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#where are those western politicians who say climate change is a myth?
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lligkv · 3 years
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what the world will look like when it’s over
Can’t Get You Out of My Head is the first Adam Curtis documentary I’ve seen. I gather it’s not the most successful demonstration of his method; it sounds like Hypernormalization or The Century of the Self are tighter in their construction, less effortful (count how many times Curtis says something like “But then it started to run out of control” in this one), and perhaps less frustrating in their narration. In the early episodes of this documentary in particular, it feels like Curtis is constantly presenting what’s being covered as the turn, the decisive shift in his narrative—the emergence of the American counterculture, the revolution of the “unit of One” led by Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing to help her break the stalemate with the other revolutionaries in China into which Zedong had fallen in the 1960s, George Boole’s development of Boolean logic to describe human thought. And the whole thing feels longer and baggier than it needs to be. The early episodes devote much time to interesting individual narratives, like that of the Trinidadian British activist or sorts named Michael Freitas (or Michael X) or a trans woman named Julie in 1960s Britain; they also sprawl in a way that makes the overall argument a bit hard to divine. It’s not until the fourth episode that the shape of Curtis’s narrative becomes clear—that our age is the product of a struggle between a new, broadly liberal-democratic and capitalist image of individualism, a dying era of collectivist struggle, and older, more vicious systems of power, derived from the control of capital and expressed through the middle classes’ suspicion and viciousness toward the subaltern and toward each other, even as they remain subject to the power of oligarchs and billionaires.
Curtis also seems to play fast and loose with the facts sometimes. When he presents Médecins Sans Frontières’s founder Bernard Kouchner as an avatar of a theory of the “one world” of liberal democracy—the idea that we’re basically one world of individuals, enjoying certain human rights regardless of political orientations or ideologies, and that Western nations are duty-bound by virtue of their prosperity to intervene when other nations violate people’s rights—it seems a distortion of what Kouchner actually says in the footage Curtis includes: “We don’t care on leftist or rightist countries [sic]; there is no leftist and rightist suffering, and there is no possibility to split the world in[to] ‘good’ people or ‘bad’ people, ‘good’ dead and ‘bad’ dead.” Which isn’t to say Kouchner didn’t believe in liberal-democratic ideas—he may well have—but what he’s shown as saying has to do with the consideration of suffering as suffering regardless of a person’s identity or allegiance, which is a different matter.
This is just one of several moments when I stopped to wonder how secure I actually was in Curtis’s hands. But ultimately, I find the emotional history he lays out resonant. The age we’re living through now, in the 2020s, is indeed the product of certain fantasies of individualism and of a post-end-of-history, neoliberal “one world”—with no ideologies but capitalism and putative democracy—meeting age-old systems of power, acquisition, and control, and age-old features of the human mind and heart: resentment, prejudice, betrayal, jealousy, the need to be prosperous, the need to be free.
And Curtis’s work appeals to me for the same reason the writer Pankaj Mishra’s work does. He historicizes our underhistoricized time. What’s more, he does so in a way that’s especially rare to see in any mainstream media venue. Usually, when you want to understand the connections between, say, colonial-era empires and post-war welfare states, or if you want to understand what happened to turn Western societies as they were post-war to Western societies as they are post-financialization, you have to seek the information out on your own. It’s valuable to have someone in a place like the BBC willing to put the pieces of these narratives together. And willing to remind us of the events that are so incredibly easy to forget even in one’s own lifetime. Abu Ghraib, for instance, which pops up in part 6 of the documentary. That shit happened while I was alive. How often do I remember it? How many American sins get drowned out in the new ones that emerge every day of every month of every year? Or in the stasis that sets in when what was once novel, like the War on Terror or the invasion into our privacy represented by the Patriot Act, fades into regular life?
I was jotting down copious notes while watching the doc, as is my wont. The questions and thoughts that came up, in no particular order:
How do the elites of a given era impose their preferred ideologies? How are the structures of power we grow up with constructed, and how do those go on to shape our behavior?
Control, as it’s practiced by societies in the 21st century, often comes down to the recognition of patterns in human behavior—and their manipulation.
The loss of power, like that which was suffered after the collapse of Britain’s empire or in the slow hollowing-out of America’s manufacturing industry in the 20th century, leads to anger and melancholy that people can’t be expected to abandon. Does doing what you’re supposed to do bring you the happiness you were promised—or anything even resembling that happiness? When we’re living in a historical moment in which the answer is no, as is often the case today, we’ll need to watch out. It’s a sign people are being manipulated and abused.
Over time, the tech industry has come to understand that you can manage people en masse by collecting their data and manipulating the messages they receive in social media activity feeds and advertising—and you can make them feel like sovereign individuals at the same time through the very same means. In light of all this, will there ever be a revolution that actually changes the structure of power we’re currently stuck in? Is there a chance to alter this extreme individualism. on the part of people who are surrounded by political systems so enervated, by the supra-governmental system that is global finance capital—which politicians can’t control, and must appease and palliate—that they can’t respond to phenomena like climate change or meaningfully punish atrocities like wars prosecuted on false pretenses? Or are we stuck where we are, in a world that’s corrupt and exhausted? In nations whose governments depend on technologies of surveillance and myths of consumerist abundance or nationalist glory to maintain power, in the absence of any real vision for the future?
It all leads to some interesting takeaways. For one, the way culture reacts to politics and vice versa. As I was watching Can’t Get You Out of My Head, I was reminded of a conversation folks on the Discord server for the Relentless Picnic podcast had had recently about the strange things Richard Dawkins posts on his Twitter account. And it led me to think: when religious “caring conservatism” was in the White House, Richard Dawkins and his New Atheism, this brash repudiation of religion and its pieties, grew as a counterweight. When Obama and his technocratic regime were in power, with social media bringing on a wave of progressivism in popular culture and algorithms presenting us a fantasy of endless choice—much of which was a thin veneer over the same old shit: banks getting bailed out, forever wars going on, productivity rising while wages stagnated—we also got Jordan Peterson-types who claimed to speak to a human need for narrative, even in this point of stability we had seemed to reach, this recovery of sanity after the chaos that was the Iraq War and the financial crisis; who claimed we needed ideas and myths to animate and drive our lives, because they sensed there was something hollow and mendacious driving all this consumer choice, for all it seemed a symbol of our freedom and progress.
Of course, both Peterson and Dawkins are provocateurs, not intellectuals; I don’t mean to dignify the movements they led much, since in both the appearance of intellectual rigor or moral clarity often covered the indulgence of the worst instincts: immaturity, obstinacy, provocation for provocation’s sake, contempt for women and trans people. The New Atheists had a point, and could be absolute assholes about it; they ultimately could be as fundamentalist and dogmatic as any religious people. As for Jordan Peterson, his actual work, in the way of so many grand theorists, uses the appearance of profundity to cover something ultimately pretty banal. And he’s most known for grandstanding in the public sphere—refusing to use people’s pronouns, the usual conservative shit. But these movements do seem to reflect a countercultural response no less than 1960s counterculture reflects a reaction to the staid culture of 1950s America and the sins it covered up.
Which leads me to the question: what was the culture’s response to Trump’s administration? Maybe QAnon and Russiagate, as conspiracies—that is, actual narratives people inhabit to explain the world’s evils, and not just a vague need for them that they satisfied with Jordan Peterson’s light form of Stoicism or his theories of Light and Dark or whatever the fuck. And in that way, perhaps, once a countercultural movement—namely nationalism and Trumpian populism—actually seemed to have overthrown a regime, of Obama-era liberal technocratic management, culture and politics came to mirror each other, rather than standing in opposition to each other. Both became equally conspiratorial and unhinged; in fact, they merged. All the ruling myths and conspiracies mutate in kind these days: Trump’s garbage about draining the swamp, a cover for Trump and his family enriching themselves and Stephen Miller’s like getting to fashion the state they wanted, becomes QAnon’s garbage about rings of child trafficking and pedophilia and Trump, of all people, being their savior—all while actual trafficking and abuse perpetuated by Jeffrey Epstein and his ilk goes unpunished, Epstein’s death swallowed up by the state without a sound—becomes the liberal pundit class’s screaming about Russia: connections between Trump and Putin that were always conjectural to me, because no one who pled them seemed to feel much need to substantiate them.
Here again I feel like what were once centrifugal forces in our culture—between mainstream and the independent media, for example; between people in power and their critics, either in the media or at society’s margins—have collapsed into a single morass. We’re all in hell and there’s no way out.
In all this, what does Biden’s administration represent? Little more than an interregnum, to my mind. How disappointing to see not even a gesture toward forgiving student debt or raising the minimum wage in these first 100 days of his presidency. There’s been some progress in climate legislation, and progress in putting Stephen Miller’s deportation machine to a halt (though they’re also reopening several emergency shelters to accommodate more minors already being held past the mandated limits for keeping them in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Refugee Resettlement). But there’s also been such triangulation on policy by the administration and its supporters and such complacency on the part of the media covering the administration, refusing to call them out on or even cover this. And how can the average voter respond but with resignation?
Ever since I read Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus near the start of lockdown, absorbing the picture of the world pre-World War II that’s presented in that book, I’ve thought we’re in the same sort of moment that Mann’s protagonist Zeitblom was in. There’s a crisis that’s passing over this whole planet like a wave or a seismic event, and no human intervention can interrupt it. We can only wait for it to pass—holding on to whatever’s to hand, waiting to see what the world will look like when it’s over.
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alisonfloresus · 7 years
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The Vilification Of Climate Change Sceptics
An article in the Washington Times recently discussed how skeptics of global warming are ‘treated like a pariah’. The article begins, ‘Scientists skeptical of climate-change theories say they are increasingly coming under attack – treatment that may make other analysts less likely to present contrarian views about global warming.’ The article cites an example of this by mentioning how a climatologist in Oregon might be stripped of his position by the governor for speaking out against the origins of climate change.
Most skeptics don’t claim that climate change is not occurring, they just disagree with what is causing it, and yet they are treated like traitors. A NASA funded study in 2004 found that, ‘Changes in the solar cycle – and solar output – are known to cause short-term climate change on Earth.’
In a storm of scientists speaking out against Al Gore’s movie, an New Zealand professor of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory has publicly stated, “Gore’s circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention.” In response to the use of images in Gore’s movie of glaciers breaking off, Dr. James Roebuck, a professor on marine geology and former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Sweden, said that, ‘The breaking glacier wall is a normally occurring phenomenon which is due to the normal advance of a glacier.’
Makes sense, especially since history tells us that glaciers move, after all, that’s what helped form our valleys and reshaped mountain ranges at the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago. Maybe my memory isn’t very good, but I don’t think people were driving SUVs 10,000 years ago. Another clever use of images to manipulate facts that Gore has in his movie is that of a polar bear seemingly stranded on a piece of a broken off ice berg, stating that polar bears are becoming extinct because of global warming.
However, there are a few things wrong with this assessment, first of all, that according to a paper published by University of Alaska professor Franklin Kane, ‘the region of the Arctic where rising temperature is supposedly endangering polar bears showed fluctuations since 1940 but no overall temperature rise.’ Secondly, if the polar bear is in such danger according to Al Gore, then why does a recent government survey in Canada show that they are not declining, but rather rising in numbers?
Thirdly, the very idea of a polar bear ‘stranded’ on a small block of ice is in itself misleading for Gore’s argument, as polar bears are excellent swimmers and according to Sea World, ‘They can swim for several hours at a time over long distances [and] they’ve been tracked swimming continuously for 100 km (62 miles)’ Professor Kane, speaking about Gore and his personal crusade, said, ‘The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science.’
Even if Al Gore was telling the truth about the causes of global warming, or climate change, which most evidence points to the fact that he is not, but even if he was, he would still be a hypocrite. It was recently revealed that Al Gore doesn’t exactly practice what he preaches, such as what he said in his Academy Award acceptance speech, ‘People all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis. It’s not a political issue; it’s a moral issue.’
Well, in that case, why is it that a recent study by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research found that one of Al Gore’s mansions uses 20 times the amount of electricity that the average American does. It was also reported that Al Gore consumes twice as much the electricity in one month that the average American consumes in one year.
In examining that there is more evidence to prove the basis for a conclusion that changes in climate are more related to an increase in the temperature of the Sun rather than influence of people, we must examine why efforts to expose this myth are stifled and those who speak out are attacked. In fact, there are reported cases of scientists who speak out against the man-made theory as having received death threats. There has even been talk of relating those who speak out against the currently held theory on global warming as being equal to those who deny the Holocaust.
In a recent op-ed piece in the Boston Herald commenting on the report issued by the UN, Eileen Goodrich wrote, ‘Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.’ This is a very disturbing comment, not only because there is reason to scientifically doubt the man-made theory, but also because this is a scathing attack on freedom of speech, the most vital and important of all rights and freedoms.
With the UN Panel’s judgment in, western politicians are quick to declare that the debate is over, and action must be taken immediately. What is this action that they are planning on taking? The Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, Alistair Darling, has publicly called for a ‘new world order’ to combat the threat of climate change. So let’s have a look at this New World Order that’s being implemented to combat the threat of global warming.
One major thing being pushed through with little, cancel that, no debate, is a UN recommendation that we impose ‘a global tax on greenhouse gas emissions’. Most people will hear this and think, ‘Good, polluters need to be taxed’. Well, this means people who drive cars will be taxed, because according to Al Gore, when you drive your car, you’re causing global warming. This is no joke, as an article in the UK’s Guardian Newspaper reported that, ‘The government is throwing its weight behind a revolutionary plan that would force motorists to pay 1.30 pounds sterling a mile to drive on Britain’s busiest roads’. That is approximately $ 3.00 per mile.
A study conducted by an expert in transportation and infrastructure found that, ‘a Birmingham commuter might end up paying about 1,500 pounds sterling a year for driving 19,000 miles.’ That’s equal to about $ 3,000 per year. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know many people who can afford that. In the European Union, plans are being made to impose an increase of taxes on diesel. The European Commission recently proposed to ‘raise the minimum tax on commercial diesel fuel by nearly 20% over the next seven years’. This, they claim, is to help protect the environment because it will act as a deterrent for people to drive.
This is just excellent news, because as anyone who has driven in the past two years knows, gas prices are just too low. Another concern arising out of the concept of taxing people for how far they drive is how it is done. According to the Transport Secretary in the UK, ‘Every vehicle would have a black box to allow a satellite system to track their journey’. This has been raising concerns in the UK of an increase in Big Brother technology and government programs. Proposals currently being made in Canada recommend that, ‘Canadians would pay an extra 10 cents per litre at the gas pumps’, mirroring plans in the European Union.
from JournalsLINE http://journalsline.com/2017/06/25/the-vilification-of-climate-change-sceptics/ from Journals LINE https://journalsline.tumblr.com/post/162239147115
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