I, like many Canadians, had for many years bought into the widespread misconception of democratic governance constituting some kind of political ‘end-state’; some pinnacle of societal achievement, in no need of further perfection and essentially impervious to most threats, such that it could be brought down only by a sudden disaster of an exceptional character and/or foreign occupation by a non-democratic state. Without even knowing his name or his record, I had nevertheless managed to fully imbibe Francis Fukuyama’s theory of “the end of history”, wherein governance by liberal democracy appears virtually synonymous with the attainment of a society-wide state of nirvana. Fukuyama has long since walked back this claim in a variety of ways, but this particular myth appears to pervade ostensibly liberal, democratic societies to this day, and perhaps has even been doing so since long before Fukuyama first put the phenomenon into writing.
Partly owing to this blessed ignorance of mine, for many years I had no reason to feel as if anything bad was happening in my own, liberal democracy. I went on to spend five years in university learning from, and speaking to, people who were experts on the subject of tyranny — if not because they had studied the topic for years, then because they themselves had lived through the experience. Even before this, I have always been drawn to literature, fictional or otherwise, first- or second-hand, dealing with the stories of those people unfortunate enough to have to try living under an oppressive and hostile state regime. I always wanted to know how things could ever get to that point — surely, one does not simply wake up one day and suddenly realize that something has gone horribly wrong. There must be warning signs; events and circumstances that might indicate the devious direction one’s country is headed towards.
All the while, my interest in such things had something of a voyeuristic aspect to it. As much as I shuddered to think of what I would have — or could have — have done in a similar situation, my musings on the matter were only slightly less ignorant than those that could be offered by someone with decidedly less interest on the topic. One way or the other, all of the first-hand tales in the world could not change the fact that I, myself, had never been in such circumstances. Crucially, this allowed me to retain a degree of separation from the horrible realities that others had endured; it did not, I believed, ever have to enter my reality. After all, it was not my brother who was dragged, kicking and screaming, out of his apartment building at three in the morning, never to be seen again. It was not my father who was shot in front of his family for refusing to hand over his farming equipment. And above all, it was not me who had to live with the memory of these things; who could vividly re-tell the events contained within, as if they had happened yesterday; who would never be able to forget them, even if I wished to do so. Though the empathy I felt for their suffering may have been genuine, their sorrow was not truly my burden to bear: I could leave this re-constructed world of terror at any point, and return to the one that did not scare me quite so much. Ultimately, I had the choice not to think about those things.
A lot of things have changed, since then. I’m no longer sure when it first was that I realized there was something rotten about the state of Canada. Certainly, it was some time around the Indian Voyage fiasco early last year that I knew for sure the country was not being led by our best and brightest. By then, the trans-Atlantic network of suspiciously well-dressed and well-fed “refugees” flowing between New York state and the Quebec border had been quite well established; this had made me angry at the time, so perhaps the end of my optimism had come even sooner than the India trip. I don’t really remember, but it doesn’t matter either way.
Fast forward to this past week. On Wednesday, a journalist, who is by no means a stranger to his seasoned colleagues whom hail from other news outlets, was repeatedly denied access to the Liberal Party campaign bus, on the alleged basis of not having the proper accreditation as a member of the media. This rationale works well as a cover-story to the public ear, because most members of the general public are not aware that accreditation is nothing like a process of “certification” or even “licencing”; rather, it is the simple act of demonstrating that one has contributed content to the news media in some manner (i.e., is a journalist), and receiving a slip of paper meant to serve as recognition of that fact. That’s it. For someone such as this particular journalist, accreditation is only a Google search away.
Of course, that’s not what happened. Effectively, this journalist was denied accreditation to board the bus, on the basis of not having accreditation to board the bus. As his colleague explains, “This is the equivalent of showing up at the DMV to get a driver’s license and them telling you that they can’t give a license because you’re not a licensed driver” — a perfect Catch-22. As the story goes, this journalist was later detained by police for following behind the bus by car; he says he had no choice but to do this, as none of the journalists who were on the bus, much less the campaign war room, were willing to tell him or his outlet where it would be pulling over next. This, in a country where, provided you meet the appropriate racial description, you can shove your hand down the pants of a 14 year-old girl and get away with it — don’t try to follow the Liberal campaign bus, though, because the police will get right on that! Later, on the other side of the country, he was denied entry (again, by local police) into a public building where a Liberal campaign event was taking place — not as a member of the media, mind you, but as an ordinary, curious member of the electorate. Just like you and me.
One of the other things I have always wondered about tyrannies of the past is whether or not a substantial part of the population was ever on board with it. Surely, one would expect that many would be made to go along with the narrative; but were there any among them who genuinely bought into the lies they were peddling? Depending on the particular regime, the answer to this varies considerably — sometimes, yes; other times, no. At any rate, most are not permitted the space to openly voice any disagreement, and the general public is left only to wonder.
Well, as it turns out, there is something to be said for the power of denial. Witnessing the passionate creativity with which any and all concerns regarding the legality, credibility, or indeed the necessity of the events outlined above have been effortlessly cast-aside by multiple members of the public, is truly a sight to behold. It’s the kind of mental run-around that could only be successfully orchestrated by those who really ought to know better — which is why I call it denial, rather than pure ignorance.
In all fairness, I can understand where they’re coming from: this land, our land, is not supposed to be a place where those things happen. Thus, there has to be some legitimate reason to refuse a journalist — conspicuously, one belonging to one of the few genuinely right-wing media outlets that remain in this country — entry to Liberal campaign events — right? There simply must be some kind of explanation for this. Because, if it turns out that there isn’t one, then that means that we live in a country where the ruling party can prevent a credible member of this press from covering their campaign events during an election, simply because there is a high chance that said journalist will disagree with the party’s position; maybe even in written form. Which, if it were true, would imply that we really, really don’t have such a thing as a free press in Canada. And that just can’t be the case — right?
Right?
No — you know what? That journalist can’t be a “real” journalist if he wasn’t allowed to cover the Liberal campaign. Maybe that’s it. Maybe, he was a journalist at some point, but he isn’t now. I’m not really sure how that would be determined beyond the aforementioned accreditation system, but surely the sitting party has a reliable way of doing it — this is their job, after all; who are we to question their performance? And, you know, even if the NDP thought his credentials were good enough to cover their campaign events, that doesn’t mean that the Liberals didn’t make the right decision — different party, different policy. What do we really know about any of this? We didn’t see how he was driving — maybe they were worried about being followed by a car. That’s reasonable, isn’t it? After all, some very important people were on board that bus; their safety really ought to come first. Maybe, then, they figured the guy was trouble when he tried to enter a different event as a member of the public, and they denied him entry just to be on the safe side. I mean, we really should be asking why this “journalist” was so persistent in the first place: do you really have to ask the Prime Minister questions, like, that badly? Like, come on, man; just do what you’re told and stop causing problems.
Right, so, there’s nothing really amiss here. This guy is just salty that he wasn’t allowed in, and he’s probably exaggerating the details because of that. That makes sense — much more sense than his version of the story, where he wasn’t allowed on the bus “just because.” None of this really means anything, then. No need to be upset. No need to fan the flames any further; we really ought to just forget about the whole thing. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Let’s not worry about it anymore.
We still live in a liberal democracy — this is Canada, after all. The true north, strong and free. There’s no tyranny in Canada, nor should we ever expect it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to cause trouble, so it’s best to ignore them. Things really aren’t that bad here.
…right?
In truth, I don’t know. I don’t like any of this; I don’t like where we’re heading, and I don’t really like to imagine what could happen further down the road. I would rather not try to speculate as to how it could get that bad here, or what that would mean, or what it might look like. In fact, I would rather not think about those things at all. Now’s about the time that I would really, really like to go back to playing the role of an audience member, to be observing the events of someone else’s world, and not be a part of it myself.
According to an article released today by The Canadian Press, one of our nation’s most ‘beloved’ (hated) politicians — Environment Minister Catherine “Climate Barbie” McKenna — who has long been the target of angry Twitter replies and private messages practically since her election, has more recently been subjected to verbal abuse while out in public; on some occasions, this has happened while she was accompanied by her kids. As the article reports:
Environment Minister Catherine McKenna says she was recently walking outside a movie theatre with her children when a car slowly pulled to a stop beside them.
The driver rolled down his window and then he let fly.
“F…… you, Climate Barbie,” he shouted, as she tried to back away from his car and get her kids away from him.
Now, it should be explained for the non-Canadians that McKenna isn’t exactly admired by large swaths of the country: she is, among other things, one of the chief architects of our nation’s controversial carbon tax; she is well-known on Canadian Twitter for her horrendously tone-deaf takes regarding pretty much anything related to the economy, or the environment, for that matter; and on top of all this, her ministry has had a direct hand in the ongoing dismantling of our oil and gas sector, which has cost some hundreds of thousands of jobs over the course of her tenure, primarily in the province of Alberta where most of said jobs were located. So, one can imagine why she doesn’t have the biggest fan club. This much is clearly demonstrated as the article continues:
The incident at the movie theatre is just one of several times her kids have been with her when someone in public began to yell at her. She has been called the C-word, a traitor, an enemy and a “communist piece of garbage.” Her family’s safety has been threatened more than once. Some people have wished she and her children will get fatal diseases. She has received sexualized messages so hateful they could be enough to make even the hardest of hearts skip a beat.
At any rate, McKenna’s been feeling enough of the heat that she now feels it necessary to be escorted by a security detail while out and about, at least in some circumstances. Now, I can understand that this must be a less than ideal situation for her to be in, no less for her kids. However, I can also understand why this is happening — and it’s not, as McKenna appears to believe, simply because she’s a woman in politics.
Before we begin to dissect this, a big, fat disclaimer: I am in no way condoning sending McKenna threats of any sort, nor attacking her children (or even attacking her when she is with them in public). It’s not even about ‘optics’, really; all this kind of thing does is give the political establishment further justification for silencing the voice of the opposition. We should be spending what limited room we still have left to be heard by the greater public in a productive, level-headed manner; not encouraging the already-small window of “acceptable speech” to grow ever smaller.
Having said that — what did she think was going to happen? Did she honestly, seriously expect to be able to ruin the livelihoods of thousands of Canadians, not just in Alberta but across the country, and not have to deal with the predictable anger generated by her actions? Canadians may be an unfortunately passive folk, but we’re far from passive enough to take this kind of abuse lying down — honestly, I’m more surprised that this kind of reaction is only bubbling up now, a month before the election, than I am that it’s happening at all. Again, I ask: did she actually think that she could play such an active, enthusiastic role in destroying the financial security of so many individuals and families without being made to face some form of backlash over it? I mean… really?
Now, I’m not at all sure if McKenna believes her own bullshit: I’m tempted to say that, yes, she does genuinely think that “our planet is burning” and is justifying the disaster she has inflected upon helpless resource industry workers and their families as being necessary for some greater good; on the other hand, her infamous penchant for staged photo-ops leads me to believe that she may be aware, at least to some extent, of the true nature behind this mass hysteria-turned-pyramid scheme we call the “climate crisis” — at the very least, she is clearly no stranger to the art of deception. One way or another, the anger she is currently facing from members of the general public is in no way unique from that faced by any other politician who’s managed to piss off as many people as she has; the only difference here is that she’s trying to defer responsibility for the consequences of her bad decisions by declaring this vitriol to be grounded in her being female, rather than in those bad decisions.
It could be that, as a liberal-minded woman in 2019, McKenna really did expect not to face the same sort of personal attacks and public condemnation for being a corrupt politician as have her male, corrupt counterparts throughout the entire history of democratic government. It’s not a reasonable expectation, but I can see someone like McKenna having it — they don’t call her “Climate Barbie” just because she’s blonde and pretty, after all. But if this is the case, she seems to have forgotten how poorly the “female politicians are beyond criticism” card worked out for her former party colleagues, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Phillpot; the electorate, on the other hand, has not — maybe McKenna thinks she’s special. Or, she could be entirely aware that no one really gives a damn that she’s female and is simply desperate to curry favour and sympathy from the (hopefully) few remaining members of the public who do care — again, I’m not entirely sure.
I will admit to being quite biased in this regard however, sitting here, as I am, actively suffering from the holy decrees issued by High Priestess McKenna — and I don’t even work in oil and gas. Among those who don’t like to think about much of anything for terribly long, it appears relatively common to assume that the only people who’re really affected by the devastation of our natural resource sector are the sector workers themselves; moreover, the fact that some of those people once made a comfortable living for themselves leads the lazy-thinkers to demonstrate little to no sympathy for the entirely manufactured crisis that they now have to endure. Of course, the matter is much more complicated: as it turns out, if a large chunk of the population in a given region derives their primary income from a particular sector of the economy, and that sector is then actively undermined at every possible twist and turn, such that those people start losing their jobs due to large-scale capital flight toward safer operational waters, we can expect the following sequence of events to unfold:
The people who lost their jobs will have to either find a different, likely lower-paying job, or they will have to move out of the region to find work — either way, they will be putting less money back into the economy than they were before, if any at all;
If there’s not as much money flowing back into the local economy, there is less ability and incentive for businesses in the service sector to have as many staff on hand and/or provide the same level of service as before. Accordingly, workers in that sector are subject to pay cuts and layoffs of their own;
Quite obviously, making less money tends to lead toward having less disposable income, which means — again — less money flowing back into the local economy. As people, businesses, and investors continue to flee the region, and there is no substitute employment available for the displaced workers to turn to, this cycle perpetuates itself near-infinitely. The casualties will continue mount up over time, and will come to include not only the original victims and the service industry, but as well those professional sectors that require having clients around in order to make a living — doctors, lawyers, real estate, the public sector, you name it;
Ultimately, by the time you get to a situation akin to the one currently faced by Albertans, thousands of individuals and families, with incomes ranging from between $0 to over $100,000 annually, end up getting screwed over; irrespective of whether or not those individuals and families were directly employed by the sector targeted for destruction.
So you see, it’s not just the knuckle-dragging F150 drivers so despised by yuppy urbanites that are feeling the pain — it’s also all those people who effectively depend upon those “uneducated hillbillies” having money to spend in order to keep their own employers afloat, many of whom happen to be on the lower end of the pay scale. As such, while McKenna and her cronies rail against the Big Oil execs for supposedly destroying the climate, they fail to realize — or care — that the reckless decimation of this particular industry ultimately affects those executives at an absolutely miniscule level, in comparison to how it affects virtually everyone working beneath them. Rather than “fighting on behalf” of the working and middle class, she and her party have played an active part in destroying them both.
Adding insult to injury is how much McKenna, along with virtually the entire roster of the Liberal party, actively demean and look down upon anyone who complains about the consequences outlined above. Anyone familiar with her Twitter feed will be aware of how frequently she chastises any and all criticism of the government’s “climate action” as pushing “divisive” and “partisan” rhetoric, before turning around and sewing further division and partisanship with claims that a Conservative government will somehow destroy the economy even more so than she has. McKenna parrots her latest mantra — “It’s good for the environment, and it’s good for the economy” — ad nauseum, while at the same time turning her back on the thousands of citizens who have very genuine, very pressing concerns regarding being made to pay greater taxes while having less disposable income with which to do so. “We’ve got a real climate plan that reduces pollution and puts more money in your pockets,” declares Her Holiness from the pulpit, while households across Alberta and beyond wonder if they’ll ever see a dime.
So — is it unfortunate that Catherine McKenna has been accosted in public while her children were present? Yes. Is it perhaps a bit scary for her to have to deal with justifiably angry people, be it on social media or in real life? Sure. Have some of the things said by those people been a bit over-the-top, or even uncalled for? I suppose I could agree to that, too.
But do I feel bad for her? Not in the slightest. I do feel bad for her kids, who are being intimidated through no fault of their own; but as for their mother, I couldn’t care less. To a certain extent, I wish I could “be the better person” here and muster up some degree of sympathy for her, however minute, despite our “differing views” — but it’s really not about different views anymore, is it? After all, these views of hers have been translated into policies that have had a direct, unilaterally negative effect on thousands of households like mine, and I find it extremely difficult to care about McKenna’s troubles when she has never even once acknowledged the far more serious troubles she has inflicted upon so many of her fellow Canadians as a result of her decisions. Some people have even lost their homes, all on account of having had the misfortune to have been employed in a sector that became a target for politically-motivated interference; this, too, McKenna has actively encouraged. With that being the case, all I have to say to McKenna is this: I’m sorry to hear that you’re being yelled at on the street, but look on the bright side — at least you don’t have to sleep there.
A. E.
12:54 pm on August 26, 2019 Tags: behavioral control, behavioral nudges, mass surveillance ( 3 ), silicon valley, social credit, social engineering
At long last, someone in the (relatively) mainstream media is talking about what I’ve been warning of on this blog for the last couple of months — China’s social credit system, coming to a smartphone application near you. Elgan’s article does not cover the totalitarian coup de gras, however — this being the addition of “carbon conscious” behavioral nudges, in between all the ‘regular’ ones — but in all fairness, it may be a little too early in the “normie sphere” of understanding the world to introduce the concept just yet. Wouldn’t want to freak people out, right?
Just for review, Elgan describes the current Chinese model off helicopter-governing as follows:
In place since 2014, the social credit system is a work in progress that could evolve by next year into a single, nationwide point system for all Chinese citizens, akin to a financial credit score. It aims to punish for transgressions that can include membership in or support for the Falun Gong or Tibetan Buddhism, failure to pay debts, excessive video gaming, criticizing the government, late payments, failing to sweep the sidewalk in front of your store or house, smoking or playing loud music on trains, jaywalking, and other actions deemed illegal or unacceptable by the Chinese government [emphasis added].
So, you see, the system already goes far beyond the level of suppressing political dissent and/or enforcing the law, however draconian: “unacceptable” behaviors are now deemed to include excessive video gaming (how this is defined is, of course, for the government to know and the citizens to find out) and being rude in public. Again — it is really not that far of a leap between these current standards and the incoming, “green behavior” standards as are to be set by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). “Failing to properly sort recyclables” would not look out of place on the above list in the slightest.
And what are the punishments to be bestowed upon those who transgress the credit system?
Punishments can be harsh, including bans on leaving the country, using public transportation, checking into hotels, hiring for high-visibility jobs, or acceptance of children to private schools. It can also result in slower internet connections and social stigmatization in the form of registration on a public blacklist [emphasis added].
I find the potential restrictions on movement to be of the most concern, here: the Chinese public may very well be used to it, at this point; but imagine if such a system were to come into place over here, in the West? You could be slowly wasting away in an economic dumpster-fire of a state — California, perhaps — and yet be unable to move residence owing to your failure to pick up enough litter to satisfy some arbitrarily-set quota. You would be, in essence, held captive in your present location until you were able to ‘absolve’ yourself of your ‘crimes’ — even if you no longer had any form of employment there, or a roof under your head.
Before brushing off this thought as unnecessarily alarmist, consider for a moment just how quickly things could spiral under control: you could be barred from public transit because you spent too much of your free time gaming. If you happen to rely on public transit to get to and from work, you’re in trouble: you’ll need to either find some longer or more expensive way to get to work, which could then leave you with too little time left over to complete your other, Good Citizen duties or, failing that, too little money left over at the end of the month to sustain yourself as before. Even if you can find work closer to home, you may have to accept lower pay or poorer benefits — one way or another, the point is that the system is set up to make it harder to attempt to clear one’s credit score the more infractions that are committed. As such, you have quite a bit of incentive to avoid gaming “too much” in the first place, lest you end up in a life-ruining spiral of trying to redeem yourself with even less ability to do so than you started off with — and this is just regarding freedom of movement; never mind all of the other punishments that are sure to exist.
The above scenario may be speculative for now, but we might not have to speculate for much longer — the article goes on to list a number of social credit-esque programs currently in use in the United States and elsewhere. I suppose not even the “free market economy” can save us from mass surveillance. The examples provided here deal with life insurance (companies monitoring your social media content to determine your premiums); scanning IDs at bars to check the individual against a blacklist of those who have been barred by other, participating businesses in the past — but, as the article says, “Judgment about what kind of behavior qualifies for inclusion on a PatronScan list is up to the bar owners and managers,” meaning that the system could be used abusively, in theory; in addition to those of Uber, AirBnB, and Whatsapp, all of which reserve the right to ban users for any reason they see fit to (or, in the case of Whatsapp, if “too many” users block you). When it comes to Uber and AirBnB, I’m not as concerned with the capacity for arbitrary bans only because neither company holds a monopoly over their respective markets — it may be more expensive to take a regular tax or to rent a regular hotel room, but it is not the same as being barred outright from doing either. That said, we should be worried by the potential for targeted mass-blocking campaigns (which would be similar to targeted mass-reporting campaigns currently in use on Twitter) to get someone kicked off of Whatsapp: as noted in the article the app is “small potatoes” in the United States, but the main form of electronic communication in many, many other countries worldwide.
Wrapping things up, the author does a great job of explaining what, if anything, people need to be concerned about when it comes to this form of social engineering:
The most disturbing attribute of a social credit system is not that it’s invasive, but that it’s extralegal. Crimes are punished outside the legal system, which means no presumption of innocence, no legal representation, no judge, no jury, and often no appeal. In other words, it’s an alternative legal system where the accused have fewer rights.
Precisely: carrying on with the example of excess video gaming, perhaps it won’t ever become illegal, technically speaking, for one to do so; but if people are being actively and effectively punished for their actions, it won’t have to be. And if it’s not illegal, the public has very few options available for getting things to change — we don’t get to elect board CEOs or hold referendums on changes to terms of services, after all.
Elgan continues:
If current trends hold, it’s possible that in the future a majority of misdemeanors and even some felonies will be punished not by Washington, D.C., but by Silicon Valley. It’s a slippery slope away from democracy and toward corporatocracy.
In other words, in the future, law enforcement may be determined less by the Constitution and legal code, and more by end-user license agreements.
Considering the now well-known biases and tendencies of American tech companies, the frightening possibilities are endless. If Google’s search engine can hide certain search results or prioritize some links over others, according to the company’s internal, politically-set mandate, could they hide businesses owned by people with poor social credit scores from Google Maps? Could Facebook find a way to penalize users in real-time for having the ‘wrong’ people on their friends list? To repeat: none of the above discussion even touches upon what the UNEP wants to do to encourage “green behavior,” and given the aforementioned biases in the tech industry, it’s hard to imagine that they wouldn’t willingly comply with requests to monitor users’ “carbon footprints.”
So, if you’re worried about the prospects now, I’m sorry to say that there’s only going to be even more to worry about in the near future. Sadly, there’s not much that can be done about it at this stage, aside from delaying the inevitable: basically, my advice would be to boycott businesses that use the aforementioned monitoring tactics to the greatest extent that you can. In this game of behavioral control, the only way to win is to not play.
Here’s some sustainability madness from my neck of the woods: $330,000 in two years of storage expenses later, the City of Calgary has been forced to admit that they have thus far been unsuccessful in finding willing markets for the garbage we’re selling; as such, they will now need to spend an additional $130,000 to have 20 thousand tons of recycled, ‘clamshell’ plastic containers shipped off to a landfill, thus bringing the tab for this particular fiasco up to $460,000 with nothing but embarrassment to show for it.
This news comes after the City chose to find $60 million dollars’ worth of budget cuts in emergency services (fire, police, ambulance — you know, important things); public transit, including the low-income discount for monthly passes; “lower disaster preparedness at the emergency management agency”, whatever that means (doesn’t sound good!); affordable housing programs, and much more — not, however, in their own pockets, with (taxable) compensation for City Councillors still frozen at $113,352.63 annually. Instead, they laid off 115 of the city’s other employees, though how many of those were among the 30% of hired employees whom also rack in more than $100,000 a year has not been disclosed.
I could go on — we could talk about all the boring at best, downright ugly at worst public “art” pieces that the city has paid hefty price tags on to commission; we could, of course, have a look at the failed 2026 Olympic bid that still managed to cost us several millions of dollars just to entertain the thought, before voters (thankfully) shot the proposal down. But this time, the city’s blunder isn’t exactly unique to our particular, rag-tag team of mostly useless politicians. This problem happens to be one that has been repeated in numerous other cities, both in Canada and elsewhere, many many times over. And, so long as the people holding the reigns continue to maintain a different interpretation of reality as does the rest of the planet, we can be sure that this problem will keep cropping up, here and elsewhere, as it has been doing for the last decade or so.
If you ask the City of Calgary, of course, this is all China’s fault. As the city’s website on the subject explains, “China’s decision to tighten their recycling markets [in 2017] left many cities including Calgary in a tough spot.” Up until then, you see, China had been just one of a handful of North America’s designated dumping grounds in the Asia-Pacific region; of the 15 billion tons of recyclable material exported by the United States in 2016, 9 billion tons of it ended up in China. Other countries selected for the honour have been Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Taiwan; all of which have, like China, since taken steps to restrict the quantities and qualities of recyclables that may be exported to their shores.
You may be wondering why we were ever imposing our bits of plastic, glass and scrap paper on our neighbors across the Pacific to begin with, and rightfully so. As it turns out, the reason for this is very much the same as that behind why all the aforementioned nations, and China in particular, have begun to draw the line: most of the recycled material that ends up in a sorting/processing facility, here or abroad, is unfit for reuse without considerable amounts of processing; not only that, there is far too much material being recycled for these facilities to reasonably handle, and not enough market demand for even those materials that do meet the standards set for resale. [1] It is therefore quite understandable that these countries, who do not appear to be in possession of any technologies better than ours are at turning trash into treasure, would be unwilling to manage the problem for us.
So, we’ve been sitting here all this time, diligently recycling all that we could under the false belief that these materials were being taken somewhere — even if that somewhere happened to be China — to be magically transformed into whatever it is a given material can be reused for. Instead, it’s been shipped across the ocean to be picked-through for valuables, with much of it ultimately being burned in Chinese landfills, thereby releasing surely large amounts of CO2, along with all of the other toxic chemicals that are released by burning plastic, into the atmosphere. Were someone to do the math on it, I’m sure we’d find it comparatively better, in terms of limiting CO2 emissions, to have burned these materials right here in our own landfills, than to have additionally burned all of the fossil fuels needed to power a fleet of cargo ships across the Pacific so that some other country could do it for us. Great work, everyone!
Considering just how long all of this has been going on for, it beggars belief that we, in the West at least, would not have at least tried to find some form of use for these materials long before we ended up with the present surplus. Quite obviously, there’s no point in hoarding them in storage facilities, as the City of Calgary has done for the last two years on the taxpayers dime, if there’s not really any particular way to be rid of the materials in such quantities that doesn’t entail their burial in a landfill or being put to the torch. According to a study commissioned by the Canadian government, just nine percent of the country’s plastic waste was actually recycled in 2016; virtually all the rest of it ended up in landfills. “Innovation” in the sector, as far as what we actually do with the recyclables is concerned, does not appear to have caught up to manifest reality — again, why no one thought to figure this out back in the 70s, when the whole “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra really began to kick off, is beyond me.
One way or the other, something’s gotta give: either we figure out a way to generate less first-use plastic, paper and glass; or we figure out a way to use these recycled materials at home, rather than shipping them off to Asia while patting ourselves on the back and pretending like we’re actually doing something of any tangible benefit. If it turns out that neither can be done, then we need to take a good hard look at the state of the recycling industry — or perhaps even at the very notion of recycling, in its entirety — and make a decision as to whether or not we’d be just as well off throwing most of our recyclables in the trash, if they’re just going to end up in a landfill anyway. As it currently stands the recycling situation is, as many of its proponents like to say, unsustainable.
If you’ve not already come to terms with the existence of this particular UN-led initiative, I can understand why you might be hesitant to entertain the thought of it. You might be thinking, surely, this is a step too far? Maybe you’re willing to believe me when I write about the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP)’s promotion of Chinese smartphone apps to encourage “green behaviors”, or even the honest suggestion of brainwashing schoolchildren into becoming climate doomsday prophets for the purpose of converting their naysayer parents. Or, maybe you’re already aware of the UN’s consistent urging us to eat less meat in the name of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions produced by livestock — but do they really want us to eat insects instead of beef?
Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a drill. Here’s the front page for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations’s Edible Insects Programme. You can download their flagship publication, from which I will be quoting extensively in this post, by clicking here. And, if you’re still unconvinced that this is a real initiative that the UNEP, FAO and World Food Programme (WFP) are seriously funding and promoting, here’s a bunch of recent, mainstream news articles on the subject of bug-eating:
Take as much time as you need to go through these links: breathe it all in, and get back to me. We’re about to embark on a wild ride.
Now, if you follow me on Twitter, you might have noticed my tendency to re-tweet pretty much any article on this subject that appears on my timeline. I have one, main reason for this seeming obsession with the UN’s maggot-meat initiative: this particular globalist project serves to demonstrate just how far these people are willing to go in terms of controlling our lives; a realization that greatly benefits from it’s coverage in “regular”, mainstream media outlets. Things like the proposed reduction of global living standards to pre-industrial levels, mandatory contraception, banning private ownership of cars, etc., are much harder to expose to the general public owing to, putting it bluntly, just how bat-shit insane they sound — and, if we’re being honest, I can’t say that I blame them. Furthermore, only the banning of private cars has received MSM attention to date, the remaining proposals must be found via dedicated review of UN publications and documents. Eating bugs, on the other hand, lacks this “conspiratorial” aura due to the media’s willing compliance in promoting the ever-living hell out of the idea.
But why — aside from the obvious — eat bugs, specifically? Why not eat any of the number of meat-substitute products that have coincidentally become available at practically every major fast food chain across the West, and are now surely available at your own local grocer to boot? Why not do as the vegans have done and switch over to tofu, nuts and vitamin supplements? Hell, much of the ire levied toward meat consumption these days is aimed at the GhG-costs associated with rearing livestock (i.e. pigs, cows, etc.) — but what about poultry and eggs? Surely, we are not (yet) in a position where insects are the only reliable source of protein left — so what gives?
Well, as I should have come to expect considering my investigative experience with the United Nations’ wacky schemes up to this date, the real meat of the issue (if I may) goes much, much deeper than what can be seen on the surface. Thus, in order to understand the bigger picture, we need to lay some ground-work: first, we need to understand the UN’s particular role to play in dictating the new path to be taken by the world’s “food-systems infrastructure”; second, we need to look deeper into why meat has been identified as a problem-item on this new-and-improved menu; then, and only then, will we be able to at least try to wrap our heads around exactly how on Earth insects, of all things, came to be pushed so heavily as an appropriate substitute for meat.
The UNEP, the UNDP, the FAO, and your refrigerator
To start with, we might recall that the second Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of Agenda 2030 is that of “zero hunger” — more specifically, the goal is, by the year 2030, to “end hunger and ensure access by all people [ … ] to safe, nutritious and sufficient food all year round;” “end all forms of malnutrition, including achieving, by 2025, the internationally agreed targets on stunting and wasting in children under 5 years of age;” “double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers [ … ] including through secure and equal access to land, other productive resources and inputs, knowledge, financial services [ … ];” “ensure sustainable food production systems and implement resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and production, that help maintain ecosystems, that strengthen capacity for adaptation to climate change” (United Nations, 2015: 17) … there are another four ‘indicators’ listed under this goal, but those just listed are the most relevant for our purposes.
Well, as can be reasonably expected when it comes to the highly-contradictory SDGs, it is once again at the intersection of “people” and “planet” where we begin to run into trouble. Just as an aside, given that the UN doesn’t care much to address the issue of government and/or local-elite corruption and exploitation of domestic food production and consumption patterns in these countries, we won’t spend much time on it either: remember, as far as the UN et al. are concerned, the reality of a given situation is only relevant to the extent that it happens to be convenient for the narrative. Anyway, on to the core problem:
Producing more food (assuming that this is what must be done in a given national context) obviously requires the use of more land, and in the case of the near-universally overpopulated developing world, they’re going to need a lot of land. Naturally, a great deal of this land might be identified among the host of forests and nature reserves that dot Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular — but no UN entity is about to let a pretty, bio-diverse rain forest be converted into farmland, no matter how many human mouths that farmland could potentially feed. As such, they’d much rather maximize the production capacity of existing farmland, by any ‘eco-friendly’ means necessary. How exactly they might go about this (aside from providing poor countries with better crop-harvesting methods and technology, which comes with its own host of problems) remains a largely-unresolved question; hopefully, it is assumed, “science” will come up with something eventually.
From this vantage point, the connection to meat consumption is relatively simple: according to the World Resource Institute (WRI), the raising of ruminant livestock (cattle, sheep, and goats) accounts for two thirds of global agricultural land use, and is responsible for roughly half of GhG emissions related to agriculture (2018: 2). In other words, one can grow more crops on the same-sized plot of land than they can raise livestock — and it has been determined that crop production is, generally, less harmful to the environment (or is at least perceived by the UN to be so) than that of livestock. Thus, if one wishes to increase the amount of food (crops) produced without acquiring more land, then it follows that existing plots dedicated to ‘unsustainable’ practices — such as pastures –might be re-purposed into being used to grow said crops instead. Never mind what the owners of that land would like to do with it, of course — we’re not taking reality into account just yet, remember?
(WRI, 2018: 16)
But what do developed, industrialized nations have to do with any of this? We have, more or less, both the farmland and the standard of living to keep the majority of our first-world populations fed — we don’t need to convert any of our livestock pastures into cropland, do we?
Well, that’s where climate change comes in.
The (Stated) Argument for Eating Less Meat
Most of the push to abandon meat consumption originates from the supposed need to limit the GhG emissions of livestock, particularly that generated from ruminants. By the way; yes, this is the infamous “cow farts” problem — or, as the WRI prefers to call it, “enteric fermentation,” for which they are presently testing feed additives that might help them fart less (p. 45). Anyway, as stated above, livestock are said to account for half of the GhG emissions produced by agricultural activities (or, put another way, 14.5% of all human-caused emissions); additionally, we are told of the tendency for nations to switch over to a “Westernized” diet as they become more urbanized and developed, which we are further told can be defined as being “high in sugar, fats, refined carbohydrates, meat, and dairy” (p. 15). If this is the case, then it stands to reason that it would be, in fact, Western countries that are consuming the most animal products per capita compared to the rest of the planet. Right?
Oh, wait a minute.
(p. 17) For the record, 52 calories of meat is roughly equivalent to one ounce of skinless chicken breast, or just under one ounce (0.7) of 80% lean ground beef.
As we can see in this graph, the data for which is supplied by the FAO and United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) themselves, it is the single nation of Brazil that topped out the list for per capita meat consumption in 2010; followed by the many nations that make up the former Soviet Union and Latin America, respectively; then the United States and Canada, which for whatever reason have had their data combined. Just for perspective: in 2010, Brazil had a population of just under 200 million, while the entire EU’s population stood at about 500 million (according to Wikipedia, that is). If my interpretation of this graph is correct, then, in the year 2010 less than half the population of the EU, in Brazil, consumed almost twice the amount of ruminant meat. Yikes.
So, has anyone talked to the Brazilians about this? Well, and perhaps it is just a case of my not being sure exactly where to look — I confess, I am not well versed in Brazilian media — but as far as I can tell? No, not really. A DuckDuckGo search for “comer menos carne mudança climática” (Google Translate’s Portuguese offering for the query “eat less meat climate change”) yields a number of articles on the subject, most of which (again, according to GT) use very much the same kind of talking points and figures as have become standard in English-language media. Curiously, however, I couldn’t find a single one that referenced the extremely high per capita meat consumption of Brazilians in particular, even in passing. Again — maybe I just don’t know where to look or how to search for it, but it sort of seems to me like Western nations are being unfairly singled-out as consuming too much meat, when the information above indicates that the consumption levels of Central and South America (Latin America + Brazil) are higher than those of the United States, Canada, the EU, and “OECD (other)” combined [1]; and Brazillian media doesn’t appear too bothered by the fact, to boot. What gives?
Enter, stage left: the infamous “meat tax”. See, something that Western countries do tend to better than their South/Central American counterparts is to generate tax revenue — unlike many developing, typically poorer nations, we have the necessary financial and bureaucratic frameworks in place already, along with a relatively tax-tolerant labour force; all that is needed now is a product to slap a tax on and a “good enough” reason to do so. Besides — just imagine trying to follow any one of the recommendations listed below, as an official in a given, poverty-stricken and likely corrupt Central American government. To what extent is “minimizing disruption to customers” at all feasible in, say, Honduras?
(p. 17)
Let’s recap what we’ve learned so far:
The UN et al. believe it to be more feasible, in terms of reducing world hunger without expanding agricultural lands, to emphasize the production of crops as opposed to livestock. It can be reasonably assumed that they will be more than willing to infringe upon, or outright seize, privately-owned lands in order to enforce such measures, as they have done many, many times in the past — but that’s a post for another day.
Moreover, the rearing of livestock supposedly uses more resources and produces more GhG emissions than compared to crop farming; thus, eating less meat is seen to be “good for the environment”. The goal, or at least the stated goal, then, is to maximize crop yields somehow in addition to converting at least some of the existing pasture lands into croplands.
Both the above points — “ending hunger” and “save the planet”, respectively — are being used as moral justification to push policies on Western countries in an effort to get them to eat less meat, up to and including an actual tax on meat and animal-based foods. This comes despite the fact that other populations eat far more meat than do Westerners; because, if making money is the true end-goal, you’ll want to focus on “targets” that are actually capable of paying-up (hence, why the mafia targeted shopkeepers rather than the homeless). And, of course, we can all guess where the proceeds of this new source of tax revenue are likely to end up (i.e., if not directly into the UN’s reserves, then to some far-flung developing nation or two as a part of the “redistribution of wealth” scheme on the global-level).
Alright: so the UN (allegedly) wants to convert more pasture into cropland in order to produce more food and “end hunger”, and happens to have found a potential, convenient way to make a quick buck along the way by guilt-ing Western nations into taxing their meat consumption habits by tying the broader issue to the increasingly-hysterical climate change narrative. So, that answers both the questions of why the UN even cares about any of this to start with, as well as why meat has been identified as “problematic” — but, we still have yet to approach the issue of where and why eating bugs enters into the picture.
The (Alleged) Rationale for Eating Bugs
The core, practical reasoning behind pushing insects as a food source, in my mind, is a lot less interesting than the theoretical arguments put forward in the attempt to justify forcing it upon a largely unwilling population. Simply put, bugs require far less land use than any given farm animal, are generally quite easy to raise, and are not as “resource intensive” in the grand scheme of things as are their warm-blooded counterparts. As such, so long as you’re quite OK with the thought of eating bugs, if the primary objective is to increase food production without using more land then it makes absolutely perfect sense to use what land you do have to raise hundreds of millions upon millions of your insect of choice, rather than to raise one, mid-to-small-sized herd of cattle. It’s not until we get to the task of moving the product into the market that we start to encounter some problems; namely, the one rather giant problem of a fair amount of Western citizens (whom are the UN’s go-to revenue source, remember) being completely repulsed by the thought of ingesting insects. As such, the main battle to be fought here is in terms of somehow generating demand for a product than no one really wants.
Of course, a lack of “political will” or “consumer acceptance” has never stopped the UN et al. (and the UNEP in particular) from pursuing a dumb idea before, and it sure isn’t about to start doing so now. It is already the case, as the main FAO report on the topic reassures us, that some 2 billion people worldwide eat insects as part of their diet; primarily in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (2013: xiii). Crucially, the report would like to stress that these folks eat bugs because they want to; and certainly not because they have little to nothing else to eat. While unable to confirm this with certainty, I would be curious to know whether or not the rich or otherwise better-off inhabitants of these areas also consume insects: if yes, then perhaps insects really are a willing part of the local cuisine; if no, then I’d be forced to hold on to my suspicions. The report does note that urban residents in Malawi (and Christians) “react with disdain to eating insects” (p. 39) — this, however, is blamed on Western corruption. I suppose, if it weren’t for those pesky colonizers, those Malawians would still be eating bugs to this day. Damn it, guys!
On that note, the report is overall quite critical of the fact that the vast majority of Western culinary traditions don’t have bugs on the menu. Because bug-eating is sanctioned in the Bible, they argue, the only reason we’re not presently stuffing our faces with fly larvae is because we associate the practice with poor brown people (i.e., we’re racist), in addition to our general unwillingness to let go of this particular cultural taboo (i.e., we’re poor sports) (ibid.). It is further argued that the reluctance of roughly 10% of the world’s population to eat insects is causing the other 90% to not want to eat insects — despite their earlier claim that people who eat bugs do so because they’re delicious; so, why would they stop on our account?
p. 40 (“Eat the maggots, bigot!”)
Now, I would argue that the much more likely reason that Westerners don’t eat bugs is because, geographically speaking, we don’t have much to choose from in the way of edible insects. As such, their only practical importance to us has been, for the most part, as pests to be exterminated — hence, the disgust factor around eating them. This argument happens to be backed-up well by the FAO’s own data — in the screenshot below, you’ll note how few regions north of the equator actually have any edible species of insects.
(p. 9) Note that Brazilians, as discussed above and despite their nation being home to 100 – 200 species of edible insects (according to this graphic), apparently still prefer to eat “regular” animal meat, for whatever reason. Can’t imagine why!
It should be further noted that there are, in fact, some dishes of European origin that feature bugs — for example, the Italian island of Sardinia has a type of cheese called casu marzu, which is riddled with live insect larvae. Though, I suppose that these sort of facts don’t jive too well with the Whitey Ruins Everything narrative, in which case I can understand why they’d leave them out.
But one burning question remains: why are they so hell-bent on selling the public on “insects-as-food” in the first place? Why the mad rush to convince Westerners to eat insects if, as claimed by the WRI report, some plant-based foods can still provide adequate protein for the non-meat eater if one plays their cards right (2018: 15)? Could they not just take our money and leave us to our rations of tofu and soy juice, without trying to rub our faces in the whole thing by pushing maggots on us as well? We might even hazard a guess that there would be not much to complain about if insects were only being pushed as feed for fish and livestock, which the FAO report goes into in quite a bit of detail. Great, I’d say — it’d be a good thing to have to use less land to grow animal feed, right? Can we not, just… leave the issue there, and call it a day?
Sadly, I’m not sure if I can provide much in the way of answers — it could be that they are unsure of whether or not the current meat substitutes on the market will really take off as previously imagined, and maybe now they’re attempting to introduce a substitute meat substitute, just to be on the safe side of things when people start getting really mad about the rising cost of real meat. Or, maybe this is yet another instance of the the UN trying to preemptively monopolize and influence an emerging industry, as is currently the case with the UNEP and fintech — are they trying to gain effective control over food production and distribution, just as they are trying to do with the global financial sector? Who knows, really — hell, the whole thing could just be a giant “make-work” scheme for the ultra-poor in developing nations, who don’t have the resources or training to find any form of employment more gainful than collecting insects in the woods to sell to hipster-granola start-ups in the West — I am honestly, sincerely unsure.
At the very least, from a purely “public relations” or “optics” point of view, I can say that it does not appear particularly wise to be calling for less meat consumption and an increase (or more rather, a beginning) of insect consumption, simultaneously. Quite predictably, this has generated a strong public perception that the UN is up to no good with the “meat file”: by bombarding the media with both messages at once — “eat less meat; eat more bugs” — they’ve made it remarkably easy for even the more naive among us to put two and two together and call it as they see it. Still, those on the bug-eating bandwagon appear to be fairly antagonistic toward the naysayers in the West; the former claiming, in one instance, that the latter’s aversion toward insects in general is “unjustified” in light of how relatively few species are actually harmful to plants, animals and people (Van Huis, 2016: 295); in another, that aversion to bug-eating “is not justified from a nutritional point of view.” (FAO, 2013: 141) That’s right — we appear to be moving toward a narrative wherein one has to have a “good reason” not to eat certain foods; the day may come where “I’d just rather not eat larvae, thanks” just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Hopefully, then, we don’t ever find ourselves at a point where powdered insect-parts are considered to be on equal footing with grain-based flour from a regulatory point of view, and we’re forced to check the labels on all our grocery purchases to be sure we’re not buying something made up of 5% bug paste — even more hopefully, we’ll have put our feet down in some manner long before such a scenario could ever come to fruition. In the mean time, we should at least try to enjoy as much meat as we can before the impending taxation regime renders it too costly for the average consumer to eat on a regular basis — and believe me, this is indeed coming down the pipes. Since this Global News editorial was written at the beginning of 2018, Canada has indeed joined the ranks of Belgium and the U.K. in revising our national food guide to promote less meat consumption — perhaps it really is only a matter of time before insects formally replace meat and dairy on the oft-politicized “food pyramid”. For now, we’ll have to stock-up the freezer and see how it all plays out.
Notes
[1] Using data from the UNDESA (available here), the 2010 population of Latin America (including Brazil) and the Caribbean was 591,532,000; the combined population for the EU, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia, on the other hand, was 869,684,000 — and this is not including the “OECD other” category (too tedious to sort out). So, again, it is not simply the case that there are more people in a given region, therefore, they consume more meat on the whole — per capita, less meat is consumed in the West than is in Latin America and the Caribbean, despite the former’s larger population.
Sources
FAO. (2013). Edible insects: Future prospects for food and feed security. Click here to download the PDF.
United Nations. (2015). Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, A/RES/70/1. Available here.
Van Huis, Arnold. (2016). Edible insects are the future? Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 75, 294-305.
WRI, UNEP, and World Bank. (2018). Creating a Sustainable Food Future. Available here.
This report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) which I am about to overview is technically the second of a two-part release — the first, which provides a general overview of the relevance of fintech (financial technology) to sustainable development, is available here. While this report is ostensibly concerned with fintech specifically, there are arguably far more valuable implications (for our purposes, at least) regarding the ever deepening-relationship between the UNEP and the global financial sector more generally, that can be drawn from a simple review of the stated goals and intentions contained within.
Right from the executive summary, for instance, we have good cause for concern. Part of my near-obsessive focus on the financial aspects of sustainable development is informed by what I know about other attempts that have been made, throughout history, toward the formation and management of a planned economy — namely, that they generally don’t work very well. Not in the sense that we, as average consumers, would readily identify as ‘well’, anyway.
So when I see that there’s a focus on “society at large” and phrasing such as “a net-positive impact,” I’m concerned: neither of these terms necessarily mean that even most people will benefit; it means, all things considered, it averages out as positive. To be more precise, it could very well be that a comparatively small percentage of folks come out of this transition much better off economically than before, while everyone else is negatively impacted, some perhaps quite severely — this would still ‘average out’ as a positive impact. Or, it could be that any losses incurred here in the present are “worth it” purely for the supposed benefits that will be gained for future generations from aligning the global financial system with sustainable development — but the thing about the future is that it can never be “the future” now. It’s a very convenient thing to point to as a means to justify all sorts of horrible ideas and initiatives that take place in the present, and I don’t think I need to spell-out the types of ideologies that have done exactly that throughout human history.
Furthermore, we’re presented with a little something that I like to call, techno-tarot reading, i.e. attempting to “predict the future” by use of computerized models and ‘forecasting’ by extrapolating historical trends into the future. I compare it to tarot reading because it’s just about as effective: Simply put, there are far too many possible variables that could have a major effect on the outcome of any particular “prediction model”, and it is not humanly possible for even a team of several hundred scientists to account for every single one of those highly-important variables — it just isn’t. Several hundreds, maybe even thousands of meteorologists across the globe continue to make notable errors in trying to predict the weather over the next two weeks, and they think that they can use those same prediction methods to tell us the state of the global economy two decades down the road? Are you kidding me?
Notwithstanding all the techno-babble in use here, it would appear that Mark Carney has forgotten that economics is a social science; meaning it is not beholden to the same standards of predictability as are physics or computer science.
So, what is the UNEP up to with all of this ‘fintech’ stuff, anyway? Well, as I briefly covered in a previous post, much of the push toward “financial inclusion” and “sustainable finance” comes from two directions; both being united by their common goal of making more money: the UN (obviously) and a handful of key players in the international banking system. For the UN, the issue is simple: if they’re ever going to have the planned, decentralized and ‘green’ economy of their dreams, they’ll need not only the funding to make it happen but as well the regulatory power to ensure that everyone’s playing by their rules — lest they be hit with fines and taxes for unsustainable business practices, the revenue from which will assuredly end up in the UN’s coffers. As for the bankers, some 2 billion people in the developing world have no bank account (the ‘unbanked’) — meaning they also pay no interest rates or overdraw fees, they have no credit card debt siphoning off their limited income, they’re taking out no loans and no mortgages — you get the idea. Just as “female empowerment” is more about expanding the income tax base and lowering birth rates than it is about women’s well-being, the same two-faced logic applies to “financial inclusion” — these poor folks have no ‘opportunity’ to rack up lots of debt, you see? Oh, the inequity!
Make no mistake, this is exactly what happens to these people, by the way. One cross-country comparison between microloan recipients in Bangladesh and payday loan recipients in Canada found that both ‘products’ tend to attract the same kinds of people to them from very similar backgrounds, for largely the same reasons — i.e., neither group tends to use these loans for re-investment, such as starting a business; rather, they use them to cover day-to-day expenses at exorbitant interest rates, thus entrapping themselves in a cycle of never ending debt (Islam & Simpson, 2018). If you know how bad the consequences of payday lending can be for people in the first world, imagine how bad it is for someone who’s already living in third world-levels of poverty.
Now, part of the reason why the UNEP, of all possible agencies, is so heavily invested (emotionally and literally) into fintech and other start-up technologies is because many of the “incumbent banks” — the top-players of our current system — don’t think that completely up-ending the global financial system to move the focus away from profits and toward complying with heavy-handed, UN-decided environmental regulations is a particularly attractive road to go down. In the next excerpt, the UNEP openly admit that start-ups in this area are better to invest in for the pursuit of ‘change’, specifically because their owners tend to be new to the world of business and, as such, don’t know enough about what they’re doing to avoid being manipulated — and that’s where the UNEP comes in.
It’s not until the second chapter that we get to the real meat of the matter; namely, what sustainable finance really has to do with sustainable development in general, aside from its potential use as a money-grabbing tool; at least some of which will, we are re-assured, actually end up being put toward some sustainability project or another. Sadly, this is not really explained in any meaningful manner — instead, we are treated to a ‘double helix analogy’ that is apparently meant to clear things up for us. Each of the terms listed below is expanded upon with an additional two or three sentences; amazingly, I remain unsure of exactly what the hell they’re talking about and will not waste any more space trying to figure it out.
The authors do not provide any further justification as to why the double helix analogy is any more appropriate than, say, a simple flow chart. I’ll have to assume that they did so because the DNA graphic “looks cooler.”
What I can do, however, is fill in a few gaps between what might be called “standard financial vocabulary” and “UN-Newspeak vocabulary”, because the two differ from one another in several crucial ways. First of all, “Redefining accounting for value”, here, is not referring solely to the monetary value of a given product or investment; rather, it refers to the environmental and social ‘value’ of the product/investment, with the monetary/economic value serving as something of an afterthought. In other words, the idea is to integrate the financial sector into the spheres of social/environmental concerns, such that anyone wanting to take out a loan is required to meet UN-defined social and environmental standards in addition to satisfying the financial risk threshold for whatever it is you need the loan for. As I briefly discussed in an earlier post on fintech and personal banking, this could get messy very, very quickly.
I’ll end this overview with my personal, absolute favourite part of this document, which is in the section on “possible, unintended consequences” that might come as a result of completely digitizing the world financial sector; specifically, the part where they admit that there’s just this one, giant conflict of interest in doing so: energy.
See, from the UN’s perspective, energy is the currency of the future. Almost everything they’ve done, or tried to do with the climate file, relates in some way to achieving their ultimate goal of controlling the production, distribution, and use of energy. This is why they’ve gotten their hands dirty with the clean energy crowd; start-up companies, as outlined above, are much easier to manipulate than incumbent companies — such as those involved in oil and gas production. So, when it happens to be the case that the current amount of energy used in bitcoin mining is about the same as the annual energy consumption for the entire nation of Ireland, they’re gonna have themselves a bit of a problem. Simply put, unless they’re willing to reverse their stance on nuclear energy, there is no conceivable way of producing the amount of energy that would be required to power even more bitcoin mining-CPUs in a manner reliable enough to sustain the global economy, without resorting to fossil fuels.
Whoops!
So, to recap: the ‘implications’ for the future of finance, as it were, appear to be oriented around the UNEP’s effective infiltration and subversion of the sector’s machinery. As demonstrated in both this publication and elsewhere, both private and public capital — e.g., pension funds; see this post from Canuck Law for an in-depth analysis of how the Canadian Pension Plan is being mobilized to fund sustainable development projects overseas, as one example — are to be tied to what we might consider to be an ‘energy standard’ for the determination of economic value, in lieu of the ‘gold standard’ of decades past; of course, we can make a reasonable guess that it will be the UNEP itself who will get to call the shots regarding the proposed ‘conversion rates’.
Whether or not this is a workable, never mind a good idea appears to be largely irrelevant, in terms of genuine concern for the environment or otherwise. Rather, the desired end-state is for both large and small-scale financial operations to become completely digitized — i.e., the institution of a cashless society wherein it becomes an effective necessity to be “on the grid” in some manner should one have any hopes of receiving or making payments within the system. As such, all transactions will become traceable to some extent and much, much more easily monitored and profiled. Combine this possibility with that of the ever money-hungry UNEP being placed at the helm of global economic operations, and it is not a far leap from this proposal to that which is currently being tested in China, whereby financial and/or game-ified smartphone applications are used to provide “nudges” toward desired behavioral changes among its users.
More worrying, however, is the potential for this UNEP-guided financial system to be used as a means of forcing both individual and corporate capital to be invested into those firms, products and projects that the UNEP happens to approve of, while effectively being prohibited from investment into those firms, products and projects deemed to be less favoured. Again, as I mentioned in my previous post on the subject of fintech, we might one day find ourselves in a situation wherein virtually every aspect of consumer behavior can be, in some way, tied back to a growing profile of ‘sustainable’ (or, conversely, ‘unsustainable’) personal behaviors, such as whether or not we drive a gasoline-powered car to work or how much meat we like to consume on a weekly basis: once every single financial transaction is made electronically, it will become quite easy to tell which bank accounts are visiting gas stations or buying burgers off Skip The Dishes. If we think of the Chinese social credit system as dystopian now, just wait until the UNEP adopts this model into a sustainability credit system: if the impending deluge of sin taxes on a variety of ‘unustainable’ products (such as meat) doesn’t leave you too financially destitute to even consider moving out of the expanding surveillance networks that increasingly characterize our urban areas, then the ‘sustainability-fees’ and penalties incurred from filling up your gas tank just a wee bit too often than what has been decided for you by some anonymous, mid-level bureaucrat at the UNEP ought to do the trick. This is the hell of financial enslavement that awaits high-income countries, never mind the highly predictable, likely disastrous consequences that could be had for those living in low to middle-income economies.
None of this, of course, is going to be of any tangible benefit to the environment, as was basically admitted during the discussion above regarding the massive amounts of electricity required to power the new, digitized economy. All of this is entirely concerned with handing the reigns of legal and regulatory oversight over the world financial sector — and, in doing so, the “means of production” in the global economy at large — over to the UNEP, the wider UN system, and their chosen lackeys and faithful enforcers: as previously described by this report, incumbent firms are far too set in their ‘old ways’ of doing things for the UNEP’s tastes; thus, it has become necessary for newer, more malleable start-ups to be manipulated into positions of power and influence that, eventually, may come to rival and, assuming all goes according to plan, perhaps even knock their predecessors out of the competition entirely. In other words, they are not seeking to ‘transform’ the world’s financial system so much as they are looking to replace it outright. ‘Climate change’ serves only as the justification provided for doing so.
Sources
Islam, K. J., & Simpson, W. (2018). Payday lending and microcredit: Two faces of the same problem? Journal of International Development, 30, 584-614.
To some extent, we can recognize that various forms of media — mainstream or otherwise — almost always have some nature of bias informing the topics that they report on and the way in which they report them. Nevertheless, it had been general practice for the field of journalism to try and remain as objective and neutral towards bipartisan issues as they could possibly manage — up until roughly the period following the First World War, that is. This problem of media bias has accelerated in strength over the last two decades, to the extent that mainstream outlets are perfectly willing to lie about the subjects on which they report; sometimes blatantly but most often by excessive editorializing (injection of personal opinions into the narrative of the story) and/or lying by omission of certain facts and figures.
If you’re tired of all the BS, lying and paternalism that now characterizes so much of our mainstream media, this guide is for you. Crucially, the point is to get the reader feeling at least somewhat confident in judging the merits of the points made and arguments put forth by various commentators on their own. Even so-called ‘fact checkers’ are frequently compromised by political interests and biases; as such, we no longer have the privilege of simply ‘trusting’ that these individuals and outlets have good, genuine truth-seeking intentions — if you really want to know the truth, you will first need to know how to accurately identify non-truths. Before you can become informed, you must learn how to avoid being misinformed.
As this is a “crash course”, the tips provided below are meant to be just that: tips, rather than some unassailable code of personal conduct. Rest assured however that doing your own fact-checking becomes much easier with practice. Eventually, you may come to a point where you are able to identify a bogus narrative mid-sentence. This is good: this means the ‘spell’ is being broken, and that’s precisely what needs to happen. To be blunt: you don’t want to ever act as stupid as the intelligentsia (elites + journalists + academics) believe you to be. It’s time to prove them wrong.
General tips for identifying potentially fraudulent claims
Trust your instincts. One’s ‘gut feeling’ is as close to authentic foresight as one can get: Human evolution has provided us with this amazing ability to subtly detect when we’re being lied to, even through written text. If some claim that you read seems suspicious, there is no harm in doing a little bit of digging into whether or not it’s true — even if you’re wrong about it, you are still one step closer to genuine truth.
Avoid blind trust in expertise, genuine or otherwise. This is very important to keep in mind, as it is common practice for journalists to introduce ‘expert opinions’ as a means of arguing their point for them. Funny enough, however, if you actually look into the background of these experts, many times they are not even experts in the field that they’re commenting on! This is most common with climate change rhetoric; you will find that many of the ‘experts’ referred to re: the value of carbon taxation or green energy are economists — economics being a social science, we should certainly not be taking our cues from them on how to ‘fix’ the climate. Of course, they will rarely (if ever) be referred to by their true profession within the article: They are banking on your assuming that they have ‘expert authority’ in the topic at hand.
Familiarize yourself with commonly-used logical fallacies. Following from above, which is formally called “appealing to authority”, both journalists and the average person have a tendency toward employing logical fallacies in their arguments. In the above case, the fallacy results from assuming that an ‘expert’ is incapable of being wrong — but they are people too, not omnipotent gods. Because many people are unaware that these are fallacies, however, their use is something of a ‘quick and dirty’ way to make a claim appear more salient than it really is. Don’t be one of those people! See here for an easy guide to some common fallacies.
Do not get comfortable with any one set of news sources. Even if you have found a given source to be generally trustworthy, you should not let your gut down: always trust your instincts, no matter where or from whom the information is coming. You should always be prepared to do some further digging on dubious claims, even for your favorite authors and preferred outlets. Ideally, you should be cross-referencing similar claims across different sources, while keeping in mind that truth is not built on consensus, but facts.
Keep an eye on the ‘compliments:criticism’ ratio. An article (aside from an op-ed, where bias is basically intended) that provides five arguments for a position but only one against it is more likely to be driven by an underlying motive than one that provides a more balanced perspective. When reading such an article, it is good to get into the habit of trying to think up the missing counter-arguments yourself; then, go see if you can find those arguments presented elsewhere. Keep an eye on the terminology used, as well: Is the favored argument described using overwhelmingly positive terms, and the counter-view with primarily negative ones? If so, this is often evidence of bias and/or hidden motives.
Ask yourself: who benefits? Who might benefit from having this information made public, whether it is genuine or not? This relates to the mantra of “follow the money”: it may be worth checking if an organization’s representative or industry/scientific expert cited in an article has donors or business ties that would benefit from that person’s opinion being so widely read.
General tips for verifying authenticity of information
Use more than one search engine. Generally speaking, this means that you should not use Google as your primary search engine, unless you are familiar with using database search techniques such as Boolean Operators. This is because Google intentionally uses algorithms to push certain results higher than others, regardless of their specificity to the search input — as such, you are not as likely to get the results you’re looking for on politically-charged topics such as climate change, gender dysphoria, “fake news” and so on. In the first case, for example, searching “climate change skepticism” on Google yields a page full of links on how climate change is definitely real and skeptics are delusional; rather than any that really are skeptical of climate change. DuckDuckGo and Bing provide worthy substitutes to over-reliance on Google results. (To really drive the point home, consider the difference in results between searching the exact same term, “arguments against climate change”, on Google and DDG, respectively.)
Get in the habit of auditing citations. This is somewhat more specific to academic articles or similar publications (e.g. by the UN et al. or other advocacy groups), but it is also good practice for news articles, too. What it means to ‘audit’ citations is for you to actually check where the citation comes from, rather than take for granted that the source is legitimate. As a relatively benign example, one UNESCO publication on countering fake-news (with journalists as the audience) featured a story about how fake news was allegedly used in Ancient Rome, backed with three, seemingly independent sources. An audit of these sources revealed that one led to an article behind a paywall in a financial journal; the second led to a blog post; and the third used that blog post as its own source! Which leads us to…
Actually read the citations, at least for more dubious claims. I know this can be tedious for some (myself included), but if you are really in doubt or at all suspicious of a certain claim, try not to be intimidated by any apparent prestige or incomprehensibility of the citation that is provided. If you don’t understand a term, search it up. Try to figure out for yourself, as best as you reasonably can, what exactly the information is saying in relatively-plain English. I have oftentimes resorted to asking my Twitter followers if they have any background in a particular area, and if they wouldn’t mind clarifying a few terms or validating my understanding of the issue at hand. Gone are the days when you’d have to hang out all day at a public library, or take a course, or at least try to get a hold of someone at a university. You have all the world’s knowledge in your hands — use it!
Some resources for gathering information
This is a short, non-complete list of sites, tools and techniques that I either use myself or know of many people who use them for research. Now, the fact that I may not have found use for some of these things does not mean that you won’t; everyone is a little bit different in this regard.
In terms of programs, everything listed here is either completely free to use or at least offers an indefinite, limited-state ‘trial version.’ But, sometimes, the trial version is all you really need. As a disclaimer, I am not affiliated with any of these sites, products or services in any manner, nor am I receiving any compensation for endorsing them. I just think they’re useful and I’m trying to spread the love.
This section will be continuously updated as I find more sites/tools that might be of use. Last update: October 9, 2019
Websites
A resource compilation from Corey’s Digs — full credit to her, of course, for compiling this. Mostly US-specific, includes: obtaining background checks; information on registered charities; scientific archives; judiciary information; FBI press-releases and other government documents; etc.
Retraction Watch – updates with detailed explanations every time an academic journal or similar publisher is forced to retract an article. This site also hosts a searchable database, which lists every single retraction recorded by the site to date (believe me, there’s an enormous amount!). I often use this to ‘audit’ the academic credibility of certain, suspect authors, articles and journals.
Inside Philanthropy – this pro-industry site hosts a ton of valuable information on donor and organization profiles, activities, news, etc. As the name implies, it is an “inside look” at the philanthropy industry that has been invaluable to me in researching various foundations and NGOs.
Influence Watch – provides (often, though not always) detailed information, including historical roots and cross-org relationships, on various NGOs, political parties, foundations, and other “public policy influencers” worldwide. It is structured in a manner similar to Wikipedia, insofar as citations are typically provided to back up the information offered — that said, like Wikipedia, keep an eye out for possible editorial bias. This site is typically better used for a general overview of a given influencer, or as a “springboard” toward further avenues of inquiry.
Follow the Money – Canadian-specific; hosted by The National Post, this database lists financial donations (individual and corporate) made to political parties and candidates. I am not sure how often the database content is updated, however; the latest entries that I have seen date from 2017, though there could very well be more recent ones there as well.
Deletionpedia – how this works is that every time a Wikipedia article is proposed for deletion, a bot makes a copy of the page and uploads it to this site. If the Wikipedia article ends up being deleted, then the copy remains on the site; if the proposal is rejected and it stays up on Wikipedia, the Deletionpedia copy is deleted. So you do have to know what you’re looking for, but if so this site can be very useful for collecting links and information that might have been deleted from Wikipedia for less-than-honest reasons.
Tools
MEGA.nz – offers 50 GB of free, encrypted cloud storage, which can be further synced to folders on your hard drive for ease of up/downloading files. You can also set passwords on shared files (with an expiry date too, should you choose) so that only those you want to share the file(s) with are able to access it. You have the option to subscribe monthly for more storage, as well — I pay roughly $7 CAD per month for the Pro-Lite plan, which gives me 200 GB of storage (of which I’ve only used up half so far, in all honesty). Lastly, it is very easy to trade files between MEGA accounts (no need to download and re-upload), which is useful for downloading content (legally, of course!) from 4ch and 8ch, as it’s largely their file-sharing platform of choice.
XMind – for the visual learners among us, this program allows you to make “mind maps” or event timelines using easily-modifiable templates. I find this very helpful for collecting information in a manner that lets me “see” where all the parts fit in relation to the whole. You can get very creative with this; I use it for both general research and for outlining projects. The free trial version is fancy enough for me, but subscription access to even more features is also available. There is a mobile app version for it as well, which is a bit clunky to use but could be useful for those who are away from the computer more often than not.
Zotero – this is one that I did not personally find much use for, but it is very popular among students, academics and authors. It is basically a file-sorting program to help you organize citations, create quick citations and bibliographies, organize your files in the manner of your choosing, and download web pages and other content directly into the program, which uses metadata to detect and auto-fill relevant information for easier citing. If you don’t already have a system in place for organizing your files, this may be worth checking out.
Throw Away Mail – this site generates a temporary email address and inbox, which automatically deletes itself after 48 hours. I use this to download documents that ask for contact information before releasing the PDF, just to avoid creating an electronic ‘paper trail’ of my research history — I may be paranoid, but better safe than sorry, right?
Foxit PDF Reader – this is the program I use for reading and editing PDF files; again, the free version does the trick just fine for me. Adobe Reader may be fine for simply opening PDFs, but if you want the ability to highlight text, add side notes/comments, or even to create your own PDFs, this is what I recommend.
Misc. Resources
Some inspirational reading from Corey’s Digs, on the challenges of information overload: Become the Master of Your Mind.
Put aside all your current thoughts and views on the issue of climate change, just for one moment, and consider the following:
The ‘problem’, as it were, is frequently presented to us in the form of a ‘fight’ — “the fight against climate change,” “the battle for our future,” and so on — obviously, the intent behind this rhetoric being to spark some feeling of resistance, or camaraderie with one’s fellow man. We are meant to think of ourselves as brave, selfless soldiers wading through the trenches, shoulder-to-shoulder as we unlikely heroes take up arms against the imminent, existential threat that is the changing climate — something along those lines, anyway.
It is alleged, with the use of all sorts of grandiose vocabulary and alarming imagery of massive floods and forest fires, that all of humanity must come together and cooperate with one another, should we ever hope to overcome our common enemy. It is stated ad nauseam that things can no longer continue on, “business as usual.” We must make the necessary sacrifices, shoulder the burden of protecting our world from this mess that we, ourselves — we are told — have had a hand in creating. It is our duty to future generations — this, too, has become a go-to phrase.
It all sounds rather romantic, doesn’t it? It sounds like the plot of a blockbuster movie, one in which the entire world gets to play the part of the plucky, noble warriors, charging through enemy territory with the wind in our hair and the setting sun at our backs. Indeed, it is quite easy to become enamored with this imagery — it is something like a daydream. But as with any other daydream, it is a mere exaggeration of the truth.
One of many problems with this appropriation (if you will) of very real, very devastating experiences of loss, horror, and — most of all — sacrifice in the battlefield, particularly when such imagery is conjured in our minds by those whom have never been in a real combat situation themselves, is that the expectations generated by such rhetoric is not at all matched by the actions that are subsequently taken in the real world. If this were a real war, if this truly was a conflict of global importance and a genuine threat to the future of our species on this Earth — if we really did have just eleven years remaining before all of hell would be unleashed upon us — our leaders, our commanding officers from whom we look to for guidance and order, would at the very least be acting as if this were the case.
Certainly, they would not be standing knee-deep in tidewaters of the coast of Tuvalu, a very remote island nation situated practically in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, posing for the cover of Time magazine.
Let’s get serious for a minute, here — if we’re really at war, we’re going to need to be adults about it.
First thing’s first: whom or what are we actually fighting against? Many of us have been under the impression that our enemy is called climate change; that we must take immediate, concrete action toward combating it; and that it is of utmost importance that we stop fooling around, pretending as if we have any time more time to waste than we already have — if not for our own sake, then for that of our children and our children’s children. Is this not what we’ve been told?
Why, then, does the Secretary-General of the United Nations — pictured above — alongside his many personal and professional aides; numerous heads of state or other high-ranking government officials, as well as all of their personal and professional aides; all hailing from nearly every conceivable corner of the world; choose to spend their valuable, limited time flying in and out of remote island nations to hold conferences and luncheons, “meet the locals” and attend all of the many photo-ops that are guaranteed to accompany either form of event? Surely we’re well past the point of needing to raise any more ‘awareness’ of the issue — nearly every war has had its conscientious objectors, so why are we still waiting around for the stragglers?
Here’s the thing: as it turns out, the enemy called climate change (or anything else related to the environment, for that matter) is little more than a scare crow; we could just as readily substitute climate change with geomagnetic reversal and end up, details aside, with much the same sort of scenario. Whether or not the climate is changing (which it probably is, as it has done for billions of years) or whether there’s anything we can do to stop it is, at the end of the day, fundamentally irrelevant. Climate change is not so much our enemy in the battlefield as it is the reason offered for our being sent to the trenches in the first place.
Give me a moment to explain.
*
Recently, the eponymous Morgoth of Morgoth’s Review (if you have not heard of this channel, his content comes highly recommended by yours truly) had a fascinating conversation with fellow YouTuber Keith Woods, wherein the latter made a particularly excellent point regarding what we might call “virtue capitalism.” While discussing the issue of over-consumption and rampant materialism in our modern society — and, I tend to agree with both gentleman that we could do with a solid reduction in either, though certainly not at the scale nor in the manner that has been proposed by our Green Overlords — Woods expressed his dislike for the increasingly popular slogan, Get Woke, Go Broke: in his eyes, the meme misses the mark entirely in the tacit implication that the market would, eventually, punish these “Woke Capitalists” for inflicting this tired tripe on tired consumers: as Woods rightfully points out, they’re not the target audience that this sort of marketing is designed to appeal to. After some thought, I completely agree — as Morgoth adds, the CEOs of companies such as Nike or Gillette have almost certainly factored in an expected amount of backlash to this woke branding; they’ve simply decided that there’s more money to be made off those who do fall for such tactics. And in all likelihood, I believe that they’re right.
Though their discussion of the matter is related back to a conceptual “white-guilt market”, Woods makes another excellent point, one that is highly relevant to our present concern, slightly earlier in the conversation. I’ve transcribed this section below, lightly edited for clarity and with the more important bits in bold (or you can listen to it yourself here):
You see this all the time now with neoliberalism, where the guilt of being within the system of this very advanced form of late-stage capitalism, the guilt that’s associated with that is now marketed as a product within that. So now when you book flights on your budget airline you get an option to tick a box at the end to donate one pound or one euro to offset the carbon emissions of your flight. And you see these, you know, the fair trade auctions and, you know… options to do all these kind of meaningless things. And people love it, because [we’re] part of this system that we’re constantly told is creating this great ecological catastrophe in the third world. The perfect product to sell to people with money, to the upper-middle class and middle class, is the opportunity to offset this guilt. But of course, when it’s stuck within the paradigm of the people that are doing it, providing you with that option, it’s completely meaningless.
This captures quite well a virtually-identical thought that I’ve had floating around my own head for some time now: that the guilt we naturally feel after several generations of being chastised for our birth into this particular part of the world is now being used to push us toward this newer, more ‘sustainable’ mode of capitalism; in theory, a form of mindless materialism that we can “feel good about.” As described earlier, we are constantly assaulted with claims that we all really need to pull together and do our part to combat this existential threat that humanity faces, which we are told is climate change — in reality, we are fighting less against climate change than we are for the ensured sustainability (if you will) of the dominant, global architecture of power. This is why nothing particularly serious or meaningful has been done in order to fight climate change, despite all of the manic proclamations of impending disaster that are so frequently tossed into the public discourse by co-opted environmental groups worldwide: if we really were going to radically, perhaps permanently up-end and transform our way of life as we have known it for centuries, the structural paradigm sounding the call for change would itself have to come crashing down, too — obviously, this is not what they intend to do.
None of this has truly gone unnoticed; rather, my belief is that it has gone largely unchallenged out of pure, psychological necessity. The immense level of cognitive dissonance that is incurred by witnessing this state of affairs — of our supposed-leaders desperately imploring us to do something, anything we can to pitch in, while they themselves erase a whole lifetime’s worth of using solely re-usable shopping bags with a single trip by private jet — has driven many of us to defer back to the delusion that there really is anything that we, personally, could do about the situation; assuming that the situation itself even exists. Perhaps it doesn’t make much logical sense in the grand scheme of things, but it’s far more preferable to believe that those who hold power over us really are looking out for us than it is to try to come to terms with the ugly truth. But this form of arrangement is far from humanity’s first.
Before the Reformation, the Catholic Church had a practice of issuing what were called ‘indulgences’ — this, despite popular belief, was not the sole reason for Martin Luther’s eventual rebellion, but it is perhaps the most well-known of them. For the uninformed, an indulgence was something of a “get out of jail free” card: one could be purchased from the Church as way of ‘excusing’ a non-mortal sin that one had committed, or on the behalf of a diseased individual who may have been languishing in Purgatory as punishment for their own sins. At the time, the scripture that guided the moral and spiritual fabric of life was available primarily in Latin; a language entirely foreign to the peasantry and the otherwise unlearned. As such, the congregation had no means of telling for themselves what the Words of God really were — the clergy disseminated it to the masses, and they had to trust in its veracity. In this way, the Church was able to justify the ethically-questionable practice of scrubbing one’s soul clean with money: it’s not as if anyone could really “fact check” the claim. But when Luther translated the Bible into vernacular German, the Church lost its advantage over the common folk. This, and many other factors, led to the turbulent period of the Reformation: armed with the ability to read and interpret the Word of God for themselves, innumerable new churches, schools and sects began to spring up across the Holy Roman Empire.
I mention all of this because, as I have said before, I believe that we ourselves are in a state of moral and spiritual subservience to the global oligarchy. Like those sixteenth-century peasants, we too are permitted to purchase indulgences as a means of assuaging ourselves of our guilt: the corporations have carbon credits; the rich have overpriced goods and misguided philanthropy; and we, contemporary peasants, have biodegradable shopping bags and paper straws — though, of course, we are always told to give more. Crucially, just like the sale of indulgences, there is little to no evidence to suggest that any of this actually does anything productive; it is simply a good and easy way to profit from the blind faith that we retain in our moral culpability.
Where the two differ significantly is in terms of consequence: The Church had no meaningful competition to consider; the virtue capitalists certainly do. The great thing about making virtue into a commodity, however, is that this “extra feature” can give a company an edge over its competition. “We are a responsible company; they are not. Buying from us is more responsible than buying from them.” From here, the logical extension comes naturally: “Buying from us makes you a good person — buying from them makes you bad.” They used to write catchy jingles to try and keep an advertised product in the audience’s head; nowadays, corporations and businesses have figured out what the non-profit industrial complex has known for decades: that guilt is truly the most effective form of marketing.
Indeed, they are acutely aware of how well the image of an emaciated African child, too starved to even bother swatting the flies from his face, sparks a deep, existential guilt within much of their Western audience, some of whom are likely to see such a commercial while sat in front of more than their fair share of pizza. By the same principal we are, as Woods observed, psychologically beaten senseless with tales of pain and suffering that is alleged to be caused by our sins; we are told that the only way out of this torment, this Hell of our supposedly “rational” age, is to sacrifice our dreams and our livelihoods at the altar of Sustainability. If only you buy more expensive products and more expensive food; if you sacrifice more of your time and your energy; if you give more and do more and care more — then, and only then, do you have a chance at salvation. We accept all of this, because we believe that the proof — the “science” — is written in a language that we do not understand — even though we ought to see no good reason to trust those whom wield the weapon of “expert knowledge” above us and, in doing so, subjugate us to their every whim and command, when they say that we are incapable of doing the commanding ourselves.
Let’s return to the metaphorical battlefield; let’s jump back into the trenches and submerge ourselves in as much mud, blood and shrapnel as did the Secretary-General in salt water. Perhaps what has happened is that most folks, like many drafted soldiers, just want to be left alone. Perhaps they have convinced themselves that once they have ceded enough ground, the powers that be will stop asking them to cede more — it may not have worked for Neville Chamberlain, but perhaps this time it will be different. Others do not need to be drafted; they go to wage war willingly, convinced that theirs is the side of True Virtue. They are so assured, in fact, that they do not stop to consider why it is that the very ones who did the convincing — kings, queens, and presidents in a real war; corporations, elites, and bureaucrats in our metaphor — are not there themselves; risking neither life nor limb for the virtues that they claim to uphold.
Or perhaps my cynical suspicions are correct, and the question goes unasked because we’d rather not know the answer. It is indeed difficult to fathom the notion that we’ve been played for fools — it is much easier on the human psyche to go simply along with it; to continue to follow the orders we’ve been given and leave these uncomfortable questions in the hands of those whom we have deemed capable of managing any uncomfortable truths that may arise from their inquiry — at least, this is what we’d like to believe. In this way, like the good, diligent soldiers at war that we’ve been led to believe ourselves to be, we continue to march in the prescribed direction and dare not question the choice of our destination. In full defiance of Kant’s immortal wisdom, far too many of us do not yet posses the courage to use our own understanding. It is as if Luther published his translated Bible and all of German Christendom were too terrified to read its pages.
…and U.S. Army veteran and running contender for Bad-ass of the Year, Senator Brian Boquist (R-Dallas), tells State Troopers who may be coming for him, “Send bachelors and come heavily armed.”
Woah — wait a minute. What the hell happened in Oregon? Most of us have been following, or at least aware of the general chaos being unleashed upon the city of Portland (with the complicity of City Hall and municipal police, no less), but it would appear that it’s the state’s capitol, Salem, where the real action is.
The missing senators have been absent from the state legislature since Wednesday, June 19th. Judging from the limited media accounts on the matter, the Republican caucus has quite literally left the building, some members of which have gone as far as leaving the state entirely, in order to block the passage of a controversial bill that would introduce a cap and trade system for GHG emissions in the state. With that in mind, one can hardly blame them: cap and trade amounts to, ultimately, little more than what greatly resembles the Catholic Church’s practice of selling “indulgences”, those being perhaps the most well-known of catalysts that sparked the Protestant Reformation. Crucially, their supposed benefit to the environment remains dubious at best — in short, they are just as prone to corruption and favoritism on the part of the regulators as are any other “development” or “sustainability” project more commonly found in the Third World, and their real impact as a incentive against high GHG emissions is highly susceptible to market fluctuations.
But the state Democratic caucus, like their cohorts in practically every other Western nation, wish to push it through nevertheless: passing off the costs of being “environmentally friendly” to the consumer is just easier to do, you see. They can keep their private jets and overseas vacationing and still feel like they’re doing something about the so-called “climate crisis”. Of course, in order to pass the legislation, they need at least twenty senators present in the Senate — without the Republicans, they’re left with just eighteen. And so, the hunt is on. As of today, the Republican senators have continued to turn-down their Democratic colleague’s polite requests to return; in response, Senate President Peter Courtney (D-Salem) has threatened to send Oregon State Troopers on a quest to haul at least two of them back, kicking and screaming if need be. “[Today], unlike last Thursday and Friday,” reports The Oregonian, “Courtney did not ask the sergeant at arms to search the building for absent Republicans.”
Only time will tell how this saga comes to an end. In the meantime, we might take some iota of inspiration from these senators. As Senator Cliff Bentz (R-Ontario) has told reporters, “We’re not just going to get steamrolled.” Bentz has also stated that ongoing negotiations with the Democratic caucus are being had; hopefully, while not holding my breath, the two parties can come to some form of reasonable agreement. All I can say is thank God there are still some politicians left in the world who are willing to pull out all the stops when it comes to a piece of bad legislation.
Not only the constituents of these senators, but all Oregonians are lucky to have at least some representatives who are willing to stand up for them. Furthermore, anyone serious about the environment, no matter from where they hail, should be standing with them in solidarity — as explained, all this legislation would produce is yet another market of imaginary goods; the proceeds of which will likely end up… well, I’ll let you take a guess.
And then, there’s Senator Boquist.
In an email to The Oregonian/OregonLive Wednesday afternoon, Boquist stuck with his earlier statement and rejected a reporter’s characterization of his threat to troopers as “thinly veiled.”
“Nothing thinly veiled,” Boquist wrote. “I have been in political coup attempts. I have been held hostage overseas. I have been jailed politically overseas … Not going to be arrested as a political prisoner in Oregon period.”
[ … ] Boquist is a U.S. Army veteran whose businesses include military training and an international operation that journalists described in the 1990s as a paramilitary force of armed American and Russian ex-military officers.
Oof.
A. E.
12:51 am on June 23, 2019 Tags: abortion ( 2 ), disability rights, eugenics, forced abortion, Human Rights, medical ethics, rights of the disabled
If you have not yet heard of the recent court-decision made in the United Kingdom, wherein the judge has determined that a mentally disabled woman should be forced to terminate her pregnancy against her will, I would highly recommend that you do so — I prefer this version for the commentary provided, but the one doing the most rounds at present is here. Alarmingly, though not unexpectedly, some sections of the online peanut gallery appear to have latched on to the fact that the woman’s mother is Catholic as a means of justifying why this decision was the right one to make; ignoring entirely that it’s not the mother who’s getting an abortion — it’s her daughter, whom, despite her lacking the ability to make legal decisions of her own accord, does have an opinion on the fate of her pregnancy; an opinion that is no less worthy of consideration on account of her disability. As it happens, the judge presiding over this case has decided, in a similar vein, that the opinion of the woman’s doctors are more “legitimate” than that of the women herself, in addition to that of her mother and her social worker.
Now, you might argue, as the prosecution has, that the doctors are more knowledgeable in this regard than are either of the aforementioned parties; by which you would be suggesting that mind-reading and the foreseeing of multiple, hypothetical future outcomes are things one might learn in medical school. Given that this is not the case, we are left with an assumption that a forced abortion is in any way a better thing to do to a person than allowing her to birth the child would be. Ultimately, this is a matter of opinion, rather than fact — the only reason that the opinion of the doctors, presumably none of whom will be getting an abortion as a result of this, is being given precedence over that of the person who actually is getting an abortion, is because the latter is severely disabled and presently residing in the care of the state. Thus, there are a number of very important, actually quiterelevant to you things to be learned from this that need to be discussed in light of this decision; this is remains the case irrespective of whether or not you are personally disabled, or even if you genuinely believe that this woman should be forced to have an abortion. It is not even necessary to delve into a discussion regarding the ethics of abortion in and of itself: All of the points that need to be made have much more to do with the mother-to-be, someone who is definitely alive and who’s basic legal status as a “person” should no longer be up for debate.
Now, it is my impression that the version of this case as it is being presented by the media is using intentionally-vague terms, such as “learning disabled” and “mood disorder”, in order to preserve the woman’s identity by avoiding specifics — I can understand that. This, of course, makes it harder for me to attempt to understand the possible implications behind her being forced to abort her pregnancy; nevertheless, I can make some generalizations. Even for those of us who are not severely disabled, it is important that we try to get an understanding of the threshold: Call me a pessimist, but I have good reason to suspect that this threshold will be progressively lowered as time goes on. Now that the U.K. has set this precedent — that the “her body, her choice” rhetoric doesn’t apply to all women — we can expect other, even non-U.K. jurisdictions to test the same waters somewhere down the line. After all, this is the same process that led us to legalizing medical euthanasia: Today, the Netherlands; tomorrow, the world.
According to Wikipedia, the term “learning disabled” is used in Britain as a stand-in for “intellectually disabled”. Assuming that this is true, and considering that the disabled woman in question is in institutional care, I would imagine her to be at least moderately, if not severely cognitively impaired; somewhere in the IQ range of 40 and under, let’s say. As well, she is claimed to have the mental age of a six-to-nine year-old child, in addition to a “moderately severe” mood disorder. Again, because we are not given any hints as to exactly what behavioral issues the woman has, I cannot possibly hazard a guess as to what her doctors’ specific concerns are regarding her ability to continue the pregnancy. What I can do is attempt to argue why their concerns — so long as they are based in her mental faculties, rather than her literal, physical ability to carry the pregnancy — ought not to matter in the first place.
We know that the woman is at least capable of voicing her own opposition to the abortion, even though the courts have apparently decided that her opinion regarding what happens to her own body doesn’t matter. Now, let’s address this concept of mental age: To have a certain mental age is not synonymous with actually behaving as if one literally were that age; in this instance, her having a mental age of six-to-nine does not mean that she can effectively be regarded as a literal child. All that it means is that she has a level of cognitive functioning similar to that of a non-disabled child of around that age range. Furthermore, it says nothing specific about her emotional intelligence — that is, her ability to process her feelings and regulate her reactions in relation to various situations. Assuming that she doesn’t suffer from a blunted emotional response (given that the prosecution’s argument would make even less sense if that were the case), let’s say that she has an emotional intelligence comparable to that of a six-to-nine year-old child. Following from this, try to think of a sad or otherwise emotional event that might have happened to you when you were around that age. As much as you may have been affected more strongly owing to a lack of life experience, that did not make your feelings at the time any less “real.” The immense grief and sense of loss that you may have felt over the death of your beloved goldfish was still real grief and loss; it’s just that it doesn’t hurt as much when it happens to you twenty years down the road. “The first cut is the deepest,” as they say.
It’s important to understand this, as much of the prosecution’s argument (and that in the judge’s ruling) seems to be based upon the premise that the woman would be more traumatized by her child being taken away than she would be if the pregnancy were terminated. Right now, they argue, the child is “not a real baby” — so it is alleged that we can abort it and she’ll just have to get over it. The judge, for whatever reason, doesn’t appear to have considered the idea that the woman’s pregnancy is real to her — she’s been carrying her child for 22 weeks now; she clearly knows that she is pregnant and what that means; and she seems to understand the abortion procedure at least well enough to know that its result will be the loss of her baby. Even six year-old children can wrap their heads around the idea of a baby “being inside a woman’s belly” — just ask any parent with more than one kid. Their non-understanding of the technical details of pregnancy does not inhibit them from getting “the gist of it,” so to speak.
Despite all this, the judge seems to think that she knows better than both the woman and her mother what the former is capable of comprehending. It is always appalling to me to see someone rights being stripped from them, especially when that someone is severely disabled or in an otherwise vulnerable position, by reasoning of what someone else thinks is “in their best interests.” This is the kind of insidious paternalism that oftentimes turns deadly, just as it has here. The prosecution has had the gall to suggest that this woman would be more affected by her baby being taken from her by social services (though remaining alive) than she would be by being forced to undergo an invasive, deeply emotional medical procedure, against her will, that results in her baby’s death — this assumption is no better backed-up by her being severely cognitively disabled than it would be were she any less so. As a matter of fact, I for one would imagine that the trauma of undergoing a forced abortion would be greatly compounded by her disabilities, rather than somehow “alleviated.” This is particularly the case in consideration of her “moderately severe” mood disorder; this being the next item on the agenda.
As it is used here, a “mood disorder” could refer to virtually any of them: She might be prone to depression, or mania, or both; this is not elaborated on either. However, it may be a safe bet that the exact disorder being referred to contains at least some depressive component, given the wording and reasoning deployed by both the prosecution and the judge. Speaking from experience (and readily backed by clinical research), the last thing that anyone suffering from a depressive disorder wants to hear is bad news — since this woman has already voiced that she doesn’t want to have an abortion, there’s no other way to describe the court’s ruling than as “bad news”, and extremely bad news, at that. Regardless of her realistic ability to care for it, she wanted this baby; now, she’s going to lose it. She doesn’t need to have a normal IQ level to be profoundly, emotionally affected by this decision; alongside surely many others, I can personally attest to my not being cognitively impaired ever getting in the way of becoming extremely upset on receipt of bad news, even when such news might not warrant quite the same response in someone without a mood disorder — that’s kind of what these things will do to a person. If she was already going to have a difficult time dealing with the stress of child-rearing, she’s really going to have a hard time dealing with the revelation that her child is going to be killed at the behest of the state — again, her having a mood disorder is a better argument against forcing her to endure an abortion than it is for it. How could you possibly hope to convince her, even if superficially, that going against her wishes really was “in her best interests”, considering that her ability to process this type of information is greatly impaired in both cognitive and emotional terms?
At risk of appearing to deploy the “Everyone I don’t like is Hitler” form of “argument” that we’ve all grown so tired of in recent years, what has happened in this case really is comparable to what was done to the intellectually, emotionally, and physically disabled under the Third Reich’s euthanasia program: In essence, this woman’s status as severely disabled has been decided as rendering her own thoughts on what happens to her and her baby to be irrelevant. Of course, the Nazis took this line of thinking a step further by actually killing the severely disabled; in this case, it is “only” the baby that will be killed, on account if its mother being severely disabled — not to suggest that this is any better an outcome, of course. Sadly, this is far from the first time that a woman, disabled or otherwise, has been forced to undergo an unwanted abortion; some women have even been forcibly, permanently sterilized, whether the force applied be literal or practical in nature. Not only in Nazi Germany but as well, historically, in the United States, Canada, and many other Western nations, have women deemed “unfit” to reproduce been sterilized against their will by order of the government; that said, it obviously remains the case that non-liberal governments top the charts in this regard. Arguably, the only reason that this particular form of eugenics ever became unpopular in the West was because the Nazi’s soured the public’s opinion of it. Over seventy years later, it appears to be re-entering the discussion — if there’s any “re-emerging Nazi ideals” that we should be seriously concerned about countering, this one would make a good candidate.
This woman is not being sterilized, but she is having her rights blatantly violated by being forced to terminate her pregnancy. Remember: Disabled people of any form, regardless of how disabled they may be, are still people — they, too, are entitled to protection of these alleged “human rights” that we keep hearing about. No matter what the reason, whether or not her body and her baby’s right to life should be violated in this manner should never, under any circumstances, depend upon the strength of her mental faculties or lack thereof: The government should not be able to force you to undergo an invasive, ultimately non-essential procedure simply because they believe you to be too stupid to decide whether or not that’s an option you’d like to take. If it would be unethical to force her to donate a kidney, it is quite unethical to force her to abort her baby — the fact that she is cognitively disabled does not alter her status as a human being. Surely, we can identify a massive difference between whether or not one can advocate for themselves in legal matters and whether or not they may do so in their own, personal affairs. Lastly, it is not as if she’s brain dead — as outlined above, she is capable of possessing her own thoughts and feelings; whether those thoughts and feelings are “legitimate” is not up to the courts to decide, for precisely the same reason as why courts should not be deciding what does or doesn’t constitute “hate speech.”
We really, really do not want to continue down this path of determining of who gets to have more rights and who gets to have less. Joke about how there should be a “license to have children” all you want, but the bulk of those who seriously advocate such things almost always fail to consider just what kind of questions would be on the test, let alone the possibility that they themselves might fail it. It’s a lot less funny when you’re the one who’s had their rights taken away entirely on the basis of factors quite beyond your control.
Now that the U.K. has joined the ranks of China and North Korea as places on Earth where it is currently possible to legally force a woman to have an abortion, one of the more important questions we need to be asking ourselves is this: Where does one draw the line? At what point, and in what condition, does one person become “less human” than another, if such a thing could be determined? But of course, where you might personally do so is fundamentally irrelevant; you are likely not who would be making that decision. As such, we should all consider ourselves to be potentially subjected to this type of third-party decision-making on our behalf — time and time again, history has shown that it is better for one to be critical of any instance of their government blatantly violating the rights of its citizens, no matter what the reason given for doing so, than it is to blindly hope and pray that such a thing will never happen to them.
Uppity Peasants 