Monday 11 November 2019

What I've Been Reading, October 2019

Links

Miscellaneous

Capitalism, Communism, Anarchy

The New Fascism, and Antifa

I hear a lot of well educated people saying that the people some of us are calling fascists don't meet all the criteria for being "real" fascists. Others have even accused us of calling anyone we disagree with a fascist. I predict that a few decades from now those same people will be saying they wish they hadn't been quite so fussy with their definitions, and had acted sooner to oppose these "new fascists", even if they weren't identical to the fascists of the twentieth century.

  • America’s Bizarre Plunge Into Authoritarian Fascist Theocracy, by Umair Haque, Medium—Eudaimonia
    "Just How Weird and Extreme is This Collapse Getting?"
  • How Fascists Warp the Idea of Patriotism, by Umair Haque, Eudaimonia
    "What (The Problematic Idea of) Patriotism Means to Me"
    "For the fascist, allegiance to a society is replaced by allegiance not just to tribe or even to 'homeland' — or even to a single figure, the demagogue. For the fascist, allegiance to anything or anyone is replaced by allegiance to a simple, ugly, grotesque set of ideas. First, that the strong are those who are pure of blood. Second, that the job of the strong is to dominate — abuse, enslave, annihilate — the weak. Third, so that the 'homeland' is cleansed and pure, too. Fourth, so that the fascists’s sons of violence and daughters of chastity inherit it."

Decoupling

While relative improvements have been made and more are attainable still, there are hard physical limits to the extent to which our economy can be dematerialized. Far from being the panacea that would allow unabated ‘sustainable growth’ as many green capitalists so desperately cling to, decoupling is one more siren song advanced industrial economies need to resist if they’re to avoid collapse.

Collapse

Peak Oil

Climate Change

  • Techno-fix futures will only accelerate climate chaos – don’t believe the hype, by Joanna Boehnert and Simon Mair, The Conversation—Environment and Energy
  • ‘Managed Retreat’ From Climate Change Is Leaving the Most Vulnerable People Behind, by Drew Costley, Medium—OneZero
    "FEMA’s program to help Americans adapt to climate change isn’t helping everyone"
  • The Stark Inequality of Climate Change, by Rachel Riederer, The New Yorker
    "Two new books argue from different angles that natural disasters—like flooding in North Carolina caused by Hurricane Florence—make inequality worse."
  • Climate Gentrification — an entitlement for the rich, by David Wineberg, Medium—The Straight Dope
  • ‘Worse Than Anyone Expected’: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions, by Hiroko Tabuchi, New York Times
    "The findings put pressure on airline regulators to take stronger action to fight climate change as they prepare for a summit next week."
  • Half a century of dither and denial – a climate crisis timeline, by Jonathan Watts, Garry Blight and Pablo GutiĆ©rrez, The Guardian
    Fossil fuel companies have been aware of their impact on the planet since at least the 1950s
  • Climate and War: Bill McKibben’s Deadly Miscalculation, by Luke Orsborne, The Wrong Kind of Green
    "Military R&D is not geared toward saving the planet from human destruction. Any overlaps with so-called green technological development is secondary to its primary, narrow framework of creating efficient systems of killing to protect a national agenda set by the interests of the wealthy elite. This framework, more often than not, runs contrary to environmental protection. From the radioactive contamination of people and land caused by the use of depleted uranium, to the pollution of drinking water, to the creation of hundreds of superfund sites across the US, America’s military is well understood to be not just a massive source of greenhouse gases, but one of the largest polluters on the planet."
    "Only when people join together, rejecting mass consumer culture embodied in capitalism and enforced through militarism, to instead create leverage through sustained civil disobedience and the creation of ecologically minded communities that view life as sacred, can the kind of radical demands needed for the potential of a livable future be realized."
    "Rather than masking reality with feel good propaganda that profits the wealthy, it is our decision to move with a fierce and loving intent from within a darkness we are able to acknowledge, that gives us the capacity to be both carriers of genuine transformation in a troubled yet salvageable world, and steadfast companions in one that is doomed."
  • Leading Australian engineers turn their backs on new fossil fuel projects , by Ben Smee, The Guardian

Food

  • The four stages of vitamin B12 deficiency, by Maria Cross, Medium
    "Given up animal foods? How to ensure you don’t get to stage four. The damage could be irreversible."
  • Red Meat and Your Health: Should You Cut Back?, by Fueled by Science, medium—Lifestyle
    "Carving up the latest studies on red meat to reveal what we know — and what we don’t."
  • Raw Faith, by Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker
    The nun and the cheese underground.
    I make cheese myself, and have no choice but to use pasteurized milk. The cheese still comes out pretty good.

Genetic Engineering

Before jumping to the erroneous conclusion that this section was paid for by Monsanto, stop for a moment and understand that organic agriculture/food is a multi-billion dollar per year industry that relies on fear to get people to buy its product. Millions of dollars are spent to convince you that non-organic food is dangerous. In fact both conventionally grown and organic foods are equally safe. Sadly neither method of agriculture is even remotely substainable.

  • Panic-free GMOs, A Grist Special Series
    "It’s easy to get information about genetically modified food. There are the dubious anti-GM horror stories that recirculate through social networks. On the other side, there’s the dismissive sighing, eye-rolling, and hand patting of pro-GM partisans. But if you just want a level-headed assessment of the evidence in plain English, that’s in pretty short supply. Fortunately, you’ve found the trove."
    A series of articles that does a pretty good job of presenting the facts about GMOs.
  • Five common GMO myths: debunked, by Real Farm Lives

Practical Skills

American Politics

  • Here’s an Idea: Don’t Pay Them, by John Nichols, The Nation
    "Congressional Progressive Caucus cochair Mark Pocan has a great idea: If Trump appointees block congressional testimony, block their paychecks."
    Without something of this sort, American democracy is just about finished with. The famous "checks and balances" don't seem to be working.

Canadian Politics

Ontario Politics

Linguistics

Debunking Resources

These are of such importance that I've decide to leave them here on an ongoing basis.

Pseudoscience

  • Let's Talk About ‘The Game Changers’…, by Thomas Mitchelhill, Medium—Film
    This article points out a good deal of pseudoscience in the film it discusses, but I still don't really agree with the "very simple point" it makes at the start.

Science Based Medicine

"Science is properly reductionist for a reason. In order to understand the world, and to have reliable empirical knowledge, you have to build your theories from the bottom up, but also confirm them from the top down. This means that we correlate ultimate effects with basic knowledge about mechanisms. Scientific knowledge does not have to flow in any particular direction. At times we discover something fundamental about the world, and then look for implications and applications. At other times we observe effects in the world, and then reverse engineer their cause. In either case real scientific phenomena become increasingly embedded in this network of knowledge. When a claim remains persistently isolated at one level, and neither leads to further applications or to more basic discoveries about the nature of reality, that is suspect."
by Steven Novella on the Neurologica blog

Lacking an Owner's Manual

The human body/mind/spirit doesn't come with an owner's manual, and we continually struggle to figure out how best to operate them.

Gender and Sexuality

Poverty, Homeless People, Minimum Wage, UBI, Health Care, Affordable Housing

Books

Fiction

A slow month for fiction. Both of the books that I read are kind of second rate.

Non-Fiction

  • Risk!, by David Ropeik ad George Gray
    "A practical guide for deciding what's really safe and what's really dangerous in the world around you"
  • Walking to Camelot, by John A. Cherrington
    "John Cherrington and his 74-year-old walking companion set out one fine morning in May to traverse the only English footpath that cuts south through the rural heart of the country, a formidable path called the Macmillan Way."

6 comments:

Antony said...

Hi Irv,

I like your blog very much - you are reading a lot of interesting stuff. I look in now and then when I have time and there is always something new to learn. Thanks for your efforts! BUT you do not seem to mention electromagnetic sensitivity (or people with chemical sensitivities) and the upcoming (already happening) rollout of 5G. This is serious stuff! If you have time to read it, please can you look at the 5G Space Appeal at https://www.5gspaceappeal.org/ ? This will give you a basic intro to the issues involved - some of which you may know already. (Apologies if you have already mentioned it - I just didn't see it.) Tony

Irv Mills said...

@ Antony

I am sorry to have to disappoint you, but please note the tag line of this blog "a reality based approach to life in the age of scarcity". And by "reality based" I mean I mean evidence and science based, or more simply, based on the "scientific consensus", and not interested in "woo" or pseudoscience.

So you won't see much here about electromagnetic or chemical sensitivities (including 5G), which are pure woo. Unless I find good articles debunking them, which I would be pleased to include.

For a more lengthy disucssion, I would suggest you read my series of articles entitledh Business as Usual, Crunchiness and Woo

Antony said...

Hi again Irv,

Thanks for your response. I read your "BAU, Crunchiness and Woo". A lot I agree with, some I disagree with, but that is the nature of debate. I'm definitely crunchy, but with minimum (can there be zero?) woo. In fact, over the last 40 years I have spent quite a lot of time attempting to grasp just exactly what is behind some kinds of "woo" - but that's another story.

5G has two main issues: 1) It is a wonderful surveillance tool that will make current notions of "privacy" totally obsolete. IoT, AI, big data will lock us all into a system of control that will be essentially inescapable. 2) Health effects. I'm worried about both 1) and 2). Perhaps you have heard about 1). Do you consider this to be woo? Many, like yourself, appear to feel that 2) is "woo. Allow me to (very briefly) attempt to change your mind.

a) Please see the paper "Wi-Fi is an important threat to human health" by Martin L. Pall at
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin_Pall - I do not think this is woo.

b) Please see the work of Arthur Firstenberg, especially his book "Invisible Rainbow" at https://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/ - the book is self-published, but I believe that that is because BAU does not want the general public to read it. Please reserve judgment on whether this is woo or not until you have read it - I know it's a long read and a bit expensive. (The content is backed by 155 pages of notes and bibliography.) I also gave you the link to the 5G Space Appeal in my first comment. I really do recommend you look at it with an open mind.

c) There are now diagnostic criteria and ICD codes for electromagnetic health effects and sensitivity. This only happened a few months ago, so it is new and still in the developing stages, but it does go some distance toward assisting people who are suffering from this problem and who thus far have been brushed under the carpet as "woo". 5G is likely to exacerbate this problem, especially as 1000s of satellites are in the process of being launched to give worldwide 5G coverage. We won't really know till it happens, but then it is too late, isn't it?

5G is very powerful BAU and potentially very dangerous, as you will see if you read the materials above - even if you do not read Invisible Rainbow. I sincerely hope you will look at the materials with an open mind and perhaps revise your judgement of electromagnetic health effects and sensitivity as being "pure woo". As you say in your long blog post: "At this point let me say that just because I have a considered opinion on most everything, I don't think that I know everything for certain. I'm only human and while I've put quite a lot of effort into figuring out what's what, I have to admit that I may have made some errors. Keeping this in mind is, I think, a good start." That's a very commendable and honest position to take. If I didn't think you would live up to it I would not be writing this comment. I agree with you and I am also very certain that I do not know everything. If you see "woo" in the above, please feel free to point it out. Thanks and look forward to reading your blog in the future!

Irv Mills said...

@ Antony

As to your point 1, I think there is very likely something to it.

As to your point 2, nope, pure woo. And fear mongering that is causing a lot of grief for those who are taken in by it.

PatOrmsby said...

Mr. Mills,
I take it you yourself do not experience negative effects from exposure to modern telecommunications devices, but a lot of people do, the number continues to increase as the volume of this biologically disruptive energy grows, and it is really patronizing to tell these people that they are just imagining all the pain they experience. How can they prove to you what you cannot yet feel for yourself?

What I really think is going on is you have built a nice life around the narrative that technological progress will save the world, and now along comes a group of people, outcasts, who are trying to tell you that no, it isn't true. There are multiple impacts on our health and environment that at some point, if we continue to ignore them, become irreversible. But if you believe that, your whole life crumbles, so you don't even want to look into it. You take the word of the people selling you these devices. Do I blame you? No, but we are all going to pay for this.

Go ahead and say that I believe in "woo," a word that makes you sound very much like a small child. To me, "woo" is just another way of saying "not conforming to group think."

Irv Mills said...

@ Pat Ormsby

Feeling a little defensive are you, Pat?

I do occassionally experience some of symptoms that some people attribute to emf, as have most people. But I certainly do not attribute them to electromagnetic fields. Why? Because I have studied up on the subject and I am convinced that there is simply no evidence to support the idea. (See links at the end of this comment).

I would never say that they are imagining their symptoms, nor question that they can be quite debilitating, but I would dispute what is causing those symptoms. In some cases the symptoms are being caused by some real condition (other than emf sensitivity) which needs to be diagnosed and treated. Where this is not the case I would attribute them to the "nocebo" effect. This is the complementary concept to the placebo effect, where negative expectations cause negative effects. These effects are quite real, and not to be scoffed at. Complementary medicine practitioners who reinforce those negative expectations are extremely irresponsible, and are in fact the cause of a great deal of distress and misery. But, as always, where there is money to be made, quacks and charlatans are eager to jump on the band wagon.

It is actually rather amusing that you would accuse me of "building a nice life around the narrative that technological progress will save the world". The subject of this blog is the collapse of industrial civilization, from an evidence based viewpoint, and one of my conclusions is that technology and progress are not going to solve our problems.

I use the term "woo" as an expression of my frustration with people refuse to accept what the evidence clearly shows to be true on any particular subject, and instead are taken in by dishonest people who stand to profit handsomely from misleading them. I could just as well say "pseudoscience", but woo has a nastier connotation which is exactly what I am looking for.

Now, this blog exists to provide me with a platform to express my opinions about collapse, and I am willing to entertain wide ranging discussion on that subject in these comments. But I am not willing to provide you with a platform to peddle woo, so I will be deleting further comments from you and your ilk on the subject.

For those who are interested in what science says on the subject of emf sensitivity, here are a few links. They will also be included in this month's list of What I've Been Reading, in the "Pseudoscience" section.

Wikipedia article: Electromagnetic hypersensitivity
Wikipedia article: nocebo effect
Pain science.com: Electromagnetic Sensitivity Absurdity
Rational Wiki: Electromagnetic hypersensitivity
Science based medicine, search results on emf sensitivity. Some excellent article near the top of the search results.
Quack Watch: "Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity" Is Not a Valid Diagnosis