Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • This is what Adaptation Looks Like

    Over Christmas large swathes of northern England drowned, washed away in a huge flood caused by storms from the Atlantic. The same storms battered the Irish coast, and are now moving up towards the arctic, where the North Pole is expected to be 1C – 30C above the average for this time of year – on 30th December. Towns in the north that do not normally experience flooding, like York and Leeds, were submerged, and some towns on the west coast experienced their second or third major floods in three years. Insurers estimate the cost of the latest floods at 5 billion pounds, and more are expected tonight and tomorrow.

    For many people these floods will bring financial ruin, because many people in the affected areas were no longer able to obtain flood insurance – the area they live in was deemed too high risk by the insurance companies, which stopped covering them after the 2011-12 floods. Those floods are estimated to have cost 3 billion pounds, and since then the government has been investing about half a billion pounds a year in flood mitigation measures that clearly were insufficient to handle the latest storms. This withdrawal of insurance comes despite the fact that the government instituted a 10 pound levy on all insurance plans in the UK to subsidize the continued provision of flood insurance to at-risk areas – even that additional support was insufficient to get the insurers to return to Cumbria, so people in that area have been running their businesses uninsured since the last floods.

    Now the Environment Agency are talking about learning to live with floods instead of preventing them, because they think the government just doesn’t have the resources to cope with the weather. The first Labour member has broken ranks and demanded that mitigation and recovery funding be taken from the foreign aid budget, citing – of all countries! – Bangladesh as an example of a place that shouldn’t be receiving aid money when British people are at need. Bangladesh, of course, faces a future of flood adaptation measures that make the UK’s look trivial, and part of the reason it is economically unable to handle that future is past British colonial intransigence. But of course now that the UK begins to face its global warming future, solidarity with poorer nations will be one of the first higher ideals to give way.

    It won’t be the last though, because this is what adaptation looks like: increasing amounts of resources being devoted to Canute-like strategies to temporarily shore-up defenses against increasingly vicious and uncontrollable natural phenomena, and the most vulnerable people on the periphery left to drown or burn. These unprecedented rains aren’t some kind of aberration or heavenly wrath with no explanation or pattern – they’re the latest manifestation of global warming, and there is much worse to come in our lifetimes. Some people will say they’re worse because of El Nino, but the same thing happened three years ago, and for six months much of Somerset was underwater before this El Nino started. The future is here now, long before everyone expected, and it’s not pretty. As the weather turns on us, what we have to do just to hold it back is going to get a lot worse, and the numbers of people affected – and their anger at the people who can’t fix it – are going to grow.

    This extreme weather and its associated damage is coming at a time when our ecosystem is suffering increasing stress from other human interference – draining the water table for unsustainable farming, overfishing, habitat destruction and invasive species as well as increasing pressure for land and basic resources like water. We see these stresses running up against the influence of climate change all the time now, in debates like those in the UK and the US about how much water to sequester for protecting environmental flows in rivers. This combination of stresses means that we have less room to manoeuvre when it comes to adaptation. Californians, for example, have adapted to the drought by draining groundwater, which takes decades or centuries of quality rainfall to replace; in the UK there is pressure to dredge more rivers, but river systems are vital to the health of ecosystems, and damaging these systems through dredging will place other pressures on the environment. Increasingly, adaptation measures that were taken for granted in the past will come into conflict with other land-use practices or environmental safeguards.

    The UK’s problem with flooding is a good example of this. To properly manage flooding in this “new normal” of increased rainfall and intense storms is going to require coordinated action all along river systems, and it will have to include setting aside some farmland to flood when rivers overflow. George Monbiot describes how upstream grouse moors and fallow fields will need to change land-use practices to prevent run-off, and the need to restore the health of rivers, rather than dredge them, in order to ensure major rains can be properly managed. Additionally, where previously winter precipitation would be stored as snow and released slowly in spring meltwater, now it will fall as rain and wash immediately off high lands, requiring changes in winter land-use patterns. This is going to create additional pressure on farmland and require new models of cooperation between urban and rural communities that, frankly, I don’t think are possible in the UK’s class-blighted society.

    Adaptation is also going to require economic changes that a lot of mainstream economists aren’t going to be happy with. The flood levy obviously hasn’t worked, and the idea that insurers will continue to be able to operate profitably under current market conditions while also providing a useful social service is beginning to look untenable. They are going to need increasingly aggressive protections as climate change worsens, or the government is going to have to take on a bigger role as an insurer of last resort. Farmers who are forced to set aside land for flood plains are obviously not going to be insurable, and communities that are clearly intended to play a role as upstream sacrifices (as happened in parts of York) can’t be expected to insure themselves. It’s hard to see how these wide scale, often transnational environmental challenges can be effectively responded to by piecemeal responses in local areas or single countries, or by isolated market entities like insurance companies. A bigger cooperative model is going to be needed if we’re to preserve the key components of our environment in the near future.

    Adaptation vs. mitigation was a key plank of the denialist platform in the 1990s and 2000s, and continues to be pushed by luke-warmers and delayers such as the Breakthrough Institute. It’s important to remember, though, that adaptation in practice means that some people have to sacrifice their livelihoods and sometimes their lives on the frontline of global warming’s impacts. For governments, adaptation is a question of dollars and shifting resources, but for the people who are forced to wade through water in the front room of their business “adaptation” can mean bankruptcy or financial ruin, displacement or – at best, in this current situation – a completely wretched Christmas. As the paid shills for delay and denial shift from braying “it’s too soon, we don’t know if it’s a real risk” to “it’s too late, all we can do is adapt,” we should remember what happened this Christmas in the UK (and also the US mid-west, and the Australian surf coast). Adaptation means some people losing their homes and livelihoods, it means towns flooded or (as happened in Japan earlier this year) entirely washed away. It also means increasing pressure on the environment and ecosystem services we all depend on, and on infrastructure like the collapsed bridge in Tadcaster or the overflowing US sewage works – infrastructure that we have taken for granted in some cases for hundreds of years. Even if we somehow conclude that adaptation is still cheaper than mitigation, we should stop and ask ourselves: is it worth the savings?

    Let’s hope 2016 brings a renewed commitment to fix this growing and increasingly dangerous problem, before climate changes washes, burns and blows away all of industrial civilization.

  • Without Lemmy we are all Nothing

    But it don’t make no difference
    ‘cos I ain’t gonna be, easy, easy
    the only time I’m gonna be easy’s when I’m
    Killed by death

    I first encountered Motorhead when I was 14, at school in Australia. I had just moved to a new school (again!) and was getting bullied in my home room, so I was spending a lot of my time alone. In my home room was a sullen, muscly kid with a dark character, called Matthew, who was friends with a guy called Glenn – even more muscly, and rumoured to have been held back a year. Glenn had a scary reputation, but it was one of those high school reputations that has absolutely no backing – no one, when asked, could say why or what about him was scary.

    One day Glenn came up to me in lunch and asked me in his rough and ready way that he had heard I was good at computers? Back when I was 14 being good at computers was a kind of novelty, and I had in fact done a one week long intensive course in BASIC a year earlier, so even though my family were too poor for a computer I was, for my time, pretty good at computers. Not too sure where this was going I said yeah I guess I am and he told me that Matthew was going to be held back a year just like Glenn had been if he didn’t pass computer class, and he didn’t get it all, and we were in the same class, so would I help? I was aware that Glenn had a reputation as the kind of boy to whom you can’t say no, but I also had a tendency not to do what other kids told me to do – a key skill when you’re being bullied at school.  However, I had noticed Matthew in class and was kind of sorry for him. I was just a year away from the abandonment of my brother by my family, who had left him in a children’s prison in the UK and moved to Australia, and I was sensitive to kids who couldn’t get it together at school. So I agreed to help.

    Matthew passed computers, though I can’t say if it was my help or just because he tried. During the term that I was helping him, though, something remarkable happened – Glenn invited me to hang out with him and Matthew at lunch. It turned out that Glenn and Matthew were as outcast from school life as me, with no friends except each other, and they spent their lunchtimes in the school weights room, which no one else even seemed to know existed but which they had managed to score for themselves. We would eat our lunch in that hungry mechanical way boys do in about three minutes, spend a couple of minutes chatting while we let it settle, and then set to work on the weights. And while we lifted, we played Motorhead on the stereo. Sure, sometimes there was a bit of Anthrax or Suicidals, but mostly it was Motorhead because Glenn and Matthew were old school like that.

    I have only a vague memory of that six months – my parents moved after six months of course, so my budding friendship with Glenn and Matt disappeared into the sludge of my childhood moves. But I do remember that Motorhead was the first music I took seriously in my teenage years, and those two boys were the first two boys who took me seriously. There we were, clustered around the bench press, Glenn pushing my body weight and then taking off all the weights so I could struggle with the bar, no judgments passed or scornful jokes made, just a group of young men making the best we could of our lunch hour. Compared to me their school days were harsh – I had been streamed into the top maths class and was enjoying my studies but for them school was an ongoing series of trials, trying to understand shit they just didn’t get, or understand why they had to get. Sometimes we would take our lunch hour out at the back of the playing fields, and they would get stoned and hang around with a couple of similarly outcast girls, with me tagging along sober.

    Once I started hanging out with Glenn, the bullying stopped. Once I tried volleyball club, and some dickhead at volleyball club got in a fight with me in the car park, and Glenn wanted to know who? Where? And I had to ask him not to waste his time. For that rare six months, in that school, Glenn was my lucky charm, the first man who ever made me feel like I could be respected just for being alive and there, the first man who ever  understood the concept of mutual aid and just being good to each other.

    And he was a stoner and a Motorhead.

    After that I moved to another school, in the country on the edge of the desert, and when I arrived as usual I had nothing in common with anyone – except heavy metal. Motorhead opened doors for me, again mostly with the boys who were repeating the year because they didn’t take the first one seriously. Now we had Metallica, Megadeth and a whole new world of thrash that I would never even have known about if it hadn’t been for those six months in the weights room, with Glenn in his Motorhead singlet, thrash booming, the smell of sweat and iron …

    Without those metal boys my high school would have been slightly less alive, largely a life of skulking around waiting to be hissed at by the popular kids. Through metal and role-playing (which of course those kids were doing) I found a group of people who took me seriously and cared about me. I can’t say that metal inspired those kids to be nice – after all, I’ve even heard that people who don’t listen to metal can sometimes be nice human beings – but it was definitely the soundtrack to my discovery of human kindness. And it was somehow appropriate, because that first breath of human spirit came from a pair of boys who were in their own way as cast out as I was, and we were all listening to music that was fundamentally about not compromising yourself, about rejecting people who reject you. Motorhead, especially, is about being yourself and not letting anyone drag you down.

    This morning I learnt that Lemmy, lead singer of Motorhead, died suddenly of cancer. It’s hardly surprising given his claim to have drunk a bottle of Jack Daniels a day, and his huge smoking habit. He was 70, and playing gigs right up until last year. His band released a statement on his death which includes this simple, beautiful admonition:

    We will say more in the coming days, but for now, please…play Motörhead loud, play Hawkwind loud, play Lemmy’s music LOUD.
    Have a drink or few.

    Share stories.

    Celebrate the LIFE this lovely, wonderful man celebrated so vibrantly himself.

    HE WOULD WANT EXACTLY THAT.

    Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister

    1945 -2015

    Born to lose, lived to win.

    That statement took me back to those teenage months with Glenn, when I was fumbling around learning to be a person for the first time. It’s probably hard for modern kids to get, but back then we were still wrestling with whether it was okay for girls to swallow, whether you should wait till your wedding day to do it, whether a single toke would get you addicted to heroin for life … there was a lot of fear of just living back then, and now that AIDS was stalking the earth there were new fears of transgression and sexuality. But metal was about living, it was about life, and it rejected all that old fussy stuff about what we should and shouldn’t do. Obviously it wasn’t just Motorhead, but Lemmy was ferociously present, he was living large and telling us all to be who we wanted to be. And we did just that, and our lives are better for it.

    Lemmy’s death is obviously a big blow for metal. But on a deeper level, it’s a reminder to all of us of our mortality. If ever any man on this earth could keep living just by sheer force of will, it was Lemmy, but he was killed by death. If Lemmy can’t escape that caped doom with which he was so familiar, what hope do we have? Only one: to live our lives large and as we like them, regardless of the consequences, as he did, and dare Death to come and get us. Let death be the least of our experiences, and deservedly the last.

  • The End of the World: Zombie Survival One-off

    THIS! IS! SPARTA!
    THIS! IS! YOKOSUKA!

    For our final session of 2015 my group and I tried a short run through the Fantasy Flight Games zombie apocalypse role-playing game The End of the World, a rules-lite system intended to simulate zombie survival in a collapsing world. I’m going to give a very brief summary of the game we played, and then a short review of some aspects of this game, which had some good ideas but I felt fell a bit flat at the end.

    The session

    Our group were a university academic, game designer and computer programmer, based roughly on our own careers (see below). The adventure started with us playing an RPG in our friend’s apartment in downtown Tokyo, only to be interrupted by his housemate showing us a news report of a disaster at a nearby infectious disease research institute. A huge fire had broken out, and in running away from the fire a scientist tripped and spilled some kind of virus over himself. He promptly exploded in a shower of bloody vomit, and very quickly the area around the research institute was shutdown, with everyone warned to stay inside. That included us, gaming inside the zone where everyone was required to stay inside.

    After an uncomfortable night in the tiny apartment we gave up on staying inside and went to the convenience store for supplies, only to find it full of scary sick people. We returned home, and decided to get out. Our friend Jimmy and his flatmate’s girlfriend Saito san came with us, in a car we borrowed from the landlord (this is Japan, this kind of thing happens). Our plan was to head to the US base at Yokosuka, because our game designer was a base boy originally and had American citizenship, and we had heard that America was evacuating, and we hoped to scam a lift with them. By now things were getting scary – the news was on a loop, the convenience stores deserted, and normally mild-mannered citizens turning murderous, and we had seen more than one person dying in an orgy of bloody vomit.

    By the time we got on the roads chaos was starting to break out, with people in cars being attacked by other people who wanted to get out, and dead people visible in many places. But there were no zombies, it just seemed like some kind of outbreak and every scared of getting caught up in it. Escaping from one such group of no-good people we damaged the car, and pulled over at an overpass to steal two empty cars (a Prius and a Mustang!) sitting near the shadows of the overpass. As we approached the cars we heard sounds of growling and hissing from the shadows of the overpass, and suddenly a bicycle came flying out of the shadows and hit our car with such force that it shattered the window. Jimmy panicked and ran away down a side street, where something came out of the shadows at lightning speed, hit him and carried him away. We didn’t need any more encouraging – we jumped into the cars and hightailed it out of there, though nothing followed us out of that overpass. We crossed the Tama river and drove on, through streets that were alternately deserted or combat zones.

    At the Yokosuka army base we were separated. They allowed the designer, Ishiba san, in, but we two and Saito san had to stay outside. As we sat there in our car wondering what to do the sun started to sink, and suddenly from all across Tokyo rose a howl of primal rage, as if monsters in the shadows were preparing to come out. We’d seen a few of these things slinking around in the shadows, and we decided it was best to hole up somewhere fast. Fortunately the programmer’s house was nearby so we drove to that in about 20 minutes, and got inside just as the sun fell below the horizon.

    After that the trouble really started. Two beasts tried to get into our apartment but we prepared and ambushed them separately. Our programmer was training in sword fighting so between us we had a real steel sword, a wooden sword, and Saito san with a frying pan – she was a member of her university tennis club, and a dab hand with a heavy iron skillet. We took out two, but the second one broke my shoulder[1]. Meanwhile Ishiba san found the base attacked from within, and had to flee in a humvee, driving over a couple of the zombie creatures as he went. These zombies were not shambling weaklings, but some kind of undead werewolf-like creature, that shucked off human flesh after its transformation and turned into a howling beast of rage and hunger.

    The game finished with us waiting out the night and then driving away to the edge of Tokyo. I suggested heading off to the radiation-affected area to hide, and another player suggested we should hide at the outskirts of Tokyo, going in during the day to steal supplies. That is where the adventure ended.

    The game

    The game was fun, but in some ways it didn’t work. I think part of the reason it didn’t work was simply narrative – we all knew it was going to be a zombie story and so there was no surprise or tension when they finally came out to play. There are three books in the series and a fourth planned, I think, so it might be better to run the session without any idea of how the apocalypse is going to happen, or even if it will, and then build a campaign that floats around that idea. In fact I have long thought of running such a campaign, starting in the 1950s or 1960s and being uncertain from the outset whether it will be a horror, alien invasion, nuclear apocalypse or something else. This system seems like it would be ideal for that, though our GM told us the online community has been saying it won’t work for campaigns.

    The system also suggests that you play yourself, i.e. make a character that is based on your own traits. The system is really simple – three traits divided into offense/defense and one good and one bad point for each trait – so it would be easy to do this, but who wants to play yourself? I role-play to not be a loser, not to watch myself get eaten by zombies. So I vetoed that flat-out, and as a compromise between my preference (play people who can do stuff) and the book, we agreed to make characters similar in career and situation to ours. So I played a deeply arrogant medical doctor who was under investigation for unethical research practices, and secretly welcomed the apocalypse because it was going to derail the investigation.

    That was more fun.

    The system is interesting and brutal. You assemble a dice pool of positive dice based on your attribute, and negative dice based on the challenge of the task; all dice are d6s. Positive and negative dice cancel if they get the same numbers, and any positive dice left over that rolled below your attribute are successes; any negative dice left over are stresses. For example if you have an attribute of 4 and a difficulty of 1 you roll 4 positive and 1 negative die; one positive die may cancel the negative die if they roll the same; any remaining positive dice that roll under 4 are successes, and if the negative die doesn’t cancel you also suffer 1 stress. Stress accrues on the same stress track as damage, and there is a separate track for physical, mental and social damage. This is why my character died; he could have survived a single blow from the zombie (just) but he had previously accrued stress from skill checks. We realized very quickly that stress was going to be serious, and avoided skill checks after that, but even a couple are a problem. Combat was also brutal – you don’t get any defense skill, so if your enemy is some kind of insane rage zombie it rolls 5 dice to hit you with no negatives to cancel them. That’s a serious amount of damage, so anything with any ferocity or skill is a death trap.

    I think the game is intended to be played this way – survival is unlikely and you need to be ready to roll up new characters regularly. But the system is so rough and fast that I suspect it might chew up interest along with characters. It does somehow manage to give a feeling of ordinary people in an ordinary world gone crazy though, so it seems like it is well suited to a zombie survival epic. The book is also very nicely laid out and stylish, so it’s worth getting if you’re interested in such an epic. I think, though, that you shouldn’t start playing yourself, and you might find yourself rapidly house-ruling it to make it bearable.

    I’m not sure if zombie survival role-playing is possible now that the genre has been so completely and thoroughly dealt with by popular culture, but if you are interested in trying a gritty, dangerous role-playing game with lots of resources for different types and styles of zombie apocalypse, that is quick to pick up and easy to run, I recommend it. But be prepared to make a lot of rapid changes to the rules as they’re laid out if you want to enjoy it – and start by playing someone a little more interesting than yourself!

    —

    fn1: in the mechanic of the game, it killed me, but I made a check to survive but come back severely mauled.

  • Holding Your Own Family to Account

    Fuck this actual thing
    Fuck this actual thing

    Most people gather with their family for Christmas, and most people seem to view this as a chore. In the days leading up to Christmas my Facebook feed is filled with articles about how to survive your drunk, racist uncle, or complaints from my friends about the impending horror of Christmas dinner. In November in the run-up to Thanksgiving Day my feed is also filled with articles from Vox and other US aggregators about how to survive the drunk racist uncle (plus, interestingly, how to rebut questions about when you are going to get married or have kids).

    I escaped most of these responsibilities years ago, because I have no family. For me Christmas is a time of mixed emotions, when on the one hand my friends all abandon me to go hang out with their family, reminding me of everything that I have missed for a long time; but on the other hand their time with their family is a chore, and is primarily made that way by the poor behavior of older relatives who cannot accept basic norms of social interaction.

    By way of explanation, my family abandoned me when I was 17 and although we made a few efforts at reconciliation subsequently, those efforts never stuck and ultimately I gave up on them. For most of our lives we have been separated (even when I was a child) by an ocean and two continents. Once I married I did occasionally have to endure Christmas with my in-laws, but I could also choose not to and often did, preferring not to spend the money or, once I was in Japan, unable to due to work.

    At some point in the process of being abandoned by, trying to reconnect with, and then giving up on my family, I discovered that actually family are not as important as the world tells you it is, and most of what the world tells you about family is misleading and/or actually destructive. In fact – contrary to popular wisdom – your family are just people, like you, and they have a responsibility to treat other family members with respect that all too often they fail to live up to. Other family members, especially junior members, are expected to tolerate the poor behavior of other members, and make special allowances for them that ultimately degrade everyone’s relationships and put a deep poison into a central factor in many people’s lives.

    We are of course used to the idea by now that adult family members have to try hard to provide a good environment for their children, to be responsible in their relationships and not to be abusive. But once we become adults everything changes. Suddenly the onus is on the children and younger family members to be an empty vessel for their parents’ idiosyncracies, anger and gradual loss of touch with reality. We all know the drill, because we’ve all done it: sitting through the lectures by the angry uncle who thinks climate change is a myth made up by lesbian Aborigines, or enduring the vicious angry barbs of the perenially-aggrieved aunt, or sitting through destructive patterns of parent-child interaction that have existed since we were little, are plain as day to us but apparently completely unnoticed by the parent in the interaction. In our twenties, especially, before we’re independent in our careers and have our own families, we have to endure the sneers of older family members who view our ideals as shallow and foolish thoughts we will grow out of when we become just like them. If we’re women, we have to endure being seen as soft and emotional if we disagree with our parents on a range of things (not just political, but about how people should behave at Christmas parties, how labour should be divided, what we should eat or how the young and elderly should be treated). We struggle to introduce new ideas to the Christmas event or to find new ways of doing things, because the older family members control everything, and attempts to deflect or defuse long-standing and destructive social dynamics are ignored, or even openly opposed. In my family, worst of all, was the assumption that my older family members could say horrible things that would see anyone in my peer group cast out instantly, and I should never, ever speak up against those horrible things or present a different opinion, but must sit quietly while a gaggle of aging, out of touch idiots rained hatred and bile down upon me.

    For the life of me I cannot fathom where that hatred came from, and I cannot understand why my parents never understood that I don’t want to hear it. I mean sure, if you want to argue … but it’s exhausting, can’t we just put it aside and talk about something else? I guess my family was incapable of any form of interaction that wasn’t conflict, and by the time you’re an adult it’s not possible to break that dynamic from within. My family was also incapable of understanding and respecting my work, which is a thing I notice often in my friends’ families too – especially working class families, whose children have moved from building things to programming things, living in two-income families with no children at a time when their parents were in single-income, breeding families fixed on a certain trajectory. The problem here is not that the children are doing different things to the parents, but that the parents don’t understand the value of those things.

    I know not everyone experiences these things at Christmas, and that for many people (I guess) Christmas is a generally pleasant, slightly boring experience with a few eye-rolls mixed in. But for a lot of us one or more of these phenomena are a common, frustrating and often quite upsetting part of any major family gathering, that leaves us exhausted, stressed and in many cases distressed. Why is this and what should we do?

    In my opinion much of this Christmas-time anguish comes from two related problems. First, parents cannot accept that their children have grown up and do not want to deal with the possibility that they could learn or grow from their children’s experience. It is the ideal of every society that every generation is better educated, wealthier and has a wider range of positive experiences than their parents, and I think it is still the case that this is true, but imparting this education and experience backward to the previous generation doesn’t seem to be part of this goal. This means that even in adulthood we are infantilized by our parents, who always weigh their limited and often negative experiences – of war, poverty and life before the internet – against our positive and empowering experiences. Even when we reach our 40s and 50s there still seems to be this ideal that we will sit down and shut up while our elders tell us stuff we have heard a million times before – and no sharing back.

    Second, and worse, society sells us an image of family relationships that is completely destructive, and that I think is built on experiences of times long past. This image simultaneously holds that our family are essential – that we can’t rely on anyone as much as family – and that our relationships with them should be unconditional in a way that our relationships with almost everyone else in life are not. I don’t think either of these things are correct. Family are often the first to let you down in a time of crisis, and in any case modern society has many systems in place to protect those who cannot rely on their family – systems like guardianship boards, pensions, elderly care, which while not perfect liberate us from dependence on our families at times of emergency – and there’s no reason to think that they should necessarily be the first or best people to turn to in times of crisis. Those of us who live far from our family understand this, even if we can trust our family, because distance renders their willingness to help immaterial. But the second part of this image, of the unconditional nature of our family relationships, is a terribly destructive force in our personal lives. What is it about family that means we have to endure each others’ foibles and cruelties without complaint or surcease, year in and year out, where we would abandon even partners who treated us with the same disregard? What possible benefit is this for anyone involved in the often-destructive relationships that hang over us from our childhoods?

    I have a feeling that at least some part of the persistence of these negative dynamics in adulthood arises from the simple expectation everyone has that family will continue to stick together even if they abuse each other. For example, I know of a family where one member sold a struggling business to another, naive family member, and used the money to move into a new, booming business, leaving that family member to sink under the pressure; they were all still expected, somehow, to get along. In my own family my Father was viewed with shock and amazement when he declared he would no longer speak to or have any dealings with an uncle who sold him a dud car that was actually a deathtrap. Family are expected to stick together even if they do things that are cruel, destructive or alienating – even if they do them over and over again. I think people all know this about family life, and it makes them reckless in their dealings in a way that they are not with strangers.

    If everyone in a family relationship knew that they would be tossed away as easily as strangers if they behaved cruelly or immorally, everyone would behave better. We all know that if we treat our partner a certain way they will abandon us, and that our friends only stick with us so long as our good points outweigh our bad points. In this regard our friends and partners keep us honest, and maintain some certain baseline of behavior. Obviously at times this changes, for example when a child is born or a shared business demands some special commitment, but in general our friends and partners respect that they have to listen to our needs, act on our complaints and at least try to show some degree of care for our needs. But family members – especially the older ones – work on the general assumption that no matter what they do, they won’t be dumped. They won’t be uninvited from family affairs even if they spout casual, disgusting racism or treat other family members with contempt. Many families harbour long grudges and wounds from past misdeeds that would have seen a member cast out from any other group. Those misdeeds would be much less likely to happen if people held family members to similar standards of responsibility that they hold the rest of the world to.

    Many people think that the family is a central unit of society, that it holds society together and is the fundamental building block of social order. Yet it is within this fundamental building block that people are held least responsible for their own actions towards others. Perhaps the family would be a stronger building block of society if people understood that they were at more risk of being held accountable within it. Perhaps people’s behavior across society would be better if within their families they were held to similar standards of behavior that they expect of strangers. Perhaps then the family would be a real building block of social cohesion, rather than – as I suspect it has been for much of human history – a stumbling block to self-improvement, in which everyone’s welfare is held back by a fear that conflict within the family will have real physical and economic consequences for everyone in the unit.

    We have updated relations in friendship groups and in couplings to reflect the realities of the modern world, but in many ways our families still rest on a fundamentally feudal (or Victorian?) assumption about their importance to the welfare of all their members. Let’s update our family relations to match the world we live in, not the world our parents inherited. Hold your family accountable for their bad behavior, and let them know they won’t always hold your patience and tolerance. We can build a better world not just by the way we treat strangers, but also by the way we treat those closest to us – and the way we force them to treat us.

     

  • The Force Awakens: An Entertaining but Disappointing Addition

    [This review contains SPOILERS so please don’t read it if you haven’t seen the film].

    I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens on Sunday, and really enjoyed the spectacle and the homecoming feeling of it, but reflecting on some of the things that niggled at me during the movie, I have decided now that it wasn’t a very good or indeed necessary addition to the series. There were many things to like about it: the first battle of the TIE fighters with the millenium falcon, much of what Kylo Ren does and his velvety Sithlord style, the spectacle of the space battles and the pace were all great. I must confess to nearly shedding a tear when Han Solo and Chewbacca emerged, and I thought it nicely reproduced the riotous colour and fantastical nature of the original series without overdoing CGI or grotesqueness. I thought all the main characters were great, really enjoyed Han and Leia’s gentle brokenness, and appreciated BB-8. I also appreciated the modernization and diversification of the cast, with a lot more women in positions of power and influence and a wider range of non-human races in the Republican forces, and I thought a lot of the dialogue hewed closer to the original spirit, without the heavy doom-laden pretentiousness (and humourless weakness) of the prequels.

    In short, on a superficial level it was a great Star Wars movie and it seems to have earned great reviews (and a metric crapton of money) from a wide range of sources on that basis. But on reflection, there were a couple of major flaws with the movie that left me disappointed. Here I will present my main three criticisms of the movie, summarize a few more minor complaints with the content, and give my final feelings about this new series of three movies.

    There was no narrative purpose.

    Why was I in the cinema watching this thing? The prequels had an obvious purpose, which was to tell the story of the rise of the Empire and overthrow of the Republic, track Vader’s fall from grace and the destruction of the Jedi, etc. In a narrative sense it was necessary, though obviously once we had watched these crawling abominations we all agreed that from an artistic perspective these movies were not only a disaster, but risked wrecking the legacy of the originals. So in this new set of movies, we need a reason to be watching. But what is that reason? At the end of Return of the Jedi we are led to believe the Empire is broken, peace has been won, and the order restored, but at the beginning of this movie there is some sinister new evil force afoot that isn’t just a remnant of the old Empire – it is much more powerful. Our escaping stormtrooper makes it out to be some kind of panopticon in its powers, and it seems to be able to build a death star that dwarfs even the supposedly unprecedented engineering feat of the last one. It appears that in a short space of time everything that happened in the original movies has been not just undone but seriously stomped all over, and yet still this time there is a Republic (not a Rebellion) and the war is ongoing. We are given no reason to understand how this happened, or why we should be throwing in our lot again with the same crew of people who somehow allowed this to happen. Implicit in this collapse of the Republican peace is a big question – will this galactic war ever end? When we joined the original crew in A New Hope we did so on the assumption that somehow they would prevail, as good always does in these kinds of movies, and there would be an ending. But now that victory is not just under threat, it has been comprehensively undone. So why should we suffer through all this stuff again – just to see it fail again? What are we doing here …?

    It feels like a family story

    I hate the way the prequels decided to keep everything in the family, and even though they preceded the original movies they still managed to find ways to include people connected to those original movies – C3PO, Boba Fett’s dad for Christ’s sake – rather than finding a new cast and drawing them together into the story of Vader’s downfall and the rise of the Empire. It’s even worse in this new movie – we get the entire original cast back, Kylo Ren is Han Solo and Leia’s son, and the entire movie is structured around the quest for Luke Skywalker (who I bet turns out to be Rey’s dad). Also, Kylo Ren is a Vader fanboy, even though he is not related to him, which undermines his character by making him into some kind of pimply evil boy wannabe rather than a serious threat, but also reminds us that nobody in this story can be independent of the originals. Couldn’t we have an evil guy who didn’t give a toss about Vader, and who was not related to the original cast, so that those cast members could just do a cameo to anchor us to the previous stories before we go off on our new journey? There are stars without number in this galaxy, and more humans than grains of sand on Dune, yet somehow the same four people really count for the entire future of the galaxy? This risks turning the whole thing into a sitcom or soap opera, rather than a galaxy-spanning epic.

    It copied too much from the original

    Sometimes it’s a good idea to copy the plot for a sequel from the previous movie. The best example of this is Terminator 2, which is an excellent movie that basically precisely follows the plot of the original movie, with The T-800 in the role of Kyle Rees. Even attacks on police stations and overturning trucks occur in the exact same sequence – you’re watching the same movie, but loving its freshness and brilliance anyway. But this doesn’t work in The Force Awakens, somehow. It has a lot of similar scenes and the key details are the same. For example: A droid lost on a desert planet brings a plea for help to a young dreamer desperate to escape; they escape from the desert world in the Millenium Falcon, chased past star destroyers by TIE fighters; everyone is looking for a lost, old Jedi who is hiding from responsibility in shame at his failed pupil; Han Solo and his young supplicants make their plans in a pan-galactic bar; there is an attack on a death star, including x-wings flying down a tunnel to put precision ordnance on a weak spot; a major planet is destroyed by that star destroyer simply to send a message; while the young idealist looks on, her elderly hero is killed in a sacrificial scene by an evil sith lord. The only thing JJ Abrams really did was change the faces, and move the elements around a bit. But while the power of the scenes copied for Terminator 2 was in their visual impact and style, the power of many of these scenes in A New Hope is in their emotional impact and freshness. We don’t get that same impact the second time round, because they aren’t fresh anymore. Sure Solo’s death is pretty shocking, and the lead up is visually cool, but the rest of these moments don’t hold the same power the second time.

    How this is all going to go wrong…

    None of these aspects of the movie would be a problem in isolation – they might even be good points – but in total they give the impression of a movie that has been made more so that we can wallow in the past glories of the original series, rather than that we can carry that series forward. It’s a homage to the joys of the original more than anything new, and worryingly it is in its newest elements that it is weakest. Of course I’m happy to see a well-constructed homage to the original series, but there were many aspects of this new movie that weren’t well done. For example, in the original Millenium Falcon traveling at light speed takes time – long enough for a game of chess and a bit of Jedi training – but in this movie people zip about the galaxy as if they were popping out to the shops; in the original Vader was an indestructible, intense and unstoppable force for evil who cut his own son’s hand off, but in this one Ren can be taken on by some random stormtrooper who picked up a sword. In the original the Empire can make a death star that is capable of destroying planets but is vulnerable to a carefully-placed proton torpedo; in this one the death star is the size of a planet and actually channels the raw power of suns, but is just as vulnerable as the original; in the original the Millenium Falcon is picked up by a Star Destroyer because it was on its way to Alderaan, but in this one it is nabbed by Han Solo’s freighter because even though it had been lost for 10 years he got an alarm as soon as the engine turned on and was able to instantly get to the right place at the right time to find it. We overlook these weak points because they’re being blasted at us at a million miles an hour by JJ Abrams’ tight-paced directing, but there are a whole series of major flaws in the story that bode ill for the future of this series. In combination with the nostalgic turn through memory lane and the dependence on scenes and tropes from the original, it makes me think that this movie is more a series of set-pieces tied together by a weak plot than a legendary adventure. If so, once Abrams’s homage shtick starts to wear thin, I fear things will unravel badly. Remember, this is the JJ Abrams who made the absolutely terrible Star Trek reboot with the flamingly bad time travel story; if you doubt that his directing is weak, you can check out the long list of problems with the new Star Wars movie here. This doesn’t bode well for the next two movies.

    My hope is that for the next two movies we will follow a dark and bitter story in which Skywalker’s anger at Solo’s death leads him on a path of ruin into the dark side and out again, perhaps redeeming himself and uniting dark and light side at the end. I don’t think that’s going to happen, though: I think JJ Abrams is going to come unstuck once he runs out of nostalgia to back him up, and is going to make two increasingly woeful and hole-filled movies that betray the original three movies just as surely as the prequels did. Of course I’ll watch them anyway (or at least, the next one); but I wonder if perhaps it might have been better to take this series out the back and put it down long before now.

  • The Paris Agreement: Finally Progress on Global Warming?

    This morning Japanese time the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) closed in Paris with agreement on what is being hailed as a ground-breaking deal on mitigating global warming. The basic outlines of the deal, summarized by the Guardian here are:

    • An aspirational goal of keeping global mean temperature rise below 1.5C
    • A pledge to reach zero emissions by the end of the century
    • A promise to implement stronger emissions controls than currently in place, and a catalogue of existing measures (called INDCs)
    • Monitoring of emissions and efforts to meet the targets, conducted every five years
    • Recognition of the damage done to some countries that had little responsibility for warming by the past warming of the big emitters (“loss and damage”) though no legally binding compensation framework
    • Funding to support transition to low-carbon economies for developing nations that are still on the energy development path
    • Recognition that some countries need longer to adapt to low emissions than others
    • It’s legally binding

    The most surprising pledges for me are the 1.5C target and the mid-century zero emissions goal. If we can achieve both of these we are truly going to have done a lot better than I ever expected. We already have reached about 0.9C of warming (people say 1C but some part of that is random variation due to El Nino), and there is still a lot of warming already built into the climate system (I have seen estimates of about 0.5C guaranteed), which leaves only a maximum of probably 0.1 C left before we hit that target. The target needs to be seen in terms of carbon budget, of course, and if we make reasonable assumptions about the climate sensitivity I have seen estimates of between 6 years to a couple of decades at current emissions before we hit that budget limit[1]. This makes the goal extremely hard to reach, but it’s much better to set a goal that requires aggressive action, miss it and fall under the 2C guardrail than to set a goal that is reachable but risky, miss it and fall into the seriously deadly zone above 2C. The 1.5C target is also important because it commits the whole world to at least try to act to prevent the destruction of the most vulnerable communities in the Pacific Islands and coastal zones of the developing world, which is important from a social justice and solidarity perspective. Setting 2C as the goal basically means telling these countries that they are going to disappear, and would obviously require that we also start talking about major refugee flows, a fairly contentious topic right now.

    If the world can be held below or at 1.5C, the future our children inherit may be recognizable to those of us alive now. I think it’s worth trying for that.

    I also approve of efforts to recognize the differential responsibility – both historic (US and Europe) and present (US and China) – for climate change, and the differential ability of countries both to adapt and mitigate. Past efforts at responding to warming, such as Kyoto, have failed to properly recognize this issue, and developing nations’ anger at being forced to slow development in order to prevent a problem that is 90% not their fault has been a major sticking point in subsequent agreements. It’s good to see a more realistic assessment of who can and should do what in what order, and all the reports out of Paris suggest that the atmosphere at the talks was much more positive than past talks. I think this positivity is partly because of the obvious horrors being unleashed on the world by 1C of warming, which makes action much more imperative than it was in 1997; but also by this recognition that development, inequality, peace and justice are all tied up in this issue and a strictly equal commitment to preventing warming by every country will exacerbate inequalities and probably fail.

    The funding being made available also opens up the possibility of a serious commitment to alternative modes of industrial development than carbon-based mechanisms. This is particularly important in the least developed nations, where a classical carbon-based path is prohibitively expensive and an alternative based on local renewables and storage is likely to be cheaper and more reliable in the short to medium term. Much of the recent rhetoric of denial has been about the importance of coal for development in Africa, but this rhetoric is misguided. Coal requires huge set up costs in grid expansion, and although it is a mature technology it requires advanced skills and systems to maintain those grids. In contrast, local solar and wind with battery or hydro storage is scalable, requires little infrastructure investment, and has low fuel costs. This makes it an ideal first step for development in rural areas of poor countries, where the grid will not reach for years and where, even when it does, brownouts and dropouts are likely to be common. Twenty years ago the cost of solar and wind and their inefficiencies might have made such an idea impossible but not now, and the rhetoric of carbon-based development needs to be recognized as out of date and counter productive.

    This agreement spells the end of the coal industry and, by mid-century, the widespread decline of oil. Oil will always have use for plastics and some vehicles, but demand is going to plummet over the next century; coal is going to be stripped very quickly back to coking coal and a few boutique uses, and a lot of people are predicting that this agreement is the opportunity many investors and banks have been looking for to secure their exit from coal. If anyone doubts the power of a global agreement to threaten the interests of the oil and coal industries, look at the desperation of the Saudi government at these talks – they even tried to portray themselves as “developing” and “too poor” to engage in mitigation efforts. Coal is not directly represented at these talks but the simultaneous Greenpeace sting that revealed the role of coal companies in buying commentary and “research” makes their desperation pretty clear[2]. The end of coal as a major source of power is going to be of huge value to human health and development, and I predict that if this agreement can be made to work it will lead to a democratization of and revolution in power generation that is going to vastly increase human wealth and, if done well, reduce inequalities across the globe.

    There is, of course, every possibility that the agreement won’t lead to any outcomes, but I don’t think that is the case. It’s not the final statement on what we need to do, and there will be future meetings and further tightening of efforts, but this agreement sets out a framework and a commitment that gives countries the opportunity they need to get to work, and to coordinate efforts. Global agreements are not always as good as they should be but they are usually better than their critics suggest, and sometimes they are really effective: the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, for example, and the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting gases are really good examples of agreements that have been very effective in achieving their goals. This agreement has some critics: James Hansen thinks it is a failure and George Monbiot thinks it should have been much stronger, for example. In this case I think Hansen is wrong, and I think his comments don’t really grapple with the way that international agreements work, and I think Monbiot is allowing his deep cynicism to obscure his vision. Global agreements, even with vague wording, can be powerful, and this agreement shows clearly that there is a global will to fix this problem. It would be unwise to be full of hope, but I see a light at the end of this tunnel[3].

    There are a few other striking outcomes from this summit that are worth commenting on. First, I was heartened to see that existing commitments made independently by countries, states and cities would likely hold warming under 3C, which is far better than I thought. To be clear, 3C is close to a suicide pact for industrial society, but I thought we were more likely to be on track for 4-6C without further action, which would put us firmly in the post-apocalyptic zone[4]. It’s good to see that independent, small-scale changes have become this widespread and effective, even if they aren’t enough. Second, the complete failure of the denialist corporations and their shills and captive governments to grandstand and hijack this conference has been notable. This is partly because the two big denialist governments – Canada and Australia – have both been toppled and replaced with more rational alternatives, and also because China has really got serious about climate change since 2009. But it’s also because those denialist movements are now just being ignored, and none of the standard denialist memes circulated in this conference, even by countries like Saudi Arabia that were trying to stymie the process. What little intellectual energy the denialist movement had is spent, and they have been reduced to a bunch of old men yelling at clouds [for money]. Finally, the special stupidity of the Republican party in the USA was on display, with some parts of the text of the final agreement apparently being moved or weakened purely because of the problems Obama would have getting them through Congress. When the entire world is having to change what it says and does because of your patent stupidity, then your stupidity has become a genuinely toxic force. This reaffirms the importance of the 2016 Presidential and Congressional elections for the future of the planet. Both domestically for Americans (on health care and judicial appointments) and internationally, for everyone who values our planet and industrial civilization, we need the Republicans to lose and lose badly. This isn’t a matter of partisan contempt (though I have plenty of that!) but of human survival. It’s sad that the party of Lincoln has fallen to such a low state, where they are simultaneously a laughing stock and a global threat.

    Still, despite those caveats and the possibility that this agreement will not be as effective as we would all like, I am positive about it. It’s a good start that will begin to spur a whole range of actions that are going to revolutionize our approach to energy and environment. When I’m a grumpy old man sitting on my porch yelling at clouds, I will at least be able to complain that the young’uns don’t appreciate the clean air, abundant cheap energy and stable climate that I am leaving them. Here’s hoping!

    —

    fn1: I have seen these estimates on websites about global warming, which I don’t link to directly even if they’re scientific sites because the ensuing flame wars exhaust and depress me.

    fn2: Again, no links because I don’t want the backwash.

    fn3: A solar-powered halogen lamp, of course!

    fn4: I think I am slightly more pessimistic than some other people on this issue. I really think the full power and force of global warming has been underestimated, and what we’re seeing at just 1C is really bad and happening a lot faster than the science expected.

  • Counting Police Deaths

    But he deserved it! Why all these forms?
    But he deserved it! Why all these forms?

    This week’s issue of PLOS Medicine has an excellent, simple article about the problem of police killings in America. It hinges around the simple fact that the Guardian’s website The Counted appears to have more accurate and up to date information on police killings than the American government, even though the US government has a real-time update of deaths in the largest 122 cities, and an ongoing FBI database of police killings that seems to significantly undercount the true numbers. The article makes the reasonable point that governments should be able to keep track of how many people their police kill, and that killings of police are tracked in great detail.

    The article argues for the public health relevance of counting police killings on two grounds. First of all, based on just the data from the website, it compares the toll from police killings to other diseases, and the results are kind of shocking:

    As of September 19, 2015, the cumulative 2015 total of 842 US persons killed by the police notably exceeded the corresponding totals reported for the 122 cities’ 442 deaths under age 25 (all causes) and also 585 deaths (all ages) due to pneumonia and influenza, and likewise exceeded the national totals for several diseases of considerable concern: measles (188 cases), malaria (786 cases), and mumps (436 cases), and was on par with the national number of cases of Hepatitis A (890 cases)

    Putting aside the rather alarmingly large number of mumps and measles deaths, it’s quite shocking that police have killed more people in America this year than the total number of people aged under 25 who died in the 122 largest cities. The authors don’t spend much time on the fact, but a remarkably large number are black: at the time I am writing this post the website counts 1061 deaths and gives a population rate of 6.34 per million for blacks and 2.67 for whites. The death rate is highest in Oklahoma, at nearly 9.3 per million. The total death rate for violence in the USA in 2010 was 56.6 per million, which suggests that police killings are approximately 10% of all deaths due to interpersonal violence in the USA.

    By way of comparison, the death rate due to interpersonal violence in Japan was 7.4 per million in 2010; in the UK it was 5.6 per million. The police in the USA have a higher death rate than everyone in the UK.

    The article also makes a strong argument for the public health importance of police killings. The authors say that

    Police are one of the most visible “faces” of government, whose work daily puts them in view of the public they are sworn to protect. Combine excess police violence with inadequate prosecution of such violence, and the ties that bind citizens and their democratically elected governments become deeply frayed, with vicious cycles of distrust and violence fueling dysfunctional policing and dysfunctional governance more generally. The direct effects and spill-over effects matter for public health and medicine alike, as reflected in the impact on emergency medical services, trauma units, mental health, and the trust required to deliver and implement any government-sponsored program, public health or otherwise.

    They also mention in the previous paragraph the challenge of police deaths, which appear to be quite high in the USA and, I suspect, as a rate are quite horrifyingly high (I don’t know how many police there are in the USA). Police in the USA have to contend with an environment of uncontrolled gun use, and I’ve no doubt that some portion of the killings listed in the Guardian website would almost certainly have been averted if the police could have some confidence that the men and women they are dealing with are unlikely to be armed. Nonetheless, police are functionaries of the government, the primary means by which the state exerts its monopoly of force, and a huge amount of our social behavior is dependent on how restrained they are in the exercise of that monopoly. I think the authors of this article are right to observe that the behavior of the police is relevant to public health, and certainly when I worked in clinics for people who inject drugs in Australia, good relations with the police were a hugely important part of our public health work – senior medical staff in the clinics I worked at spent a lot of time negotiating with police and making sure that they understood their public health role, and having the police onside paid huge dividends in our public health work.

    The article finishes by recommending that deaths involving police – either of police or by police – be publicly notifiable, like AIDS mortality or measles. This would enable the state to track the behavior of police, and to give real-time information about how police are behaving to public health authorities. I think this is a good idea, though I don’t think it’s necessary in every country. In Australia police deaths and deaths in custody are already notifiable [that link is from Queensland but I think every state is the same], and I think it’s safe to say that Australian police activities are not hampered by this requirement. Australia went through this discussion in the 1980s and 1990s, when there was a major government inquiry into Aboriginal deaths in custody that turned up some remarkable and counter-intuitive findings[1], and made important reforms to the way police behave. It’s really not difficult to enact these reforms if a government wants to, and although reforming police forces can be tough and requires political leadership, and police forces are often very racist, they are also bound together by a calling to civic duty that can be used to force powerful changes. Requiring that police deaths be counted is the first step to holding police accountable for those they kill. It’s always worth remembering this simple principle: if you aren’t counted, you don’t count.

    Police violence in America seems to be something that happens in Republican and Democrat jurisdictions (Chicago seems to have developed its very own police torture centre, and yet Chicago is a Democrat stronghold). I suspect that problem is not one of simply political will, but also requires gun control and other anti-corruption measures at the political level that would seem natural in the rest of the world but seem to be anathema in the USA. It might also require removing appointment of police commissioners and deputies from public vote to political appointment. I don’t know what the correct changes would be. But actually forcing the police to register the people they kill – to count the dead – would be a big first step towards the changes that need to be made.

    Let’s hope President Trump agrees with me …

    —

    fn1: In brief, Aboriginal people were no more likely to die in custody than white people, but were much, much more likely to be charged and taken into custody than white people, which produced a perception in Aboriginal communities of slaughter in prison. The reason for the charges was identified, primarily as the “trifecta”: a police officer approaches an Aboriginal person over the charge of offensive language, which rapidly escalates to abuse of an officer, and then becomes resisting arrest. The first of these three charges was almost exclusively applied only to Aborigines, and no one even really understood that this thing was happening until the government inquiry uncovered it and introduced a range of recommendations to reduce the rate at which Aboriginal people entered custody. Result: less black deaths in custody. It occasionally still enters the news, but mostly has become an irrelevant part of Australian history. My guess is that the same straightforward approach to discrimination won’t happen in America …

  • Should the Republican Elders go Democrat?

    In the first Republican debate all the candidates were asked if they would rule out an independent presidential bid, and Donald Trump was roundly decried for refusing to do so. In hindsight, perhaps the better question would have been “If a batshit insane dude captures the nomination, will you endorse the Democrat candidate?” Because it is looking increasingly likely that a batshit insane dude is gonna steal the Republican candidacy, and if he wins the whole world is in a dark place.

    It’s very clear now that a significant proportion of the Republican “base” are sympathetic to a campaign that is, essentially, fascist. Some “moderate” left-wingers are trying to claim that Trump is not fascist, and are splitting hairs over whether he is really a narcissist or just “leading America down a fascist path” but I think it’s clear from his latest little announcement that the F-word is no longer hyperbole. Lots of Republicans have gone ballistic over his plan to prevent all Muslims from entering the USA but some of the front-runners have been careful to avoid criticizing him directly, and it’s not clear whether the objection from some of those Republicans is based on respect for “American values” or fear that such a strategy would prevent them from winning an election. It’s certainly clear that for a significant proportion of Republican primary voters the much-vaunted Republican ideals of freedom of religion, freedom of speech and freedom of association are running a distant second to any political strategies based on racial discimination and nebulous notions of “strength,” mingled in with a healthy dose of imperialism.

    This is, of course, the consequence of a long period of Republican craziness, that has mixed racist dog-whistling with openly racist attacks on Mexican migrants and overseas Muslims, along with muscular support for torture and the police state and racism and violence towards internal enemies. This is the environment in which Elliott Rodgers, Robert Dear and Dylan Rooff enacted their openly racist or misogynist militarist plans, and the environment in which some sizable minority of Republican voters have shifted towards an openly fascist platform. For all his bluster and popularity, Trump is a latecomer to this scene of frenetic hatred and partisan divisions: he is a well known birther, but his birtherism is hardly unique or especially well-represented, and when he says there is “something wrong” with the president he is drawing on a deep vein of discontent that is obviously built on racist origins. Although we can hope, there’s no reason to think his latest utterances are going to sink his campaign or discourage his followers.

    I think some of the Republican elders must be starting to think that they have woken a slumbering giant here, and worrying that when it starts stomping about it isn’t going to be particularly careful about where it puts its feet. Certainly the Bushes are worried about it, and given how reviled they are by the base I think it’s safe to say they didn’t have much part in the creation of this monster. But a lot of them are up to their necks in it. Cruz, Huckabee and some of those doyens of hate radio, the Limbaughs and Hewitts, need to face the fact that they built this beast, and they’re now caught in its storm. But others, like Christie and Kasich, for all that they’re oily operatives that anyone with any sense wouldn’t go near in this political universe, I think they realize that this beast is going to devour its own party first, before it bursts out of the chest of American democracy and starts eating everything in sight. They want to stop it.

    I think they may find that they can’t stop it without interfering in the nominating process. I think Trump is going to win some states, and if they’re lucky he won’t get a clear majority, but there’s a chance he will, and then they face a choice: refuse to nominate him and have him run third party, essentially splitting the vote; or let him be the candidate and watch him either win and destroy the country (unlikely) or lose massively and hand the Democrats a massive majority. In that case I think it’s likely that Trump’s candidacy will spoil the House and Senate elections, and the Republicans risk losing control of all three branches of government. I don’t think the Republicans understand just how toxic this primary is going to be for them, and my fundamental faith in humanity tells me that the longer Trump is in charge, the worse the general election will be for them in every house.

    The basic problem here for the doyens of the Republican party is that they have a crazy-wing, and they need to destroy it. Take Cruz as an example. Trump’s antics have made Cruz look almost reasonable, but he’s actually a complete fruit loop. Yesterday he held hearings in the Senate committee on science, of which he is somehow the chair, which all the serious Republicans didn’t attend because they hate him, and which were basically a joke. Steyn was in attendance as an expert on climate change, but didn’t get a chance to speak because Cruz was outnumbered by minority Democrat members, because the other Republicans didn’t want to be there. So instead of having a chance to discuss a Republican approach to climate change based on free markets and innovation, they had some grandstanding about how it isn’t real, and Steyn got some free publicity for his doomed attempt to defend himself from libel charges that will absolutely destroy him. This isn’t how serious people behave, it isn’t how policy is made, and it isn’t a serious base for a political party. Senior Republicans know this, but they don’t know what to do about it.

    Trump offers these Republicans a chance to take their party back from the religious nutjobs and Tea Party lunatics. But first they need to find a way to destroy those lunatics, and what better way than to show that they are a tiny minority of the electorate. I think at the very least the senior figures in the Republican party need to make it clear that they won’t support Trump and that if he wins the primary they will campaign against him in the general. They should lay down the line on policy and make clear why they don’t support him. I think, further, that they should endorse the democrat candidate as a strategy for saying enough is enough, and when Trump gets sweet fuck all of the general vote they can start rebuilding – an 8 year process with a real political movement at the end of it. Once Trump lays waste to their party the elders can come forward with a plan to rebuild it based on coherent strategies on ISIS, global warming and healthcare, strategies that may not be what my reader(s) or I want but are generally consistent with vaguely intelligent notions of how to get shit done.

    The alternative is that Trump gets selected, leading figures in the party like Cruz refuse to distance themselves, and the Republicans get smashed at every level in the elections, losing complete control of the government. That may seem overly apocalyptic, but bear this in mind: Even though people say he lost the Democrats the senate in the mid-terms, he actually did exceptionally well for a president in his second mid-term. Mid-term elections in the second term typically go really badly for the incumbent and Obama did a lot less badly than the historical average. The Democrats are more popular than they look, and if Trump wins the primary there is every chance of a bloodbath. If the Republican leadership want to take back their party, now is their chance, but they need to show leadership and moral backbone, something in precious short supply in the Republican party. If they don’t act to crush him in the general, the Republican party is going to be toast for a long time to come. Or worse still, America will become a fascist state.

    It’s time for the Republicans to show they love their country and not their donors.

  • The New York Times Editorial is Weak

    The New York Times has today published an editorial on the front page of the printed issue, demanding an end to the gun epidemic in America. This is apparently the first time since 1920 that the NY Times editorial has been on the front page, and this is apparently a sign that the editorial is Very Serious. The seriousness of the placement is slightly weakened by the fact that the last such decision – in 1920 – was to publish an editorial about the decision to select a presidential contender no one has ever heard of – a newspaper publisher who became a popular president but whose legacy has been undone by a scandal so puerile it is named the Teapot Dome scandal. On such stern foundations are NY Times front page editorial legacies built.

    The editorial’s seriousness is much more seriously undermined, not by the history of liberal East coast blathering, but by the weakness of its content. This editorial purports to be a strong statement on gun crime, and is being sold as such by the NY Times itself and by various news agencies across the nation, but what it offers is nothing more than platitudes and grandstanding. Specifically, it doesn’t do any of the following things.

    • It doesn’t lay out a specific program: Although this editorial demands legislative action to end gun crime, it doesn’t specify anything. What should be done? It mentions the desire to end the sale of semi-automatic weapons but it doesn’t give any concrete plans about how to remove these weapons from circulation and use. A call for action on such an issue should either reference existing campaigns that have concrete plans, or lay out a set of plans of its own. At the very least the USA is going to need an assault weapons buyback scheme, but this isn’t mentioned.
    • It doesn’t attack the Republicans: In the third paragraph the editorial twice mentions how “America’s elected leaders” have rejected gun control legislation, but doesn’t single out the party primarily responsible for this problem and doesn’t make any effort shame them for their constant rejection of sanity. “Both sides do it” is a journalistic trope but it’s completely invalid in the US context where the majority of opponents of gun control are Republicans, and high profile Democrats have repeatedly and vociferously called for national lawmakers to grow up on this issue.
    • It doesn’t attack the NRA: Those three letters don’t appear anywhere in the editorial, even though everyone knows that the NRA’s power to hijack electoral processes is at the core of the legislative gridlock on this issue. How can an editorial on gun control in America be hard-hitting and serious if it doesn’t mention the pervasive and pernicious influence of this insurrectionist and racist movement? At the same time as this editorial was published Igor Volsky was running a high profile Twitter campaign to expose the influence of NRA money on Republican politicians, and the issue of “thoughts and prayers” was prominent in national media, but the NY Times couldn’t even look sideways at this aspect of the debate …
    • It doesn’t demand repeal of the second amendment: No one is going anywhere on gun control in the USA until the 2nd Amendment is repealed, but the only reference to the amendment in the editorial is the ridiculous claim that “It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment.” Quite the contrary: given the impossibility of debating the wording, the only choice is to abolish it. Given that this amendment suggests the existence of a “well-regulated” militia that in the modern American context is obviously incapable of even poor regulation, the only option is to abolish this amendment. Why is it hard for the NY Times to say this obvious fact? Because if they did so they wouldn’t be “serious”. “Serious” newspapers claim that both sides do it, and look for leadership to cross the partisan divide, and realistic solutions. But none of this applies to gun control: only one side is doing it, leadership won’t help, and realistic solutions are currently impossible. This means that media organizations who fancy themselves to be activists need to transcend the usual journalistic bullshit and say something serious about the real problems the country faces. Apparently the super-serious NY Times can’t rise to this simple journalistic challenge.
    • It doesn’t name and shame: The very first comment on the article is a demand for a list of legislators who have been bought off by the NRA, consistent with Igor Volsky’s Twitter campaign. The NY Times cannot name a single politician (even “machine gun bacon” Cruz) who should be singled out for opprobrium about the horrors that have been perpetrated in America in the past year. Why should politicians who stand opposed to simple, reasonable checks on mass murder get a pass from the newspaper of record? Because it is a weak rag that prefers grandstanding to solutions. Publish the names of those who oppose gun control measures, and publish the full details of their political donations and support from the NRA. Furthermore, suggest a legislative and activist agenda to solve this problem. The NY Times can’t do either.

    Achieving gun control in America – or, alternatively and more realistically, reducing gun deaths significantly – is going to require detailed, serious work on legislation and public health initiatives. The NY Times has offered nothing in support of the actions that might change the situation in the USA. My personal opinion is that gun control alone is not going to be successful in the USA, because there are so many guns in circulation and so much opposition to giving them up. Solving this problem in the USA is going to require innovative solutions, which I think will include:

    • Gun buyback schemes that will be expensive and probably not very successful
    • Major changes to the way the criminal justice system and law enforcement personnel deal with criminals, especially black criminals, to reduce the risk of reoffending and improve reintegration
    • Special laws holding gun companies accountable for crimes committed with their weapons, even those sold years ago, so that they are held responsible for their recklessness
    • Campaign finance reform so that the NRA cannot dominate elections
    • Criminalization of the NRA as a hate group
    • Tax changes so that guns and ammunition become prohibitively expensive
    • Voluntary (or, if that fails, mandatory) guidelines for media organizations that stop them broadcasting any details of mass shootings, thus discouraging future mass shootings
    • Revocation of the Dickey Amendment that prevents federal funding of research into gun crime
    • In place of or in addition to that, private foundations such as the Clinton foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) need to commit serious funds to not just research into gun crime, but also supporting candidates who support gun control. BMGF should commit to funding election campaigns at a rate 10 times that of the NRA (this will probably require constitutional changes at the BMGF) and fund gun crime research to a level that precisely replaces what the government would have funded
    • Personal liability laws that make individuals responsible for the cost of injuries from their guns, including guns accidentally fired by children, and the requirement of all gun owners to have insurance
    • Strict laws holding insurance companies liable for failure to protect citizens injured by gun owners covered by insurance
    • Public information campaigns to shame gun owners and make them unmanly
    • Divestment campaigns forcing pension funds, investors and foundations to get rid of any investments they have in gun companies
    • If possible, stricter rules on investing that make it hard for gun companies to raise new funds

    If you can’t ban guns, you can make them uncool, expensive and risky investments. You can embarrass individuals who like them, and make the cost of owning them financially and socially prohibitive, then offer financial remedies for people who want to turn in their guns. Even if you can’t ban them, you can make owning them difficult, expensive and embarrassing.

    Or you can grandstand for effect, and achieve nothing. The New York Times obviously thinks the latter is easier and more rewarding than the former.

  • Fear of a Blair Planet

    SPOILER: Everything they do turns to shit
    SPOILER: Everything they do turns to shit

    Last week David Cameron, British PM, put the case for bombing ISIS. It was interesting not for what he didn’t say but for the extent of what he did say. In stark contrast to the last time a British PM tried to ginny up a war, this time he was unstinting in his efforts to present facts and legal material in support of his bloodthirst. I watched it live (by coincidence!) and was interested to see that he released the legal evidence for war – something Blair never did – and spoke in detail to a list of reasons why bombing ISIS would be a war of self-defense, justified by not just international law but common decency. I can’t find the speech online, but you can read highlights here. In my opinion this was one of Cameron’s finer moments, reminiscent of the Cameron I saw on TV in 2009 before I left the UK, making strong speeches upbraiding the Labour Party for abandoning equality and promising that the Conservatives would be a party of greater equality and opportunity.

    He does a good act, does the pig-fucker general. He let it all down today when he called the opposition leader a “terrorist sympathizer,” a cheap and pathetic shot that he really didn’t need to deliver after making a strong and passionate speech in favour of a war that, I think, many people would be happy to support. Why smear shit on that gilded lily? This particular insult is particularly stupid because while many people might suspect Corbyn of being a bit too close with Assad, it’s really obvious to everyone that a) this wouldn’t be happening if Assad had a few more friends and b) Corbyn is obviously a pacifist, which means he is not a terrorist sympathizer and everyone knows this. Saying something like “Corbyn can’t be trusted with the nuclear arsenal” is a perfectly reasonable slur; there is, however, no logic to claiming a pacifist is a terrorist sympathizer, and coming from someone in a position of such strength as Cameron this is just pathetic.

    It’s also redolent of the worst rhetorical excesses of the period leading up to the Iraq war, when anyone who didn’t agree with a plan to kill a million Iraqis, displace 4 million more, and ignite a powder keg in the middle East was derided as a coward and a friend of Saddam Hussein. After those heady days of bloodthirsty stupidity it’s a very, very bad plan to show any hint of the same arrogance. This was on display in both Cameron’s speech and Corbyn’s reply, both of which were heavy with caution about the idea of sending British soldiers to the middle East. Cameron was at pains to point out that this was not a war of choice, and Corbyn was at pains to point out that the Labour Party is no longer the party of indiscriminately murdering foreigners.

    Progress! And how did this progress come about? Because everyone in British politics is now desperate to avoid being compared to that most sinister of Vampiric figures, Tony Blair, the muppet who sucked Britain into a devastating war with a country it had no reason to invade, against all reason and popular will. Excepting the Scottish National Party, who are a kind of post-Blairite success, the rest of the parliament were engaged in a ten-hour long debate this week with not each other, but the ghost of Vampires past – Tony Blair. They could as well have burnt his effigy and all gone home, because until a couple of generations have passed and that evil grinning demon is dispelled from the British conscience there is no possibility of having an honest debate about war. How can you debate something when the shame, stigma and sin are so deeply ingrained as this? Little knowing, Shakespeare prepared a scene for just this moment in British political history: “Out, damned spot!”

    But like the play, it won’t wash out, and as a result Corbyn’s response to Cameron’s speech was, in my opinion, crabby and limited. He could have set a higher tone by commending Cameron for his thoroughness, reminding everyone from the start of what a heinous mistake the last British effort was, and engaging the points that Cameron made rather than reading off a list of questions that Cameron had basically already answered. Corbyn’s speech was aimed at an absent Tony Blair, and those of his ghouls who remain connected to the parliamentary Labour Party, rather than the ostensible warmonger standing in front of him. Was ever a political party more hamstrung by its recent history than this? They elected a near-pacifist, who has completely reasonable grounds for his beliefs, and is strong in them, but the first time a war comes along he actually has a really good opportunity to engage with the British public by renouncing those beliefs “for a greater good”: only he can’t, because he and his whole party couldn’t go to war against Darth Vader himself if he was murdering puppies by the bucketload, because even the suggestion of a warlike impulse and the entire country will yell “FUCK! Blair!” and head to the bomb shelters.

    He doesn’t have a reflection, but surely Blair’s shadow stretches far.

    Later in the week Corbyn recovered some poise, and wrote a much more solid opinion piece for the Guardian, explaining in more detail why war won’t work. He seems to be largely supported by his party, though reports say he is allowing a conscience vote, which is good. War should be a matter of conscience, though that wouldn’t have stopped the Blairite clique, who are as completely lacking in conscience as they are in souls. Corbyn’s piece points out that without boots on the ground we can’t win, and the only boots on the ground that can win are local, but the local forces are either useless or very very dubious. He also points out that British planes won’t add much to all the other powers there so why bother? I have the same feeling about Trident: just let it all go boys, you’re no longer a world power! But the deeper point I think is more important: without ground troops bombing campaigns are a waste of time, and there is no army ready to deal with ISIS.

    ISIS are the Khmer Rouge of the Middle East. Just like the Khmer Rouge, they sprung out of destruction and waste, sowed now as it was then by the US air force and triggered by a local insurrection. In the end the Khmer Rouge were brought down by a Vietnamese invasion, which it appears many scholars think met all the conditions for a “just war”: they invaded Cambodia to protect themselves, stop massive refugee flows, and end a despotic and genocidal regime. Cameron was at pains to make the same points in his speech, though he didn’t compare the UK to Vietnam, and I think he’s on solid ground. The difference, of course, is in the source of ground troops: Vietnam is a neighbour of Cambodia, and sent in 150000 Vietnamese troops, defeating the Khmer Rouge in two weeks (ha!), but there is no similar ground force available to beat ISIS. If the western powers are going to depose ISIS they’re going to need a local force, and the only local forces available are either unacceptable (Iran, Hezbollah, Assad) or uninterested (Turkey).

    When I read the debates about what to do about ISIS I find myself trapped by the same demons as Corbyn. On first blush it appears like the perfect humanitarian intervention – no clearer case has presented itself in 30 years. But our recent history of interventions and the recent history in the area make me think that no intervention is going to work. Which leaves ISIS rampaging across the region, destroying everything they touch, even though there’s the possibility of a coalition of global powers acting together for the first time since world war 2 to destroy an unqualified evil, uncompromised by concerns of local politics or history. Since the Khmer Rouge no one has been so obviously cruising for a bruising as ISIS, and no coalition more clearly ready to form since world war 2.

    And yet over it all hangs the shadow of Blair and Bush. Vox recently published a great article featuring a debate between Christopher Hitchens and a few other randoms, in which Hitchens was 100% convinced that no harm could come from invading Iraq, while someone else in the debate was predicting, essentially, ISIS. Reach back in history and view that, and weep at how stupid our political masters can be. If they hadn’t invaded Iraq, a million people would still be alive and ISIS probably wouldn’t exist; and if they did, the political will to destroy them would be intense and unstoppable.

    There is no place in hell hot enough for the people who made those decisions in 2003.