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ESCAPE TO LESBOS
~ Majid Naficy
“Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (December 973 – May 1057) was an Arab philosopher, poet, and writer. Because of his controversially irreligious worldview, he is known as one of the "foremost atheists" of his time according to Nasser Rabbat.
Born in the city of al-Ma'arra (present-day Ma'arrat al-Nu'man, Syria) during the later Abbasid era, he became blind at a young age from smallpox but nonetheless studied in nearby Aleppo, then in Tripoli and Antioch. Producing popular poems in Baghdad, he refused to sell his texts. In 1010, he returned to Syria after his mother began declining in health, and continued writing, which gained him local respect.
Described as a "pessimistic freethinker", al-Ma'arri was a controversial rationalist of his time, rejecting superstition and dogmatism. His written works exhibit a fixation on the study of language and its historical development, known as philology. He was pessimistic about life, describing himself as "a double prisoner" of blindness and isolation.
He attacked religious dogmas and practices, was equally critical and sarcastic about Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Zoroastrianism, and became a deist. He advocated social justice and lived a secluded, ascetic lifestyle. He was a vegan, known in his time as moral vegetarian, entreating: "do not desire as food the flesh of slaughtered animals / Or the white milk of mothers who intended its pure draught for their young".
Al-Ma'arri held an antinatalist outlook, in line with his general pessimism, suggesting that children should not be born to spare them of the pains and suffering of life.
Al-Ma'arri wrote three main works: The Tinder Spark, Unnecessary Necessity, and The Epistle of Forgiveness. Al-Ma'arri never married and died at the age of 83 in the city where he was born, Ma'arrat al-Nu'man. In 2013, a statue of al-Ma'arri located in his Syrian hometown was demolished by militants from the al-Nusra Front.
Al-Ma'arri taught that religion was a "fable invented by the ancients", worthless except for those who exploit the credulous masses.
Do not suppose the statements of the prophets to be true; they are all fabrications. Men lived comfortably till they came and spoiled life. The sacred books are only such a set of idle tales as any age could have and indeed did actually produce.
Al-Ma'arri criticized many of the dogmas of Islam, such as the Hajj, which he called "a pagan's journey". He rejected claims of any divine revelation and his creed was that of a philosopher and ascetic, for whom reason provides a moral guide, and virtue is its own reward.
His religious scepticism and antireligious views extended beyond Islam and included both Judaism and Christianity as well. Al-Ma'arri remarked that monks in their cloisters or devotees in their mosques were blindly following the beliefs of their locality: if they were born among Magians or Sabians they would have become Magians or Sabians. Encapsulating his view on organized religion, he once stated: "The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.
Some have drawn parallels between his work and Lucretius. And, scholars think that Dante's "Divine Comedy" was inspired by both this work and the writings of al-Ma'arri's contemporary, Ibn al-'Arabi. Taha Hussein compared Kafka's work and philosophy to al Ma’ari.
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THE YORKSHIRE MOORS AND ANNE BRONTE
~ I’ve just got back from a week’s filming in Haworth and its environs – its bleak, freezing, inhospitable, endlessly compelling environs – for a documentary about … yes, you guessed it: the Brontës. There were three of us presenting, each going in to bat for a different member of the family.
The novelist Helen Oyeyemi was Emily’s champion, the BBC stalwart Martha Kearney was Charlotte’s, and I was there to represent Anne. She’s the only Brontë sister I can really cope with. The others, with their Wuthering Heights and their Jane Eyres, are just … too much. Sturm und Drang are not my way, in life or in reading. Give me the quiet, forensic scrutiny of Agnes Grey, the eponymous heroine of Anne’s first book, based on her miserable experiences as a governess for two rich families full of semi-feral children. Or the slow, pitiless anatomizing of the effects of alcoholism on a Victorian family, so accurate that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall could have been written yesterday.
No madwomen in the attic. No ghosts. No blinded, Byronic heroes. Anne’s protagonists are ordinary women coming to extraordinary decisions, and they end up with good men: farmers, curates – with working eyes but no grand estates – who must stand by until her heroines have rescued themselves.
But a curious thing happened as the week went on. I found myself increasingly in sympathy with Charlotte and Emily, that hitherto emotionally exhausting pair. It is impossible to walk across the open moors for long without starting to feel the stir of wild imaginings, a longing to fill it with stories big and bold enough for the job, and to people it with characters strong enough to infuse its unforgiving acres with life. It is impossible to sit in the parsonage for long – looking down on a rapidly industrializing mill town in one direction, eternally unchanging landscape to the other – and not feel your imagination whetted between the past and future.
By the end, the wonder really was that Anne managed to put all those temptations to melodrama and gothic insanity to one side and steer her own course. Or maybe we’ve got her all wrong; maybe Charlotte and Emily were the realists, writing what they knew, and she was the fantasist, wildly imagining ordinary houses, pretty gardens and emotions that can fill only a human heart and not the gaping maw of the Yorkshire moors.
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As she begins, Ellis is single, going on 40, prone to seizures and anxious about all three conditions. By the end, she’s marrying a good man and feeling because “there’s nothing that can soften this. Nothing. She didn’t even make 30.” But Anne’s sad ending is balanced by her own happy one. “Take courage” were Anne’s last words. Ellis comes away uplifted.
She uses the vocabulary of popular journalism: “eye-watering”; “phenomenal”; “achingly fashionable”. She is given to speculation – the words “Anne must have” recur – but Ellis has done her research. She starts off acting wide eyed but soon she is giving us sensational and pertinent extracts from the writings of William Carus Wilson, the founder of the school in which the two eldest Brontë girls died. She demonstrates that the mournful sequence of Brontë deaths is an instance of a ghastly historical reality (the average life expectancy in Haworth in Anne’s lifetime was 26) and material for the maudlin contemporary cult of the happy deathbed. “Anne didn’t want to die,” writes Ellis. “Of course she didn’t.” Her indignation is salutary.
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She structures her story character by character, a way of coming at Anne from all angles. Mother Maria Brontë (née Branwell), who died before Anne was two, comes first and allows Ellis to think about maternity. Tabby the housekeeper brings in the moorland: its beauties, dangers and its folklore. Sister Emily is the trigger for a consideration of creativity; her father, Patrick, for a tribute to Anne’s urge towards activism. It’s a sound structure and it allows Ellis to give the Brontë story – well worn to the point of being worn out – a fresh turn.
Ellis grew up longing for Heathcliff, she confesses, but came to her senses eventually. As for Heathcliff’s creator, Ellis relishes Branwell’s childish fantasy of Emily as a “gurt bellaring bull” who has a tantrum and is straitjacketed and put to bed. She is skeptical of romanticism. “Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils,” wrote Charlotte. Ellis asks what kind of a liberty it was that made it so traumatic for Emily ever to leave home.
Ellis’s range of reference is eclectic. She alludes to Kate Bush and Cold Comfort Farm, but she is also interested in the theology of William Cowper’s poetry. She knows what happens when a bog bursts and why. She puts Patrick Brontë’s life story in the context of contemporary anti-Irish racist stereotyping: when his son, Branwell, was drinking himself stupid in the Haworth pub, he seemed to its other regulars not a romantically self-tormenting rake, but just another drunken Paddy.
Ellis is funny about her own naivety, but she does the hard work of textual analysis and archival research. She has read the papers of the numerous Brontë scholars who have picked over every relic at Haworth. She is grateful for their assiduity, but she doesn’t overvalue it: “Can you really judge a person by their teapot?”
She is combative on Anne’s behalf. As her champion, she identifies Charlotte as her opponent. Anne died at the age of 29. Charlotte lived another six years, during which she changed her youngest sister’s poems, disparaged her novels (“Wildfell Hall, it hardly appears to me desirable to preserve”) and belittled her personally. Anne lived, wrote Charlotte, “in the shade”, covered “with a sort of nun-like veil”. Ellis argues that it was Charlotte who cast the shade and drew the veil.
Anne was the first of the sisters to write about being a governess and the first to have two books out. When her unscrupulous publisher tried to pass The Tenant of Wildfell Hall off as being by the author of the better-selling Jane Eyre, Charlotte and Anne went to London (Anne’s only visit) to set things straight. Charlotte was concerned to distance herself from Anne’s book, which was already being described as “morbid, coarse and repulsive”. Anne, braver and more honest, in Ellis’s view, wanted to lay claim to it.
Anne dies. Ellis’s boyfriend proposes to her at a Björk concert where “everyone is dressed up as pirates and mermaids and jellyfish”. There is something of the jolly vicars about all this. I’m thinking of the irritating kind of cleric who, unable to trust the congregation to respond to the grave beauty of the liturgy, keeps interrupting it to explain what’s going on or to throw in some jokily banal anecdote to reassure anyone scared off by seriousness. But Ellis is cleverer than she lets on. She says she’s longed to have sisters “to sing into a hairbrushes with, to talk boys with”. Actually, she would probably have talked books with them and the conversation would have been sharp witted and well informed.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/08/take-courage-anne-bronte-art-of-life-review
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The older I get, the more I find that you can only live with those who free you, who love you with an affection that is as light to bear as it is strong to feel.
Today's life is too hard, too bitter, too anemic, for us to undergo new bondages from those whom we love. This is how I am your friend, I love your happiness, your freedom, Your adventure in one word, and I would like to be for you the companion we are sure of, always. ~Albert Camus
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Escapism is inescapable for us ~ Jeremy Sherman
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WHY SOVIET CITIZENS DIDN’T TRY TO SAVE THE SOVIET UNION
Realistically, there were two occasions for supporters of the Soviet Union to go out and save their country:
During the GKCHP coup d’etat in August 1991.
This would effectively mean going out in support of the coup makers, against the Russian president Boris Yeltsin. The man was hugely popular in the cities at the time, the idea would be as weird at the time as rallying against a royal wedding. Besides, the coup-makers seemed to have the army, the secret services and the police on their side, why would anyone need to go out in the streets to restore order.
After the announcement of Belavezha Accords in December 1991.
Here, another problem. There was no organized political force at the time who saw their interest in keeping the USSR. The state till was empty, the Cold war lost, the Communist party banned. Anyone who was someone in the previous party-state bureaucracy, the police and the army was busy positioning themselves as fiery Russian (anti-Soviet) patriots and stealing the cherries of Soviet legacy. Hey, even Putin asked his liberal patron in St Petersburg to call his highest KGB boss and tell him Putin didn’t want to work for the secret police anymore!
Restoring the USSR for Putin and many other Communists would mean handing back the goodies and being prosecuted for petty-bourgeois crimes and failure to defend the Soviet rule.
Some lower-level old-timers managed to gather a few thin rallies. The problem with them was no one really understood what “keeping the USSR” actually meant. Returning power to Gorbachev? Everyone hated him. Returning power to the coup-makers? They were a bunch of pathetic losers. It all ended up in some scared people coming together with Soviet flags to ask each other, “who’s gonna pay our salaries and pensions now?”
The cardinal problem for the old-timers was the archetypal psychology. The Soviet rule was a Stalinist construct. It was built by a lot of violence, primed with fear, reinforced with blood. It rested on the proletarian discipline: you are told what you need to do by your boss, and once told, go ahead no matter what. This time, no boss was around to tell the old-timers what they needed to do.
The concept of proletarian discipline was compounded by the old Russian tradition of subjugation to whoever has the power in the Kremlin. In Russia, if there is trouble in the street, you run home, lock the door and watch on the TV how the rulers and Cossacks crush the skulls of trouble-makers. As the mantra of Putinism goes, “don’t rock the boat!”
We had enough worries in December 1991. No one wanted to rock the boat more than it was rocking already. ~ Dima Vorobiev
Ross Dredger:
What a bleak time for Russia. One of many — too many.
The problem with revolutions is that rarely do the revolutionaries have the infrastructure and means to fulfill the promises of the better life. England found that out in the 17th century and France in the 18th. Even the highly regarded American revolution led to decades of uncertainty while their Founding Fathers were trying to figure out how to run their new country (at the very least it produced a story for a hit Broadway musical some 220 years later).
For a country with so much promise and potential, it is saddening to see how Russia took so many steps backward in its progress. It is really unfair to judge by Western standards. I think this is the source of much of the misunderstanding of the present state of the country.
Putin remains popular and the West, with its blinders on, cannot figure out why.
Dima Vorobiev:
The 1991 events was a revolution without revolutionaries.
Putin basically is more of a solution than a problem for the West. A weak aggressive nationalist in the Kremlin would so much worse.
Jim Henderson:
A revolution without revolutionaries. Splendidly and sadly precise.
Dima Vorobiev:
Yeltsin: Straight talk, great stature, plain language. Didn’t have much competition anyway.
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MISHA IOSSEL ON RUSSIAN WAR CRIMES
Two young girls, two 14 year-old sisters, Anna and Yuliya Aksenchenko, killed by Russian missiles in Kramatorsk last evening. They would be turning 15 on September 4.
This is horrible, but we must not avert our eyes. The world must know.
This is what Putin's Russia does in Ukraine right now. It kills innocent people, children. This is what Russia stands for in the world writ large: infinite hatred, limitless evil, senseless murder, deadly, pathological self-loathing manifesting itself as the need to destroy life all around it.
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COULD RUSSIA COLLAPSE LIKE THE SOVIET UNION IN 1991?
Absolutely they could experience another collapse as bad as 1991. Only in 1991 it was the result of economic issues from the market. Here Russia would have the added issues of sanctions that are unlikely to go away anytime soon.
The sanctions would inhibit, if not make impossible, any recovery by Russia.
Will a collapse occur? So far it hasn’t. But Putin knows the longer the war continues the greater the likelihood. ~ Brent Cooper, Quora
Janne Tapio:
The Soviet economy was collapsing throughout the 1980s, thanks to the war in Afghanistan and other issues.
Obviously they could have tried to hold it together with violence. Bad economy in itself does not make countries collapse. The North Korea is still very much a country.
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WHO SERVED IN THE ARMY? NOT FIELD MARSHAL SHOIGU
Alexandra Kollontai, a communist revolutionary, diplomat and feminist with Finnish ancestry recalled that immediately before the USSR invaded Finland in 1939, Vyacheslav Molotov, Soviet Foreign Minister and the mastermind of Winter War against Finland, bragged to her that the Red Army would be in Helsinki in 3 days.
Three days after the war broke out came and went and Finns were nonchalantly making Molotov cocktails (a glass bottle with flammable liquid and a rag for a fuse) to haul at the invaders and singing defiantly Nyet, Molotov!
For almost half of my life, Russia has been fighting wars with America throwing her economy under the bus and sacrificing millions of brightest minds to brain drain and each time believing that it’s worthwhile for the higher purpose. Russia remains staunchly Eastern Orthodox country stuck in a distant past and modern West is Lucifer’s work to her who must be fought and defeated for God’s justice to prevail. The battle of good vs evil is not framed in biblical terms but framework is the same.
The Three Day Glorious Special Operation repeated itself in Ukraine 83 years later and Vyacheslav Volodin, Speaker of State Doom’a (Nether Chamber of Erstwhile Parliament) floated an idea of permitting employment to public officials only if they have served in the military.
These are the verboten words that Volodin uttered to senators unaware of the irony of what he had just suggested.
Vyacheslav Volodin himself has not served in the military, and therefore should resign following his own advice.
Volodin’s boss, autocrat and commander-in-chief Vladimir Putin has not served in the military, either. The man who has deliberately weakened military forces and institutes of powers to bring them down to his cowardly and paranoid level in order to rule indefinitely.
The Minister of Defense, Field Marshal Sergey Shoigu has not served in the military.
Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has not served in the military.
Former Prime Minister and (when not drunk) Deputy Head of Security Council Dmitry Medvedev has not served in the military.
Mayor of Moscow Sergey Sobyanin has not served in the military. Etc, etc.
In Russia, unless you pursue an officer career, serving in the military is what poor people and stupid people do, who have no brains to study at university or no money to buy yourself out of mandatory service.
Serving in the military is what children of peasants and proletarians do.
Army is a lower class duty, shunned by the higher ups in the food chain.
Middle and upper classes don’t ever do the military. Russia’s is not “people’s army.” It’s still very much a serf army where commanders are more like masters that belong to a superior social class rather than higher ranked servicemen whose duty is to defend the homeland.
Military is not a place for decent, educated folks like the ones pushing yes buttons in the parliament and pushing papers in bureaucratic institutions of power.
What Volodin has offered is turning the system on its head -- flip the social pyramid upside down.
From now on going forward, it’s the proletariat and peasants who will be in charge and get cushy ministerial jobs and ruling party appointments.
An erratic thought germinated in Volodin delirious mind possibly afflicted with dementia or Alzheimer’s bore a hopeful situation in which clandestinely, unbeknownst to media and ordinary people, a communist revolution 2.0 took place in Russia, and a renegade time warp has sucked Volodin into a black hole back to the future of the blessed 1970s, when V. Volodin was a young regional nomenklatura worker serving the communist party of the Soviet Union.
Another upgrade to the state repression apparatus that occurred after Russian Armed Forces’ failure to capture Kyiv in three days was the legal permission granted to KGB and National Guard to open fire “at the concentrations of people” in urban environment including women and children.
Next time there’re prominent anti-war or anti-Putin protests on the streets of Russian cities and towns, National Guard (that have just received battle tanks from Wagner Group) will open fire from assault rifles, machine guns and shell demonstrators indiscriminately until they are dispersed or all lying dead.
Attack helicopters and fighter jets will finish off the job if necessary because firing at unarmed protesters is a no brainer to any sadistic psychopathic coward.
Supremacy of Putin’s regime will be upheld no matter the size of human costs and the consequences to the subjects. He’s in charge and so he makes all the rules. But who will come to his defense when masses revolt? No one.
What country is Putin going to leave behind? A backward , third world pariah state, in a worse shape than he inherited from Boris Yeltsin in 1999.
Israel with the population 14 times smaller than in Russia, and its GDP 4 times smaller, spends 5 times more money on science that Russia.
50,000 scientists have fled from Russia in the past few years.
And how did Russian government respond apart from jailing a score of scientists for failing to build new wonder weapons?
Russian government demanded from scientists and businessmen to learn in 7 years how to produce microchips, robots and machines. And if they don’t?
Following Stalinist principles they will all be thrown into Gulag on made up treason or corruption charges.
And if science fails, then Orthodox Christian Church will cause miracles to happen with the assistance of schoolchildren.
Towards that purpose, Patriarch Killkill who supports genocide against his fellow Orthodox Christians in Ukraine only because his boss Putin doesn’t like them, lobbies to make public schools adopt Church Slavonic lessons instead of English in the mandatory school curriculum.
An Orthodox prayer a day keeps Americansky devil away!
Unless the Devil fetches Bombardier Private Jet, a Mercedes Benz Executive Class car, a sleek yacht, or a countryside compound decorated by Italian artists and designers that Patriarch Killkill has a penchant for. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Philip Machanick:
Russia is a weird place. You can be arrested protesting with a blank sheet of paper but march on Moscow with heavy military gear, shoot down 7 aircraft and kill at lest 15 people and all is forgiven if you just say, sorry, I didn’t really mean it. Now I will go to Belarus to sulk because Putin doesn’t love me anymore. A pretty wretched fate. But not quite as bad as being jailed or defenestrated.
In a mafia state, the mafiosi are the only club that counts.
Biker QLD:
With the Molotov cocktails, the story I got from my Finnish parents went along the lines of, the Russians started coming into the country and claimed to be dropping off bread parcels, which was bullshit, so my grandparents would throw the cocktails at the Russians and say “have a drink to go with your bread parcels!”
Elena Gold:
And today, the Russian Duma approved the draft law on mandatory labor for school kids, which doesn’t require an agreement of parents.
Child labor, here it comes!
Alan Taylor:
Russia’s crusade against the English language is really, colossally stupid. That Russia is choosing this path is a great tragedy for the Russian people.
Rudi Pelosi:
Putin will leave a time bomb of a country behind when removed from power with a frustrated, brainwashed population with much lower human potential than when he took over the country.
Abcd Efg
The sad thing is that Russian scientists are by no means incompetent or bad and have a good reputation even internationally.
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AFTER THE COMING COLLAPSE
Not just Putin’s regime, but the Russian Federation will collapse. The West isn’t ready for that and is trying to stop this process.
But Russia will still collapse.
“All that’s going to happen, already happened.” The trees of tomorrow have already been planted; sprouts will sprout.
Wagner mutiny was the first black swan event.
If the West refuses to accept that Russia is collapsing, as the result of its own internal processes, triggered by Putin’s starting the full-scale war in Ukraine, then we will see a second black swan event that will make the West accept the fact that Russia is collapsing.
There is little the outside world can or should do to influence the power struggle inside Russia; but to think that Putin guarantees stability is a view that has been falsified by the development of Russia in the last years.
Russian Federation is the last empire that managed to survive into the new millennium, but its existence now threatens the whole civilization. I’d very much prefer the civilization to survive. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
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WHY THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM SPREAD SO QUICKLY IN 1917 RUSSIA
Year 1917 was the year of two revolutions. The first one, toppling the monarchy and start of a slow-moving peasant confiscation of the lands owned by the state and landed gentry. The second one, a small group of Marxists supported by the military in St. Petersburg who went about nationalizing banks, industries and urban properties.
The jump from the first to the second didn’t have anything to do with the spread of Communist ideology. When Bolsheviks took power in November ‘17, the number of people with a knowledge of Marxism on the level of an average Quora user was counted in low thousands, if not hundreds.
Communists were the only organized force who promised the nations three things: (1) end of war, (2) unconditional confiscation of land by peasants, (3) confiscation of urban property by the lower classes of society organized in Soviets.
Grabbing of power with massive confiscation of property and sharing it between revolutionaries is as old as our civilization. Nothing particularly Communist about it. As the subsequent events showed, in 1917 even the Bolshevik leaders had a vary vague idea what to do next.
Poster below: the leader of Russian revolution Vladimir Lenin delivering an inspired speech on the decorative background made of the main Communist slogans in 1917, “Peace to the people”, “Land to peasants”, “Power to Soviets”. ~ Dima Vorobiev
Kerensky’s mistake was in not pulling Russia out of the war. If he had, it would have strengthened his position and deprived the radicals of their chance to seize power.
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GERMAN PROPAGANDA DURING WW2
It was very effective and many people still believe in it today.
For example, Goebbels created an image of a very modern and mechanized Nazi army.
But what was the reality? Indeed, much of World War II logistics relied heavily on horses and various types of trucks and vehicles stolen from occupied parts of Europe. ~ RI Shohag, Quora
Stephen Moerlein:
I think the Germans were amazed at how mechanized the US army was, with its innumerable jeeps that almost made walking unnecessary for many GIs.
Thad Oneal:
Germany lacked oil resources. I’m pretty sure Germans knew this.
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THE UK COMPARED WITH THE US
~ To an foreign observer, many Americans seem to need to be constantly reassured they live in the greatest (and “free-est”) country in the world. “Land of the free, home of the brave”. It is often claimed to be a fact, without any apparent need to justify the statement. To suggest that perhaps it is not actually true would shake the very foundations of many citizen's belief system. It is repeated ad nauseum. In any other country it would be called indoctrination. It starts in the school system. Waving and saluting flags, swearing allegiance repeatedly, singing the anthem at every opportunity (clutching hearts to add emotion), and “God Bless America” is repeated so often its almost a plea. No speech can end without this addition. Even the President and all his cabinet feel the need to always wear a little flag to prove how patriotic they are. It’s a bit Stalinist!
Hollywood turns out countless versions of the same theme — Americans heroic and good, fighting evil foreigners (albeit there was a time when Hollywood was accused of being traitorous because it wasn’t pro “American” enough and allegedly harbored evil communists). To a non-American it gets a bit tiring. It also often gets hijacked by an unpleasant fringe of society. I've been told its just patriotism, but the British, and almost all other democratic countries, don't need to bother with all that and shout about it. They just know how lucky they are and don't require constant reassurance, or to boast and shout about it. They don't feel a need to prove how patriotic they are, or constantly call on God for affirmation that they are somehow special. I think this reflects on UK as a country with a much longer history, perspective and maturity.
America is a much more religious country than the UK. I was shocked at how many people attend church (or other religious institution) every week. Of course there is nothing at all wrong with that, but the mixing of religion and politics and the number of people who blindly follow the various doctrines is shocking to a Brit. I was taken aback at how often God was introduced into the conversation on some of my travels. In such an advanced country it is amazing to an outsider how often faith trumps logic in so many people’s thinking. Try being a politician and not claiming to be a “believer” in the USA — good luck! Even Trump had to pretend to please his core followers (he had to admit Jesus was more important than him — that must have hurt!).
Christian and other religious fundamentalism is common and dangerous when mixed with politics — which it commonly is in the US. It can be seen everywhere, especially certain ”bible belt” states. Europeans have taken to joking “don’t forget to set your watch back 50 years when you clear the US border on entry”. I've been told in complete seriousness that it's God's will that Americans can bear arms (the means to kill) by the same folks who defend the “right to life”. Fake preachers, ridiculous TV evangelists, and down right crooks getting rich on religion thrive, as do conspiracy theorists — often combining their toxic claims with a religious evangelism. QAnon being one of the most dangerous. They seem so obviously fake, illogical, and ridiculous to us Brits, but they get away with it in the US and have a frightening following right up to senior representative level.
Noise. A slightly frivolous one here but why are Americans so loud? Why does any TV anchor on US TV have to shout everything, all the time. Why all the whooping and clapping before an act has even started or for that miraculous achievement of actually hitting a high note? Self awareness is a gene missing in so many citizens! I had a headache most of the time.
The healthcare sucks in America if you are poor or have the wrong insurance, are unemployed, or are sick too long. Incidentally, and I stress, it is very good if none of these apply to you. I was fortunate and enjoyed the best of it and was impressed. Paying medical bills is one of the most common causes of bankruptcy. Being financially ruined just for being sick? That is sick! Hospitals and clinics checking you have the means to pay before they will treat you? That is just plain wrong. The fact that huge numbers of Americans think this is better than “socialized medicine” (without any knowledge of it, or any objection to equally socialized US institutions like the FBI, National Park Service or Coast Guard as just a very few very random examples) points to an “I’m all right Jack” society. The British system is not perfect in some ways, but it cares about everyone if they're sick, not whether they can pay.
There is also a world class UK private medical system if that rocks your boat — the rich and famous fly in from all over the world to use it. It is hugely reassuring knowing it’s there for you, no questions asked and it shows a more compassionate country.
The rich are richer in the US and there are more of them, but the poor are way poorer and swathes of America resemble a third world country. It shocks us foreigners when we see it. We really do not expect it. Sometimes mile after mile of it. You just don't get that in the UK. Yes there are poor, and yes there are depressed areas, but not close to some of the urban and rural poor found in large, and often crime ridden, areas of the US. It is are not especially generous, but the safety net for the really needy is kinder in the UK.
The right to ramble. There are stunning National and State Parks in the USA but outside of these it is often difficult to just go for a country hike or walk without hitting a “No Trespassing” sign, often reinforced with a threatening gun logo. In the UK our laws and the literally tens of thousands of miles of footpaths and bridleways means that access to the land is far less restricted and, within reason, we can walk or hike virtually anywhere as long as we do no harm or damage, and we do not have to drive for hours to get there..
The unbelievable levels of gun ownership in the US and general crime statistics cannot be ignored. More people are murdered annually in just one US city each year than the entire UK. Not because the British are any less prone to crime or violence. We are no better as individuals and just as prone to “lash out”. Its mainly down to the ready availability of guns. “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people”. A common refrain. Yes, but give people ready access to guns and people get killed. Availability in the UK? Very difficult. People shot? Virtually zero (as at April 2022 not one death by gun in London since October 2021). Military grade assault weapons? Crazy. A daily US average of 54 gun deaths. Each one a life tragically wasted. That’s deaths.
Woundings run at about 3 times that figure. Why? I’ve seen people walking around the stores in some states proudly showing their hand guns, as if they are John Wayne on a movie set. Come on! Childish. I could have taken those guns and used them on the cowboy showing off had I felt inclined. Guns and ammunition on sale openly as if it was an everyday item? Insane. 400 million guns owned. This is an aspect of American life I simply could not get used to. It’s shocking.
Private gun ownership somehow equates to freedom? That is not freedom. That’s fear. I didn’t feel one bit free in the thought that the guy in the car next to mine probably had a gun in the glove compartment. A large section of US society thinks the simple answer is to have a bigger gun in your own glove compartment. Sick. Armed guards everywhere from banks to schools, driven by fear. There is something morally and ethically wrong with a country when even the massacre of 6 and 7 year old school children ultimately fails to move politicians enough to do something meaningful. Citizens of other advanced nations shake their heads in total misapprehension of this aspect of American culture. I know weapons. I have used them in war and had them used against me. I have seen what modern weapons do to a person and it’s not like the movies. It lives with you for the rest of your life. This is a country that has never really matured.
We think our government institutions are bad in the UK. Many are pretty good in comparison with their US counterparts. Try dealing with the IRS or Immigration and you'll know what I mean. The IRS harrassed and occasionally threatened me to complete a US tax return for years after I returned to the UK despite the fact that I had only ever been an employee of a UK multi-national, had paid my US taxes in full, was not a US citizen, had left the country, my visa had long expired, I had become a UK tax payer again and planned no return. In the end it required a letter from my UK lawyer to get them off my back. Dealing with the IRS is so stressful for US citizens that huge numbers prefer to pay someone to do it for them. I wont even start to describe what dealing with Immigration is like.
Police. In the UK the police are, on average, far better trained, far fitter and don't shoot you! I was staggered to have a gun pointed at me for a minor traffic violation! That would never, ever, happen in the UK. Indeed, if it ever did, the cop concerned would be immediately suspended pending a full investigation of the justification and if there was none, it’s a firing offense (pun intended). Many US police are poorly trained paramilitaries and shoot a hell of a lot of their own citizens every year. Many of them are so overweight you wonder how they could possibly chase down a criminal (perhaps why they shoot?). If a UK cop is trusted with a weapon, he or she has been seriously vetted and trained. UK police and policing wins every day.
Food and diet. Obesity. Americans love their food but on a world scale it is actually pretty bad. Quantity wins over quality and sugar and other additives are added to food at levels now banned in Europe. Even an unacceptable proportion of police are fat in America. Perhaps that's why they shoot — they can't run. The number of seriously overweight citizens shocks Europeans. To be fair our food was pretty bad decades ago but we have improved up to world standard. The US, if anything, has sadly got worse. Unless of course you want to live on steak. burger and pancakes and die young, then its destination of choice! Of course there are plenty of places that still serve good or even great food, but by comparison to Europe you have to go really looking for it, and sadly most don't bother.
Extremist politics and division. It saddens me that the US has become a divided nation and it’s getting worse. “You either agree with me or you are stupid or bad” has increasingly taken over from reasoned debate and compromise. The politicization of the Supreme Court in a democratic country shocks us. Judges chosen for their political views? Presidents pardoning convicted criminals because they are politically well connected? In advanced countries, law is surely separate and above politics? The prevalence of weapons, conspiracy theorists and irresponsible leadership make this a serious worry. In the UK we tend to avoid conspiracy theorists and consider them weird if not slightly insane. In the US they elect them. The storming of the Capitol could have turned into a massacre and is evidence of how bad things have become.
I will simply mention work/life balance. Europe/UK wins easily.
Finally I want to stress I have highlighted some decisive points based on my experience. My experience may be different from others. I am answering the specific question. The US is still a great country. I fully accept that there are many areas of the country where some of these observations may not apply, it's a big country! I can only use my personal experience. I loved my time there, met some great people, learned a lot and saw much to admire. I have served with Americans, there was a lot of mutual respect, they were good men and women and I was happy when they had my back.
More than a few felt that they were doing God’s business which mystified, sometimes amused and slightly worried my British military comrades, bearing in mind what we were about to do, but it did not affect their professionalism. I could certainly create a list of negative points for most countries I’ve spent time in, including the UK. But, at a key point in my life, I had to make the choice and I knew, without doubt, where I wanted to spend the rest of my life and raise my kids. Also, while I was in the US it was a largely united country. Now it is bitterly divided over guns, race, abortion and elections, to name a few topics. My decision seems even more wise now. ~ Chris, Quora
Mark Hurd:
Brit here, I married an American girl, lived there 10 years on the West coast, got fed up with the crime etc and brought my wife and two kids home to England. That was 30 years ago. My wife says that if I die before she does she'll be staying here.
Ken Neal:
Flare ups in the UK almost never end in fatal violence as few people carry any sort of weapon, criminals excepted. Few criminals carry a weapon because they know that they will face highly professional armed police if they do and the sentence they receive will be a lot longer than if they weren't carrying a weapon.
Yes, there is gang related violence in some inner city areas but that violence rarely spills over into the rest of society. On the rare occasions when it does, when someone is caught in the crossfire, the public outcry is so great that the perpetrators are usually caught within a few weeks. We had two instances last year and the perpetrators were caught but one in a year is highly unusual let alone two.
Oriana:
What amazed me most was how non-urban most of the country is. It's mostly suburban. Single-family houses predominate. They are great to live in, but monotonous to look at. The same goes for shopping centers.
But one needs to remember that this is still a frontier country, especially on the West Coast. Of course there are no Gothic cathedrals or baroque castles here. That simply has to be accepted as part of the package. But there is the luxury of space -- again, mostly on the West Coast. Supermarkets more than make up for the lack of history. And public restrooms are generally free.
Speaking of history, I still occasionally get perplexed by how ignorant most of the population seems to be. Ignorant and not in the least curious. The same goes for geography, basic science, great world literature -- this list could go on.
Actually it's worse than ignorance. There is often a pride in that ignorance: "I don't know and I don't want to know."
In spite of the religiosity (comparable to Mexico's), there is also a surprising ignorance of bible stories and even the teachings of Jesus. Those who are knowledgeable in the realm of religion tend to be atheists or Buddhists.
I hasten to add that there are of course plenty of exceptions and some wonderful universities and libraries like islands in that in huge sea of ignorance.
And Americans are on the whole very friendly. Just stay away from politics and religion, and you can bask in the warmth of human connection.
Joe:
In the article The UK Compared to the US, the author writes that private gun ownership is fear-based, and for Americans, owning a weapon equates to freedom is the propaganda myth promoted by the National Rifle Association. Also, it is the mantra of anti-gun-law enthusiasts. I believe gun ownership is a byproduct of the American economic system.
The first colonists based their economy on the practices of exploitation and predation. In the Southern colonies, it was slavery. In the North, it was more subtlety called indentured servitude. Of course, slavery existed in the Northern colonies as well, but it was not as blatant as in the South. In the early years, economic oppression was deniable because the authorities said the land was free in the West.
The immigrants developed this farmland with the tactics of exploitation and predation on the Native Americans. Over time, the indentured servants gained their freedom and lived in poverty. Their neighborhoods were labeled slums and inundated with new immigrants. The wealthy farm owners forced the African slaves to live on plantations, and the settlers forced the Native Americans onto reservations. Although the American capitalistic system needed a substantial amount of money, it also had to be enforced by might, which meant using force. In the North, many of the immigrants found their way west. The rich and powerful utilized the police force to keep those who stayed from moving to better neighborhoods. The plantations armed their overseers and used them to enforce slavery.
After the Civil War, the overseers became the police and continued to use guns and dogs to enforce segregation instead of slavery. In the West, the rich and powerful used the cavalry to keep the Native Americans confined to the reservations. The enforcement of exploitative and predatory practices with gun violence produced an unexpected outcome.
The rifle and pistol became symbols of freedom. Over time, firearm ownership became a personal badge of freedom. To the original colonists, freedom meant the ability to do the morally right thing, and discipline meant the will to do the right thing. The use of a weapon for economic oppression changed the meaning of freedom. The new meaning became, If I own a gun, I can do whatever I want. At this time, the leaders created a new myth: Guns protect the law-abiding citizen from the drunk and lawless people living in the slums.
Weapons protected the good citizens from the drunk and lawless ex-slaves and the Native Americans. The leaders labeled this policy as law and order. Today, the myth has evolved to say guns are needed to protect people from immigrants, ex-slaves, Native Americans, and the government.
The government is a euphemism for those who work to increase opportunity for the economically oppressed. One of the emotions used to promote this policy is fear. Another is bigotry. Today, an honest discussion of the importance of guns in the American culture must include economic oppression based on racism and dread.
Oriana:
This reminds me of a conversation I overheard in the parking lot of my supermarket. Two men were talking, both around forty, casually dressed.
“Bob, what d’you need so many guns for?” the more dominant-looking guy asked, trying to suppress a chuckle.
“To protect myself from the government,” Bob replied without hesitation.
I imagined Bob making some kind of last stand in his backyard against the Marines. Did he ever give thought to what his chances might be?
But I guess that, as in discussions of religion, logic doesn’t enter into this.
It was with relief that I watched Bob climb into his pickup truck and drive off, always ready to defend himself against the government.
Joe:
Mary:
I think the key statement in the discussion of American differences from other Western countries is that “it is a country that has not really matured.” The other big thing to consider is the whole idea of still having a frontier — huge open spaces sparsely populated, with most living in rural rather than urban areas.
Patriotism is a kind of obsession: flags everywhere, not just in cemeteries and public places, but in front of houses, flying from cars and trucks, in schoolrooms...and everywhere, before meetings or classes, games and memorials...the reciting of the pledge of allegiance.
Despite little knowledge of history or other countries...and real resistance to learning anything of the kind...(pride in ignorance is actually a thing here) it is always assumed without question that the US is the best and brightest, most free and democratic of all countries. Our way is always the best way — even when it demonstrably is not.
You see this in the resistance to anything like universal health care. It is automatically assumed that in countries with universal health care, people wait years to see a doctor and get substandard or rationed care, and want to come "in droves" for superior care in the US. This in the face of actual experience here, experience most people have run into of being denied coverage for something even if they have "good" insurance, of being denied payment because of a “pre-existing condition” — or being covered but having enormous and often insurmountable out-of-pocket costs that are uncovered.
Rationing care and denying care are actually the principal roles of medical insurance companies. They primarily exist to make a profit, not make sure you get the care you need. What's even worse, now with the right-wing Supreme Court, we not only have the insurance companies between the patient and the care they need, but also the government and its oppressive laws.
The problem is summed up in a nutshell when you know most bankruptcies in the US are due to medical costs.
The gun insanity here also has its roots in the frontier. Gun mythology comes out of all the stories of the Wild West, even though the mythology assumes much more gun ownership and gun use than actually existed. The stories of life, lawmen and outlaws in the American West are highly romanticized. Westerns on the big and small screens promulgated these stories until they were part of every child's experience. Our heroes were all men with guns: Davy Crockett, The Lone Ranger, Wyatt Earp, the Gunslinger, the Rifleman, Kit Carson, etc. And most dramas were settled with gunfights, most often quite like a ritual, a face off between men at high noon in the main street. Someone always had to die to settle a problem.
No other major advanced country has our horrible problem with mass shootings. It seems we have grown to simply accept mass shootings as the cost of that supposed "freedom" to own guns. These events are happening daily, and I see an escalation in gun aggression with certain recent killings/shootings of strangers, or a neighbor, simply approaching your door, or entering your driveway. At least twice the gun owner/property owner shot the other person Through The Closed Door!!!
I remember being shocked and uncomfortable in an Arizona grocery store when the man in front of me at the cash register had his gun holstered openly at his hip. And I was at the salon getting my hair cut while the stylists were interrupted by a man who entered to buy some ammo. Apparently there was a SHORTAGE OF AMMO, and one of the ladies had scored a bunch and was selling some of it to people who couldn't find ENOUGH. When I asked why I was told matter of factly: "well you need it for your guns." They were surprised I didn't already know this.
Madness!!!
Oriana:
I remember the time I was hiking with my husband and my parents on a trail in the local mountains. The trail was empty except for us. Suddenly a man emerged, a rifle across his back. He exchanged a few words with my husband while I did my best just to breathe and not shake, since I couldn’t stop thinking how easy it would be for this stranger to shoot all four of us and then push the bodies down the ravine. Fortunately the man was not a psycho after all, and soon continued on his way, but the memory of the terror I experienced, however briefly, stayed with me for life.
A friend told me that once he was hiking in the marvelous Devil’s Punchbowl area when he saw a man on the trail with a gun actually in his hand! Not aimed at anyone, but still . . . This was an easy trail, popular with families, level enough for young children. Again, fortunately nothing happened, but still . . . but still . . .
Insane seems too mild a word.
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~ Mass shootings happen more often around the Fourth of July than on other days. The 2023 holiday alone saw at least five.
Since 2014, only four dates have seen mass shootings in the double digits in a single day – three occurred over the three most recent July Fourth holiday weekends in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
Summer days overall have higher numbers of mass shootings than other times of the year, according to CNN’s analysis. Of the top 10 calendar days with the highest number of mass shootings since 2014, all but one — New Year’s Day — was in June, July or August. ~
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/04/us/july-4-holiday-mass-shootings-dg/index.html
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THE FRENCH “GOSPEL OF ENJOYMENT”
~ Apparently, the Carthusian monks who distill the herbal liqueur Chartreuse have been struggling to maintain a work-life balance. Sales of the drink, which totaled $30 million in 2022, continue to bankroll the order. The brothers’ vows of solitude and silence have not prevented the company that hawks their wares, Chartreuse Diffusion, from building a global luxury brand. Nonetheless, in January 2023 the wholesaler announced their decision to limit supply despite robust demand. What would prompt a firm to commit the cardinal sin of leaving money on the proverbial table?
The monks’ stated motives were two-fold. Although they expressed a concern with the environmental impact of their operation, the deeper impetus was spiritual. As the order reminded frustrated tipplers, they first and foremost are in the business of contemplating eternal mysteries.
Well beyond Chartreuse, or even Dom Pérignon, France has long been associated with a specific version of the good life, from haute cuisine to haute couture. In the global imagination, the French excel not only at putting quality before quantity, but also in distributing the finer things more widely than their Anglophone counterparts. The French are as famous for their national healthcare system, month-long vacations and 35-hour working week as they are for bread, wine and cheese. That bosses are disallowed by law from requiring their employees to read or respond to work emails after business hours only reinforces the perception that life is meant to be savored.
A distinctly French and Catholic ethic of enjoyment, or jouissance, was inscribed into the script of the French Revolution once the state decided to absorb Church property long believed to have been given by God for the care of souls. Indeed, the origins of this ethic extend deep into the 18th century, and its effects show no signs of abating even now. If work defines one’s early adulthood and middle age, such exertions will be redeemed during a long retirement during which citizens can enjoy the fruits of their labor in reasonably good health and material tranquility – not only their own, but also the aggregate wealth generated by those still working – without the compulsion to produce forever more.
Even in France, where secularism forms part of the national heritage, economic theology remains the coin of the realm. We must examine both sides. Tellingly, Macron does not dispute the central premise of his millions of critics. A televised address this April reminded his recalcitrant flock that austerity is a matter of survival in the global economic order. ‘Gradually working more,’ he said, ‘also means producing more wealth, and we need it.’
Unleashing the productive forces of the French nation will require a ‘new pact’ between workers and the state, one that the president assures will keep his compatriots from having to endure ‘work that does not allow for living well’. Rising skepticism abroad and severe political backlash at home have not cooled another of Macron’s plans, that of establishing Paris as the world capital of the cryptocurrency market. The money will roll right in, we are told, and it will further enhance the productive powers of the French workforce.
As the history of economic theology makes clear, what Karl Marx called the fetish character of commodities is not a novel phenomenon, but rather one especially remarkable iteration in a series of attempts to describe the enchanting character of seemingly mundane objects. According to Marx, with the introduction of money as universal equivalent, ‘circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as a gold-crystal.’ Later he returned to post-Reformation confessional distinctions to code interest-bearing capital, the very quintessence of the modern economy, as Catholic. Here one came face to face with ‘the religious quid pro quo, the pure form of capital … the transubstantiation, the fetishism, is complete’. The founder of scientific socialism, then, could himself be regarded as an economic theologian of sorts who followed in the well-worn steps of early modern predecessors. After all, the laws of political economy continue to demand exuberant faith as much as restrictive calculation.
The Catholic ethic sanctions a vision of social solidarity in profusion. Since the French Revolution, a gospel of enjoyment has informed not only official government policy, but also dissident movements founded by self-professed socialists, who idealized the communalism of the early Christian Church in an attempt to outline an alternative program of economic modernity. Social democracy thus has origins that are religious and revolutionary in equal measure. As Macron tries to impose reconciliation from above, it remains to be seen how, in France and around the world, the dually Catholic and capitalist ideal of limitless abundance can be squared with the equally pressing demand to glean psychic and spiritual fulfillment in the here and now. ~
https://aeon.co/essays/chartreuse-economic-theology-and-the-french-spirit-of-capitalism?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=4e81f927d4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_06_30&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-b43a9ed933-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
Oriana:
Personally, I never associated Catholicism with the idea of enjoyment, especially the enjoyment of bodily pleasures. Quite the opposite. As I understood it, Catholicism severely condemned sensual pleasure as sinful. Worse, suffering was sanctified as good for you; my grandmother, who’d survived Auschwitz, believed she’d suffer for centuries in the fires of Purgatory before being admitted to heaven at last.
At the same time, it can’t be denied that various monasteries became famous for their brand of wine or cheese. Reality is always more complicated than theory. The beauty and luxury of Catholic churches. especially before Vatican II, stood in splendid contrast to the bare walls of Protestant churches. And the rumors of the good food enjoyed by the monks and nuns (weren't they supposed to fast?), and, as always, nuns falling in love with priests, were known to me since childhood.
But it was the monks in particular who were supposed to be fat and jolly. And it was the monks who produced the famous liqueurs, brandy, beer, cheese, and other delicacies.
And it’s reality, no matter how self-contradictory and remote from the initial monastic vows, that wins in the long run. I’m told that the emphasis on sin is still there, but not on vivid descriptions of hell.
I think the Western civilization has eagerly embraced the ethic of enjoyment. Frankly, I sometimes miss the “Protestant” work ethic and the pre-Covid era when the customer got more respect. But I also support the idea that work should be enjoyable.
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AN IMMENSE CULT THAT PREDATES STONEHENGE: Al Ula in Saudi Arabia
~ Spread over a vast, remote landscape in north-western Saudi Arabia are millennia-old archaeological remains that could change our understanding of prehistory. ~
The car was gliding smoothly along the immaculately maintained highway in Al Ulah, a region in north-western Saudi Arabia, when my driver abruptly veered off the road. "I missed the turn," he said. I looked out of the window in confusion as I couldn't see an obvious bend. "Here," he exclaimed, as the car jolted across basalt rocks to join a barely discernible path into the desert.
We drove into a vast, flat landscape. A bright blue sky enclosed us on all sides and a smattering of white clouds hung low. After a few minutes, we stopped by a circle of stacked stones. I climbed out of the car, waiting to meet Jane McMahon, part of a team of archaeologists from the University of Western Australia that has been working in Al Ulah since 2018. All around me was an arid plain of grey-black rocks lightly dusted in pink-hued sand. There was something otherworldly about it all: the lack of a single tree or a blade of grass; the stillness of the air that was only occasionally interrupted by a bitter gust of wind that chilled you to the bone.
I'd come here because recent discoveries in Al Ula are shining a light on a fascinating period of history in Saudi Arabia. Since the nation only opened for international research a few years ago (and to tourists in 2019), many of its ancient sites are being studied for the first time. While historians are familiar with the ruins of the 2,000-year-old cities Hegra and Dadan and their place on the Incense Route (Hegra's tombs and monuments are a Unesco World Heritage Site), they didn't have much knowledge about the civilization that came before, until now.
What has been discovered is that spread over Al Ula's vast, remote landscape are millennia-old archaeological remains that could change our understanding of prehistory. Work by McMahon and her colleagues is shedding light on some of the earliest stone monuments in world history – predating Stonehenge and the earliest pyramid in Giza.
The Nabataean city of Hegra
When McMahon arrived, she explained that the circle of rocks next to me was the remains of a house occupied in the Neolithic period (from 6000 to 4500 BCE), and that this area was once scattered with thriving settlements. Until recently, the prevailing wisdom was that this region had little human activity until the Bronze Age after 4000 BCE. But McMahon and her colleagues' work has unearthed a very different story: that Neolithic Saudi Arabia was a dynamic, intensely populated, complex landscape spread over a vast area.
Around me were more than 30 dwellings and tombs, and that was just a tiny fraction of the remains here. I tried to imagine the landscape as it may have been thousands of years ago: green, lush and teeming with people as they moved noisily round, herding goats and calling out to each other.
"The climate and inert landscape of Saudi Arabia means most of the archaeology is pretty well preserved on the surface from 5,000 to 8,000 years ago. So exactly as you see it is how it was all that time ago," McMahon said, explaining that understanding more about the lives of these early peoples could also shed light on how the large, dense settlements of Hegra and Dedan developed, and how cultural and technological changes in the region, such as irrigation farming, metalworking and written texts, came about over the following millennia.
"The cultural changes that took place following the Neolithic are huge, but we don't know a lot of how those changes happened," she said.
However, even in the hands of such experienced archaeologists, one Al Ula discovery has continued to elude explanation. Spread over an area of a staggering 300,000 sq km and built to a fairly consistent type, are 1,600 monumental rectangular stone structures that also date to the Neolithic period. Initially named "gates" due to their appearance from the air, the structures were later renamed "mustatil", which translates to "rectangle" in Arabic.
"It makes the mind race that we have structures as big as five to six football fields, made of thousands of tons of stone, that not only cover such as massive geographic region but that also are 7,000 years old," said Dr Hugh Thomas, co-director of Aerial Archaeology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Projects (AAKSAU). He has been working alongside McMahon for the past two years conducting aerial archaeology surveys and targeted excavations to understand the mustatil's purpose.
Mustatil are certainly impressive, and the only real way to get a sense of their size is from the air. When I flew over them in a helicopter, I could see the large stones laid out in straight lines across the sand, about the length of four football fields and a width of at least two.
"In my opinion, mustatil are some of the most unique archaeological structures so far identified in the world," Thomas said. "When we look at other structures dating to the Neolithic that are just as impressive in their construction, I am hard-pressed to think of any that cover such a large geographic region.”
While Thomas's team has recorded mustatil of varying sizes and complexity, they've also noted consistent characteristics. They're all constructed in a similar manner, by piling rocks to form low walls that are filled with gravel, and they include a head (the top of the structure), a base, and long walls connecting them. Some have entrances and multiple narrow interior courtyards. The stones used for building have been especially chosen to fit together to support the large structures, displaying a deep understanding of local materials.
These prehistoric monuments were first recorded in the 1960s by a local team carrying out ground surveys, but at that point, no one knew what they were. Remote sensing surveys carried out by Professor David Kennedy (also from the University of Western Australia), in 2017 intensified interest, and initial theories suggested they were used as territorial markers for ancestral grazing grounds. Yet, as more and more were found, all dating to the same period, a different understanding emerged.
Thomas, McMahon and their teams have since unearthed evidence that suggests cultic practice. They've uncovered large numbers of cattle, goat and wild gazelle skulls and horns in small chambers in the heads of the mustatil, but found no indication that these were kept for domestic use. Since no other animal's body parts were found, it led the team to deduce that these were sacrificial. It further suggested that the animals were sacrificed elsewhere. This is important because it is evidence of a highly organized cultic society, much earlier than was previously thought – predating Islam in the region by 6,000 years.
"Excavation of several mustatil have revealed artefacts suggestive of ritual practices taking place inside the structures," said Thomas. "The people who built them had a shared culture and belief system and this was not a practice that was localized. It spread across a huge swathe of Arabia about the size of Poland.”
Thomas added: "Saudi Arabia has had the appearance of being an arid and inhospitable landscape, viewed in isolation from the rest of the world other than a few notable sites, such as Dedan and Hegra. However, archaeological evidence, such as the mustatil, demonstrate that the region had a rich and complex history. To have a structure so widely dispersed across such a massive area suggests a shared belief system, language and culture on a scale that I personally never imagined possible.”
Munirah Almushawh, co-director of an archaeological project in Khaybar (another area of Al Ula), agrees, noting that not only did this society share a single belief system, but they traveled huge distances to share the knowledge that allowed them to build the structures. Some of the mustatils weigh as much as 12,000 tons; more than the Eiffel Tower. Their construction would have required knowledge, skill and organization over long periods of time.
"The mustatil suggests large social networks, innovative architectural skills and vast exploration in prehistoric Arabia," Almushawh said.
Despite these exciting discoveries, knowledge of mustatil is still in its infancy, with just five of the 1,600 excavated so far. What is certain is that Al Ula will only continue to reveal its mysteries. As the region reopens for tourism, plans are in place to construct a massive, open-air museum where visitors can self-navigate around various archaeological sites or be taken through by a guide. Travelers will be able to learn about the Neolithic period, see the ancient ruins of homes and mustatil and imagine for themselves how this seemingly highly organized society lived and moved through the landscape.
McMahon and Thomas are as excited for Al Ula's future as much as for its past. "The significance of what we've discovered is rewriting the history of the Neolithic in north-west Arabia," said McMahon. "Our work has so far uncovered only what has always existed: the complexity of the Neolithic period in this region, which had previously been considered either uninhabitable or merely unimportant in this time.” ~
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220704-a-mysterious-cult-that-predates-stonehenge
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DON'T TRY TO FORCE THINGS
"Don’t ever force a lock; you’ll bend the key or break the lock. You jiggle until it revolves. So, Wúwéi is to act in accordance with the pattern of things as they exist, not to impose on any situation a kind of interference that is not in accordance with the situation.
For example, we have a slum, and the people are in difficulty, and they need better housing. Now, if you go in with a bulldozer and knock the slum down, and you put in its place by some architect’s imaginative notions of what is a super-efficient highrise apartment building to store people, you create a total mess. Utter chaos. A slum has what we would call an ecology. It has a very complex system of relationships going in it by which the thing is already a going concern, even though it isn’t going very well. Anybody who wants to alter that situation must first of all become sensitive to all the conditions and relationships going on there.
It’s terribly important, then, to have this feeling of the interdependence of every form of life upon every other form of life." ~ Alan Watts
Rare photo of Alan Watts & Jiddu Krishnamurti
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RISING LIFE EXPECTANCY AND RELIGIOSITY
I think one factor in the decline of religiosity has been the rising life expectancy. It’s easier to demean earthly life when it’s typically short. When a person can expect to live into the eighties or nineties, to experience the full human journey, then the richness of this life can finally outweigh the pie-in-the-sky promises. The core question is: how much do you value this life versus the afterlife?
The late seventeen-hundreds were the time when more attention was beginning to be paid to making earthly life better — for instance, we see a great decrease in cruelty as entertainment. Rousseau’s religious views varied throughout his life, but in the end he remains one of the great figures of the Enlightenment who represents a transition from a religious worldview to a secular one that values human freedom and happiness in this life, ultimately disavowing both Calvinism and Catholicism, especially the doctrine of the Original Sin and the fallenness of man.
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MICROPLASTICS ARE POISONING US
~ In 1863, when much of the United States was anguishing over the Civil War, an entrepreneur named Michael Phelan was fretting about billiard balls. At the time, the balls were made of ivory, preferably obtained from elephants from Ceylon—now Sri Lanka—whose tusks were thought to possess just the right density. Phelan, who owned a billiard hall and co-owned a billiard-table-manufacturing business, also wrote books about billiards and was a champion billiards player. Owing in good part to his efforts, the game had grown so popular that tusks from Ceylon—and, indeed, elephants more generally—were becoming scarce. He and a partner offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward to anyone who could come up with an ivory substitute.
~ John Hyatt invented the process for making celluloid, the first artificial plastic. In the late 1860s, while searching for a substitute for ivory for making billiard balls, Hyatt combined nitrocellulose, camphor, and alcohol and heated the mixture under pressure to make it pliable for molding. ~ Wikipedia
Hyatt’s invention, often described as the world’s first commercially produced plastic, was followed a few decades later by Bakelite. Bakelite was followed by polyvinyl chloride, which was, in turn, followed by polyethylene, low-density polyethylene, polyester, polypropylene, Styrofoam, Plexiglas, Mylar, Teflon, polyethylene terephthalate (familiarly known as PET)—the list goes on and on. And on. Annual global production of plastic currently runs to more than eight hundred billion pounds. What was a problem of scarcity is now a problem of superabundance.
In the form of empty water bottles, used shopping bags, and tattered snack packages, plastic waste turns up pretty much everywhere today. It has been found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, thirty-six thousand feet below sea level. It litters the beaches of Svalbard and the shores of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, in the Indian Ocean, most of which are uninhabited. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a collection of floating debris that stretches across six hundred thousand square miles between California and Hawaii, is thought to contain some 1.8 trillion plastic shards. Among the many creatures being done in by all this junk are corals, tortoises, and elephants—in particular, the elephants of Sri Lanka. In recent years, twenty of them have died after ingesting plastic at a landfill near the village of Pallakkadu.
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How worried should we be about what’s become known as “the plastic pollution crisis”? And what can be done about it? These questions lie at the heart of several recent books that take up what one author calls “the plastic trap.”
“Without plastic we’d have no modern medicine or gadgets or wire insulation to keep our homes from burning down,” that author, Matt Simon, writes in “A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies.” “But with plastic we’ve contaminated every corner of Earth.”
Simon, a science journalist at Wired, is especially concerned about plastic’s tendency to devolve into microplastics. (Microplastics are usually defined as bits smaller than five millimeters across.) This process is taking place all the time, in many different ways. Plastic bags drift into the ocean, where, after being tossed around by the waves and bombarded with UV radiation, they fall apart. Tires today contain a wide variety of plastics; as they roll along, they abrade, sending clouds of particles spinning into the air. Clothes made with plastics, which now comprise most items for sale, are constantly shedding fibers, much the way dogs shed hairs.
A study published a few years ago in the journal Nature Food found that preparing infant formula in a plastic bottle is a good way to degrade the bottle, so what babies end up drinking is a sort of plastic soup.
In fact, it is now clear that children are feeding on microplastics even before they can eat. In 2021, researchers from Italy announced that they had found microplastics in human placentas. A few months later, researchers from Germany and Austria announced that they’d found microplastics in meconium—the technical term for an infant’s first poop.
The hazards of ingesting large pieces of plastic are pretty straightforward; they include choking and perforation of the intestinal tract. Animals that fill their guts with plastics eventually starve to death. The risks posed by microplastics are subtler, but not, Simon argues, any less serious. Plastics are made from by-products of oil and gas refining; many of the chemicals involved, such as benzene and vinyl chloride, are carcinogens. In addition to their main ingredients, plastics may contain any number of additives. Many of these—for example, polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs, which confer water resistance—are also suspected carcinogens. Many of the others have never been adequately tested.
Microplastics, meanwhile, don’t just leach nasty chemicals; they attract them. “Persistent bioaccumulative and toxic substances,” or PBTs, are a hodgepodge of harmful compounds, including DDT and PCBs. Like microplastics, which are often referred to in the scientific literature as MPs, PBTs are everywhere these days. When PBTs encounter MPs, they preferentially adhere to them. “In effect, plastics are like magnets for PBTs” is how the Environmental Protection Agency has put it. Consuming microplastics is thus a good way to swallow old poisons.
Then, there’s the threat posed by the particles themselves. Microplastics—and in particular, it seems, microfibers—can get pulled deep into the lungs. People who work in the synthetic-textile industry, it has long been known, suffer from high rates of lung disease. Are we breathing in enough microfibers that we are all, in effect, becoming synthetic-textile workers? No one can say for sure, but, as Fay Couceiro, a researcher at England’s University of Portsmouth, observes to Simon, “We desperately need to find out.”
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Whatever you had for dinner last night, the meal almost certainly left behind plastic in need of disposal. Before tossing your empty sour-cream tub or mostly empty ketchup bottle, you may have searched it for a number, and if you found one, inside a cheerful little triangle, you washed it out and set it aside to be recycled. You might also have imagined that with this effort you were doing your part to stem the global plastic-pollution tide.
The British journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis used to be a believer. He religiously rinsed his plastics before depositing them in one of the five color-coded rubbish bins that he and his wife kept at their home in Royston, north of London. Then Franklin-Wallis decided to find out what was actually happening to his garbage. Disenchantment followed.
“If a product is seen as recycled, or recyclable, it makes us feel better about buying it,” he writes in “Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future.” But all those little numbers inside the triangles “mostly serve to trick consumers.”
Franklin-Wallis became interested in the fate of his detritus just as the old order of Britain’s rubbish was collapsing. Up until 2017, most of the plastic waste collected in Europe and in the United States was shipped to China, as was most of the mixed paper. Then Beijing imposed a new policy, known as National Sword, that prohibited imports of yang laji, or “foreign garbage.” The move left waste haulers from California to Catalonia with millions of mildewy containers they couldn’t get rid of. “PLASTICS PILE UP AS CHINA REFUSES TO TAKE THE WEST’S RECYCLING,” a January, 2018, headline in the Times read. “It’s tough times,” Simon Ellin, the chief executive of Britain’s Recycling Association, told the paper.
Trash, though, finds a way. Not long after China stopped taking in foreign garbage, waste entrepreneurs in other nations—Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka—started to accept it. Mom-and-pop plastic-recycling businesses sprang up in places where they were regulated laxly, if at all. Franklin-Wallis visited one such informal recycling plant, in New Delhi; the owner allowed him inside on the condition that he not reveal exactly how the business operates or where it is situated. He found workers in a fiendishly hot room feeding junk into a shredder. Workers in another, equally hot room fed the shreds into an extruder, which pumped out little gray pellets known as nurdles. The ventilation system consisted of an open window. “The thick fog of plastic fumes in the air left me dazed,” Franklin-Wallis writes.
Nurdles, which are key to manufacturing plastic products, are small enough to qualify as microplastics. (It’s been estimated that ten trillion nurdles a year leak into the oceans, most from shipping containers that tip overboard.) Usually, nurdles are composed of “virgin” polymers, but, as the New Delhi plant demonstrates, it is also possible to produce them from used plastic. The problem with the process, and with plastic recycling more generally, is that a polymer degrades each time it’s heated.
Thus, even under ideal circumstances, plastic can be reused only a couple of times, and in the waste-management business very little is ideal. Franklin-Wallis toured a high-end recycling plant in northern England that handles PET, the material that most water and soda bottles are made from. He learned that nearly half the bales of PET that arrive at the plant can’t be reprocessed because they’re too contaminated, either by other kinds of plastic or by random crap. “Yield is a problem for us,” the plant’s commercial director concedes.
Franklin-Wallis comes to see plastic recycling as so much (potentially toxic) smoke and mirrors. Over the years, he writes, “a kind of playbook” has emerged. Under public pressure, a company like Coca-Cola or Nestlé pledges to insure that the packaging for its products gets recycled. When the pressure eases, it quietly abandons its pledge. Meanwhile, it lobbies against any kind of legislation that would restrict the sale of single-use plastics. Franklin-Wallis quotes Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, who once said, “If the public thinks recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment.”
Right around the time that Franklin-Wallis started tracking his trash, Eve O. Schaub decided to spend a year not producing any. Schaub, who has been described as a “stunt memoirist,” had previously spent a year avoiding sugar and forcing her family to do the same, an exercise she chronicled in a book titled “Year of No Sugar.” The year of no sugar was followed by “Year of No Clutter.” When she proposes a trash-free annum to her husband, he says he doubts it is possible. Her younger daughter begs her to wait until she goes away to college. Schaub plunges ahead anyway.
“As the beginning of the new year loomed, I was feeling pretty good about our chances,” she recalls in “Year of No Garbage.” “I mean, really. How hard could it be?”
What Schaub means by “no garbage” is not exactly no garbage. Under her scheme, refuse that can be composted or recycled is allowed, so her family can keep tossing out old cans and empty wine bottles along with food scraps. What turns out to be hard—really, really hard—is dealing with plastic.
At first, Schaub divides plastic waste into two varieties. There’s the kind with the little numbers, which her trash hauler accepts as part of its “single stream” recycling program and so, by her definition, doesn’t count as trash. Then, there’s the kind with no numbers, which isn’t supposed to go in the recycling bin and therefore does count. Schaub finds that even when she purchases something in a numbered container—guacamole, say—there’s usually a thin sheet of plastic under the lid that’s numberless. A lot of her time goes into rinsing off these sheets and other stray plastic bits and trying to figure out what to do with them.
She is excited to find a company called TerraCycle, which promises—for a price—to “recycle the unrecyclable.” For a hundred and thirty-four dollars, she purchases a box that can be returned to TerraCycle filled with plastic packaging, and for an additional forty-two dollars she buys another box that can be filled with “oral care waste,” such as used toothpaste tubes. “I sent my TerraCycle Plastic Packaging box as densely packed with plastic as any box could be,” she writes.
Eventually, though, like Franklin-Wallis, Schaub comes to see that she’s been living a lie. Midway through her experiment, she signs up for an online course called Beyond Plastic Pollution, offered by Judith Enck, a former regional administrator for the E.P.A. Only containers labelled No. 1 (PET) and No. 2 (high-density polyethylene) get melted down with any regularity, Schaub learns, and to refashion the resulting nurdles into anything useful usually requires the addition of lots of new material. “No matter what your garbage service provider is telling you, numbers 3, 4, 6 and 7 are not getting recycled,” Schaub writes. (The italics are hers.) “Number 5 is a veeeery dubious maybe.”
TerraCycle, too, proves a disappointment. It gets sued for deceptive labeling and settles out of court. A documentary-film crew finds that dozens of bales of waste sent to the company for recycling have instead been shipped off to be burned at a cement kiln in Bulgaria. (According to the company’s founder, this is the result of an unfortunate mistake.)
“I had wanted so badly to believe that TerraCycle and Santa Claus and the Easter bunny were real, that I had been willing to overlook the fact that Santa’s handwriting looks suspiciously like Mom’s,” Schaub writes. Toward the end of the year, she concludes that pretty much all plastic waste—numbered, unnumbered, or shipped off in boxes—falls under her definition of garbage. She also concludes that, “in this day, age and culture,” such waste is pretty much impossible to avoid.
A few months ago, the E.P.A. issued a “draft national strategy to prevent plastic pollution.” Americans, the report noted, produce more plastic waste each year than the residents of any other country—almost five hundred pounds per person, nearly twice as much as the average European and sixteen times as much as the average Indian. The E.P.A. declared the “business-as-usual approach” to managing this waste to be “unsustainable.” At the top of its list of recommendations was “reduce the production and consumption” of single-use plastics.
Just about everyone who contemplates the “plastic pollution crisis” arrives at the same conclusion. Once a plastic bottle (or bag or takeout container) has been tossed, the odds of its ending up in landfill, on a faraway beach, or as tiny fragments drifting around in the ocean are high. The best way to alter these odds is not to create the bottle (or bag or container) in the first place.
“So long as we’re churning out single-use plastic . . . we’re trying to drain the tub without turning off the tap,” Simon writes. “We’ve got to cut it out.”
“We can’t rely on half-measures,” Schaub says. “We have to go to the source.” Her own local supermarket, in southern Vermont, stopped handing out plastic bags in late 2020, she notes. “Do you know what happened? Nothing. One day we were poisoning the environment with plastic bags in the name of ultra-convenience and the next? We weren’t.”
“We now know that we can’t start to reduce plastic pollution without a reduction of production,” Imari Walker-Franklin and Jenna Jambeck, both environmental engineers, observe in “Plastics,” forthcoming from M.I.T. Press. “Upstream and systemic change is needed.”
Of course, it’s a lot easier to talk about “turning off the tap” and changing the system than it is to actually do so. First, there are the political obstacles. For all intents and purposes, the plastics industry is a subsidiary of the fossil-fuel industry. ExxonMobil, for instance, is the world’s fourth-largest oil company and also its largest producer of virgin polymers. The connection means that any effort to reduce plastic consumption is bound to be resisted, either openly or surreptitiously, not just by companies such as Coca-Cola and Nestlé but also by corporations like Exxon and Shell.
In March, 2022, diplomats from a hundred and seventy-five nations agreed to try to fashion a global treaty to “end plastic pollution.” At the first negotiating session, held later that year in Uruguay, the self-described High Ambition Coalition, which includes the members of the European Union as well as Ghana and Switzerland, insisted that the treaty include mandatory measures that apply to all countries. This idea was opposed by major oil-producing nations, including the U.S., which has called for a “country-driven” approach. According to the environmental group Greenpeace, lobbyists for the “major fossil fuel companies were out in force” at the session.
There are also practical hurdles. Precisely because plastic is now ubiquitous, it’s difficult to imagine how to replace all of it, or even much of it. Even in cases where substitutes are available, it’s not always clear that they’re preferable. Franklin-Wallis cites a 2018 study by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency which analyzed how different kinds of shopping bags compare in terms of life-cycle impacts. The study found that, to have a lower environmental impact than a plastic bag, a paper bag would have to be used forty-three times and a cotton tote would have to be used an astonishing seventy-one hundred times. “How many of those bags will last that long?” Franklin-Wallis asks. Walker-Franklin and Jambeck also note that exchanging plastic for other materials may involve “tradeoffs,” including “energy and water use and carbon emissions.” When Schaub’s supermarket stopped handing out plastic shopping bags, it may have reduced one problem only to exacerbate others—deforestation, say, or pesticide use.
“In the grand scheme of human existence, it wasn’t that long ago that we got along just fine without plastic,” Simon points out. This is true. It also wasn’t all that long ago that we got along just fine without Coca-Cola or packaged guacamole or six-ounce bottles of water or takeout everything. To make a significant dent in plastic waste—and certainly to “end plastic pollution”—will probably require not just substitution but elimination. If much of contemporary life is wrapped up in plastic, and the result of this is that we are poisoning our kids, ourselves, and our ecosystems, then contemporary life may need to be rethought. The question is what matters to us, and whether we’re willing to ask ourselves that question. ~
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/03/book-reviews-plastic-waste?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
In the past I used to read reports about plastic-eating bacteria or algae. What happened to those interesting proposed solutions?
And what about the compressed plastic bricks that were supposed to revolutionize construction?
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WHY EGGS ARE NOT REFRIGERATED IN SWEDEN
~ As with most things, there are two approaches: American and European.
egg washer
One major risk with egg consumption is the bacteria salmonella that is often present on eggs and can be dangerous if you eat undercooked eggs, as we all like to do on a daily or at least weekly basis, plus other bacteria that might penetrate inside. To that end Americans wash eggs thoroughly, to remove anything that was in the chicken alongside the egg and remove bacteria.
This works, but it also removes the protective coating on the egg that prevents bacteria from penetrating the pores on the shell. The egg isn’t contaminated when it leaves the factory, but something else could make its way inside quite quickly, so the egg needs to be refrigerated to prevent an infection.
European approach is to vaccinate the chickens against salmonella and rely on the natural coating to protect the egg. These eggs don’t need refrigeration, but you also need to clean the chicken cages more often than Americans, because dirty eggs aren’t as appealing to the customer. The costs work out to be about the same in both cases.
When it comes to food poisoning from eggs, the incidence in Europe is about one tenth that in America, which should provide a clue as to which approach is superior. No surprises there either. ~ Tomaž Vargazon
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WHY EATING CHICKEN SKIN IS GOOD FOR YOU
~ For years, cardiologists and nutritionists have said that eating chicken skin and other fatty parts of the chicken was not good for you. Before you baked your chicken in the oven, it was imperative that you take the skin off.
Now, it is coming to light that chicken skin is not as bad for you as was once thought.
Why? Most of the fat in chicken skin is the healthy, unsaturated kind, beneficial to your heart [e.g. the oleic acid, also found in olive oil]. The next time you make chicken, then, it’s okay to leave a piece of the skin on. According to the Harvard School of Public Health, unsaturated fat can be associated with lowering your cholesterol and blood pressure.
In addition, leaving the skin on keeps the chicken moister and more flavorful, so you'll need less salt — and you won't need breading at all.
One thing to remember is that the chicken skin should be eaten in moderation. Chicken meat, as well as the skin, has more omega-6s than other meats, which can increase inflammation in your body. ~
https://www.insider.com/eating-chicken-skin-good-for-you-2017-9
Oriana:
And let’s not forget that chicken skin is a source of collagen.
As for oleic fatty acid, it’s regarded as a beneficial, life-extending fatty acid.
But a word of warning: the skin of broiled or grilled chicken should not be consumed. High heat results in the production of harmful compounds.
Polydorus is dead who loved running
Now somebody has to tell his father
That exhausted man leaning on the wall
Looking for his favorite son
~ Alice Oswald, from Nobody: A Hymn to the Sea
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