February 5, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

January 18, 2021

Campaign Ideas: The QAnon World

Posted by faustusnotes under Crime Fiction, cyberpunk, DMing, Game planning, Gaming material, Horror, Old Campaigns, RPG aids, Science Fiction | Tags: |
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Some years ago now I played in a World of Darkness campaign set in a near-future world where McCain was president and a secret conspiracy was slowly pulling the world into an evil and hellish future. I played a washed-up communist called John Micksen, who served the Winter Queen and had found magic (he eventually tried to retire from service to the Winter Queen, but failed). We fought our way through many obstacles until eventually we reset the world and ended the evil god’s plan, although ultimately the ending of the campaign had a somewhat unsatisfactory “we woke up and it was all just a dream” feeling. We laughed at much of the world that we were adventuring in: the comic book proto-fascism of the McCain regime (complete with martial law and Starship Troopers style propaganda); the similarities to the Butcher books (which our GM swore were a coincidence); the vast and expansive nature of the plot and what we were up against (gods, angels, vampires; we had the helldog Cerberus as our guard dog by the end); the comical paedophilia and satanism of our enemies; the incredibly complex conspiracy theory we were unraveling. But in retrospect we were playing in a foreboding of the world to come. Not the real world, of course, but the strange fantasy world that so many QAnon lovers have fallen into over the past four years. But for all its awful real-world consequences, as a campaign world the fantastic visions of the QAnon conspiracists leave my World of Darkness campaign for dead. On the still slightly optimistic hope that by Wednesday their figurehead will be out of the white house, we can begin to shrug off Qanon as just a particularly weird and unpleasant cultural movement of these weird times, and then maybe we can begin to think about what an excellent gaming world their insane conspiracy theories have left us.

In the Qanon world a cabal of satanists have taken over the US government and are using their power to commit horrible deeds, including harvesting “adrenochrome” from tortured children, and attempting to make a world government where a small cabal of freaky people control every aspect of our lives. Almost every major institution in the US and much of the world is in on it, and only a small group of aware people are in a position to stop it. In this insane view of the world Trump is going to sweep the conspiracy away and save the universe, but the conspiracy itself goes all the way back to when Clinton was in the white house, with the tentacles of the evil organization involved slowly stretching out through all the organs of the state. This means that there are various stages of the Qanon world that could be used as a setting, probably starting with some period in the 1960s (QAnon believe the Kennedy conspiracy, and also seem to see a connection between MK Ultra and what they think is happening now). It blends Stranger Things, the X Files, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer seamlessly with every one of Dan Brown’s craziest stories to make an all-encompassing and absorbing world of evil to take on. Really, it’s an ideal campaign world. Let us consider some of its special features.

  • Demonology and magic: The whole thing is run by a cabal of very rich satanists, who could easily be into devil worship and black magic, or could be some kind of elite and ancient force of magic users, holdovers from the Knights Templar or some weird actual mediaeval cult (a lot of Qanon seem to think the Vatican is involved) or Vampires. Given the far right’s newfound interest in organic food, tarot and inspirational Instagram posts it’s also possible there could be forces of good aligned behind other forms of magic: religious and spiritual magic, norse witchcraft and religion, etc. The sky is the limit! There’s a lot of scope to merge the Qanon conspiracy with a Gaiman-esque American Gods scenario, in which the strings are being pulled by old gods and what is happening in the USA is actually a puppet play with the strings being pulled by fallen gods seeking temporal power. Why not chuck in the Annunaki? (The Facebook Annunaki History group has a thread with 156 comments discussing their link to Qanon!) Maybe John Dee was one of the original cabal? So much to play with!
  • Lots of guns: Most of the action takes place in America, where gun control is now a complete loss, and the PCs can walk around freely as heavily armed as they like. This is always a problem with modern-era games – how to enable the PCs to pack the kind of firepower they need to take down an Annunaki-worshipping paedophile deep state operative with an APC – but in Qanon world that’s no problem, open carry is completely cool and you’re always free to stand your ground where the paedophiles are concerned.
  • All the secret organizations scale: Because almost everyone and almost anyone can be part of the conspiracy, you can start at low level organizations – the paedophile scheme of your local pizza parlour, deep state connections in the local girl guides group, bizarre rituals under the primary school – and scale up to national or international super agencies. You can go from snooping on your pizza parlour to fully armed raids on the UNESCO HQ. The sky is the limit!
  • False flags everywhere: Almost any component of modern history can be turned into a Qanon conspiracy, which opens the potential for the PCs to be present at – or stop – any one of a range of horrible recent events. 9/11, Columbine, pretty much any war, Jonestown, the El Paso shootings, Fukushima, whatever – you can be there to stop it, to investigate who really did it and hold them to account, or to do it. And similar to the City of Mist RPG, if you do get caught in a firefight you know it won’t be news for what it actually was, but will be swung by the deep state media into another school shooting or drug bust, so your investigative and retributive activities don’t need the kind of scrupulous attention to detail that would be required in, say, a Rivers of London -based magic/reality campaign, where even the police don’t have guns.
  • Viral apocalpyse: The whole thing of course can come to a head in 2020, when the deep state unleashes a virus that will overwhelm the world unless Bill Gates gets to inject you with chips. The PCs can be working to stop this happening, or they can be working to prevent the vaccine from being deployed, or protecting an organization developing a real vaccine for true believers (maybe it’s magical – maybe it’s not!), or racing to find the origins of the virus before it mutates and turns even on its creators, or maybe the game starts as everything is really falling apart and they have to stop the apocalypse. What are Iran and North Korea doing anyway? There’s so much at stake!
  • Obvious character classes: The Hacker, the Veteran, the Survivalist, the Scientist, the Occultist, the Criminal, the Private Investigator, the Corporate Dropout, the Activist, the Politician, the Entertainer, the Lion Tamer, the Agent, the Podcaster … the profiles and rules just write themselves in this world, and the ideal party will be a mix of all of them, with their combat skills, science background, occult background and street contacts. We aren’t going to bust this conspiracy open and less we can cover all the bases!
  • Obvious enemies: Forget Blue Lives Matter, recent events have shown us that if you’re a Qultist you need to be flexible about how you deal with the legal representatives of the state, and the agents of the deep state are everywhere – they can be in congress (even the Republican party), on TV (suddenly even in Fox News), in the military (look at all those generals who refused to back the Qult!), and of course scattered all through the corporate world (don’t forget to turn off location services before you storm congress in the campaign finale!) And who doesn’t like raiding the homes, luxury yachts and secret underground paedophile bunkers of the super rich? There is a pantomime list of evil-doers to take on, and no need to feel bad about killing them – after all, they’re all paedophile satanists!

The QAnon conspiracy offers a rich and intense world of conspiracies and dangers that provides a GM a perfect balance of investigation, negotiation, fighting and stealth to keep players constantly entertained. Being set in the real world, maps and settings are easy to produce and use, and inspiration is all around you (just like the conspiracy!) You don’t even need to be balanced – no matter how outrageous and outlandish your story, it will still pale in comparison the fantasies that actual Qultists wallow in, just as X-Files looks lame compared to the QAnon story, and just as my World of Darkness campaign looked kind of tame when compared with what actually happened after 2016. You can go to town!

Of course there is one small problem with the QAnon conspiracy as a world setting: the good guys in this conspiracy are Nazis. That is a slightly unpleasant downside. But there are obvious simple solutions to this plan: you can move the setting back in time a little, to when conspiracy theories were the domain of a wide array of kooks and weirdos and hadn’t been cornered by gun-toting white supremacists. You could simply retrofit the setting so that the Nazis are the paedophile satanists (with conservatives every accusation is really a confession, after all) and keep the entire QAnon world with just the sides switched (there are so many false flags wrapped within schemes hidden inside disguises that who knows, anyway?) or you could play non-Americans who have to deal with the torrent of racism and fascism coming from their American comrades, with associated schisms and additional challenges to fighting through to the heart of the problem. Could it be that Q himself is a double agent, a double negative intended to discredit anyone acting against the conspiracy by wrapping it all up in Nazism, just as at some point in the decline of the X-Files we find out that all of Mulder’s conspiracies had been planted by the government to keep people distracted from the truth of Alien contact[1]?

If Trump manages to cling on past Wednesday, or there is another attempt at insurrection that is actually successful, we’ll be living in the QAnon world and there’ll be no point in playing make-believe games based on it. But hopefully on Wednesday this entire shitshow will fall apart and some degree of normality will return to US politics, after which we can begin to look on QAnon as a hilarious and awful moment of mass hysteria, that provided a rich and complete setting for a modern-era role-playing game with guns and magic. Let’s hope that it will all soon pass into the realms of fiction, so that we can turn it into the fodder of day dreams, and no longer have to give it sly side-eye while wondering if it will soon become the substance of our waking nightmares.

fn1: I could be misremembering this, but there were so many twists and turns in the dismal end of that story that who can say?

 

December 7, 2020

A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: Entertaining Political History that Ultimately Lacks Teeth

Posted by faustusnotes under book reviews, Monsters, Reviews, Science | Tags: , |
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How it should have ended

I just finished reading A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, an entertaining story about the collapse of a small American town by a local journalist, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling. It was a fun and engrossing tale with a lot of good points which I really enjoyed reading, but ultimately it failed to live up to its promise, and here I want to explain what was great about it, and why it ultimately failed. Unlike many of my reviews, I think this one is mostly spoiler-free.

The book is a recounting of real events in the town of Grafton, New Hampshire, USA, between about 2004 and about 2018. Grafton is a small rural town in backwater New Hampshire, with a history of opposition to taxes, low property values and rural individualism, and in about 2004 a bunch of libertarian activists decided to take it over in what they called the Free Town Project. This project – which apparently once had a website and a dedicated political program – recognized that the town was politically vulnerable and potentially ideologically sympathetic to their goals, and decided to buy up land, move in, and take over politically. This mean stacking the school board, the local town council, and any other institution that they could democratically invest. They would then implement libertarian policy: defund local government agencies, remove any planning laws and zoning rules, and open the entire town up to the liberating effect of small government politics at its most extreme.

In the book’s telling, as a result of these changes the town’s social services failed, and in the chaos that followed the New Hampshire bear population overran the town, stealing food and terrorizing the locals, killing cats and livestock, and ultimately severely injuring several humans. The bears’ invasion of the town happened slowly, encouraged by poor trash management, ineffective local infrastructure, lack of regulations on how humans and the environment interact, and a breakdown of basic social order which prevented people from living according to common rules. In the book’s telling this is primarily the fault of the libertarian takeover, but I don’t think the book makes the case very strongly, and its disordered framework, combined with a lack of political sense by the writer, means that the libertarians get blamed for the much bigger, much more insidious problems that really drove the confrontation between bears and humans in this small town.

A light-hearted series of anecdotes telling a powerful story

The book is basically a loose history of the town’s last 10-15 years, hung in a fairly loosely-structured way over some key anecdotes from the time when the libertarians invaded. These anecdotes hold up the stories of several key figures in the town’s recent history, either libertarian invaders (like John Connell in the church), libertarian sympathizers (the Barbiarzes), or town residents with various relationships with the bears (like “Doughnut Lady” and Jessica Soule. These people themselves have interesting and sometimes complex back-stories, in some cases having their own part to play in other important historical events (like Soule’s connection to the Moonies). They are often given sympathetic and rich depictions, and their stories, though sometimes sad, are presented relatively objectively. The writing style is light-hearted and chatty, with frequent asides and a careful awareness of the perspectives of everyone involved in the story, including the bears. In this sense I think it is good quality journalistic writing, easy to keep reading and engaging. In between the anecdotes and character histories there are interesting discursions on the politics of the town and the state of New Hampshire, with broader political and economic context presented clearly and simply so that the information is easy to absorb and doesn’t distract from the fundamentally personal nature of the story. Even with obvious arseholes like Redman (or in fact most of the libertarians in the story) it tries to hold off from being openly judgmental or scornful, to the extent for example that the constant threatening, heavily-armed atmosphere of the town is simplified to the concept of Friendly Advice (capitalized), rather than depicted as an openly menacing wild west trashpit (which is what the town seems like to this reader).

This is good work, because what Hongoltz-Hetling is ultimately doing here is telling a story about how a bunch of dickheads walked into town, co-opted its political institutions, destroyed them, physically destroyed the town environs themselves, refused to do anything to help the town or each other, then upped and left the ruins they had created when the going got tough (i.e. when the bears came). They left behind them an elderly, poor and vulnerable population whose social services had been gutted, and whose gardens and roads had become, where they were still passable, dangerous bear-infested wilderness. And make no mistake, a lot of the people described in this book are quite unpleasant: the aforementioned Redman, who can’t shut up and can’t keep his gun in his pants; Pendarvis the paedophile who gets booted out early not because anyone disagrees with his stance on children, but because it’s a bit too publicly embarrassing; John Connell, who took over a 300 year old church, destroyed the local religious congregation and then trashed the church itself; and pretty much everyone involved in the Campfire incident. Other characters, like Doughnut Lady, were at best clueless and at worst actively dangerous, and nobody involved in this story seems to have any sense about how stupid what they’re doing is. It’s really a rogues’ gallery of idiots and arseholes, living in their own filth. Despite this – and the fact that the bears are the most endearing characters in the book – the book manages to keep you involved, and it really is fun to watch, like watching a car crash if the car was full of clowns or something. It’s definitely worth reading, and enough of a page-turner that I tore through it very quickly.

But, it misses the point: through a combination of poor structure and politically naivete typical of journalistic writing, it obscures the real problems in the town, and fails to draw the obvious and deadly important lessons that are there to be learnt if one looks at the story with clear eyes.

The problem of unstructured narrative

There is a timeline and a story in this book, which works something like this: in 2004 a bunch of libertarians took over the town, over time they ground its social services into the dirt, and by 2016 the whole project fell apart and they drifted off to take on other tasks, or died. But within this basic framework there are a lot of stories and events that aren’t clearly placed, and the narrative jumps back and forward in time a lot, so that it is difficult to tell how all the events relate to each other. This isn’t a problem for holding together a fun story (which it definitely does) but it doesn’t help to support the book’s central thesis. For example, it’s not really clear exactly when people turned up and when they left or why, or when exactly key events happened that we are supposed to take as indicators of societal decline or ursine growth. It’s also unclear when exactly the author met these people and where he gets his anecdotes from – it isn’t until the very end of the story for example that we learn he only met the Doughnut Lady in 2016, and it’s not clear how often he met her. A related story takes place in 2017, but somehow through the rest of the book we’re suppose to believe things happened much earlier. The story of Mink the bear (in Hanover) takes place in 2017-2019, while the primary bear situation in Grafton is supposed to have happened in perhaps 2012, after the drought, though it’s not clear. At another point the author pinpoints 2016 as the point where the bears got out of control, and implies it is a state-wide phenomenon, but in other places we’re led to believe it happened much earlier.

This wouldn’t be a problem for a standard story, but it complicates the narrative here because the author is trying to construct a tale of decline linked to the 2004 invasion, but can’t seem to put it all into order so that we can see the degeneration. My suspicion is that this is because the order doesn’t work, and it’s not the libertarians’ fault that the bears got out of control, though they may not have helped. There are bigger problems at play here, but the author has either failed to notice them or did not want to damage his story by telling it properly, and drawing out a darker, much more threatening and much less patriotic story, with much more frightening implications.

The problem of political naivete

In the beginning of the book the author devotes some space to describing Grafton’s long-standing anti-tax atmosphere and its feuds with state and federal authorities over this issue. In other parts of the book he describes New Hampshire’s lax attitude towards regulation and taxation – they have no seatbelt laws, no mandatory car insurance laws, and no sales tax – and at the end he notes the success of libertarians in local and state politics, which did not happen overnight. The obvious sub-text here is that Grafton has never had good social services because it has always been anti-taxation. It has always been poor, and its land values are low, and it has always had poor social services because its residents have always refused to fund them. The libertarians kicked this along a little – probably the Grafton residents by themselves wouldn’t have voted to defund streetlights, for example – but it was always there. And this accelerated defunding of public services comes against the backdrop of a state that refuses taxes, and has the motto Live Free or Die. The problem here isn’t a few libertarians taking over a town, but an entire state that has a long history of libertarian ideology, and more broadly a nation that won’t support social services and won’t accept social responsibility or regulation. Bears are a problem throughout New Hampshire, because Americans refuse to take social responsibility or work together to solve problems, as is now abundantly clear from their absolutely appalling response to coronavirus. The defunding of public services in Grafton is a result of a much longer, slower and more ubiquitous pattern of anti-government, “individualistic” politics that is common throughout the country. It’s just more noticeable in Grafton because Grafton is a poor town in a rich state, and these problems always affect the poor first. That’s why Grafton was dealing with bear attacks on humans in 2012, while Hanover (the rich town that is home to Dartmouth College) only started to notice them after 2017. That’s also why the libertarians targeted Grafton in the first place – they would fail to overturn political structures in a richer and better-connected town, and they guessed that when they arrived.

This isn’t just about a small town either. The behavior of Grafton residents was a microcosm of America’s approach to global warming. They knew what they were doing would cause environmental problems but they kept doing it, and then when the problems began to become evident they refused to take the correct measures or work together to solve it, and then piece by piece the town fell apart. Essentially the people of Grafton became environmental refugees, leaving the town in large numbers since the first bear attack of 2012 and abandoning it to its poorest residents – who of course were then even poorer. This is exactly what is beginning to happen across America, as people who can afford to move abandon low-lying and vulnerable coastal areas or drought-stricken inland areas and move to more climatically viable areas. Yet even as people begin to suffer the consequences of a slow-growing crisis that they were warned about for years, and voted not to stop, they continue to argue against any action to either mitigate or adapt to the coming problems. This is Grafton in a nutshell.

But nowhere in the book does the author discuss this. He does not place Grafton’s libertarian politics within the broader context of Republican politics in America; he doesn’t relate it to climate change at all, or draw the obvious links between the small happenings in Grafton and the larger national and global issues we all face; he doesn’t discuss at all what in America’s culture drives people to this intensely sociopathic politics. He misses the opportunity to really interrogate what is happening at this crucial juncture in global politics. And in this sense he is perfect mirror of American journalism more generally, which consistently fails in its responsibilities, and boils huge global problems down to personality politics, cutesy anecdotes, and debates stripped of context, history or class struggle. Just as his book presents us with the failing of American politics in a microcosm, so his writing presents us with the failings of American journalism in its perfect, decontextualized essence.

This is an excellent book and a fun read, but ultimately it failed to rise to the opportunities the story offered, and is yet another example of the millions of ways that American journalism has failed its own people. Read it if you want to enjoy fun stories about idiots ruining their own lives, but don’t look to it for insight into the political challenges America faces, because that opportunity was missed.

 

June 23, 2020

It Can’t Happen Here: Weak Insights into America’s Current Predicament from a Bad Book

Posted by faustusnotes under book reviews, Reviews | Tags: , |
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America is currently Having a Moment, and various historical works have been identified as having predicted or foretold her Current Predicament, including Sinclair Lewis in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. Since I am interested in tracing the cultural and historical origins of the Present Unpleasantness – and since I have already made the effort to read the US fascists’ utopian vision so you don’t have to – I thought I would give this book a go and find out how prescient it was. I was interested in seeing how much of the current trends in the Republican party had their roots in longstanding cultural phenomena that Americans themselves could identify, what mistakes they though the left wing opposition made to allow this to happen, and how they got out of it. Unfortunately, this book was largely a disappointment on all of these counts.

The book chronicles the rise of an all-American dictator, Buzz Windrip, as he first wins the presidency in an election and then proceeds to rapidly dismantle all America’s constitutional protections and political institutions on a rapid road to dictatorship. The story is told through the perspective of Doremus Jessup, editor of a small-town newspaper in rural Vermont, as he tries to first understand, then live with, and finally fight back against the regime of the Corpos, as Windrip’s party come to be known, and the struggles of his family and friends as they try to accommodate, collaborate with, or oppose the new order. Doremus is near retirement when the Corpos come to power, and is presented as the kind of soul of America or something (it’s not very clear); his viewpoint is given authority and superiority even though he is obviously a blinkered, naive man with a massive investment in exactly the system of capitalist exploitation that Windrip pretends to want to tame but ultimately takes over. He is a biased and self-serving narrator at best and, compared to the ideologically pure and driven characters at the centre of the Turner Diaries, very ignorant about how class and race interests drive American society. He is also, in the context of modern America, something of an anachronism. There is very little independent local media in America now, the entire media industry is now much more dependent on advertising revenue and corporate interests than it was in the 1930s, there is now a major mainstream media organization directly dedicated to promoting fascism in the USA[1], the editors of most major newspapers in the USA are now openly right-wing and happy to enable the kind of illiberal politicians that Windrip is modeled on, and it is highly unlikely that someone of his age and class position in the USA now would be “objective” or “open-minded” or have a balanced view about things like unions, which Doremus pretends to do in this book.

Doremus’s class position makes him a poor judge of Windrip, and a bad character through which to view the political realities of Windrip’s ascent to power. He doesn’t understand class politics, is completely ignorant of the racial character of American oligarchy, and is deeply wedded to an ideal of free speech and debate as valid tools for resolving conflicting social interests. He also has a sneering disregard for poor and working class people and is openly dismissive of people who go off the rails or live differently to a very straight and narrow vision of work and family. It’s really obvious why his handyman, Shad Ledue, hates him and why he is viewed with so little respect by the local fascists once they have America in their grip. Right to the end he seems to think that running a printing press and handing out a few pamphlets about how bad Buzz Windrip is will convince people in the grip of a fascist terror regime to rise up and restore democracy; and he genuinely seems to believe that America can return to its old settled system after Windrip is gone as if all the class and race conflicts that divide America will just disappear overnight – because fundamentally he doesn’t understand where they come from. The protagonists of the Turner Diaries don’t have any such difficulties: they have analyzed all of America’s situation on race lines and have a very clear idea of where it is going wrong and what is needed to fix it. Doremus is almost the perfect depiction of the stereotypical liberal that Twitter leftists despise, or the embodiment of the kind of squishy liberal Lenin would sneer at (or King would warn black Americans against). Wikipedia tells me this book is meant to be a satire, so maybe this choice is deliberate, but I’m not sure – the book ends with a paean to Doremus’s fundamental importance to the American condition, so I suspect it is meant to be lauding him while gently laughing at his more sedate personal characteristics. Whatever it is doing, it doesn’t work, and it is hard to have much sympathy for Doremus as the fascist regime closes its grip around him and the only effort he makes to struggle is against the ruddy crassness of it all, until it is too late and he realizes how he has been done in.

The book does find some interesting similarities with Trump in Windrip’s pre-dictatorial rise. He is supposed to be crass and lewd, a witty entertainer who is capable of bewitching people at his rallies (yes, he holds lots of rallies) and swaying skeptics with his folksy speeches and ribald style. He rises through the Democrats (who were the party of racists at that time I think), and some think of him as a communist because he promises to improve the rights of workers and the poor, with vague promises that Jessup is sure will never be delivered on; at the same time he is appealing to corporate oligarchs with promises of increasing their strength and control and removing the fetters on their business, and appealing to religious conservatives with a promise of a new American dawn. In this he is very much like Trump, who somehow managed to get away with being seen as more left-wing than Clinton (remember “Hilary the Hawk, Donald the Dove”? Or that primary debate where he somehow managed to convince otherwise Serious People that he was serious about healthcare reform?) When he gets into power of course he doesn’t deliver on any of this: the $5000 each household has been promised never materializes, unions are destroyed and all the oligarchs become his personal agents, in a perfect recreation of European fascism in America (perhaps we could call it Fascism with American Characteristics). Doremus seems to just dismiss this obvious fakery as typical politicians’ dishonesty, which is exactly why he is such a dupe for this shit. Another similarity between Trump and Windrip is Windrip’s slimy advisor Sarason, who is a bit of an enigma and is sometimes seen as the real power behind the throne, with some vague parallels with Stephen Miller. It also implies that Sarason is the real force behind Windrip’s politics, and Windrip is just a blowhard – this is exactly the same stupid and naive idea that gets people thinking Trump isn’t really serious about his racism, or that he doesn’t believe in the fascist stuff he’s doing. But this implication at least isn’t clear in the book, unlike in the Twitter feeds of modern pundits who are always so sure that Trump doesn’t really mean what he says. Windrip’s regime is also incompetent and chaotic, with senior leadership constantly changing and also fighting with each other for promotion and favours, and it’s just as corrupt as the Trump regime (more, obviously, once it gets full and unfettered control of all branches of government). Windrip has also written a book, which I guess is the same as Trump, who has a book written in his name.

But here the differences also become clear. Windrip’s book – and his speeches generally – are coherent, he is not a man sliding into dementia. Windrip didn’t run for office to cover up his tax fraud and to close off the tightening investigations into his Russian money-laundering, but to actually implement a full fascist program, which he does. Windrip is not enabled by a corrupt party, he doesn’t win senate or house and has to take power from them by imprisoning his political opponents “for their own protection”. Windrip is backed up by a huge and very well organized stormtrooper organization called the Minute Men who he deploys almost immediately to destroy all political opposition, including the Supreme Court – in 1935 America the political institutions are much less supine and partisan than they are for Trump, and Windrip has to destroy them rather than relying on them to do his bidding. Windrip is, in short, much more competent and organized and coherently fascist than Trump. He has a network of secret prisons and concentration camps set up pretty much immediately after dissolving congress, and after that he quickly completely reorganizes American life beyond recognition. So no, he’s no Trump.

The book is also strangely vague on the actual reasons for Windrip’s appeal or partial electoral success. What exactly about him do people like, and what about his appeal is so slippery that the supposedly all-powerful media organizations can’t see and counter? He promises everyone $5000 and the media point out that this is obviously bullshit, but everyone ignores them, and there is no explanation for how he hand-waves away all these problems in his platform or with his obvious slide into fascism. At the beginning a lot of people in Doremus’s circle dismiss the worst possibilities with the eponymous phrase “it can’t happen here” but nobody at any point bothers to explain why it can’t or why it did. The only clear “political” opinion that flows through the book is the scorn everyone in Doremus Jessup’s social circle feels for poor and working-class Americans, and the huge gulf between his class and theirs. Windrip appeals across this gulf to the “forgotten men” of America but the book cannot explain why this contempt is so clear (and can’t seem to judge it, except perhaps to gently rib it) and can’t explain why or how Windrip has seen it or how to manipulate it. It can’t really even say if this is what helped Windrip win – there is no analysis of what coalition of voters he built, who he appealed to, or how the vote worked out, so we have no idea how this supposedly vulgar and empty suit managed to pull off his coup. The centre of the book is strangely empty of any attempt at analysis. It’s just a story, and not very well told. Compare this with Orwell’s description of the collapse of the Republicans in Homage to Catalonia, or his explanation of the ideology of the Party in 1984; or consider Koestler’s description of the party and its ideology in Darkness at Noon. There’s just nothing to explain anything at the heart of the political events in this book. I was recommended it as a way to make sense of how Trump rose and won, but this is exactly the only part of the story where there is no information. In the end the book is as much of an empty shell as Windrip himself.

It’s also quite boring. It’s not particularly well written, aside from a few nice descriptions of Vermont countryside. The characters all have awful and weird names, and are generally insufferable. I’ve never read Dickens but I think this might be riffing on that style? In any case it’s just horrible and I can’t take them or their opinions seriously, nor can I care about their fates when they’re so stupid and vacuous and judgy. There is essentially little plot – Windrip wins, then there is some faffing around with watching America fall in line, then Jessup finally loses his shit (for no special reason) and writes a stirring editorial that gets him arrested (and of course achieves nothing); he is spared and starts to secretly work for a comically inept opposition coordinated from Canada; finally gets caught and put in prison; then is rescued improbably and ends up fleeing to Canada to recover before returning as an agent to America, when the story ends. Boring. Even when his son-in-law is killed no one seems to really get roused, and you just can’t get much energy to side with these characters. It’s all just weak. If a book was intended to make you side accidentally with fascists it would be this book when Jessup’s former handyman Shad Ledue gets the chance to lord it over scornful, contemptuous and patronizing Jessup (who thinks himself so good and decent).

As an example of this inspidity there is one section where Jessup takes it on himself to attend a Windrip rally before the election, during which he describes the violence of the Minute Men and the fervour of the crowd. In the audience he is almost beguiled by Windrip despite having seen his men beat up people outside (and knowing what is happening in Germany and Italy); he goes home without much further comment and doesn’t make any attempt to join any dots or inquire any deeper into what is happening to make this movement grow. He simply doesn’t have the critical tools to understand what is happening in his own country, and doesn’t have the curiosity to figure it out. He then writes an editorial that basically just boils down to “isn’t this guy and his followers a bit of a crass oaf, who could support that?” He is an empty shell, and the book doesn’t offer anything to flesh him out personally or politically.

So, this book is very boring and poorly written, with annoying and frustrating characters who don’t seem to have a clue or get one at any point in their political and personal journey. As an insight into America’s Current Predicament it is of little use, since it comes from a different time with different politics and it is, in any case, politically shallow and incurious. It lacks any of the passion and invective – or the insight – of its better peers from Europe and the UK. Attempting to understand what’s going on in America from this book would be a waste of time. There is no insight here, so don’t bother.

fn1: Which, incidentally, is why Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent is now irrelevant

 

April 21, 2020

Understanding Trump’s Popularity Through the Lens of Tiger King

Posted by faustusnotes under Crime Fiction, Movies, Reviews | Tags: , , |
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I have just had a knee reconstruction and have spent the last 6 days wallowing in self-pity in a hospital bed in Tokyo, completing the last (I hope) uglinesses of three months of body horror (report to come). With little else to do I have resorted to Netflix, and of course I have watched Tiger King. So far I have just finished episode 5 (I was distracted by The Innocence Files, which I strongly recommend), but by the end of Episode 5 I was convinced that the main character of Tiger King, Joe Exotic, is very similar to Trump, and his public and political reception in America is an example of why Trump was not an isolated phenomenon. Americans, I think, have a problem with people with narcissistic personality disorders – too many Americans admire them – and are way too easily fooled by conmen. Here, I will explain why I think Joe Exotic is similar to Trump and what his public reception says about Trump’s rise.

First some basic background. Tiger King is a documentary about these super weird Americans who keep big cats as pets and money-machines, in these weird and horribly shitty rural zoos that should be closed down with extreme prejudice. The story is that it was meant to be a doco about one particularly weird and flamboyant member of this strange society, Joe Exotic, but during the making of the doco Joe tried to get a rival killed and so the whole thing spiraled out of control. I haven’t got to that bit yet, but everything leading up to is pretty disturbing. The main character is Joe Exotic, a gay gun-toting zoo owner from Oklahoma who has two husbands (not legally I guess?), both of whom are straight, and has a menagerie of something like 220 lions and tigers that he shows off to the public in flamboyant performances. He makes a lot of his money from cub petting, in which he takes newborn cubs (before the mother can lick them!) and allows customers to snuggle and play with them, until they reach about 12 weeks old, after which he dumps them in the zoo with the rest of the adults, where they become mostly just a financial burden (so he killed them or trafficked them). His opponent is a woman called Carole Baskin who runs a (rather dubious looking!) animal sanctuary for abused big cats, and has spent years trying to shut down Joe’s operation, including using a sneaky (according to the doco!) copyright trick to force him massively into debt. Rumour has it that Baskin killed her first husband and fed him to a tiger, information the doco does very little to dispute even though it seems pretty obvious that her husband was up to something shonky in Costa Rica and probably got himself killed down there. There are a few other tiger owners – one called Antle who has a sex cult and another who is a dodgy former criminal – and there is a ragtag crew of people who work for Joe Exotic and go to enormous lengths for him (one of these, who apparently was misgendered in the doco, lost an arm to a tiger and kept working for Joe). In his little menagerie-kingdom Joe keeps a lot of guns and explosives (he is clearly not one of those super-rare “responsible gun owners” that his libertarian political campaign manager would have us believe is the norm), meth and pot, and a lot of boys toys. In general Joe treats the tigers badly, and his relationship with his cats is emotionally very hot and cold and is basically transactional. They make him money, and he plays with them, but he doesn’t trust them and he doesn’t particularly seem to respect them.

It should be added that this documentary is really not very objective and although it’s great viewing, as a documentary it’s shit. It obviously has taken Joe Exotic’s side (at least in the first 5 episodes) and doesn’t show much objectivity about its subject at all.

So how is Joe like Trump? Let us count the ways:

  • He has the same personality disorders: He obviously has narcissistic, antisocial and borderline personality disorders, just like Trump, or as some might put it he has the Dark Triad. His relationships are entirely transactional (he basically buys his straight boyfriend with meth) and everything is all about him. This is most clearly seen at the funeral for his second husband, which he makes all about himself, and the subsequent marriage to his new boyfriend within two months, which he uses to humiliate and break his dead husband’s mother. It’s visible in the way he treats his animals, his insatiable need for fame, the way he treats his staff, and the way every emotion he ever shows is clearly and obviously a performance. He can never be wrong, nothing is ever his fault, and the whole world is out to get him.
  • He is deeply misogynist: The videos he makes of Carole Baskin are really shocking, and he cannot control himself when he is talking about her. Even when he is running a political campaign he is making campaign videos calling her a bitch and a whore, and on his youtube channel he put videos of her as a sex doll being face-fucked with dildos, and being fed to his cats. He has the same reaction to a woman challenging him as Trump does to female journalists.
  • He is messy and disorganized and terrible with money: Just like Trump, he is incapable of running or organizing anything, and only gets anything done because a group of strangely loyal misfits jump at his every order and do everything he wants, even when everything he wants is constantly contradictory and changing. He also obviously can barely keep the farm afloat, where a better manager would turn it into a cash-making machine. Whatever money he does get he squanders on bullshit, like meth and trucks for his straight husbands or guns and ammo. This is no clearer than in the stupid brace he wears on his knee for much of the series – he obviously has not got health insurance and hasn’t paid for it for his staff (likely the real reason Saffer chose to have his damaged arm amputated – with no health insurance he could not pay for the reconstruction surgery). He would rather flamboyantly suffer than buy one less truck a year for one of his husbands and pay for health insurance for himself, let alone his crew.
  • He has dodgy mob connections: He obviously has access to a regular supply of meth, and is able to traffick lions and tigers however he wants, and in the first (?) episode we see him cozying up to a drug dealer who is so shady it’s hard to believe. Not only does he have these dodgy criminal connections, but he also obviously admires them – and they obviously see him as an easy mark.
  • He is an easy mark: Like most of the senior figures in the GOP, while he is running a long con on his friends, associates and supporters, Joe Exotic is also easily being conned by others. He got done like a dinner by the Kirkham guy, and when Jeff Lowe gets to him he is so easily tricked into giving up control of everything. Trump is the same – this is why he is owned by Russia. The biggest con-artists are also the biggest marks.
  • He has no interest in truth: He is a classic bullshitter, just like Trump. Whatever he says is true, and if he contradicts himself two days in a row it doesn’t matter because he does not recognize the difference between truth and lies. Words don’t work for him as they do for us.

So of course, just like Trump he runs for political office. First of all he tries the presidential campaign but then failing that he runs for Governor of Oklahoma, with a libertarian (idiot) for a campaign manager and a platform of low regulation. His platform and campaign imagery are so Trumpian – there’s even a scene where he tells some shlubb that if he is elected there will be “someone as broke as you” in charge, trying to market himself as a man of the people. Unlike Trump he doesn’t win, but he does get 18% of the vote. And when people are interviewed about why they will vote for him they give exactly the same reasons as people give for Trump: he’s just like us, he tells it as it is, he’s not politically correct and that’s good, etc. The interviews with his supporters could have just as easily have been at a Trump rally.

Furthermore, his chief enemy (in business, not politics) is so obviously identifiable as a Hillary Clinton-like figure: an older white woman with a real set of goals, who is methodical and prepared and speaks clearly and with intent, who every single media outlet seems to have described with the same adjectives as Clinton – desperate to be liked, unlikable, untrustworthy, etc.

This is the enduring puzzle of American politics. How could an obvious fraud, grifter, gangster, womanizing rapist psychopath like Trump be popular in America? We see the same thing with Joe Exotic: in a Morning Consult poll of 400 viewers of the show he had the second-highest favorability ratings and Carole Baskin had the lowest, and her husband the second lowest – below a libertard gun nut, a tiger-killing narcissist, his meth-head husband, another tiger trader with five “wives” in a sex cult, a rich fraud from Vegas who uses tigers to fuck models (or at least put their pictures on instagram), and another tiger trader who wishes he could learn how to “control women” the way the sex cult dude does. How do Americans judge older white women on a mission to be at the bottom of this pile?

I previously described the Trump campaign as similar to WWF, a giant fraud that all its fans know is a fraud but love anyway. Tiger King is another insight into this strange cultural phenomenon that seems to be unique to America, where people fall easily for frauds and gangsters and love them even after their obvious shonkiness is revealed. There is nothing authentic or real about Joe Exotic – he is a narcissistic, manipulative and vicious bastard who uses people for his own ends, and has never shown a true part of himself in his life – but despite the rest of the world watching this doco and recognizing this immediately, somehow to Americans he is authentic and serious in a way that a softly-spoken older white woman can never be.

America has a problem with grifters, psychopaths and narcissistic frauds. Too many Americans cannot understand when they’re being taken for a ride, and too many Americans enjoy being fleeced. This is the essence of Republican politics – it’s a giant con job played on people who are eager to be fleeced by men the rest of the world would not consider fit to lick our boots. It’s terrifying, and if Americans can’t break out of this strange fugue state and start understanding the way they’re being conned, their country is done for.

 

March 28, 2020

Coriolis 28: I Prefer People Who Weren’t Captured

Posted by faustusnotes under Coriolis, game reports, Science Fiction, Space Opera | Tags: , |
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The Belle of the South

The crew of the Beast of Burden have disabled a pirate ship in the Rigel system, and are preparing to board. The cast for this session:

  • Adam, gunner and acting captain
  • Oliver Greenstar, colonist
  • Reiko Ando, deckhand and swordwoman
  • Siladan Hatshepsut, archaeologist and data djinn
  • Saqr, pilot and mystic

Two of their attackers have escaped, one has been reduced to shards of metal, and one lies paralyzed in space, Siladan’s data pulse still wreaking havoc in its systems and preventing it from escape or attack. They transferred all their fighters to the Beast of Burden and moved in to board the incapacitated vessel.

Onboard the Donald J Trump Jr 3rd

They drew close and attached their docking station, though it did not connect cleanly because the seal on their target was of a strange and unorthodox design, that did not fit their docking seal. Siladan fit a breaching charge and they blew the door open and prepared to enter.

Inside was a small open area, covering the majority of the space inside the ship, containing only four standing steel barricades set at even spaces in the room. Soldiers lay in wait behind these barricades, ready to open fire on anyone who entered. Unfortunately for the men waiting inside, Adam was carrying the group’s machine gun, and laid down an immediate barrage of bullets that decimated the crew. Siladan and Reiko charged forward under Oliver’s covering fire, and although some of them suffered light wounds, they were able to break into the room and close to melee range. Most of their enemies were firing vulcan carbines, which they used ineffectually to attempt to drive the fighters back, but one was using a strange energy weapon that seemed to fire a highly-focused and extremely dangerous laser. They had never seen this before, but after a couple of seconds of brutal and one-sided hand-to-hand combat its owner lay gurgling on the floor, the gun in Adam’s competent hands.

The rest of the ship consisted of just two small ready rooms that led from the docking area to the bridge. In the bridge they found two crew in their seats, dead, and a large and precise series of holes cut in the hull by the Beast of Burden‘s accelerator cannon. There was no atmosphere in the bridge, and when they entered they found a man hiding under a desk. They dragged him out, and when they did so they somehow broke a seal of duct tape on his exo suit, causing it to leak air. As he panicked they dragged him back into the ready room, sealed the door against the de-atmosphered bridge, and forced him to surrender. They had the ship, and a prisoner.

The Loser’s Flag

The ship yielded nothing interesting. It was an entirely functional, plainly dressed and frankly very primitive looking fighting vessel, with no decorations but for a picture of a strange orange-skinned fat man in one room, and a cross with a strangely sexualized semi-naked man crucified on it in another. They thought it might be a strangely perverted figure of one of the icons, but they could find no sign that anyone here was religious at all, and their prisoner obviously did not speak their language fluently. The only other icon they found was a strange flag, with many stars on it. It made no sense though, because it did not have enough stars to represent the Third Horizon, and too many for just this system. No one could remember how many stars were in the Dabaran circle, so it was a mystery to them. Stranger still, every crew member of the ship had replaced their natural eyes with poorly-made and rough-looking cybernetic goggles, which protruded from their skull and made them look like barbarians. Medical scans of the bodies revealed no other cyberwear – just the complete replacement of their visual system with these poorly-crafted cyber-eyes.

They attempted to loot the ship’s Exo suits but they were old, run down and heavily-repaired, and not worth much. When they investigated the dead pilot and gunner they found that they had died when the atmosphere exited the ship – their exo suits were not impermeable, and they had died of suffocation as the air drained out. This ship was obviously very old, very run down, and was running on tape and stitches. These pirates had not expected serious opposition, and had been flying in a vessel that was obviously not much longer going to be able to hold out the Dark.

The First Horizon

They tried to get their captive to show them where the ship’s data core was, but they could only learn that the ship had no data core, only separate partial data storage for each position on the ship. Worse still, their captive’s position was Data Djinn (though he called it “SIGINT Ops”), but he had to interact with the ship’s computer using a keyboard. They gave up on electronic information and resorted to interrogating the captured crewman.

This data djinn’s name was Alex “The Q”, and he was cooperative with their interrogation after a few threats. He first warned them that his mother ship would come back for him and then they would be in deep trouble, but after that he was happy to speak. They learnt that he and his fellows were the remnants of a First Horizon fleet that had been trapped in Rigel at the end of the portal wars some 200 years ago. They were based on a troopship called Zarra’s End, and at the last moments of a retreat in this system its drive systems and main reactor, as well as its stasis pods, had been destroyed by heavy fire. Unable to move, it and its complement of support ships had been abandoned by the last scattered survivors of the First Horizon’s fleet, and had been left to die in the Dark of the outer reaches of Rigel. They survived, however, and since then they had become pirates in this system. They used the ships they looted to repair their own ships, but would not take on any of their victims’ technology, and had no way to repair their own stasis beds and no technological skills to transfer stasis pods from the ships they captured. They had been stranded here for more than a century, building a pirate society in the barely-functioning remains of the Zarra’s End.

Further investigation revealed that the society on Zarra’s End was an unpleasant and abhorrent system of heirarchies and slavery. Alex “The Q” told them that the system they lived in had infected them with a strange, incurable and inherited disease, Deneb’s Blindness Disease, which caused anyone in the system to go blind after 6-8 years. So all children born in the pirate enclave had cybereyes fitted at about this age, and grew up with only electronic sight. There were not enough cyber-eyes to go around, however, and the skill to make and repair them was limited, so they recycled eyes and newly-made eyes were often not very good quality. The men who received the best eyes became warriors, while the men with poorer eyes became support staff and servants. Women received no eyes, grew up blind, and were confined to a small area of the ship. People captured from other ships were used for slave labour until they went blind, then spaced.

Adam had been planning to recommend they take this ship and leave, but when he heard that he decided that they needed to destroy these pirates. They would not take their time sending information about them to the Legion. They would go and kill them all, and free their prisoners.

Strange Manners from Strange Horizons

Something they noticed about Alex “The Q” was that he had very erratic behavior that made him very difficult to talk to. He alternated been explosions of extreme and violent rage and sudden desperate craven spasms of sorrow and despair. He would cower and beg and cry, then bristle up and scream and fight, until someone punched him enough to put him in his place. Sometimes he would become sullen and unresponsive, as if wracked by depression and angst. From these episodes of depression he would inevitably explode in spite and rage, before cowering and sniveling to his new captors. His behavior was incomprehensible and erratic, and they could not fathom how he could be this way.

On a hunch Saqr accessed the video recordings from the Donald J Trump Jr 3rd‘s last few days, hoping to see the face of someone who had stayed behind on the Zarra’s End before the ship left on its pirate mission. If Saqr could see one person who was not currently on board the ship, he would be able to use his mystic powers to find the Zarra’s End’s location. Unfortunately, however, the video recordings from the ship’s internal cameras only went back two days, and no new faces were visible on it. But the footage did show Saqr a wild panorama of violence, bullying and hatred. The pirate leader would regularly beat and castigate his inferiors, forcing them to cower and beg and hitting them with impunity; and they would then enact the same violence on those next down the ladder of the heirarchy. The entire crew lived in terror of each other, on the edge of constant violence, acting barely civilized and obviously only uniting in the appreciation of violence towards others. Something was very wrong with this pirate community – either it was a strange and desperately evil cult, or something had gone very awry in its military code. Was all of the First Horizon like this, completely overrun with authoritarian violence? No wonder the Firstcome had fled, and no wonder they had fought a war with the First Horizon and sealed the portals. No one wanted a society like this a mere portal’s jump away.

No matter. They would exterminate this nest of hold-outs, free their prisoners, and end the menace in Rigel.

The ambush

Alex “The Q” spoke a strange language that they could not decipher and could not hope to trust him to use, so they decided to lay a trap for the rest of the fleet from the Zarra’s End. They asked the passenger ship Plainsong – the original targets of the pirates’ violence – to again send out their distress signal, and lay in wait for the incoming ships of the Zarra’s End, their ship disguised in stealth mode.

They did not have to wait long. Soon a large contingent of fighting ships approached, which Alex “The Q” identified as:

  • The Twin Towers
  • Constitution 231
  • The Kentucky Derby
  • The New York Minute
  • On the Road
  • The Michelle Malkin

and a larger ship, the raider Belle of the South 142. As they approached the Plainsong’s emergency beacon the PCs’ entire fleet – the Beast of Burden, the Judgment of the Dancer, and the No Satisfaction – closed the jaws of their trap.

This battle was vicious, and when it began there was no guarantee that they would prevail. Fortunately their first shots disabled the Belle of the South‘s drives, and as it drifted by useless they were able to decimate the remaining smaller ships in the fleet, returning through the debris cloud to tear apart the larger ship as it repaired its drives and returned to the battle. Within a few minutes of springing the trap they had eliminated the entire pirate fleet, and were ready to attack the Zarra’s End.

They piled into the Donald J Trump Jr 3rd‘s boarding area, loaded up their weapons, and headed towards the Zarra’s End, faking battle damage and ready to attack. These barbarians from the First Horizon would be dead soon, and whatever horrors they had brought with them would be lost in the Dark between the stars. No mercy for slavers, and no kindness towards their ancient enemies: they were ready to do what had to be done.

 

March 20, 2020

Updates on the Novel Coronavirus: Is the World Overreacting and What Can We Expect?

Posted by faustusnotes under Health, Japan, Meat Life, Science | Tags: , , |
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The 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has now escaped China and taken a firm grip on the rest of the world, with Italy in a complete lockdown, most of Europe shuttered and the UK and the US spaffing their response up a wall. A few weeks ago I wrote a short post assessing the case fatality rate of the disease and assessing whether it is a global threat, and I think now is time to write an update on the virus. In this post I will address the mortality rate, some ways of looking at the total disease burden, discuss its infectiousness, and talk about what might be coming if we don’t get a grip on this. In the past few weeks I have been working with Chinese collaborators on this virus so I am going to take the unusual step of referencing some of my meat life work, though as always I won’t name collaborators, so as to avoid their names being associated with a blog that sometimes involves human sacrifice.

As always, what COVID-19 is doing can be understood in terms of infectious disease epidemiology and the mathematics that underlies it, but only to the extent that we have good quality data. Fortunately we now do have some decent data, so we can begin to make some strong judgments – and the conclusions we will draw are not pretty.

How deadly is this disease?

The deadliness of an infectious disease can be assessed in terms of its case fatality ratio (CFR), which is the proportion of affected cases who die. In my last post I estimated the CFR for COVID-19 to be about 0.4% (uncertainty range 0.22 – 1.7%), and suggested it was between 2 and 10 times as deadly as influenza. The official CFR in China has hovered around 2%, but we know that many mild cases were not diagnosed, and the true CFR must be lower. Since then, however, the Diamond Princess cruise ship hove into view, was quarantined off Yokohama, and carefully monitored. This is a very serendipitous event (for those not on the ship, obviously) since it means we have a complete case record – every case on that ship was diagnosed, symptomatic or not. On that ship we saw 700 people infected and 7 deaths, so a CFR of 1%. I used a simple Bayesian method to use that confirmed mortality rate, updated by the deaths in China, to estimate the under reporting rate in China to be at least 50%, work which is currently available as a preprint at the WHO’s COVID-19 preprint archive. I think a decent estimate of the under reporting rate is 90%, indicating that there are 10 times as many cases as are being reported, and the true CFR is therefore 10 times lower. That puts the CFR in China at 0.2%, or probably twice as deadly as the seasonal flu. However, we also have data from South Korea, where an extensive testing regime was put in place, that suggests a CFR more in the range of 1%.

It’s worth noting that the CFR depends on the age distribution of affected people, and the age distribution in the cruise ship was skewed to very old. This suggests that in a younger population the CFR would be lower. There is also likely to be a differential rate of underreporting, with probably a lower percentage of children being reported than elderly people. It is noteworthy that only 1% of confirmed cases in China were children, which is very different to influenza. As quarantine measures get harsher and health systems struggle, it is likely that people will choose to risk not reporting their virus, and this will lead to over estimates of mortality and underestimates of total cases. But it certainly appears this disease is at least twice as dangerous as influenza.

CFRs also seem to be very different in the west, where testing coverage has been poor in some countries. Today California reported 675 cases and 16 deaths, 2.5 times the CFR rate on the Diamond Princess in probably a younger population. Until countries like the US and UK expand their testing, we won’t know exactly how bad it is in those countries but we should expect a large number of infected people to die.

On the internet and in some opinion pieces, and from the mouths of some conservative politicians, you will hear people say that it “only” kills 1% of people and so you don’t need to worry too much. This is highly misleading, because it does not take into account that in a normal year less than 1% of the population dies, and a disease that kills 1% of people will double your nation’s total death rate if it is allowed to spread uncontrolled. It is important to understand what the background risk is before you assess small numbers as “low risk”!

What is the burden of the disease?

The CFR tells you how likely an affected person is to die, but an important question is what is the burden of the disease? Burden means the total number of patients who need to be hospitalized, and the final mortality rate as a proportion of the population. While the CFR tells us what to expect for those infected, estimates of burden tell us what society can expect this disease to do.

First, let us establish a simple baseline: Japan, with 120 million people, experiences 1 million deaths a year. This is the burden of mortality in a peaceful, well-functioning society with a standard pattern of infectious disease and an elderly population. We can apply this approximately to other countries to see what is going on, on the safe assumption that any estimates we get will be conservative estimates because Japan has one of the highest mortality rates in the world[1]. Consider Wuhan, population 12 million. It should expect 100,000 deaths a year, or about 8,000 a month. Over two months it experienced about 3000 COVID-19 deaths, when it should have seen about 15,000 deaths normally. So the virus caused about 20% excess mortality. This is a very large excess mortality. Now consider Italy, which has seen 3500 deaths in about one month. Italy has a population of 60 million so should see 500,000 deaths a year, or about 40,000 a month. So it has seen about 10% excess mortality. However, those 3500 deaths have been clustered in just the Northern region, which likely only has a population similar to Wuhan – so more likely it has seen 40% excess mortality. That is a very high burden, which is reflected in obituaries in the affected towns.

Reports are also beginning to spread on both social media and in the news about the impact on hospitals in Italy and the US. In particular in Northern Italy, doctors are having to make very hard decisions about access to equipment, with new guidance likening the situation to medical decisions made after disasters. Something like 5% of affected people in Wuhan needed to be admitted to intensive care, and it appears that the symptoms of COVID-19 last longer than influenza. It also appears that mortality rates are high, and there are already predictions that Italy will run out of intensive care facilities rapidly. The situation in northern Italy is probably exacerbated by the age of the population and the rapid growth of the disease there, but it shows that there is a lot of potential for this virus to rapidly overwhelm health systems, and when it does you can expect mortality rates to sky-rocket.

This is why the UK government talked about “flattening the curve”, because even if the same total number of people are affected, the more slowly they are affected the less risk that the care system breaks down. This is particularly true in systems like the US, where hospitals maintain lean operating structures, or the UK where the health system has been stripped of all its resources by years of Tory mismanagement.

Who does it affect?

The first Chinese study of the epidemiology of this disease suggested that the mortality rate increases steeply, from 0% in children to 15% in the very elderly. It also suggested that only a very small number of confirmed cases are young people, but this is likely due to underreporting. This excellent medium post uses data from an Italian media report to compare the age distribution of cases in Italy with those in South Korea, and shows that in South Korea 30% of cases were in people aged 20-29, versus just 4% in Italy. This discrepancy arises because South Korea did extensive population-level testing, while Italy is just doing testing in severe cases (or was, at the time the report was written). Most of those young people will experience COVID-19 as a simple influenza-like illness, rather than the devastating respiratory disease that affects elderly people, and if we standardize the Chinese CFR to this Korean population we would likely see it drop from 2% to 1%, as the Koreans are experiencing. This South Korean age distribution contains some important information:

  • The disease does not seem to affect children much, and doesn’t harm them, which is good
  • Young people aged 20-39 are likely to be very efficient carriers and spreaders of the disease
  • Elderly people are at lower risk of getting the disease than younger people but for them it is very dangerous

This makes very clear the importance of social distancing and lockdowns for preventing the spread of the disease. Those young people will be spreading it to each other and their family members, while not feeling that it is very bad. If you saturate that young population with messages that people are overreacting and that there is not a serious risk and that “only” the elderly and the sick will die, you will spread this disease very effectively to their parents and grandparents – who will die.

It’s worth noting that a small proportion of those young people do experience severe symptoms and require hospitalization and ventilation. In health workers in China there was a death rate among health workers of about 0.2%, and we could probably take that as the likely CFR in young people with good access to care. If the disease spreads fast enough and overwhelms health systems, we can expect to see not insignificant mortality in people aged 20-39, as their access to intensive care breaks down. This is especially likely in populations with high prevalence of asthma (Australia) or diabetes (the US and the UK) or smoking (Italy, and some parts of eastern Europe). So it is not at this stage a good idea for young people to be complacent about their own risk, and if you have any sense of social solidarity you should be being very careful about the risk you pose to others.

How fast does it spread?

The speed at which an infectious disease spreads can be summarized by two numbers: the generation time and the basic reproduction number (R0). Generation time is the time it takes for symptoms to appear in a second case after infection by the first case, and the basic reproduction number is the number of additional cases that will be caused by one infection. For influenza the generation time is typically 2-4 days, while for COVID-19 it is probably 4-6 days. The basic reproduction number of influenza is between 1.3 – 1.5, while the initial estimates for COVID-19 were 2.5, meaning that each case of COVID-19 will affect 2.5 people. Unfortunately I think these early estimates were very wrong, and my own research suggests the number is more likely between 4 and 5. This means that each case will infect 4-5 other cases before it resolves. This is a very fast-spreading disease, much more effective at spreading than influenza, and this high R0 explains why it was able to suddenly explode in Italy and the US. A disease with an R0 over 2 is scary and requires special efforts to control.

Those early estimates of R0 at 2 to 2.5 had a significant negative impact on assessment of the global threat of this disease. I believe they led the scientific community to be slightly complacent, and to think that the disease would be relatively easy to contain and would not be as destructive as it has become. In my research our figures for projected infection numbers show clearly that these models with lower R0 simply cannot predict the future trend of the virus – they undershoot it significantly and fit the epidemic curve poorly. Sadly governments are still acting on the basis of these estimates: the UK government’s estimate that the disease will stop spreading once 60% of people are affected is based on an R0 of 2.5, when an R0 of 4 suggests 75% of people need to be infected. An early R0 estimate of 4 would have rung alarm bells throughout the world, and would have been much more consistent with the disaster we saw unfolding in Hubei. Fortunately the Chinese medical establishment were not so complacent, and worked hard to buy the world time to prepare for this virus’s escape. Sadly many western countries did not take advantage of that extra month, and are paying the price now as they see what this disease really is like.

Because this disease is so highly infectious, special measures are needed to contain it. For a mildly dangerous disease with an R0 of 1.3 (like influenza), vaccination of the very vulnerable and sensible social distancing among infected people is sufficient to contain it without major economic disruption. Above 2, however, things get dicey, and at 4 we need to consider major measures – social distancing, canceling mass gatherings, quarantining affected individuals and cities, and travel restrictions. This is everything that China did in the second month of the outbreak once they understood what they were dealing with, and is also the key to South Korea, Japan and Singapore’s success. Because some western governments did not take this seriously, they are now going to have to take extreme measures to stop this.

How many people will be infected?

The total proportion of the population that will be affected is called the final size of the epidemic, and there is an equation linking the final size to the basic reproduction number. This equation tells us that for influenza probably 40% of the population will be affected, but it also tells us that for epidemics with basic reproduction number over 2 basically the entire population will be affected. In the case of Japan that will mean 120 million people affected with a mortality rate of probably 0.4% (assuming the health care system handles such a ridiculous scenario), or about 500,000 deaths – 50% of the total number of deaths that occur in one year. The Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami killed 16,000 people and was considered a major disaster. It’s also worth considering that those 500,000 deaths would probably occur over 3-4 months, so over the time period they would be equivalent to probably doubling or tripling the normal mortality rate. That is a catastrophe by any measure, and although at the end of the epidemic “only” half a percent of the population will be dead, the entire population will be traumatized by it.

For a virus of this epidemicity with this kind of fatality rate, we need to take extreme measures to control it, and we need to take it very seriously as soon as it arrives in our communities. This virus cannot be contained by business as usual.

Essential supplies ready

What’s going on in Japan?

The number of cases and deaths in Japan remains quite small, and there has been some discussion overseas that Japan’s response has been poor and it is hiding the true extent of the problem. I don’t think this is entirely correct. Japan introduced basic counter-measures early on, when China was struggling and well before other countries, including cancelling events, delaying the start of the school year, introducing screening at airports and testing at designated facilities, working from home and staggering commuter trips to reduce crowding on trains. For example, work events I was planning to attend were cancelled 2-3 weeks ago, and many meetings moved online back then. Japan has a long history of hygiene measures during winter, and influenza strategies are in place at most major companies to reduce infection risk. Most museums, aquariums and shopping malls have always had hand sanitizer at the entrance, and Japan has an excellent network of public toilets that make hand washing easy. Many Japanese have always maintained a practice of hand-washing and gargling upon returning home from any outside trip, and mask wearing is quite common. Japan’s health system also has a fair amount of excess capacity, so it is in a position to handle the initial cases, isolate them and manage them. This has meant that the growth of the epidemic was slow here and well contained, although it was a little out of control in Hokkaido, where the governor declared a state of emergency (now ended). It is true that many cases are not being tested – hospitals do not recommend mild cases to attend for treatment, but to stay home and self isolate, and it is likely that mild cases will not be tested – but this is not a cover-up situation, rather an attempt to ration tests (which are not being fully utilized at the moment). There are not yet reports of emergency rooms or hospitals being overwhelmed, and things are going quite smoothly. I expect at some point the government will need to introduce stricter laws, but because of that early intervention with basic measures the epidemic appears to be under control here.

My self-isolation plan was kind of forced on me at the end of February, because I dislocated my kneecap at kickboxing in a sadly age-related way, will probably require reconstruction surgery, and am spending a lot of time trapped at home as a result. Actually that was the day that everyone else was panic buying toilet paper and so I was stuck at home with a dwindling supply of the stuff until my friends stepped up. I think most people in Japan have reduced their social activities (probably not as much as me!), and are spending less time in gatherings and events (almost of all which are canceled now), and so through that reduction in contacts plus aggressive contact tracing, the disease is largely controlled here.

Is the world over-reacting?

No. You will have heard no doubt various conservatives on Fox news and in some print outlets complaining about how the world has over-reacted and we should all be just going to the pub, perhaps you’ve seen some Twitter bullshit where a MAGA person proudly declares that they ate out in a crowded restaurant and they’ll do whatever they want because Freedumb. Those people are stupid and you shouldn’t trust them. This virus spreads easily and kills easily, and if it gets a stranglehold on your health system it will be an order of magnitude more deadly than it is right now. If you live in a sensible country (i.e. not the UK or the USA) your government will have consulted with experts and developed a plan and you should follow their recommendations and guidelines, because they have a sense of what is coming down the pipeline and what you need to do to stop it. Do the minimum you are asked to do, and perhaps prepare for being asked to do more. Don’t panic buy, but if you feel like strict isolation is coming you should start laying in supplies. Trust your friends and neighbours to help you, and don’t assume your government is bullshitting you (unless you’re in the UK or the USA, obviously). This is serious, and needs to be taken seriously.

When HIV hit the world our need to wear a condom was presented to us as a self-preserving mechanism. If you choose to circumcise your baby boy you’re probably doing so as a service to future him, not to all the women or men he might spread STIs to. But this virus isn’t like HIV. Your responsibility here isn’t to yourself, it’s to the older, frailer and less healthy members of your community who are going to die – and die horribly, I might add, suffocating with a tube in their throat after days of awful, stifled struggle – if this disease is allowed to spread. We all need to work together to protect the more vulnerable members of our community, and if we don’t react now we will lose a lot of the older people we grew up with and love.

So let’s all hunker down and get rid of this virus together!

fn1: This is a weird and counter-intuitive aspect of demography. Japan has the longest life expectancy in the world’s healthiest population, and one of the world’s highest mortality rates. Iraq, in contrast, would see half as many deaths in a normal year (without American, ah, visitors). This is because healthy populations grow old, and then die in huge numbers.

 

August 4, 2019

Was the El Paso Shooter an Eco-fascist?

Posted by faustusnotes under Crime Fiction, Meat Life | Tags: , , |
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As sure as night follows day there has been another mass shooting in America, this time at a Walmart, where 20 people have been killed by a 21 year old white man who published a manifesto on 4chan. He turns out – shock – to have been a white supremacist who is concerned about Mexicans taking over Texas, and particularly worried about the possibility that it will flip Democratic (because Hispanics vote Democratic) and usher in an era of permanent Democrat rule (which is apparently a bad thing). You can find his manifesto here if you are up for reading this sort of stuff, and you can tell where he stands pretty quickly from his two opening sentences:

In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.

This dude is not happy about Hispanics taking over his country, and he has a plan. He says he has read The Great Replacement, a theory espoused by the dude who wrote The Camp of the Saints (Steve Bannon’s favourite book) and he thinks he needs to take action to protect his nation from being overrun by foreigners. Most of his manifesto is classic white supremacist nutjob stuff, though remarkably lucid for the genre and (by Fascist standards) relatively well argued. On Twitter, however, he is getting some traction amongst concerned leftists because he ascribes some environmental reasons for his actions, and some people are hailing him as the first eco-fascist shooter. For example, William Black writes:

This suggests that he has an environmental motive for his attack, and needs to kill foreigners to make sure that only Americans can enjoy the fruits of America’s fragile environment.  In response, someone else suggests that hyping the threat of global warming may have been a mistake:

If the right is turning to eco-fascism then it will put a new slant on all their activities and give them a new wedge to use against opponents of fascism; it also signals that they may have seriously upped their game, since until now ineffectual bullshit flailing against the “Chinese hoax” of global warming has been their thing. But how true is it that this guy is an eco-fascist? And was he really worried about global warming? His manifesto is 2,359 words long, and this is his entire comment on environmental issues:

The American lifestyle affords our citizens an incredible quality of life. However, our lifestyle Is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources. This has been a problem for decades. For example, this phenomenon is brilliantly portrayed in the decades-old classic “The Lorax.” Water sheds around the country, especially in agricultural areas, are being depleted. Fresh water Is being polluted from farming and oil drilling operations. Consumer culture is creating thousands of tons of unnecessary plastic waste and electronic waste, and recycling to help slow this down is almost non-existent. Urban sprawl creates inefficient cities which unnecessarily destroys millions of acres of land. We even use god knows how many trees worth of paper towels just wipe water off our hands. Everything I have seen and heard in my short life has led me to believe that the average American isn’t willing to change their lifestyle, even if the changes only cause a slight inconvenience. The government is unwilling to tackle these issues beyond empty promises since they are owned by corporations. Corporations that also like immigration because more people means a bigger market for their products. I just want to say that I love the people of this country, but god damn most of y’all are just too stubborn to change your lifestyle. So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.

It’s 270 words, or just over 10% of his manifesto. He commits almost that much verbiage to describing the weapon he’s going to use. This isn’t exactly Unabomber-level commitment to the cause is it? In his ecological dissertation he does not mention global warming or climate change, but only overuse of resources, with a reference to The Lorax (which I don’t think has any words to say about global warming). His screed is essentially Malthusian, not environmentalist, and his position is relatively clear: since political change to reduce waste and overconsumption is hard, we need to cull the herd. This isn’t a new position in right-wing thought, although obviously attaching it to an AK-47 is an unpleasant rhetorical escalation. In the 1990s Australia had a right-wing anti-immigration party, Australians Against Further Immigration, who worked from this exact position, and it’s been a fixture of European fascism forever. But it’s not the centerpiece or even a major part of his manifesto: It’s bolted on the end of his piece, as an addendum to his main concern, which is the Great Replacement. He devotes about as much space to complaining about the role of corporations in undermining American workers through immigration – this is a theme all through the first two pages of his writing, covering the issue of automation and Universal Basic Income and how the presence of low-paid foreign workers will mess up the society-wide response to automation that he sees as necessary – and much of what he writes has a lot more to do with the National Conservatism[1] of Hurley and Carlson than it does to do with any kind of eco-fascism.

It’s also impossible to imagine that an American conservative at this time would break so much with conservative orthodoxy as to endorse global warming as real. That would basically alienate you from your entire political cohort, and would be a poison pill for all your political relationships. Now that his social media are shut down it is impossible to glean his opinions about this, but it should be clear from recent American political movements that it is almost impossible to be an American conservative and accept the reality of global warming, let alone take it seriously enough to kill people over.

This man is not an eco-fascist, but that does not mean that eco-fascism won’t come to America in time. As the climate crisis deepens we can expect all high-income nations to experience increasingly difficult environmental problems, and since the USA is particularly vulnerable to global warming we can expect to see it hit harder and earlier than say Europe. You can be sure that when it becomes impossible to avoid acknowledging the problem the American right will find a way to blame all the years of inaction on the left and/or Jews, and will react with its customary lack of humanity or sense to deal with the challenges global warming creates. But before that you can expect a long period of denialism and increasingly brutal treatment of refugees, foreigners, and ultimately poor and black people within US borders as resource crises strike (probably starting with water). I have previously reviewed the foundational text of modern American fascism, the Turner Diaries, and noted the extreme nihilism and violence of their vision, and in that book it is very clear what the American right’s response to resource pressures will be. On the one hand it is clear that they are willing to burn the entire world down rather than compromise their racial purity, and their solution to extreme privation is to force white people to compete in a brutal and murderous competition to gain access to the limited resources available. So we can expect the American right to further exclude refugees and migrants, to become more vicious in their treatment of “non-productive” minorities within America, and to enhance these cruelties while continuing to burn the fossil fuels that are causing the problem; and when they finally accept that it is too late, we can expect them to pit poor whites against each other to determine who gets to survive in the burning times.  I doubt we will see anything as enlightened as a violent fascist overthrow of corporate polluters in order to preserve the environment for the white race. If you doubt me about that, read the Turner Diaries and ask yourself what the movement’s leaders would do, given they all consider that to be the ur-text for their movement.

We have a long wait yet before eco-fascism comes to America, if it ever does, but in the meantime we have a very real and very dangerous fascist movement taking over the country. Don’t look to some weird eco-fascist fringe for the threat to the future of America and the world: look to the Republican party, which is producing all the intellectual and rhetorical support for these terrorists, and looking the other way while the country burns. And don’t get distracted: their only real interest at this time is race, and they have their eyes on the prize even if you don’t. So stay focused, and do everything you can to beat these people back before they burn down your country and our world.

fn1: Good choice of name there boys, you’ll go far.

 

May 9, 2019

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

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

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

Strategy 1: English Teacher

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

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

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

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

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

Strategy 2: Japan government scholarship

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

The application period is usually about now so get busy!

Special notes for high school students

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

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

Notes on other Asian countries

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

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

A note on the long-term risks of English teaching

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

Why Japan?

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

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

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

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

 

February 5, 2019

Why I Can’t Enjoy American Football

Posted by faustusnotes under Reviews, Sport | Tags: , |
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It’s just not cricket …

It’s that time of the year again, and the newspapers are full of reports about the Superbowl. Vox has been flooded with articles about why we hate the Patriots or why players keep getting bigger, and everyone is expected to have an opinion on this sport. Apparently this year’s effort was extra boring, and the half-time adverts were crap, and the Maroon 5 dude revealed that he has a tattoo in Times New Roman font[1]. This year I didn’t bother with this whole thing, because I have tried to get into American Football and I just simply cannot. I have tried, and I just can’t really enjoy it.

This is a bit of a surprise to me, because I can enjoy most sports if I understand them. Indeed, I put in a bit of effort over the past two years to learn the rules of NFL, I spent time watching matches (which are broadcast live here in Japan if you have cable tv, and which on replay are stripped of adverts and quite easy to watch), I put a bit of effort into studying some of the rules and trying to figure out what was going on. It’s my view that the single biggest reason most people don’t enjoy most sports is that they simply don’t know the rules, and that if a sport is played well by elite athletes and you understand the rules you will probably enjoy it. So I was surprised when I tried to learn the rules of NFL and I still found it simply unenjoyable. I have tried to find reports from others about why they don’t enjoy NFL, but there are precious few, or they are reports like this one that don’t really seem to explain the game’s problems. So I thought I would write a post about why I can’t get into NFL. Perhaps someone will comment to give their own opinion, or to explain why I’m wrong (nicely, I hope!) or perhaps not, but here I would like to outline some of my reasons.

Here I am not going to waste time talking about the many political problems of the NFL – the blackouts, the teams’ insatiable demands for government money, the racist team names, the fact that college football players aren’t paid, the disgraceful treatment of cheerleaders, the concussion scandals, the awful mismanagement of the knee issue or the blatant disgusting militarization of the whole thing – which are well known and are a good reason to boycott it on principle, but not an explanation for why the game itself is simply not enjoyable. I also don’t intend to talk about this as “my favourite sport is better than yours” or to suggest that NFL players aren’t great athletes or that rugby dudes are tougher than NFL dudes or anything silly like that. I thought I should like NFL – I like ball sports with heavy contact, I approve of violent sport, and I like watching men smash each other, and I enjoy most other ball sports when I watch them – but I don’t enjoy it. I also don’t intend to tell people what sports they shouldn’t like, or laugh at people for watching weird shit – if you like snooker or darts or curling that’s all cool and not my business – but I wanted to try and pin down why I don’t enjoy NFL, and see what other people have to say about that. For the record, my favourite sports in approximate order would be kickboxing/MMA/boxing, rugby, high quality English premier league soccer, AFL, some olympic-level sports, lower quality soccer, and then a bunch of other stuff in no particular order. I’m not anti-sport, and I’m not opposed to violent sport (I thoroughly oppose any efforts to ban boxing, for example, on pure civil liberties grounds). I also have done kickboxing (and other martial arts) for 25 years, fought in an amateur fight once, and enjoy regular training with rough men. I’m not squeamish about violent sport. So, here are my reasons, in no particular order.

  • The weird stops and starts: I really cannot get used to the strange way the game stops, waits, everyone changes, and then it restarts. It doesn’t feel like sport to me, and it all feels strangely pre-determined. It feels more like work than sport. I just can’t get into the pre-organized changing of sides and ordering of attack and defense. Weird, given I am into turn-based combat in RPGs, but there you go.
  • The lack of ebb and flow: This is a big one for me and I think the single biggest spoiler. When the QB gets sacked or a pass is incomplete the game just … stops. No one fights for the ball, there is very rarely a change in direction of the attack, and it seems impossible that the flow of the game would change several times. When you watch soccer or rugby there is a constant shift and flow of possession, attack and defense, and no reprieve for either team when they have or don’t have the ball. If an NFL team is defending at 4th and goal, there is no sense in which they are under the cosh as they would be in a concerted soccer or rugby attack – they just have to foil one more play and then they are guaranteed the ball. Worse still, the attacking team don’t need to worry about the possibility that a pass will be interrupted or that they will miss the pass, because there is no penalty for this in the flow of the game. The only way the flow changes is if someone intercepts and catches the ball or a player straight drops it and the opposition scoop it up. This gives the game a really dead flavour. Nobody is risking anything, nobody is pressed, strategy isn’t built on what-ifs. So many times you get the 5th play and the team brings on a whole different set of players to punt, because there is this regular process that doesn’t change, shift or move around. It’s weird and I cannot think of any other sport except perhaps cricket which is so completely lacking in these sudden shifts of play.
  • The weird timing: There is something really strange about the way that time is calculated in NFL, as if time were not a thing at all. Teams have time-outs during which they keep playing, a one hour game seems to take 3 hours to play, the last 5 minutes just goes on forever, and every player has to be insanely careful about the implications for timing of e.g. an incomplete pass vs. being pushed out of bounds. I appreciate that rules are rules but why do there have to be so many weird and complex ways of simply keeping track of time? In any other game it’s simple: time passes at its usual rate until the game is over, and injuries are handled either by stopping the clock when they happen or adding time on. I don’t understand why there have to be so many weird ways of keeping track of time.
  • The strangely hypocritical rules: The weird timing brings me to the most frustrating thing I have ever witnessed in sport – a player being penalized for throwing a ball down in frustration and wasting 3 seconds of time, right before the game cuts to 2 minutes of adverts. What is going on with that? Why is time-wasting punished harshly in a game that takes 3 hours to play an hour’s football? Similarly, why is it a terrible offense to touch someone’s helmet but completely cool to hit them with a head-high tackle that is guaranteed to cause serious injury? It’s so pernickety, so finnicky, and so arbitrary.
  • The enormously complex rules: Most games have a simple set of penalties for all infringements, with at most two levels of escalation to deal with more serious incidents. But NFL has this intense system of penalties which involve decisions about whether to reset the downs and whether to penalize with distance, and seem to have an enormously complex set of rules that can be broken. It also seems in comparison to other games to have a lot of indecipherable decision points about basic aspects of basic gameplay, such as what constitutes a catch or pass interference. Every game has ambiguities and inconsistencies, but NFL seems to be consistent only in its ambiguities and complexity. It can be frustrating watching rugby and having to depend heavily on the referee’s judgment, but this pales to insignificance compared to the opacity of referee decisions in NFL.
  • The action is everywhere at once: When a play starts there is action happening all across the line and further downfield, and it’s very hard to follow all of it. I think this also means that in every play there are multiple infractions and it’s just luck if the referees see them. This is fine if complexity is your thing but it’s a uniquely weird experience that this is a ballgame yet almost all the action is off the ball.
  • The messy sideline situation: It really weirds me out that for the whole game there is this unruly mob of random people standing all along the sideline. Hundreds of people just shuffling around doing their thing. It’s so messy and weird. Every other ballgame has allocated places – a bunker or a coach’s area or something – but in NFL everyone is standing right down by the sideline crowding the game and just being messy. I guess it’s necessary because of the constant substitutions and changes of team (and we wouldn’t want to waste time!!!) but it’s just weird to me, like a pitch invasion is constantly being threatened.
  • The specialization: Every game has its specialist players but the level of specialization in NFL seems extreme, and not really much fun to watch. Vox tells me this wasn’t always the case, and that when substitutions were allowed more freely this led to the growth of specialization. It’s particularly focused on the quarterback, and I have never seen a game as focused on a single position as NFL. I guess this is a nice analogy for America’s political system, which is obsessively focused on the actions of one man, and I think it’s just as frustrating in sport as in politics. What kind of team game boils down to the decisions of one man? A weird one.
  • The weird camp machismo: I know it’s a bit of a cliche to say this but NFL players are really really camp, and it’s weird that Americans think they look super macho. I recall watching an interlude in a Japanese broadcast[2], and the American review was focused on some player from some team and talking about how incredibly tough and powerful he is. While the narrator was going on about this the camera was doing a slow-motion reel of this dude walking along, helmet in hand, with aggressive and threatening music playing. It was all a big and theatrical build-up to describe how aggressive and manly this dude was. The dude in question was walking slowly along the sideline with his shirt rolled up and tucked into his chest armour, showing off his powerful abs. So basically this super macho dude was walking along in spandex tights and a midriff top, and I’m meant to think that this is tough and not camp. It just doesn’t work for me. Don’t get me wrong, I know these guys are hard as nails, but what is wrong with Americans that they confuse camp and macho? You see the same thing in WWE, which is outrageously camp, and in super hero movies, which are wall-to-wall spandex and glowsticks. I guess there’s a reason that the players have to wear tight spandex tights with gussets, and have a towel hanging out of their back pocket that makes them look like a glistening furry or something, but I don’t know what that reason is and I suspect I wouldn’t be convinced even if it were explained to me. I just can’t get into the American vision of macho, and I think there’s a deep cultural insight somewhere in the fact that a country whose politics is steeped in misogyny and homophobia has so much difficulty distinguishing between camp and macho.
  • It’s dangerous by design: As I said, I’m into violent sports, but I’m not into sport that is designed to damage its participants. Even boxing has limits on the amount of damage its players are allowed to sustain. But much of NFL seems to be designed to damage the players, or specifically allows tactics that are at their most effective when designed to hurt. The bit where the linesmen crash into each other is obviously dangerous by design, but also the complete lack of any sanction for head-high tackles and neck grips means that players are rewarded for injuring each other. With players getting bigger and stronger every year, and no limit on their strength due to exhaustion as the game wears on, it’s inevitable that people will be seriously injured as a necessary consequence of playing the game. This is particularly shit if you’re a college football player who isn’t even getting minimum wage for your work, you’re betting your whole economic future on making it to the next tier, and then the game fucks you up because that is what the game is designed to do. Most sports have a pretty sharp pyramid shape and most people fall by the wayside and never make it to the top, but to be wrecked before you get anywhere good because that is what the game is designed to do isn’t very fair. Other games have introduced specific systems or rule changes to minimize the risk to players, without necessarily changing the overall level of violence or aggression, but NFL seems uniquely unwilling to do this. There’s a limit to how much I can enjoy a sport I know is designed to ruin its participants, and there are so many moments when the dangerous acts are gratuitous. It’s possible that NFL, being dangerous by design, can’t be changed, but in that case it will likely die as American parents forbid their kids from playing it. I won’t miss it if it does.
  • There’s no endurance penalty: In rugby and soccer players have to play for the full length of the game, which means that they have to balance the energy they put into individual plays against the need to go the distance. This is a natural part of any competitive system in nature. But in NFL the constant switches of teams mean that players don’t have to balance these things, and don’t get exhausted near the end as far as I can tell. This takes a lot of tension out of the game, and also eliminates one form of extreme effort from the enjoyment of the game. Particularly in rugby and boxing the last 10 minutes are a test of endurance and will as much as anything else, and losing teams have the chance to win something back by ruthlessly capitalizing on mistakes that happen when people are exhausted. The game also has a natural sense of having run its course, as the players are completely done for at the end, rather than having come to a bitter end because a weird unbalanced and unnatural clock finally reached 0. I also don’t really feel like I’m there alongside the players when they aren’t even sweating. It makes all the drama seem manufactured and culturally mandated rather than arising from the game, an impression that is simply reinforced by the injection of high drama through the narrative efforts of the announcers rather than arising organically from the contest itself.

Put together these things make the game seem dry and sterile to me, a manufactured contest rather than a real game. It doesn’t help that there aren’t many teams and a short season, which just increases the sense that all the drama is manufactured. The crowd also doesn’t have anything resembling the passion of similarly-sized European soccer crowds. Also what’s going on with every player saying which university they’re from when they introduce themselves in the pre-game team review? That’s super weird.

So those are the reasons I can’t enjoy NFL. Apart from “dangerous by design” I don’t think any of them are objectively bad things – they’re just things I don’t like, and obviously you’re welcome to not not like them. I would be happy to hear explanations or alternative interpretations of some of these things (except “you’re dumb for not liking this thing you don’t like”), or other comments on things that stop you enjoying this game. Also, tips on how to enjoy it! (Except “drink more” because the games are broadcast in the morning here).

fn1: And he’s not even a millenial!

fn2: Because Japan doesn’t broadcast the American ads and doesn’t play its own (because Japanese tv isn’t as rapacious as American I guess) they fill the advertising breaks with a review of the previous week’s games, which is prepared by the NFL. I guess the NFL has to prepare this for its overseas affiliates because we aren’t used to intense advertising and need something to fill the space. Or maybe it’s some weekly show. Anyway, it features weird overblown narration with a mixture of faux-highbrow imagery and bad puns, and we also get to see a lot of the sideline behavior of the players, which is frankly fucking awful.

 

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