as innocent young people taking necessary measures to defend themselves from police violence. In the Hong Kong riots police attack protesters; in the G20 London protest “violence broke out”, the passive voice used to ensure the police did not take the blame. There were no lasers used by demonstrators at the London protest, but rioters in Hong Kong have fired lasers at police “to obscure their identity”, and the media have not reported this as if it might carry some risk of blindness for police. For weeks they have reported about demonstrators helping old men across the road, about their kindness to strangers, about the organized way they care for their town and each other. There was even some ridiculous footage of them cleaning up their rubbish. You didn’t see any of that at the G20 London Protest, even though it all happened (these things always happen at protests).

The underlying demands of the protest are also reported differently. The G20 protestors’ concrete demands for change – for a fairer distribution of the wealth that global elites have been stealing from ordinary people, for greater equity, for environmental action and action on global warming – were ignored, and the whole movement made out to be a seething mass of discontented socialists. In the Hong Kong riot the protests are always reported as being about the extradition law, even though their actions – the “Hong Kongers!” chants, the “go back” chants, the racial slurs, the equivalent of Pride Boys moving in the mass[1], the tearing down of the Chinese flag, the calls for independence – make it clear that a large part of this movement is not about that at all, but a demand for independence from China. They also completely misrepresent the law itself, presenting it as a law to extradite people to China when it is not that at all, and conflate it with things completely unconnected to the law (like the bookseller issue). There is also a constant breathless expectation that the police will turn more violent or the army will be sent in, even after four months of restraint and patience on behalf of the Hong Kong government that would never have been seen in the UK.

If the G20 protests had lasted 4 months, shutting down Heathrow Airport and the Tube and involving vicious attacks on European bank workers on the streets week in and week out, would the Metropolitan police have been so restrained? Considering that they murdered an unconnected civilian on the first day, and covered it up? No, I don’t think they would have. And rather than having the main media organizations wondering daily whether the police would escalate, by the time a month had passed outlets like the Times and the Daily Mail would be begging them to. Western media coverage of the G20 protest in London was shameful, and their pathetic acquiescence to the lies the police told about the murder of Ian Tomlinson was a deep stain on their profession. Now we have to watch them uncritically refusing to report anything bad about the Hong Kong demonstrations, and reporting them as if they were a fun family picnic for the simple reason that their government doesn’t like the Chinese government – and for reasons of good old fashioned racism, of course. Today, for example, the Hong Kong chief of AFP tweeted a claim that the Opium War was good for China, and doubled down on it when challenged. These people are responsible for reporting to you about what is happening in Hong Kong, and they don’t care about any truth or any balance at all.

Underneath all of this unrest in Hong Kong is another tragedy. The extradition law was brought to parliament after a 20 year stay because a Hong Kong national murdered his pregnant girlfriend in Taiwan and fled the country, and because there is no extradition treaty with Taiwan he cannot be sent back to face justice. The story of that murdered girl and her family’s need for justice has been buried in the hyperbole about freedom and the rule of law, just as 10 years ago the truth of Ian Tomlinson’s murder was buried by a complicit, lickspittle press under an avalanche of lies and obfuscations. It is looking likely that the murderer of that Taiwanese woman will get away with his crime, just as PC Harwood suffered no legal consequences for murdering Ian Tomlinson. And in both cases the press will look the other way, forget the ordinary people that mattered, and offer up lies and calumny in the service of the national interest. They shamed themselves then and they shame themselves now.

fn1: It’s pretty well established that the 2014 umbrella movement had a nasty racist component, probably led by a movement called Civic Passion that is also present in the current demonstrations, and seems to be a little bit like a Pride Boys movement for Hong Kongers.

 

May 9, 2019

Two Strategies for Getting Out of America if You’re Young and Scared

Posted by faustusnotes under Health, Japan, Meat Life, off-topic ranting, Travel | Tags: |
[2] Comments 

Are you young, American, living in America and scared about where your country is headed? Want to get out before it all goes down? Are you worried about getting shot at school or work, or by the police? Don’t think that the healthcare situation is going to get better or even stay as bad as it is? Have a pre-existing condition and don’t know how you’re going to be able to afford medicines after you turn 26 (or even now)? Are you worried about Roe vs. Wade and pretty sure your reproductive rights are going down the tube in the next few years? Noticed that the new Georgia anti-abortion bill includes ectopic pregnancies, so is actually gynocidal? Are you poor and doubt you’ll ever be able to get into a good university and make a decent career, but don’t want to be stuck in an Amazon warehouse the rest of your life because working class work no longer pays in America? Are you black and don’t want to get shot by the police, or Jewish and a little bit worried about where those Proud Boys are taking your country?

Do you need to get out? This post outlines two strategies for a simple and easy way to get out of the USA, for people aged 16-21 who are either finishing high school or finishing university, and not sure what to do next. If you’re confident that even if the Dems win the next presidential election things still aren’t going to get better, you might want to consider one of these two strategies. Both involve leaving America for Japan, and this post is to tell you how.

Strategy 1: English Teacher

Lots of young people don’t know about this, but there are lots of private English teaching companies in Japan that are always looking for staff from native English speaking countries to work in them. To get a job at an English teaching company in Japan you need three basic qualifications: you need to be a native speaker, you need a bachelor’s degree, and you should still be in possession of a face[1]. Most of the big English teaching companies do recruitment tours in the USA, but they usually also have open recruitment on their websites. You can find them pretty easily on google. For a company like Aeon you will go to a day-long recruitment seminar that doubles as an interview, and usually you’ll get a job offer as a result. You just need to turn up looking presentable, act like you care, and be willing to work with kids. You do not need to be able to speak Japanese or have any knowledge of Japanese culture (though knowing more about Japan than “manga!” and “geisha!” would be helpful probably).

Once you get the job the English teaching company will place you in a random city in Japan, pay for your airfare, and organize an apartment for you. This may be a share house or it may be a one room. You’ll get paid probably 200-250k yen per month (about 1800 – 2000 USD) and will have to pay taxes and health insurance from that. Health insurance is affordable, and it covers everything: no pre-existing condition exemptions or any shit like that. It starts from the day you arrive in the country. Usually the company will help you set up bank account, phone etc., so even if you don’t speak Japanese you’ll be good to go. Once you arrive and get settled you can save a bit of money and after a few months you’ll be in a position to move somewhere you like, or change companies to a better one. If you speak Japanese because you were lucky enough to study it at high school you can maybe shift to a better job. But the key thing is you’ve landed in civilization, and you’ll be safe.

The salary isn’t great but it’s enough to save money if you don’t do dumb-arsed things, and you will be able to make occasional short trips in Asia on that salary. Japan is not an expensive country and especially if you aren’t in Tokyo or Osaka it’s a super cheap place to live. The working conditions at teaching companies aren’t great (typically some evening and weekend work, and your days off may not be guaranteed to be Saturday and Sunday) but they don’t have at-will firing over here and even though you’re foreign you have all the employment rights of a local, including unemployment benefits after a minimum period of time in the job. English teachers are generally considered to be the lowest of the low among foreigners living in Japan, for reasons you’ll understand within minutes of meeting your colleagues, but it’s better to be the lowest of the low in Japan than to be middle class in America. So do it!

If you’re a high school student this option isn’t open to you (these companies require a bachelor’s degree) but you can aim for it: they don’t care where your degree is from so you can attend a local low-cost uni (I believe you guys call this “community college”?) and still get accepted when you graduate. See my special notes for high school students below.

There are also similar companies in China and Korea (see my notes on other Asian countries below). There is also an Assistant Language Teacher program where you work in schools, which is apparently a little more demanding to get into. Google is your best friend here!

Strategy 2: Japan government scholarship

The Japanese government runs a large scholarship program for students from overseas, called the Japan Government Scholarship, also known as the MEXT scholarship or Monbusho scholarship. This is available for all education levels: undergraduate, masters or PhD. You apply through your embassy (the US website is here) about now. The scholarship pays your university fees, a monthly living allowance, and a return airfare. You can apply for this for your undergraduate studies, so you apply from high school and go straight to university study in Japan. Unless you are planning on studying certain topics (e.g. Japanese literature) you don’t need to be able to speak or read Japanese: they set a Japanese test during the application process but this is used to determine what level of training you need, not to screen you out. The amazing thing about MEXT scholarships is that they’re not very competitive – not many people know about them and not many people want to move to study in Japan – so even if you don’t have a stellar record you still have a chance. Also they don’t discriminate on race or economic background, as far as I know, and it’s a straight-up merit-based application. The allowance is not great – I think about 100k yen for undergrads and about 150k for postgrads – but you’ll get subsidized uni accommodation and won’t pay tax, so it’s perfectly viable. If you go for Masters you need to find a supervisor who teaches in English and isn’t an arsehole – this is a big challenge – but you can do it if you try. One big benefit of the MEXT scholarship at postgrad is you get a year as a “research student” during which you don’t study in the department you’ve chosen but instead just learn Japanese. You can get really good at Japanese this way if you pay attention. Another great thing is that once you’re in the MEXT program it’s easier to go to the next step – so you can go from undergraduate to masters to PhD. Theoretically you could go from 1st year undergraduate to the end of a post-doc on Japan government money, which would put you in Japan for 11 years and probably stand you in a good position for a permanent faculty position, which are like hens’ teeth in the USA but quite common here. ALSO, if you do undergraduate study here you have a very good chance of being able to get a job in a Japanese company when you graduate, probably quite a good one, and build a career here.

The application period is usually about now so get busy!

Special notes for high school students

Note that if you’re finishing high school you can target all of these strategies now. Apply for the MEXT scholarship and if you don’t get it, go to a local community college or whatever they’re called. Target one where you can study an Asian language, either Chinese, Korean or Japanese. Then apply for MEXT again at the end of your undergraduate, and if you don’t get it apply for an English-teaching company in whatever country you studied the language for. You can use this English teaching job as a base to find a job in whatever field you actually want to work, because you’ve got four years of language training under your belt and so should be able to speak the local language reasonably well. If this falls through you’re still okay because no matter how shit your degree was at that community college, a second language is a skill you can take to the bank. You can probably then find an okay job in a US company targeting that country. This means you’re still trapped in a failing state, but at least your attempt to get out didn’t doom you to work at Starbucks (though who knows, four years from now maybe America won’t have any industry except Starbucks).

Remember, if you get the MEXT scholarship you’re going to graduate from university with no debt, proficient in a second language, and with a full career path in Japan likely right there in front of you.

Notes on other Asian countries

Most Asian countries have the English-teaching option available – for sure you can get to China or Korea if you don’t want to go to Japan, and they all have approximately the same requirements. All three countries now have functioning health insurance systems and you won’t get shot in any of them. They’re all aging and need young people, and at least in Korea as well as Japan Americans are generally still viewed well (for now; this is changing). Obviously there are some issues about personal freedom in China and if things continue to go south in the US-China relationship you might not feel safe from reprisals from the government. Other countries like Thailand, Vietnam etc. also have English-teaching jobs but I’m not sure about the pay and conditions – you might find you can’t save money in these countries and it becomes a kind of trap. I don’t know. But any of the high-income Asian countries are good places to teach English.

China also offers scholarships for overseas students through the CSC. The Chinese education system is very good and if you get a degree at a good Chinese university you’re probably getting a better education than you’d expect in any American uni. I don’t know if the CSC offers scholarships to Americans (since, let’s face it, you guys suck) or what the long-term consequences of that will be for your career in either country, but it could be worth investigating. You might also want to consider Singapore, which has excellent universities, but I have no idea how it works.

A note on the long-term risks of English teaching

You can make a life time career as an English teacher in Japan but it won’t be well paid and you’ll remain permanently lower middle class, which is not a big deal over here (Japan is an equitable country) but also not the best working life to pursue. But most importantly, if you spend more than a few years as an English teacher straight out of uni, your employability in your home country will take a nose dive, because you have no skills or experience relevant to a real job. So you need to make an exit plan if you want to return to the west. One option is to get an English as a second language (ESL) masters (you can do this online) and try to move into teaching English at uni, which pays slightly more and has a bit more prestige, but is a slightly riskier career (it can mean a permanent career as an adjunct, which is tough). Another option is to try and jump ship to a real company using whatever skills you’ve got but this can take time and may not lead you to a good place. If your Japanese is good you can maybe shift to being a standard office worker, but if you have no Japanese you need to bear in mind that English teaching is a trap if you do it for more than a few years. Bear in mind that Japan is aging fast, the pool of available workers is dropping in size, and as time goes on opportunities for foreigners here (even foreigners with weak language skills) are only going to grow. Also contrary to what you’ve heard (see below) Japan is becoming more and more open and welcoming to foreigners, even under supposedly militarist Prime Minister Abe, so things will just get easier as time passes. It’s worth risking for a year or two to try and build an escape plan, and if it doesn’t work out what have you lost? Just be ready to jump out if you see that trap closing before it’s too late.

Why Japan?

I’m recommending this escape plan because I know Japan: I live here and I know it’s a good place to live. You’ve probably heard that it’s expensive, treats foreigners badly and is very inward-looking. None of this is true. You’re not going to experience much racism at all, if you’re a woman you’re not going to get sexually assaulted on the train, and it’s not an expensive place to live. Rent is affordable even in Tokyo on an English teacher’s wage, your health insurance is fixed at a small proportion of your salary and is always affordable, food is good and cheap, and you can live a good life here even on low wages. You can’t live an American life of huge housing, a car, an assault rifle and all the home-delivered pizza you can eat but that’s a good thing, not a bad thing: those are the reasons your country is killing the planet and itself.

If you live in Japan you will be safe, you will be healthy, and you’ll be able to build a life for yourself even on a low income. If you want to live here long term you’ll need to learn the language (which is boring and bothersome to do); you may find that as a foreigner you are not going to be able to ascend to the peak of your career here no matter what it is. It may be hard for you to buy a place here either because your low salary precludes saving a lot of money for a deposit, or the bank won’t loan you money if you don’t have permanent residency. You won’t be able to afford to go back to America a lot unless you get out of the English teaching trade, and you will be restricted to short visits to nearby Asian countries. You’ll probably have to work hard and if you choose the wrong company after university (or the wrong post-graduate supervisor) you’ll be bullied and overworked. These are risks of moving here! But you’ll definitely have healthcare, you’ll have no risk of being shot by either crazy white guys or police, if you’re a woman you can walk safely at night no matter what time or how deserted the streets, and no matter what you earn people will show you the respect you deserve as a human being. And the government is not going crazy, nor will it.

So if you’re young and scared and worried about your future in America, and you really want to get out, consider these two strategies, and get out while you still can.

fn1: Actually I’m not sure if they care about whether you have a face. But just to be sure, apply now before some lunatic gets a chance to shoot you in the face.

 

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