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CIRCE
I wear purple like a mystical sunset.
That’s when the men arrive.
I was a failure in life.
Now with my herd of handsome swine,
everyone thinks me successful.
But it’s too easy, loosening my hair,
letting the late light
play its game of glints
as I stand in a marble
alignment of shoulder and thigh;
too practiced, serving the spiced wine,
singing my slow-dying song.
Too familiar, that tremor
when they feel the tug
away from the need to be human.
The sun with its heart of fire
sets the sea on fire;
the waves toss their torn veils.
I knew a boy before I became
queen of this doomed island.
I put my head in his lap
like a tired child – I was
a tired child — and he
held his breath and closed his eyes.
No one has touched me since.
~ Oriana
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ON JEWISH REVENGE
Since 7 October 2023, nekama (‘vengeance’ or ‘revenge’ in Hebrew) has emerged as one of the key words in Israeli public life. We’ve heard discussion of nekama from the government, the Knesset, the media, the army, social networks, synagogue bulletins, and in popular culture.
Perhaps the most immediate and relevant invocation came on the same day of Hamas’s attack, from the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who declared: ‘The IDF will immediately employ all its power to destroy Hamas’s capabilities. We will strike them until they are crippled, and we will avenge with full force this black day they inflicted upon the State of Israel and its citizens.’ In the past few months, there were many poems on revenge written by Israelis, some of them IDF soldiers.
Like many basic concepts, there is really no consensual definition for revenge, or for its relation to near-synonyms such as ‘vengeance’ or even ‘retaliation’ and ‘retribution’. It seems certain, though, that revenge is connected to the realm of emotions and affect, for there can be a desire or a fantasy of vengeance without actualization. But, of course, it also describes actions. The thirst for revenge animates much of the world of tragic literature, and it is a common element in art, theater and cinema. Revenge begins within the family or tribe but it expands beyond, to town or sect or king or nation.
Revenge has a distinctive and dynamic relationship to time: it is caused by an act of wrong that happened in the past as an explanation for the present moment, but it is also directed towards the future. Austin Sarat, a scholar of law and politics, explains that vengeance attempts, consciously or not, to reenact the past, as it is ‘one means by which the present speaks to the future through acts of commemoration’. The fact that vengeance looks backwards and seeks to cancel out past actions is one reason why the relationship between revenge and justice is complex. Revenge can indeed be the opposite of justice, a product of utter despair, a kind of empty and final gesture toward restoring one’s shattered self-respect.
The scholars Susan Jacoby, Martha Minow and Sarat have all written important work trying to better understand and clarify the connection between revenge and justice. They all would concede that there is an understanding that ‘revenge is a kind of wild justice,’ as Francis Bacon wrote in his essay ‘Of Revenge’ (1625). Most modern systems of law claim authority by distinguishing themselves from revenge, though conceding that feelings for revenge cannot be eradicated. Scholars of politics and law seem to agree that there is no place for revenge in modern international relations. Here too, however, as the scholar Jon Elster has shown, revenge persists, often concealed under more technical and dispassionate terminology about state or national interests.
Jewish sources give us many, sometimes contradictory, voices on nekama. Many biblical texts prohibit vengeance by human hands, as well as collective Jewish vengeance, although there is an exceptional case of revenge against the people of Amalek, biblical enemies of the Israelites.
In post-biblical work, vengeance assumes the form of a divine promise that the redemption of the people of Israel will come to fruition when God enacts revenge upon their enemies. This version of nekama is a kind of eschatological prophecy. The only act of vengeance in the Bible with some elements of the noble, albeit dangerous, tragic revenge we find in the classical Greek literature, is the story of Samson in the book of Judges avenging himself on the Philistines in ancient Gaza. It is not a surprise that some of the poems and popular songs about revenge are focused on Samson.
The violence of the 20th century has profoundly shaped modern and contemporary Jewish views of vengeance. Violence against Jewish people in the past century includes not just the Holocaust but also the Kishinev pogrom in the Russian Empire, the massacre of Jews after the First World War in Ukraine by those who blamed them for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution (which led to the assassination of the Ukrainian politician Symon Petliura by Sholem Schwarzbard), the massacre of Jews in 1929 in Palestine, and more.
Since 7 October, the Holocaust and its memory has re-emerged as particularly central to Israeli and Jewish thinking on vengeance. Immediately following the exposure of the horrors of the Hamas attack, Israeli Jews invoked memories of the Holocaust. Historical basis for such comparisons aside, in the Israeli Jewish psyche, 7 October clearly passes through a filter of collective trauma centered on (but not limited to) the Holocaust. Indeed, the popular perception of Israel, its need for security, and its national narrative of ‘from Holocaust to rebirth’ are inseparable from trauma. Nor is it possible to disentangle the link between the Holocaust and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which was both Israel’s War of Independence and the Palestinians’ Nakba (‘catastrophe’).
In an important 1996 paper, the American Jewish philosopher Berel Lang asked: what is vengeance and revenge in Jewish consciousness worldwide? What about in the Yishuv (the Jewish community in pre-state Palestine), during and after the Holocaust? How did the desire for vengeance, Lang wanted to know, influence the memory of the Holocaust? Lang wondered because there were few attempts (and even fewer successful ones) of revenge by Jews following the Holocaust.
It would be wrong to say there was no discussion, however. One needs to understand ways in which, during and following the Holocaust, Jewish desire for vengeance was displaced from direct acts against Nazis or Germans to other, less direct phenomena: for example, the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law enacted by the State of Israel in 1950 to bring to court SS soldiers and Nazis; and people such as Simon Wiesenthal, known as ‘Nazi hunters’, who tried to gather information and track down Nazis around the world. The desire for revenge and retribution was also part of the divisive and robust debate around whether Holocaust survivors should accept payment from Germany and around the Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany, which was signed in September 1952.
The ‘Avengers’, a group led by Abba Kovner, a partisan from the Vilna ghetto, are central figures in post-Holocaust Jewish revenge. After the Second World War, the Avengers targeted Germans. Dina Porat’s book Nakam: The Holocaust Survivors Who Sought Full-Scale Revenge (2022) tells their story. An Israeli-German co-produced film, Plan A (2021), is also about the Avengers. This renewed interest in them may create the impression that they were unique, but that is not the case. Kovner, who wished to avenge by killing as many as 6 million Germans, is an extreme figure, but he is not exceptional. As we will soon see, Kovner’s writings and ideology express central concepts in Jewish and Israeli culture that emerged after the Holocaust and in the years surrounding the founding of Israel.
Even before the full dimensions of the Nazi extermination of European Jewry had been fully revealed, Jews wrote about and engaged in profound debate on the question of revenge. Most of that writing is in Yiddish. Yiddish is the historic language of central and eastern European Jewry, dating back 1,000 years. It is a Germanic language, but fuses Semitic components, as well as Slavic and other elements from where Jews lived. It is a diasporic language. Zionism and, later, Israel rejected it in favor of modern Hebrew as the national language. Despite the fact that most Zionists were Yiddish speakers, it was the language that must be forgotten in the making of Israeli society and culture.
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In Kraków, a few months before he was murdered by the Nazis in 1942, Mordechai Gebirtig wrote ‘A Day of Revenge’, a poem in Yiddish that was also put to music. The Soviet poet and member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Peretz Markish wrote ‘To the Jewish Soldier’ (1943), a Yiddish poem in which the speaker declares: ‘The blood on every road cries out, vengeance.’ Poets, writers and journalists in Europe and the US discussed questions of Jewish revenge, its possibilities and limits. Jacob Glatstein wrote ‘Revenge, Revenge, and Revenge!’ (1944), an article where he considers revenge by European Jews as a desire and principle of justice, while acknowledging, due to their murder by the Germans, its impossibility.
In the mid-1950s, discourse of revenge in Yiddish faded away but, as Lang pointed out, the aspiration did not disappear; it transformed. For example, it shifted towards a search for Nazis in hiding, the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, and fueled debates about reparations from Germany to Israel. It also moved into other phenomena that generally do not seem directly related to revenge, such as the ‘Stalags’ – a popular, short-lived genre of Holocaust pornographic Hebrew books in Israel that flourished in the 1950s and early ’60s.
During and after the Second World War, a parallel but distinct discourse about revenge also arose in Hebrew, an ancient language that was revitalised to become a key aspect of Zionism. The Hebrew-language works came from the poets Uri Zvi Greenberg and Nathan Alterman, who immigrated to Palestine from Europe, and from younger writers born in Palestine. Alterman, the most influential mainstream Hebrew poet of the 1940s, examined vengeance and revenge in his books The Joy of the Poor (1941) and Poems of the Plagues of Egypt (1944), and in poems published in the Labor Zionist newspaper Davar. For example, Alterman wrote ‘A Prayer of Revenge’ in which the speaker seeks divine assistance in carrying out their vengeance:
And what does your servant, supreme Father, seek?
Only to stretch out his hand to their necks …
And they said: Let there be vengeance.
Do not tell him: Have mercy! Do not call to him: Forgive!
Do not forget, do not forget what they did to him.
Alterman wrote this poem during the Second World War, before Hebrew readers in the Yishuv knew exactly what was going on in Europe. It expressed the sense of vulnerability and frustration, turning to God as a father with a wish for revenge as expressed in ancient Jewish texts, but without making clear who should enact the vengeance.
By the end of the Second World War, writing about vengeance in Hebrew had taken on a new significance. A million and a half Jews fought in the armies of the Allied Powers. Writing in Hebrew, however, focused on the 30,000 Jews from the Yishuv who volunteered to fight alongside the British army, especially the Jewish Brigade, numbering about 5,000 men. The Brigade fought on the Italian front in March-May 1945, but most of its activity followed the war. Its significance lay in the fact that the language, flag, symbols and anthem of the Jewish Brigade were Hebrew. Brigade people were active in the paramilitary units of the Haganah and Palmach. The anthem of the Jewish Brigade was written by the poet Yaakov Orland:
Our blood is flowing like a river and fire
Our covenant is calling – for vengeance!
We swore, we swore, brothers in arms,
That none shall return in vain.
Twenty years later, the writer Hanoch Bartov, a Brigade member, wrote in his autobiographical novel Pitzei Bagrut (1965; later translated and published in English as The Brigade) these words, spoken by the protagonist Elisha Kruk:
“Not much: a thousand burnt houses. Five hundred dead. Hundreds of raped women … We’re here to redeem blood. One wild Jewish vengeance. Once, like the Tatars. Like the Ukrainians. Like the Germans. All of us … will enter one city and burn, street after street, house after house, German after German.”
It is clear from these texts that vengeance was a motivational force in the decision of young Jewish soldiers who enlisted to serve in Europe as part of the Brigade (some of them had lost family members in Europe), and that at least some of these soldiers expected to be able to take revenge on Germans.
In 1945, Brigade soldiers met for the first time in northern Italy with people of the She’erit Ha-pletah (‘the Surviving Remnant’), Holocaust survivors and refugees, as well as partisans and ghetto fighters. Some of the She’erit Ha-pletah had been active in Zionist youth movements even before the war. Kovner had just gathered in Lublin, Poland, about 50 young men and women who had a burning desire to take revenge against not only the Nazis but the entire German people. The details that captivate the imagination of many in the story of Kovner and the Avengers – ‘Plan A’, the killing of 6 million Germans by poisoning the water supply of major German cities, and ‘Plan B’, the killing of SS officers and Gestapo officials who were imprisoned in prisoner camps – are less important.
More significantly, Kovner stands as a bridge between Holocaust survivors, most of whom spoke, read and wrote in Yiddish, and people from the Brigade, who represented the Hebrew Zionist Yishuv. It is the latter who shaped the ethos of the State of Israel, and some of whom later served in senior roles in the IDF and Israel’s security apparatus. This is a significant shift towards revenge as part of the Zionist discourse of military power in the context of conflict with Arabs in Palestine in the years around 1948 and the establishment of the State of Israel.
In 1944, the Zionist leader and future Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion spoke about ‘revenge for the spilled blood’ of European Jews as one of the reasons for establishing the Brigade. By November 1945, Ben-Gurion – the pragmatic politician and statesman – concluded that, after the war, revenge was ‘a matter of no national benefit’ because killing Germans will not bring back those who were murdered, and he silently disavowed Kovner’s plans. Nonetheless, Kovner and the Yishuv formed a significant relationship. Kovner’s family and several members of the Avengers settled in Kibbutz Ein ha-Horesh in March 1946, and Kovner became an influential figure around 1948, when, amid war, the IDF gradually began to form.
As the scholar Uri S Cohen has shown, in the struggle with the Palestinians and Arab states, Hebrew writers and poets, mostly men born in Palestine and known as the Palmach Generation, wrote a great deal about revenge. For example, the novelist Moshe Shamir wrote a series of novels between 1947 and 1951, each featuring a theme of personal and collective revenge, not against the Nazis or Germans, but against Palestinian Arabs. The desire for revenge against Palestinians during the 1948 war coincided with an important transition away from militias such as the Palmach, towards a regular Israeli army.
Revenge became a central part of Hebrew militia culture. Nahum Arieli, a commander in the Palmach, wrote about the death of his friend and Shamir’s brother Eliyahu: ‘To gather strength, to organize quietly, and to go out again … to avenge our Eli!’ Instead of Nazis or Germans, revenge against the Arabs served as the emotional core of the literature of the 1948 war. During ‘Israel’s border wars’, between 1949 and 1956, which were essentially a chain of ‘reprisal operations’ dominated by the Commando Unit 101, vengeance remained a driving force. From these conflicts emerged well-known fighters who loomed large in the Israeli and Jewish public imagination, including Ariel Sharon and Meir Har Zion.
Kovner did not fight in the 1948 war. Instead, he served as a ‘cultural officer’ of the Givati Brigade. Kovner named the commando unit of the Givati Brigade Shu’alei Shimshon (‘Samson’s Foxes’) after the biblical Samson and his foxes who carried the fire of vengeance against the Philistines. In his new role, Kovner wrote ‘battle pages’ with rhetorical force:
With love and with hatred, for the sake of our homes, for the sake of the lives of our children, and the eyes of eighty generations are watching us, and six million souls . . . call out to us from the earth: Rise, the great revenge – free Israel, forever!
Kovner is many things, a historical and political figure, a writer, but he is also a symbolic and transitional figure because his words and actions during the 1948 war show a profound change: the transition from revenge as a response to the Nazis and Germans to revenge against Arabs. As Netiva Ben-Yehuda, an Israeli author, editor and radio broadcaster who was a commander in the Palmach, wrote years after about the 1948 war: ‘We fixed our guns on the Arabs, we pulled the trigger … and we imagined to kill Nazis.’
For Lang, the displacement ‘at one farther remove’ of revenge against Nazis or Germans onto Arabs was ‘a form of demonization and aggression’. Lang maintained that it could not be accounted for by the real threats Israel had faced, and that it required ‘disfigured representations’ of Arabs. In its people’s ‘emergence from [the] powerlessness’ of the Holocaust, the State of Israel had found in the Arabs an ‘available target’ for revenge. The Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-On, who for many years studied the relations between Israelis, Germans and Palestinians, suggested that the desire for revenge had found an outlet against another group that was causing feelings of threat: the Palestinians, who are perceived as ‘the natural continuation of the previous aggressor’.
There are key differences between what people who did not directly experience the horrors of the Holocaust wrote in Hebrew, and what survivors and refugees who arrived in Palestine/Israel after 1945 wrote in Yiddish. Avrom Karpinovitsh’s Yiddish story ‘Don’t Forget’ (1951) deals with a Jewish soldier who arrives in Palestine from a displaced persons camp directly into the battles of 1948, after being conscripted as part of the ‘foreign recruitments’.
In Karpinovitsh’s story, the unnamed soldier finds himself alone and disoriented after capturing a Palestinian Arab. The Jewish soldier has no idea what to do with the captive and, in the absence of a common language, they cannot communicate. The captor is terrified but hopes that, if he manages to bring the captive to his commander, he will finally be able to transform himself from a disgraced refugee into a ‘real Israeli soldier’. His plan fails because he cannot find his way in the unfamiliar terrain and the oppressive weather.
The climax of the story occurs when the captive takes advantage of the soldier’s moments of confusion and picks up a stone. At that moment, the prisoner speaks for the first time and says something, presumably in German: ‘You have no right, I am a war cap[tive].’ Instead of considering the status of prisoners of war, the Jewish soldier feels threatened, and his memory leads him to a particularly traumatic moment:
The captive’s hoarse murmur transported him back once again to the earthen hut in the middle of the forest where he and his mother hid after fleeing the ghetto – ‘Don’t forget, my child, to say Kaddish for your dead father. Even if, God forbid, you remain alone, don’t ever forget.’
The Jewish soldier remembers how the Nazi killed his mother brutally in front of him and the cry of ‘Don’t forget’ that he still hears. Now, when he is confronted with the Palestinian captive, he contemplates:
This is him . . . That same pale face of the Angel of Death. The same cold vicious glance, there in the forest, and here – with the stone. The same killer’s hands with the long fingers that strangled her so powerfully as she cried out … and perhaps this is not the same man?
In this harrowing story, it is hard to discern reality from the imaginary. In this traumatic moment, ‘don’t forget’ translates into a call for revenge in the new reality. The Holocaust survivor who becomes an Israeli soldier, in his imagination, turns the Nazi into a Palestinian and brutally kills the captive. At that moment,
Something gnawed at his heart: an unsatisfied thirst for revenge … Suddenly, the picture of his mother, fresh-faced on a Friday evening, surfaced before his eyes. She would never come back to him, not even with a thousand deaths of this murdered man.
The protagonist is disgusted with the act of violence and the futility of displaced vengeance.
The story does not provide answers but only questions. Karpinovitsh’s ‘Don’t Forget’, written in Yiddish by someone who was close to the events of the Holocaust, gives voice to refugees who immigrated to Palestine/Israel and were thrown into the 1948 war, trying to assimilate into Israeli culture immediately after experiencing the horrors of the Second World War. The story asks questions about the power of traumatic memories, and the relations between memory and the desire for revenge as ‘wild justice’, but also reflects on the act of displaced and violent revenge as ultimately futile and harmful.
By the end of the 1948 war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees, mostly fleeing to nearby Arab countries. The armistice agreements between Israel and its neighbors drew the new borders for the State of Israel, but violent incidents around these borders were quite common. In October 1953, members of an Arab paramilitary commando group killed a Jewish family in the town of Yehud, which had been depopulated of its Palestinian residents in the 1948 war.
Before the ‘reprisal operation’ that occurred after the attack on Jews, Sharon, as commander of Unit 101, wrote in the operation’s orders that the objective was an ‘attack on the village of Qibya, its temporary conquest, and maximum damage to the population with the aim of evacuating the villagers from their homes … by damaging a number of houses and killing residents and soldiers in the village’.
Although Sharon’s comment does not mention the word nekama, it must be understood as a vengeful act that became part of the norms for Unit 101. During the operation, IDF soldiers blew up 45 houses in the village with their occupants, and 69 residents of Qibya, mostly women and children, were killed. Many Yiddish writers were shocked and responded to the massacre. In a New York Yiddish journal in 1964, Glatstein wrote:
Anger, revenge, smoke,
A small camp with murder in their eyes.
Girded with bow and arrow,
In treachery of night …
Glatstein, who’d written about Jewish revenge against the Nazis and Germans in 1944, is furious about the Israeli displacement of vengeance.
The Yiddish-Israeli writer Yossel Birstein also wrote about Qibya in the story ‘Between the Olive Trees’ (1954). Most of the story revolves around Hasan, an elderly Palestinian in the olive grove near ‘the ruined huts from the last war’. At the climax of the story, a soldier stops Hasan and declares his authority as a representative of the armed forces. In the confrontation, a bag of oranges falls from his donkey, and while Hasan bends down and goes ‘on all fours’ to pick them up, the Israeli soldier towers over him and their gazes meet, when the soldier sees Hasan ‘like a pile of rags’. In this brief encounter, the Jewish soldier hears the subdued cry of Hasan, and ‘is confused’ by it. The confusion surely arises from his memory of persecution in the Holocaust, which surfaces and moves the soldier.
Hasan, the elderly Palestinian, and the Israeli soldier in the story are both figures who have repressed painful and traumatic experiences that occurred during the Holocaust and the Nakba. The story depicts a Jewish refugee or survivor who, in order to fulfill his new role as an Israeli soldier in retaliatory and vengeful actions like Qibya, is required to see the Palestinian as a threatening enemy and, even worse, as a dehumanized being. Birstein handles the matter with delicacy, but readers can sense in the story the danger of the vengeance’s displacement from Europe to Israel/Palestine, a displacement that leads to dehumanization.
As we can see, during and after the Holocaust, European Jews clearly desired revenge, and this feeling persisted for many years, often in complex, displaced ways. The problem raises the question: can the impulses towards revenge be directed to less violent and destructive channels in post-Holocaust Jewish culture? Following in the footsteps of Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the topic in the book The Human Condition (1958), Lang explains a fundamental difference between two possible responses to acts of wrong or injustice: forgiveness and revenge.
In terms of temporality, forgiveness is effectively the attempt to erase what happened in the past, and therefore to try to let a painful memory go. Revenge is different because, in the desire to avenge wrong acts, the past must persist. Because vengeful desire is directed towards the future, it resonates in the present and contributes to the memory of the past by not letting it go. We must understand that memory is something that we choose, too; it requires construction and cultivation. It is not just a natural attribute or a reservoir waiting to be filled. Thus, one can understand a human sense of the need for revenge as a persistent desire for justice and, therefore, as an element to foster memory, both personal and collective, part of a Jewish imperative to ‘never forget’ what happened in the Holocaust.
Rachel Auerbach’s Yiddish story ‘Lullaby’ (1952), which takes place in Israel, also bears out Lang’s observation about the link between the desire for justice and preserving the memory of the Holocaust by survivors and refugees who try to overcome trauma and rebuild their life. Auerbach immigrated to Israel from Europe in 1950. She was one of the chroniclers of the Warsaw ghetto. She founded and directed the testimonial collection department of the newly created Yad Vashem, where ordinary people, rather than historians and politicians, would be able to testify in their own way and words.
Auerbach understood memory as an act of overcoming destruction and death through the spiritual effort involved in testifying. In Auerbach’s ‘Lullaby’, the protagonist visits her cousin Reuven, who lost his only daughter, Yosima, a pianist and composer who died in the ghetto. Reuven’s first wife could not bear the loss and took her own life. Later, Reuven became acquainted with Ruth, and they married in Israel. The narrator visits their home with one room dedicated to the memory of Yosima, and the two young children born in Israel: a girl, and a boy with the strange name Kamy, short for Nekamyah (‘God will avenge’).
Reuven and Ruth compose lullabies to Kamy and give different meanings to the name. The father’s lullaby is:
Black crows
Tore your sister
In the black exile.
Black is the diaspora, my son.
At dawn, the sun rises,
A sun of freedom,
And remember, vengeance, my son:
Revenge!
The mother’s lullaby is:
Sleep, sleep my precious child,
Be strong, upright.
With people and with God
For the sake of father,
For the sake of mother,
For the sake of all Israel.
The narrator listens to the two lullabies and reflects on what will become of the child when he grows up. ‘Perhaps he will be a poet, perhaps an actor – someone extraordinary? And perhaps he will be an ordinary person like all others?’ Auerbach’s deceptively simple story is about a specific dilemma of Jews trying to rebuild their life after the Holocaust in Israel. It raises larger philosophical and ethical questions about personal and collective memory, trauma, revenge, justice and the meaning of being human – an ‘ordinary person’ – in dark times, a question that still haunts us today as it did after the Holocaust.
What can we learn from this story and, in general, from the literary cultural analysis I presented here? First, we must acknowledge that vengeance is a human emotion, and it is inescapable – not an alien element, but rather a part of modern Jewish culture. Second, vengeance may lead to collective memory as well as to a cycle of bloodshed. We observed the historical displacement of a desire for vengeance against Nazi Germans, mostly expressed in Yiddish during and after the Second World War, for revenge against Palestinian Arabs, mostly expressed in Hebrew and in Israel around and after 1948.
This displacement has existed ever since then and has played an important role in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. It was activated most forcefully on 7 October 2023, because of the unprecedented violence of the attack on southern Israel, and the extreme vulnerability of Israeli Jews who sensed that the State of Israel and its army failed in its most basic function, to defend its citizens. This activation of vulnerability is, in no small part, due to the intergenerational collective trauma of the experience of the Holocaust.
Because of the displacement of modern Jewish vengeance from Europe onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the vengeful war taking place since 7 October is even more dangerous and tragic. To begin imagining a better future for both Israelis and Palestinians, it is imperative to be more aware of this cultural history with its memories, traumas and numerous blind spots.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-role-for-revenge-in-jewish-life-literature-and-culture?
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He who seeks revenge digs two graves: one for his enemy, and another one for himself. ~ attributed to Confucius, but for many years I thought it was an Arab proverb
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REVENGE VERSUS JUSTICE
The terms revenge and justice often get muddled. And that’s hardly surprising. In the course of history, the two have been frequently used interchangeably. You may even be familiar with the phrase “just revenge.” Still, as meanings alter and evolve over time, the connotations of these two words have increasingly diverged. It’s now uncommon to see them used synonymously. And doubtless, revenge has borne the brunt of the various semantic changes that have transpired.
It would be convenient to advance the claim that justice is fair and revenge is not. But as the words “just revenge” suggest, revenge—depending on its underlying conditions, motivations, and execution—might be either just or unjust, fair or (frankly) outrageously out of proportion to the wrong originally done. There seems to be equivocality tightly woven into the term that’s less perceptible in the related concept of justice. All the same, the well-known phrase “miscarriage of justice” warns us to be careful about distinguishing between concepts that, finally, must be understood as both relative and subjective.
Revenge is predominantly emotional; justice primarily rational. Revenge is mostly about “acting out” (typically through violence) markedly negative emotions. At its worst, it expresses a hot, overwhelming desire for bloodshed. As perverse as it may seem, there’s actual pleasure experienced in causing others to suffer for the hurt they’ve caused the avenger, or self-perceived victim (cf. the less personal Schadenfreude).
Justice—as logically, legally, and ethically defined—isn’t really about “getting even” or experiencing a spiteful joy in retaliation. Instead, it’s about righting a wrong that most members of society (as opposed to simply the alleged victim) would agree is morally culpable. And the presumably unbiased (i.e., unemotional) moral rightness of such justice is based on cultural or community standards of fairness and equity. Whereas revenge has a certain selfish quality to it, “cool” justice is selfless in that it relies on non-self-interested, established law.
Revenge is, by nature, personal; justice is impersonal, impartial, and both a social and legal phenomenon. The driving impetus behind revenge is to get even, to carry out a private vendetta, or to achieve what, subjectively, might be described as personal justice. If successful, the party perceiving itself as gravely injured experiences considerable gratification: their retaliatory goal has been achieved—the other side vanquished, or brought to its knees. Just or not, the avenger feels justified. Their quest for revenge has “re-empowered” them and, from their biased viewpoint, it’s something they’re fully entitled to.
On the other hand, social justice is impersonal. It revolves around moral correction in situations where certain ethical and culturally vital principles have been violated. When justice is successfully meted out, the particular retribution benefits or protects both the individual and society—which can operate effectively only when certain acceptable behavioral guidelines are followed.
Revenge is an act of vindictiveness; justice, of vindication. The intense effort to avenge oneself or others can easily become corrupting, morally reducing the avenger’s status to that of the perpetrator. Two wrongs do not make a right and (ethically speaking) never can. Degrading another only ends up further degrading oneself. Even if a kind of justice might be served through an act of revenge, it could still be argued that there’s nothing particularly admirable or evolved in retaliating against a wrong by committing a “like” wrong. Or to behave vengefully is, at best, to take the low road to justice.
Revenge is about cycles; justice is about closure. Revenge has a way of relentlessly repeating itself (as in interminable feuds, such as the Hatfields and McCoys)—and ever more maliciously. Revenge typically begets more revenge. Whether it’s an individual or an entire nation, it takes place within a closed system that seems able to feed on itself indefinitely.
Unlike tic-tac-toe, tit for tat is a game without end. One side gets satisfaction, then the other is driven to get its satisfaction, and then, theoretically, ad infinitum. There can be no resolution, no compromise. Each faction (say, Israel and Palestine) has its own agenda, its own sense of right and wrong. And the righteous rigidity of each side usually demands that some trusted outsider intervene if matters are ever to be settled.
Justice, in contrast, is designed (by individuals or officials generally not linked to the two opposing camps) to offer a resolution far more likely to eventuate in closure—especially if, in fact, it is just (equitable). And when justice is done so is the conflict that led up to it. Beyond that, punishments for wrongdoing carry an agreed-upon authority lacking in personal vengeful acts, which are calculated solely to “get back” at the assumed perpetrator. Technically speaking, so-called “vigilante justice” isn’t really justice, or social justice, at all—though at times it may appear to be. Taking matters into one’s own hands may sometimes seem justified, but it hardly meets the more rigorous criteria for consensual, or community, justice.
Revenge is about retaliation; justice is about restoring balance. The motive of revenge has mostly to do with expressing rage, hatred, or spite. It’s a protest or payback, and its foremost intent is to harm. In and of itself, it’s not primarily about justice but about victims’ affirming their inborn (but non-legal) right to retaliate against some wrong done to them.
And because it’s so impassioned, it’s typically disproportionate to the original injury—meaning that it usually can’t be viewed as just. The punishment may fit the crime, but it’s often an exaggerated response to another’s perceived offense.
On the contrary, justice is concerned with dispassionately restoring balance by bringing about equality—or better, equity. It centers on proportion as it equates to fairness. Not driven by emotion, restorative justice—meted out by a court of law—seeks to be as objective and evenhanded as possible. It’s not, as is so much of revenge, about doing the other side “one better” but about equitably—or properly—punishing wrongdoing.
In fact, the ancient “law of the ‘talion’” (an ethical standard originating in Babylonian law and present as well in the Bible and early Roman law) focuses on what is commonly known (but, hopefully, only metaphorically!) as the “eye for an eye” conception of justice. In brief, the kind or magnitude of justice meted out is contrived to “correspond” as exactly as possible to the gravity of the original injury. ~ Leon F. Seltzer
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evolution-the-self/201402/don-t-confuse-revenge-justice-five-key-differences
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"Christian ethics demand that you should not take revenge. The paradox is, naturally, that Christians worship a God who is the greatest avenger of them all. Defy him and you burn in eternal hell, an act of revenge which is completely out of proportion to the crime." — Jo Nesbø
Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. (Romans 12:19)
Blood doesn’t wash away blood. — Persian Proverb
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~ On May 14, Israel celebrated its Independence Day. The country declared independence in 1948. For some people, the occasion was all about current events. Israeli settlers and their supporters rallied yesterday along the border with Gaza, where an Israeli military offensive has been underway for months. Senior government ministers attended, too, and they called for Israel to build Jewish settlements inside Gaza. ~
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/15/1251510151/on-israels-independence-day-a-rally-calls-for-jewish-settlements-in-gaza
Mary: REVENGE: A REPEATING CYCLE
The problem with revenge, no matter how satisfying it may feel, is that it locks you into a repeating cycle that is fatally tethered to the past, and truncates all possibilities for the future. The Hatfield-McCoy feud mentioned is a good example. Revenge is not only destruction visited on the enemy, it is self destructive, limiting, stunting and deforming the one seeking or enacting vengeance. Enduring the kind of evil embodied in the Holocaust surely engendered rage in the survivors, but satisfying that rage could be confining yourself to living on in that particular hell rather than growing and building a life beyond it.
Such evil must never be forgotten nor forgiven. Vigilance must always be ready to act against its repetition. But vengeance is not the same as justice, though it may feel justified. It is one thing to bring criminals to account, to prosecute them according to the law — but vigilantism avoids the niceties of law and community, becoming a mirror image of the evil it intends to punish. It mires you in the violation, in the pain and fury of the past, trapping you there more surely than walls and chains. Freedom and survival mean only the pursuit of revenge, forcing the future back on a past that can't be escaped. Revenge is self defeating, never finished, a trap that swallows hope and potential. Something we have yet to fully realize and accept — because it seems like justice, and feels like justice: a sweet poison, hard to resist.
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A SINGLE TANK IN THE VICTORY DAY PARADE IN MOSCOW MAY 9TH
Russia and Putin kicked off its 79th "Victory Day" military parade on Thursday, in a show of Russian military might and patriotism as the war with Ukraine rumbles on into a third year.
The annual event on May 9 commemorates the Soviet’s claimed victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. (Germany had surrendered the day before to the US and Britain)
The parade typically sees thousands of Russian troops and pieces of military hardware paraded through Red Square in Moscow, with other events held throughout Russia.
This year there was a single tank in the parade. The Russians have lost some 7,434 tanks so far in the war and 14,313 armored vehicles. Russia has lost 12,340 pieces of artillery and 349 planes and 325 helicopters.
the lonesome tank, flying the Soviet flag
So there was not a lot of spare equipment for the parade.
The same was true for soldiers. Russia has sustained 479,710 casualties in its war so far, stretching the ranks of its personnel.
Putin gave a speech. He threatened to use nuclear weapons one more time. (Yawn)
If the war in Ukraine continues, Putin may have to do the parade without any tanks next year. ~ Brent Cooper, Quora
Dimitri Zolochev:
The USSR had high profile and massive military parades for decades, but by 1991 it meant nothing. The USSR collapsed from the rot and decay of communism. Putin is on the same road, which is his current fascist regime and dictatorship is rotting and spoiling from the inside Kremlin and nation. Putin’s narcissistic pride means he doesn’t care if his war ultimately terminates and bankrupts Russia once again.
Mark Evans:
One lone T-64 tank.
Made in Kharkiv, Ukrainian SSR.
Joe Bytown:
Think of all the equipment, all the missiles, all the men, all the resources being flushed down the drain in this “military operation”. Imagine if this massive effort was instead expended to improve Russia’s hospitals and schools and libraries and roads. If instead of building tanks to be blown up and left to rust in a field, the money was spent on research and development to create industry and jobs. Your leader has squandered decades worth of cash investment in your country, which could actually make it a world leader, in order to conquer a few hundred square meters of farmland.
Kremlin: laying flowers in memory of assassinated dissident Boris Nemtsov
Oriana:
My favorite is this Russian tank on display — the tracks on one side got stolen. 
TRUMP IS INSANE, AND OUR REPUBLIC IS SICK
Before the Roman Republic collapsed into Empire, Romans had a proverb: “If you put up with the crimes of a friend, the crimes become your own.”
The Republic collapsed into despotism in the two centuries we call 100 B.C. to 100 A.D.
Diligent study of this period will show that Donald Trump is insane. He is insane through the same course that drove — or allowed — so many Roman emperors to become insane, including Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Commodus, Elagabalus … and so on.
They all became insane in the same manner — spoiled brats — vanity above all: Inheriting unearned riches and political power led them to believe that they actually deserved Imperium mundi: Power over the entire world.
Seneca provides illustrations of this in his early book, De Ira, “On Anger.” Here are two stories Seneca told, as history.
Harpagus, a Persian general under Cyrus the Great, offended Cyrus by failing to carry out an order. So Cyrus invited Harpagus to a dinner of meat stew, and as Harpagus chowed down, Cyrus had the severed heads of Harpagus’s two young children brought in, to show him what he was eating.
“How do you like your dinner now?” asked Cyrus the Great.
According to Seneca, Harpagus replied: “Every meal is pleasant at a king’s table.”
Harpagus’s reward for this mild reply was that he didn’t have to finish his dinner.
Also in De Ira, Seneca wrote that Caligula (recently dead, and reviled) had murdered the son of a wealthy Roman citizen because the son had a nice head of hair, while Caligula was going bald.
Citizen Pastor begged for the life of his son, but Caligula killed him. Then he had Pastor dressed in flowers and finery, and ordered him to drink a toast to his emperor — who had just murdered his son. So Pastor toasted Caligula and drank the wine.
Why did he do it, Seneca asks — succumb to it?
Because Caligula knew that Pastor had another son.
Friends, Countrymen, Members of Congress: Isn’t it time we stop praising Trump, but bury him?
I’m not a doctor, so am not governed by the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater Rule,” which states that if a doctor has not personally evaluated a public figure, the doctor should not make public statements about the man’s or woman’s mental health.
A fair rule, I guess. But it doesn’t apply to me. After 30 years study of Roman politics and 37 years reporting on U.S. politics, I tell you with confidence: Donald Trump is insane.
He exhibits all the traits of the worst emperors: overweening vanity; amorality; ruthless pursuit of vengeance upon critics; unearned self-regard; sexual depredations unpunished. I could go on.
Corollary:
Just as this loathsome man shares the ruinous traits of the worst Roman emperors, our nation is showing that it shares, increasingly, the weaknesses that dragged Rome into its own sewers. Cowardice in the public sphere, above all, and the obsequious willingness of millions of supposedly free subjects to bow their necks to a man who is obviously insane.
Trump is a sociopath, a psychopath — “not very good at cooperation.” He seeks the presidency again not for the good of our tottering republic, but to wreak vengeance upon the people this childish brat believes, and tells us, have “betrayed” him. He does this to stroke his own ego: He has no superego. But no ego-stroking is enough for a psychopath, even if the stroking brings him to ejaculation, if only in his infantile, polymorphously perverse mind.
Seneca the Stoic tells us that lasting happiness can come only from reason, virtue and self-restraint. That’s why a psychopath can never be happy.
To listen to Trump, you’d think he’s the unhappiest schlub in America. And he may well be: He brags about it. His entire political platform today is that he is unhappy, and that it’s no fair, and that his followers have to fix that — by any means necessary.
Lacking reason, virtue and self-restraint, the psychopath seeks happiness by inflicting pain upon others: because they failed to provide him the pleasure he seeks but is unable to feel — and never will.
God help us, and the world, if we re-elect this psychopathic pervert to office again: this torturer by proxy, insatiable liar, accused rapist, ignorant man.
Donald Trump is insane. And the Members of Congress kissing his robes are cowards.
Most of the congressmen and -women, governors, state legislators, lobbyists and TV hosts fattening themselves on his unhappiness are not insane — though a few are — but they are guilty too.
(Remember that Trump commanded every member of his Cabinet to praise him at their first meeting? That he fired the head of national cybersecurity for rejecting claims of voter fraud?)
Trump’s sycophantic enablers in Congress and on Faux TV are no better than the cowed official who watched the Persian King Cambyses shoot the official’s son in the heart with an arrow, after Cambyses bragged that he could shoot just as well drunk as sober. (Seneca: De Ira.)
And what did Cambyses’ adviser, the dead boy’s father, tell his king?
“Good shot.”
What a Grand Old Party that was. A party of cowards. ~ Robert Kahn
https://www.courthousenews.com/donald-trump-is-insane-and-our-republic-is-sick/
Mary:
On the similarities between the fall of the Roman empire and our current situation — it certainly seems there are threats of chaos and collapse, threats that may be insurmountable: from climate change, to the rise of fascism, the failures of democracy, and the potential for demographic collapse in many more places than Russia. Reality seems difficult to assess amidst torrents of lies, delusions, and omissions — like the absence of mainstream media reporting on the increasingly unhinged rhetoric and glaring symptoms of dementia in Trump's speech.
It makes you question your own ability to distinguish fact from fiction. And it's terrifying to realize both the urgency and brevity of time we have to address, for instance, the worst of climate change, and the influence of those who refuse to see the problem and are not only opposed to working to slow the rapid changes but want to double down on the activities that caused the danger in the first place, working against clean energy and environmental protection to increase their own profits, even at devastating costs to everyone and everything else.
Sometimes it's hard to hope we won't just march ourselves over the cliff.
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CHRIS HEDGES: IS BIDEN’S MAKING IT EASY FOR CHRISTIAN FASCISTS?
Biden and the Democrats, along with the Republican Party, gutted antitrust enforcement and deregulated banks and corporations, allowing them to cannibalize the nation. They backed legislation in 1982 to green light the manipulation of stocks through massive buybacks and the “harvesting” of companies by private equity firms that resulted in mass layoffs.
They pushed through onerous trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which crippled union organizing. They were full partners in the construction of the vast archipelagos of the U.S. prison system — the largest in the world — and the militarization of police to turn them into internal armies of occupation. They fund the endless wars.
The Democrats dutifully serve their corporate masters, without whom most of them, including Biden, would not have a political career. This is why Biden and the Democrats will not turn on those who are destroying our economy and extinguishing our democracy. The slops in the trough would dry up. Advocating reforms jeopardize their fiefdoms of privilege and power. They fancy themselves as “captains of the ship,” labor journalist Hamilton Nolan writes, but they are “actually the wood-eating shipworms who are consuming the thing from inside until it sinks.”
Authoritarianism is nurtured in the fertile soil of a bankrupt liberalism. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia. And it is true now. The Democrats had four years to institute New Deal reforms. They failed. Now we will pay.
A second Trump term will not be like the first. It will be about vengeance.
Vengeance against the institutions that targeted Trump – the press, the courts, the intelligence agencies, disloyal Republicans, artists, intellectuals, the federal bureaucracy and the Democratic Party.
Our imperial presidency, if Donald Trump returns to power, will shift effortlessly into a dictatorship that emasculates the legislative and judicial branches. The plan to snuff out our anemic democracy is methodically laid out in the 887-page plan amassed by the Heritage Foundation called “Mandate for Leadership.”
The Heritage Foundation spent $22 million to draw up policy proposals, hiring lists and transition plans in Project 2025 to save Trump from the rudderless chaos that plagued his first term. Trump blames “snakes,” “traitors,” and the “Deep State” for undermining his first administration.
Our industrious American fascists, clutching the Christian cross and waving the flag, will begin work on day one to purge federal agencies of “snakes” and “traitors,” promulgate “Biblical” values, cut taxes for the billionaire class, abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, stack the courts and federal agencies with ideologues and strip workers of the few rights and protections they have left. War and internal security, including the wholesale surveillance of the public, will remain the main business of the state. The other functions of the state, especially those that focus on social services, including Social Security and protection of the vulnerable, will wither away.
Unfettered and unregulated capitalism, which has no self-imposed limits, turns everything into a commodity, from human beings to the natural world, which it exploits, until exhaustion or collapse. It first creates a mafia economy, as Karl Polanyi writes, and then a mafia government.
Political theorists, including Aristotle, Karl Marx and Sheldon Wolin, warn that when oligarchs seize power, the only options left are tyranny or revolution.
The Democrats know the working class has abandoned them. And they know why. Democratic Party pollster Mike Lux writes: Contrary to many pundits’ assumptions, economic issues are driving the problems of Democrats in non-metro working class counties far more than the culture war…These voters wouldn’t care all that much about cultural difference and the woke thing if they thought Democrats gave more of a damn about economic challenges they face deeply and daily…The voters we need to win in these counties are not inherently right-wing on social issues.
But the Democrats will not alienate the corporations and billionaires who keep them in office. They have opted instead for two self-defeating tactics: lies and fear.
The Democrats express a faux concern for workers who are victimized by mass layoffs while at the same time courting the corporate leaders who orchestrate these layoffs with lavish government contracts. The same hypocrisy sees them express concern for civilians being slaughtered in Gaza while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel and vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the U.N. to sustain the genocide.
Les Leopold in his book Wall Street’s War on Workers, filled with exhaustive polling and data, illustrates that economic dislocation and despair is the engine behind an enraged working class, not racism and bigotry.
He writes about the decision by Siemens to close its plant in Olean, New York with 530 decent paying union jobs. While Democrats bemoaned the closure, they refused to deny federal contracts to Siemens to protect the workers at the plant.
Biden then invited Siemens’ USA CEO Barbara Humpton to the White House signing of the 2021 infrastructure bill. The photo of the signing shows Humpton standing in the front row along with New York Senator Chuck Schumer.
Mingo County in the early 20th century was the epicenter of an armed clash between the United Mine Workers and the coal barons, with their hired gun thugs from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. The gun thugs evicted striking workers in 1912 from company housing and beat up and shot union members until the state militia occupied the coal towns and broke the strike. The federal siege was not lifted until 1933 by the Roosevelt administration. The union, which had been banned, was legalized.
“Mingo County didn’t forget, at least not for a long time,” Leopold writes. “As late as 1996, with more than 3,200 coal miners still at work, Mingo County gave Bill Clinton a whopping 69.7 percent of its vote. But every four years thereafter, support for the Democrats declined, going down and down, and down some more. By 2020, Joe Biden received only 13.9 percent of the vote in Mingo, a brutal downturn in a county that once saw the Democratic Party as its savior.”
The 3,300 Mingo County coal mining jobs by 2020 had fallen to 300, the largest loss of coal jobs in any county in the country.
The lies of Democratic politicians did far more damage to working men and women than any of the lies spewed by Trump.
There have been at least 30 million mass layoffs since 1996 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking them, according to the Labor Institute. The reigning oligarchs, not content with mass layoffs and reducing the unionized workforce in the private sector to a paltry 6 percent, have filed legal papers to shut down the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that enforces labor rights. Elon Musk’s SpaceX as well as Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s targeted the NLRB – already stripped of most of its power to levy fines and force corporate compliance – after it accused Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s of breaking the law by blocking union organizing.
The NLRB accused SpaceX of illegally firing eight workers for criticizing Musk. SpaceX, Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joes are seeking to get the federal courts to overturn the 89-year-old National Labor Relations Act to prevent judges from hearing cases brought against corporations for violating labor laws.
Fear — fear of the return of Trump and Christian fascism — is the only card the Democrats have left to play. This will work in urban, liberal enclaves where college educated technocrats, part of the globalized knowledge economy, are busy scolding and demonizing the working class for their ingratitude.
The Democrats have foolishly written off these “deplorables” as a lost political cause. This precariat, the mantra goes, is victimized not by a predatory system built to enrich the billionaire class, but by their ignorance and individual failures. Dismissing the disenfranchised absolves the Democrats from advocating the legislation to protect and create decent-paying jobs.
Fear has no hold in deindustrialized urban landscapes and the neglected wastelands of rural America, where families struggle without sustainable work, an opioid crisis, food deserts, personal bankruptcies, evictions, crippling debt and profound despair.
They want what Trump wants. Vengeance. Who can blame them?
https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/17/chris-hedges-joe-bidens-parting-gift-to-america-will-be-christian-fascism/
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HANNAH ARENDT ON MARXISM
In this era of economic precarity and resurgent authoritarianism, it is unsurprising that both Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt occupy a central place in many readers’ minds—and a lingering one on their nightstands. Sales of Capital boomed following the 2008 financial crisis, and Donald Trump offers good reason to read The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is fitting, then, that the new Critical Edition of Arendt’s complete works begins with this, a volume of fragments from an unfinished book originally planned to be called Karl Marx and the Tradition of Political Thought.
In Georg Büchner’s play Danton’s Death (1835), the titular French Revolutionary cries the words originally made famous by Pierre Vergniaud, “The revolution is like Saturn—it eats its own children.” This line may have been in Arendt’s mind when she was writing these texts, which over the course of nearly 600 pages attempt to come to terms with the revolutionary challenge Marx elaborates in political philosophy. She responds by developing an alternative form of politics, what she calls “natality”: collaboration birthing a future, instead of revolutionary fervor devouring it.
According to his dialectical model of history, Marx thought capitalism would create its own gravediggers. Arendt doubts any such tendency to self-destruction, and thus she finds nothing dialectically redeemable about the violence of the marketplace. While a free market would totally colonize the space of political action, Arendt also argues that total expropriation is “hell.” The dogged pursuit of economic ends, whether the free market or redistribution, results in mass violence. That economic compulsion can only be challenged by politics, and politics can only be determined by individuals exercising judgment in public.
The problem is that the means of ensuring the possibility of exercising judgment cannot be predetermined. The Modern Challenge to Tradition does not square this circle of political checks on economic pursuits so much as it dwells in the intractability of the problem.
Marx’s version of human nature is a problem, Arendt argues, because it subordinates political questions to economic forces.
In an essay titled “Ideology and Terror” (1953), she makes one of her most controversial claims: “that loneliness, once a borderline experience . . . has become an everyday experience of the ever growing masses of our century.” Her critics easily believe in the prevalence of loneliness, but they often challenge the apparently causal relation she proposes between it and totalitarian states. Arendt maintains the centrality of loneliness to totalitarianism, but more clearly grounds it not in an existential cause—say, anomie, that keyword of the social theory of Emile Durkheim—but in a political one: terror.
Loneliness is not the cause of totalitarianism, she claims, but terror produces loneliness. Once a population is lonely, totalitarian governments will find it far easier to govern, for lonely people find it hard to join together, lacking the strong extra-familial bonds necessary to organize rebellions. These individualizing effects of loneliness prevent political action even in non-totalitarian states, because politics requires collaboration and mutuality. In this regard, Arendt claims a role for emotions in politics.
Arendt finds two problems in Marx. One is methodological, that he replaces philosophy with politics. The other is philosophical: Marx has a dialectical model of history. For Marx, she summarizes, capitalism consists of a process in which progressively more people transition from peasants to wage laborers, who have no option but to work in order to survive. Up to this point, she agrees. The next step is the problematic one.
Marx argues that the division of society into owners and workers makes revolution necessary and inevitable. Arendt argues, by contrast, that the formation of labor parties and the granting of legal rights to the working class ends the inevitability of revolution. While this appears to fit within the classic divide between reform and revolution, Arendt understands it as having profound, philosophical significance. Furthermore, just because revolution is not inevitable does not mean reform will solve the problem presented by the capitalist economy.
Arendt recognizes in Marx a way to think about the “mute violence” of modern society, a violence she finds ubiquitous in democracies no less than in dictatorships. She identifies Marx as the first in the great tradition of Western political thought to focus on this problem:
“Marx knew that the incompatibility between classical political thought and modern political conditions lay in the accomplished fact of the French and Industrial Revolutions, which together had raised labor, traditionally the most despised of all human activities, to the highest rank of productivity and pretended to be able to assert the time-honored ideal of freedom under unheard-of conditions of universal equality.
Marx knew that the question was only superficially posed in the idealistic assertions of the equality of man . . . and only superficially answered by giving laborers the right to vote. This was not a problem of justice that could be solved by giving the new class of workers its due. . . . There is the fact of the basic incompatibility between the traditional concepts making labor itself the very symbol of man’s subjection to necessity and the modern age which saw labor elevated to express man’s positive freedom, the freedom of productivity.”
Reform is not enough, but Marx was wrong to wish to “realize philosophy,” that is, to make the idealist claims of justice and autonomy actual by politicizing the economy.
Arendt places her faith in an adamant commitment to the existence of contingency in history, which she calls natality. She had already developed this concept in her early work on Saint Augustine, whom she often quotes: “Man was created, before which no one was, so that a beginning could be.” Every birth, she argues, brings the possibility for a fundamentally different world. This is true for the births of people no less than those of ideas and social forms. This is a further disagreement with Marx, of course. Where she finds history filled with moments of contingency, in which the judgment and actions of individuals had great consequences, Marx sees epiphenomena masking the fundamental tensions guiding history.
“Natality is the condition of human plurality; and politics . . . is necessary only because man is a being who is only in the plural as long as he is alive. . . . As long as we live, and no matter what kind of life we lead, we cannot avoid the unpredictability of human actions in which the only thing we can foretell is not the actual outcome of the process which we have started, but that every good deed, done for no matter which cause or motive, will make the world a little better, and every bad deed, done for no matter which sublime end, will immediately make the world a little worse, just as every great deed will here and now raise the level of human existence, show for better and worse what man is capable of.”
Thus the normative task Arendt elaborates is an individual responsibility for the world manifested in the collaborative activity of political life. The revolution of natality is one in which all, mutually, take responsibility for the world, where judgment is exercised in public discourse on political questions.
This is a considerably different political program than “Workers of the World, Unite!” Yet she implicitly agrees with much of that slogan. Perhaps the closest we can come to a meeting of Arendt and Marx is to imagine an Arendtian revision of the Marxist formula to seize the means of production. Arendt would argue that we instead ought to say, seize the means of exercising responsibility for the world.
In the invocation of a great deed, Arendt holds out a hope for novelty, for the birth of something new that allows for political beginning. And in the present moment of apparently catastrophic climate change, where seemingly no politician either wants to take action or be held accountable, her notion of responsibility has an appeal, despite the word having often been tarnished by conservative diatribes.
As this volume makes clear, Arendt’s struggle with Marx is a genuine one that ends at an impasse. She recognizes him as a companion, yet she mistrusts his ambivalence toward violence and his belief in a science of history. Marx and Arendt differ in many ways, but where the two concur offers a very modest politics: to collaborate and organize in public.
For both Marx and Arendt, political change will happen only because people, no matter how humble their social status, come together, talk about what type of world they would like to live in, and strive to make it a reality.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/geoffrey-wildanger-hannah-arendt-marx-and-mute-violence-modern-society/?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=482a1636d3-reading_list_5_5_2024&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-482a1636d3-40729829&mc_cid=482a1636d3
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MISHA FIRER ON RUSSIA’S DEMOGRAPHIC CRISIS
~ Russia is in the throes of a severe demographic crises. The birthrates are at the historically record low rivaled only by the period of a plague epidemic in the late 18th century.
The decline started long before war in Ukraine. Rearing children in Russia is a very, very expensive enterprise: school expenses, extra curricular activities, clothes, foodstuff, summer camps.
In case of divorce, wife takes husband to the dry cleaners, laundry, and if there’s anything left the bank for a control shot.
As a result of disputes in court that always, ALWAYS takes the side of the woman, husband is ordered to pay child support that often exceeds what he actually makes, or rule of thumb —
a quarter of his wages.
In addition, he would spend money when spending time with the child so the price of having one child easily amounts to half his salary after he had paid as much to the state in taxes.
And what if there are two children?
Having three children pushes vast majority of families below poverty line. There is no room in modern Russian apartments that are slightly larger than prison cells to house so many people.
It’s mostly the rich and ultra religious families who have many children. A tiny minority.
The rich send their kids abroad to study never to be seen again, and Putin invites the few families with tens of kids to Kremlin to make it look like his propaganda is working.
Having children is not a great investment these days. They grow up and confine elderly parents to senior homes. As for men, half of them die before they reach the new retirement age of 65 so having a steady job suffices to have the ends meet.
It’s a fifty per cent chance that you will need a pension but if you do it can feed you and provide free transportation for the remaining years.
A man who can’t find decent employment stops paying child support. He cannot buy real estate, a car, or leave the country until he pays off all of his debts.
Putin has taken advantage of this debt burden that saddles hundreds of thousands of men in Russia and offered them a great opportunity: they sign military contract to be cannon fodder for his war in Ukraine in exchange for debt relief.
A great number of such hapless fathers are strewn across the Ukrainian steppes who took the chance to feed their children with whom they couldn’t even live under the same roof due to judges verdicts. There are more on the way.
The two brigades that have conducted an incursion into Kharkiv Oblast in the past week are entirely formed of “contract servicemen” and plenty of them joined in to pay off child support debts.
Traditional family values Rusky Way!
That’s why the number one company in capitalization in the Russian Federation is Sberbank where 80% of the adult citizens hold bank accounts.
I don’t know about you, Westernskyy, but we have all become bonded serfs to the bankers here.
Men have smartened up. When a man faces a situation in which he has to pay all that he got to have a child who can be snatched away from him and yet he would still have to pay, he operates in his self-interest and decides not to get married and have any children.
Quickly abandoned pregnant women who go to the clinic to have an abortion are forced to keep the child because nurses and doctors are under pressure to improve birth rates to make Putin happy.
Women who want to start a family and have 1.2 children have to wait in line for a long time to find a financially secure man.
This is a highly competitive environment. For one such man there’s a dozen women who try to get him hitched.
This has led to the epidemic of men who figured how to game the system and sleep around with multiple women promising riches and plastic surgeries on tap.
“So where are the traditional family values that Putin said that Russians adhere to?” you might wanna ask.
There are none. I don’t know why Westernsky every time fall for Putin’s lies.
If there’s a silver lining, it lies with the young people. They have cast aside old-fashioned ideas of family units and practice indigenous-style polygamous and polyandrous social relationships forming semi-formal communities.
I hope they will ultimately figure out how to jack up birthrates because we are heading for mass extinction. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
James Urie:
If you Misha can see the perils of the demographic decline, are there not other people in Russia that see the same thing?
Putin's SMO/war has killed off or maimed a half million Russian males and I would venture to say that 2/3rds are of the primer working and reproductive age 18 - 35.
Is it possible that the new Defense Minister will persuade Putin to revise his plans? He is a money guy who knows that the cliff is rapidly approaching and jumping off like a bunch of Lemmings isn't a winning plan.
Nancy Knight:
Our young people here in the U.S. face similar hurdles. The cost of getting a college education has skyrocketed into the upper atmosphere, costing tens of thousands of dollars per year, saddling students with outrageous debts, while home prices have also soared, assuring that this will be the first generation of citizens who will do much worse than their parents in the present economy. I don’t really know what the solution is.
Maria Takarli:
The solution would be free public education up to and including PhD level, as is the case in several European countries.
THE RADICAL FEMINIST GULABI GANG TRIES TO PROTECT INDIAN WOMEN
They wear pink saris and carry lathis (bamboo staves) for protection against physical attack. They punish abusive husbands, publicly shaming and sometimes beating them. They also watch out for and expose dowry beatings, dowry death, rape, child marriages, desertion, depriving girls of education, child molestation, and sexual harassment.
They have invaded police stations to demand that police investigate these matters, and other things that affect the community such as corruption. India’s police are notoriously corrupt and sometimes only the threat of a full-scale female riot will get them to act.
Nobody knows quite how many of them there are. Estimates range from 270,000 to 400,000. You don’t want to mess with women under their protection, or they will mess you up.
The Gulabi Gang
Stephen Cherry:
Amazing… Women taking and exercising their collective power. Western women especially Americans can take a lesson
Freya Hahn:
I love this ! I wish we had a group here !
Madeleine Madeleine:
Women need to do this in every land and culture…fight against abuse!!
Maria Barry:
True Amazons!
*
A BIGOTED COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS
Harrison Butker is a placekicker for the Kansas City Chiefs and a miserable human being. NFL fans will probably know him. Everyone else will likely not. However, after his commencement speech at Benedictine College, he will be more famous — or infamous — depending on how much you appreciate bigotry in your fellow Americans.
Benedictine is a private Catholic college. Butker is a Catholic. So far, so good. Far be it from anyone to say Benedictine should not organize itself as it sees fit. And Butker’s belief is constitutionally protected. Even if it were not, common decency and respect for private choices would demand he be free to practice his faith.
However, Butker has no interest in extending that common decency or respect to others. This pompous ass has the gall to tell the LGBTQ community they are sinners for being who they are. That women should be barefoot, pregnant, and kitchen-bound. And that antisemitism is a true believer’s duty.
In just over 20 minutes of hateful oratory, he proved that America harbors some of the most reprehensible people on the planet. Here are some of this bigot’s offerings.
He starts by congratulating the graduates for making it through COVID. Fair enough. But then he went on to criticize “bad leaders.”
“As a group, you witnessed how bad leaders who don’t stay in their lane, can have a negative impact on society. It is through this lens that I want to take stock of how we got to where we are and where we want to go as citizens. And yes, as Catholics”
It soon became apparent that the “COVID fiasco” — now in the rearview mirror — would occupy a principal role in Butker’s speech. Why? He soon makes it clear.
“While Covid may have played a large role during your formative years, it is not unique. Bad policies and poor leadership have negatively impacted major life issues. Things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values in media, all stem from the pervasiveness of disorder.
Our own nation is led by a man who publicly and proudly proclaims his Catholic faith but is at the same time delusional enough to make the sign of the cross during a pro-abortion rally.
He has been so vocal in his support for the murder of innocent babies that I am sure to many people it appears that you can be both Catholic and pro-choice. He is not alone.”
Indeed, Biden — I will say his name because, for some reason, Butker has not — is not alone. American Catholics are pro-choice. A Pew Research poll reveals that 59% of them support abortion in all or most cases. It is a typical position. All religious Americans, except for White evangelical Protestants, support a woman's right to choose.
Butker goes on to conflate pro-life COVID measures with LGBTQ acceptance.
“From the man behind the Covid lockdown to the people pushing dangerous gender ideologies on the youth of America, they all have a glaring thing in common. They are Catholic.”
At this point, atheists can breathe a sigh of amazed relief that they are not on the point of Butker’s rhetorical dagger. The fundamentalist Catholic has targeted people who, in his opinion, are doing Catholicism wrong.
“This is an important reminder that being Catholic alone doesn't cut it.”
He adds, “If we are going to be men and women for this time in history we need to stop pretending that the ‘Church of Nice’ is a winning proposition. We must always speak and act in charity, but never mistake charity for cowardice.”
I thought "nice" was a good thing. I have also never mistaken charity for cowardice.
According to Butker, I am deluded.
Butker goes on to say he did not want to be a public asshole. But God has given him that platform. So he must embrace it. We must take his word for it — as God never talks to anyone except the zealots.
Butker then celebrates Catholic martyrs. Nothing is more exciting to the fanatic than people dying for the faith — as long as he is not the one dying. He then rips Catholics who are modest in their faith. He adds:
“The world around us says we should keep our beliefs to ourselves whenever they go against the tyranny of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
I do not remember Jesus saying that DEI was a tyranny. Butker must have a different Bible. Next, he goes cryptic.
“Congress just passed a bill stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail.”
He appears to be referring to the malicious canard, “blood libel.” Which is the fundamentalist Christian position that all Jews are mortal sinners damned to eternity in hell for killing Jesus. And I am guessing he is referring to some congressional anti-hate speech measure.
Next, Butker takes on the numerous priests and bishops he says are “misleading their flocks.” He adds that it is up to congregations — including his audience — to demand their religious leaders get back on the hate train.
Butker then revisits COVID and criticizes Church leaders for responding to the pandemic wrong. An error he blames on “fear of being sued, fear of being removed, fear of being disliked.”
He is opaque on what they did wrong. But Butker seems to be referring to the church closings that he said left parishioners to die alone without sacraments. He does not mention the Vatican by name, but let us note that the Pope was intelligent enough to suspend public services in the Holy See. Butker is the kind of arrogant prick who thinks he knows better.
Next, he celebrates history’s “heroic shepherds, who gave their lives for their people.” He then tells a bald-faced lie:
“Over the centuries there have been great wars. Great famines. And yes, even great diseases. All that came with a level of lethality and danger. But in each of those examples, Church leaders leaned into their vocations and ensured that people receive the sacraments.”
Bullshit. During the Black Death and Plague years. Catholic management shut down churches and canceled religious processions. As for war and famine, neither are infectious. The comparison with COVID is irrelevant.
Finally, after his speech is half done, he gets around to the reason for the occasion — the graduating class. He tells them to be good Catholics. Fair enough. It is a Catholic College. But then the misogyny starts.
“For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point, in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told you.
How many of you are sitting here now, about to cross this stage, and thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.”
Being an arrogant bastard, Butker makes someone else’s graduation about him.
“I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabel would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother. I am on this stage today, and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation.”
It would have saved time if he had just told the women to forget their dreams. Their role is to have sex and cook dinner. To add drama, Butker tears up as he reflects on his wife’s decision to embrace the most important title of all, “homemaker.”
Butker then further beats down women by telling them to not “play God” with reproduction.
“Let's be honest, there is nothing good about playing God with having children — whether that be the ideal number or the perfect time to conceive. No matter how you spin it, there is nothing natural about Catholic birth control.”
Having put the girls in their place. Butker turns to the boys.
“To the gentleman here today, part of our plagues our society is this lie that has been told to you that men are not necessary in the home or in our communities. As men, we set the tone of the culture. And when that is absent, disorder, dysfunction, and chaos set in. The absence of men in the home plays a role in the violence we see around the nation.”
Only men set the tone? I also have no idea who claims that men are unnecessary in the home and community. And Butker does not say. Because, like the shark in most of the movie ‘Jaws’, if you do provide details of the threat, it is that much scarier.
Butker then adds to his fundamentalist credit by pining for the Latin mass (TLM) — which the Vatican has not mandated since 1964. He then encourages students to move to parishes where the TLM is still used.
Next up, premarital sex.
“Sadly, I'm sure many of you know of the countless stories of good and active members of this community who, after graduation and moving away from the Benedictine bubble, have ended up moving in with their boyfriend or girlfriend prior to marriage.”
And finally, apostasy.
“Some even leave the church and abandon God. It is always heartbreaking to hear these stories and there is a desire to know what happened and what went wrong.”
If Butker were interested in reducing Catholic ‘sinning,’ he should reflect on the conditions in the Church that led to the institutional coverup of serial child rape. The Church’s history of killing native populations. Its legacy of indigenous cultural destruction in the Americas. The death of so many Africans from HIV/AIDS due to its anti-condom stance. And the poverty it created by its ban on contraception.
I have no beef with individual Catholics. Everyone is entitled to worship how they choose — or not at all. But Jesus Christ, for people like Butker to think that Catholics or the Catholic Church have the moral standing to lecture is insane. ~
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/5/15/2240906/-NFL-kicker-s-commencement-speech-slams-LGBTQ-feminism-contraception-choice-IVF-the-media-Jews?detail=emaildkre&pm_source=DKRE&pm_medium=email
Oriana:
Like most churches, the Catholic church wants poverty and disease to continue. When people grow prosperous and content, they tend to lose interest in religion. Religion attracts desperadoes and those mired in low self-esteem. Recovering addicts speak about divine help rather than give credit to the sane part of their own psyche or the power of the peer group. Many people who survive a dangerous illness give credit to god rather than their medical team.
And it is indeed striking how priests, all male and presumably celibate (though sometimes the news reports make it seem that the priests and nuns have more sex than anyone else), preach that women should have large families. This not only perpetuates poverty, but also keeps women subservient, without the ability to earn money on their own.
And it’s not just Catholicism. Most religions seem afraid of free, self-sufficient, powerful women. Ironically, it's women who tend to be more religious (both in terms of belief and church attendance) than men.
(My thanks to Mary McCarthy for sending me the link to this article.)
*
WHY THE JAPANESE ATTACKED PEARL HARBOR EVEN THOUGH THEY KNEW THEY COULDN’T TAKE ON THE UNITED STATES
Because that gambit had worked for them 37 years earlier, against Imperial Russia.
Our story begins in 1899, when a group of disaffected Chinese nicknamed “the Boxers,” fed up with the influx of Christian missionaries, treaty ports, and other violations of their national sovereignty, staged a massive uprising. Across northern China, Christian missionaries and their congregations were massacred. Railroads and other examples of foreign-built infrastructure were destroyed. Matters came to a head in 1900, when the Boxers converged on Peking and put the foreign legations there to siege. The rebellion was then put down by an alliance of eight countries, which included both Japan and Russia. Russia, however, went one step further—it occupied Manchuria. Ostensibly this was to secure the region, and Russia’s interests there, against further unrest in China.
But Tsar Nicholas II and his hawkish advisors may have been playing a more sinister game. Thwarted in its attempts to surreptitiously invade India, the golden horn of Asia (and the crown jewel of the British Empire), over the past century, Russia now set its sights on the Far East as its new commercial frontier.
But Russia’s occupation of Manchuria was too much for the Japanese, latecomers to the imperial game and eager to gain a foothold on the mainland. Though they offered Russia the chance to keep Manchuria in exchange for acknowledging that Korea was in Japan’s sphere of influence, the Russians flatly refused.
What followed stunned the Russians and the rest of the world.
In 1904, Japan launched a surprise attack on Russia’s Far East Fleet, moored at Port Arthur—Russia’s only warm-water port in the region, located in Liaodong Province and leased from China’s Qing Dynasty. Though the resulting battle was indecisive, as Japan was unable to reach the bulk of the Russian fleet due to defensive fire from shore batteries, the attack heavily damaged a cruiser and the battleships Tsesarevich and Retvizan, the two heaviest battleships in the Far Eastern theater. The psychological effects of Japan’s attack were far more devastating: Russia was simply flabbergasted that the Japanese had seized the initiative and ambushed their fleet while it lay at anchor.
The Japanese then blockaded and finally besieged Port Arthur. The siege lasted eight months, and the Japanese took thousands of casualties attempting to capture fortified Russian positions on the hilltops surrounding the harbor. But in December of 1904, the Japanese managed to capture a key fortress and turned their 11-inch howitzers on the moored Russian ships. The Far East Fleet, unable to either retaliate or retreat (due to the blockade), was totally destroyed. Japanese shells sank four battleships and two cruisers, and the fifth battleship was so badly damaged it had to be scuttled a few weeks later.
Never before in history—or since—has such damage been wrought upon an armada by land-based artillery.
Japanese infantry, meanwhile, managed to repel any attempts by the Russians to relieve their beleaguered garrison at Port Arthur. Now that the fleet had been destroyed, the garrison’s commander, Major General Anatoly Stessel, saw no further point in resisting. He sent a message to the Tsar, begging his sovereign’s forgiveness, and surrendered to the Japanese on January 2, 1905. (He was court-martialed in 1908 and sentenced to death, but later pardoned.)
The Japanese followed up this stunning victory with another. In February of 1905, during the Battle of Mukden, wave after wave of determined Japanese troops managed to turn the Russians’ flanks. The Russians retreated rather than risk encirclement, and the battle devolved into a series of rearguard actions and skirmishes. The Russians took almost 90,000 casualties; the Japanese almost 80,000. It had been a costly victory for the Japanese, who declined to pursue their fleeing enemy beyond Mukden. But it was far worse for the Russians. No modern European army had ever taken such a drubbing from an Asiatic nation before. All Russian—and Western—preconceptions about the inherent superiority of the Russian soldier over the Japanese were rudely shattered.
But the final humiliation was yet to come. During the blockade of Port Arthur, the Tsar had mobilized the Baltic Fleet to relieve the Far East Fleet. After sailing 18,000 miles, they learned that Port Arthur had fallen to the Japanese. Desperately low on supplies, the Russians now had no choice but to sail for Vladivostok, their sole remaining Far Eastern port. But to get there, they’d have to pass through the Tsushima Strait, lying between Japanese-occupied Korea and the Japanese home islands. The Japanese knew this, too, and lay in wait for the Russians in the strait. During the resultant Battle of Tsushima, in May 1905, the Japanese annihilated the Baltic Fleet. The Russians lost eight battleships and innumerable smaller vessels, as well as 5,000 men. The Japanese lost three torpedo boats and 116 men. Just three Russian ships made it to Vladivostok; the few other survivors were interned at neutral ports. The Japanese then occupied Sakhalin Island, and the Russians—to their shock, dismay, and shame—were forced to sue for peace. (A peace which, interestingly enough, was brokered by Teddy Roosevelt.)
Now, this was a stunning victory for the Japanese. But let’s not kid ourselves here. Japan had maybe 380,000 active-duty troops; with reserves, conscripts, and militia, it had 850,000. The Russians had three times that number. But Russia was hampered in its response to Japan’s aggression by the staggering distance between its capital and its Far Eastern possessions. The Trans-Siberian Railway was not yet complete, and only reached to Irkutsk. Russia had neither the means nor the political will to muster its full strength during the Russo-Japanese War. The Japanese were fighting with a ferocity born of desperation, attempting to eliminate Russia’s naval power in the Far East and bottle up its land-based forces until Russia was compelled to surrender. This they successfully did.
They tried this tactic again in 1941, but it didn’t work. The United States, unlike Imperial Russia—which, as a direct result of the Russo-Japanese War, underwent a violent revolution and civil war not long after—did have the political will to fight for its possessions and interests in the Pacific, as well as the manufacturing and logistical capability necessary to conduct a long-distance war. The strategy which had served Japan so well in the Russo-Japanese War—strike hard and fast and demoralize your enemy—backfired on them spectacularly in the Second World War. The USA would not be demoralized. Its resolve was only hardened by the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, and it would gradually wear Japan down with near-limitless resources and superior tactics.
The point is this: both in 1904 and 1941, the Japanese had no illusions about their ability to sustain a war in the long term. They simply didn’t have the manpower or the resources. Hell, as the other answerers of this question have pointed out, that’s exactly what Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was all about—gaining access to mainland Asia’s coveted commodities. The Japanese figured that if they could pummel the US fleet at Pearl Harbor with one decisive blow, just as they’d pummeled the Russian fleets at Port Arthur and the Tsushima Strait, they’d completely destroy America’s will to fight and be given a free hand in the Pacific.
The Japanese rolled the same dice in 1941 that they’d rolled in 1904, and they came up short.
American pilots fighting against Japan
*
LEARNING TO LIVE FROM YOUR STRENGTHS, NOT YOUR WOUNDS
“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.” ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you." ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Oriana:
In my case, which I suspect is a pattern more common in women, it's not that I began to hate everything around me. Rather, I began to hate myself and what I perceived as my wasted life.
Phrases like “wasted potential” or “wasting your education” were like a knife in my heart. Yet for many years I simply had no idea what to do with my intelligence, wide knowledge, and special talents. It was a torture. It was only natural that I despised myself and grew depressed — all the time knowing from experience that if only I had a goal, I would work toward it with all my heart, trying to deliver quality and originality. If only I had a goal, a vocation. For me, happiness was working with utter dedication toward a goal. In my late teens, I learned how to do that. In my twenties and early thirties, even that ability to work very hard became a part of my "wasted potential."
There was the consolation of beauty, but simply enjoying beauty wasn’t enough. Hard work and achievement came first. Enjoying beauty was the reward I gave myself for achievement. Only then palm trees turned into fabulous plumed fountains, and the clouds in the sky into the wind-blown manes of horses on their way to greener pastures north of this parched desert.
I write in the past tense, since now I have a more relaxed attitude and fewer delusions about how far I can go with writing. I do want to enjoy the limited remainder of my life, so no more torturing myself with questions how come I have failed to accomplish more (I've also understood the power of factors other than one's own effort). Rather, I want to share my poems and reflections using whatever modest venues remain: Facebook, this blog, a once-a-year reading. Yes, I may “deserve” a wider audience, but not having that dream audience is not a tragedy. I am grateful for every reader I know I have and for the unknown number of readers I’ll never meet. 
*
AGAIN: WHY HASN’T COMMUNISM WORKED? (Yes, people still keep asking that question.)
Communism doesn’t work, has never worked worked and will never work.
Humans are inherently selfish and desperately want to win and protect their families.
Communism does not allow that.
Communist societies have only produced mediocrity and a lack of creativity.
Everyone in a communist society cheats, I mean everyone. So it’s not communist, you are always trying to steal something from someone else.
I lived in Vietnam in its total communist period then turning slightly open. It was a disaster. Here is an example. I moved to Vietnam in 1992, nothing worked, not the phones, not the electricity, not the water, not nothing. Except the communist government, it worked, not as in they actually worked, it means they made sure they watched you, surveilled you and got you.
I had a company and was paid a good salary in USD which went into my US bank account. I then got some local money (Dong) to buy local goods like fresh foods. Every year I had to go in and personally declare my income. As we were going to the counter to declare my income, I asked my local Vietnamese manager what should I say, he said US$1,000. I said I earn much more than that and he knew it. He said, just say one thousand dollars, trust Mr Henry. Ok. The stern tax guy asked in English — a rarity in those day — how much do you make. I said one thousand per month. He said OK, that’s your tax.
He handed me a paper, it said my tax was one thousand dollars a month. I said that’s impossible, you will take everything I make. He said, you don’t like it, leave Vietnam, we are a communist country, everyone is the same.
On the way back to the compound, on the back of the Honda Dream100cc, we were at a busy corner. Mr Minh was driving; I was on the back. He said we had to wait at the back because if they see us, it will be a fine of $100. I said it’s impossible. He said, each corner is rated for the police, they have to make their quota, anything above they keep. You are a foreigner so they will ask for 100. I said, that’s more than the average person makes in 2 months.
A month later I flew up to Hanoi, I had gotten the Apple distribution and went to meet a couple of foreign companies that wanted the full package for graphics and local printing. The government invited me to ‘make a deal’. We went to their Soviet computer office. Stacked on top of each other were hundreds of unused and totally unusable Soviet bloc made computers. They said they would trade 100 for 1 Apple computer including printer or a total deal of USD10,000 for what was junk.
I told them, sorry. The next day my Apple import license was revoked.
I could go on an on. Vietnam, of course China pre Deng XioPing, anywhere in the Soviet bloc including Hungary where I now live up to 1989, everyone was told every day what to do, what to eat, where to go, what their jobs were. If you were the best and brightest or had a ‘connection’ you ate better or had better privileges. Otherwise your life was totally dreary and without a future.
Capitalism as I have written to paraphrase Churchill, is the worst economic system except for all others. [Oriana: Churchill said about democracy: “democracy is the worst form of Government except for all other forms]
Communism doesn’t work. It produces little dictators who report upwards to the bigger dictators all the way to the top.
I have also lived in China in the early days as in 1981 for instance when they had nothing and the first words you learned were ‘mei you’, (don’t have it).
Over and over I have learned that communism is a death sentence for the human spirit.
Everyone who is in it is caught in a death spiral. A daily drudgery of mediocrity, of petty slights and of being watched.
In China as a ‘foreign expert’ in 1981, my travel companion (we were on a special pass, another issue, travel restrictions) lost his passport. He freaked out, no US consulate for thousands of miles as we were in Chungking or Chongqing, the ancient capital in the middle of China on the Yangtze River. He had left it on a boat no less and we thought this is a disaster.
The next day it showed up at our hotel, they just handed it to him and told him to be careful. No smile, no nothing and his thankyous were met with a scowl. They were watching everything we did 24/7.
Ok, it is no longer that way because communism is no longer communism and they don’t even try. They just lie which is the last thing you need to know about communism. But they have gone back with a vengeance to this system — much more powerful than just a local committee spying on you and reporting everything you do.
Now China actually boasts with their AI facial recognition software they can ascertain the details of every citizen in less than 10 seconds. That means 1.4 billion people, they are watching every street corner, they are taking pictures of you just like in the movies. They know who you are, what you do and if you ‘jaywalk’ they send you a ticket. If you do it again, you get a visit from your local communist boss to talk about ‘reeducation’ and if you do it a 3rd time they start to restrict your privileges and charge you more money. Each time you do some minor infraction they ratchet it up higher and higher watching you closer and closer. This is the sophistication of the Chinese communist party today which is not communist, it is totalitarian just like so many other so called ‘communist’ countries.
There is no opposition, there is only the party.
Communism’s entire goal is for an elite to control everyone else. If you are not a party member, you have no rights.
So anyone who has ever been around communism, may have a bit of ‘nostalgia’ like some do in Hungary for those old days when they were the local district boss. The rest of the country loathes them and those days.
Sure in capitalism you have to work, there are clear winners and losers and there are no guarantees. There are social safety nets all over Europe and even in the USA and Australia, Canada, the UK and New Zealand. More than in most Asian societies where your family is your communist supplier.
Human beings will never be happy in a communist system. Socialism with capitalism mixed like Scandinavia or the Netherlands, absolutely — but not communism.
Remember in the end, if you have only read about it, it may sound nice each according to their means each according to their needs etc, and on and on with the bull shit.
In the end, it’s all a lie. ~ Henry R. Greenfield, Quora
*
Michael:
Communism in large numbers tends to devolve into nasty dictatorships. In smaller numbers, like Kibbutzes where it's a few hundred or so, they also tend to break up.
The first generation is enthusiastic and self-sacrificing but as time goes by, their kids want more freedom, they don’t want to be farmers or whatever the Collective wants them to be.
It may not be the only thing but that lack of freedom means communism becomes forced. An old sit-com called Taxi had an immigrant from an unnamed country. In an episode Latva Gravas says: ‘In my country we share everything we have with everyone’ and a woman hears and interrupts saying ‘Oh, that’s beautiful’ and the man goes on ‘Or they shoot you’.
There’s some truth to that.
Eric Widdison:
Communism can work in communities that are no bigger than a human's monkeysphere. That's the number of individuals that, based on human brain size, you can have a close, personal relationship with. It is about 150.
That's no guarantee that communism will work on that scale. It just means that it could work, using community standards rather than authoritarian control.
Curiously, ideal libertarianism has the same community size limit, for the same reason.
Michael:
I’d also add that under extreme conditions Communism may be necessary. When starvation and war are threatened a group needs to come together, restrict and share.
There was an island in the extreme South, with few resources but the people there practice a more communal life style and it’s worked.
This is a bad point but in survival sim games you also find the need for top down authoritarian planning, otherwise your ‘colony’ dies. When your colony succeeds you can stop heavy central planning because market forces and innovation trump central planning by than.
Indre Cuckler
On spot analysis. One thing obviously that life in a communist country was somewhat different depending on a country and the stage of communism. The film East West portrays it well how it looked in the Soviet Union at the high of the communism. I grew up in Lithuania that was communist till 1989, but life was not horribly bad, the people worked hard and things did work, though they were poor quality. One of the most awful things was that your life was determined forever! You knew that in your lifespan you won't outlive it!
But things changed for me quickly. I can’t just imagine how my grandparents felt, but they always had hope that Lithuania will be independent one day. Perhaps one positive thing not in communism but living in the absence of capitalism that people had time to be together and socialize. Yes, work was mandatory everyone worked but it is not like they had 2–3 jobs and spend tons of time shopping (there was nothing to buy) so they spend time reading, having hobbies and just talking together that is all they had. You just never get that level of togetherness after experiencing how it was. But that is all. Of course all the rest was hard, hard life.
Frank Gao:
I feel the same way! I grew up in 1980’s China and life was indeed not bad, at least for a child. All necessities were provided for, and people visited each other a lot! However older generations who experienced the cultural revolution generally had no nostalgia for the communist era.
Hans Bossert:
It’s all about people control and brings out the worst in fellow humans. To this day we have people wondering how national socialism got off the ground. I despise the lot of them, be they left or right.
*
CAN HUMANITY ADAPT TO THE COMING COLLAPSE?
Peter Watts: In this corner, the biosphere. We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050.
In response to all of this, the last COP was held in a petrostate and was presided over by the CEO of an oil company; the next COP is pretty much the same thing. We’re headed for the cliff, and not only have we not hit the brakes yet, we still have our foot on the gas.
In that corner: Dan Brooks and Sal Agosta, with a Darwinian survival guide. So, take it away, Dan. Guide us to survival. What’s the strategy?
Daniel Brooks: Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior.
This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.
Stepping back a bit. Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didn’t want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, “It’s OK; I can fix Darwinism.” This guy’s name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, “I can fix Darwinism. We’ll just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of what’s-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, we’re going to call it survival of the fittest, and it’s whatever is best now.” Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from “evolution is long-term survival” to “evolution is short-term adaptation.” And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.
Well, fast-forward and how’s that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencer’s ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwin’s ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwin’s original message, we not only find an explanation for why we’re in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.
To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive.
Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours. So we have to understand that we’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence. And so, if there is the kind of nature collapse that the Melbourne Sustainable Studies Institute is talking about, how are those people going to survive?
A completely dispassionate view would just say, “Well, you know, most of them won’t. Most of them are going to die.” But what if it turns out that we think that embedded within all of that technologically dependent society there are some good things? What if we think that there are elements of that existence that are worth trying to save, from high technology to high art to modern medicine?
In my particular case, without modern medical knowledge, I would have died when I was just 21 years old of a burst appendix. If I had managed to survive that, I would have died in my late 50s from an enlarged prostate. These are things most would prefer not to happen. What can we begin doing now that will increase the chances that those elements of technologically-dependent humanity will survive a general collapse, if that happens as a result of our unwillingness to begin to do anything effective with respect to climate change and human existence?
Peter Watts: So to be clear, you’re not talking about forestalling the collapse —
Daniel Brooks: No.
Peter Watts: — you’re talking about passing through that bottleneck and coming out the other side with some semblance of what we value intact.
Daniel Brooks: Yeah, that’s right. It is conceivable that if all of humanity suddenly decided to change its behavior, right now, we would emerge after 2050 with most everything intact, and we would be “OK.” We don’t think that’s realistic. It is a possibility, but we don’t think that’s a realistic possibility. We think that, in fact, most of humanity is committed to business as usual, and that’s what we’re really talking about:
What can we begin doing now to try to shorten the period of time after the collapse, before we “recover”? In other words — and this is in analogy with Asimov’s Foundation trilogy — if we do nothing, there’s going to be a collapse and it’ll take 30,000 years for the galaxy to recover. But if we start doing things now, then it maybe only takes 1,000 years to recover. So using that analogy, what can some human beings start to do now that would shorten the period of time necessary to recover? Could we, in fact, recover within a generation? Could we be without a global internet for 20 years, but within 20 years, could we have a global internet back again?
Peter Watts: Are you basically talking about the sociological equivalent of the Norwegian Seed Bank, for example?
Daniel Brooks: That’s actually a really good analogy to use, because of course, as you probably know, the temperatures around the Norwegian Seed Bank are so high now that the Seed Bank itself is in some jeopardy of survival. The place where it is was chosen because it was thought that it was going to be cold forever, and everything would be fine, and you could store all these seeds now. And now all the area around it is melting, and this whole thing is in jeopardy.
This is a really good example of letting engineers and physicists be in charge of the construction process, rather than biologists. Biologists understand that conditions never stay the same; engineers engineer things for, this is the way things are, this is the way things are always going to be. Physicists are always looking for some sort of general law of in perpetuity, and biologists are never under any illusions about this. Biologists understand that things are always going to change.
Peter Watts: Well, that said, that’s kind of a repeated underlying foundation of the book, which is that evolutionary strategies are our best bet for dealing with stressors. And by definition, that implies that the system changes. Life will find a way, but it won’t necessarily include the right whales and the monarch butterflies.
Daniel Brooks: Right, right. Yeah.
Peter Watts: And you take on quite explicitly the neo-protectionists, who basically want to preserve the system as it exists, or as it existed at one point in the idealized past, forever without end, as opposed to allowing the system to exercise its capacity to change in response to stress. You cite anoxic ocean blobs; you cite, quite brilliantly I thought, the devastating effect beavers have on their local habitat.
Daniel Brooks: Yeah.
Peter Watts: And you take on the sacred spirit animal of the World Wildlife Fund, the polar bear. And the bottom line here is that shit happens, things change, trust life to find a way, ‘cause evolution hasn’t steered us wrong yet.
Daniel Brooks: Yeah.
Peter Watts: Now, this is an argument that some might say is invasible by cheaters. I read this and I thought of the Simpsons episode where Montgomery Burns is railing to Lisa, and he says, “Nature started the struggle for survival, and now she wants to call it off because she’s losing? I say, hard cheese!” And less fictitiously, Rush Limbaugh has invoked essentially the same argument when he was advocating against the protection of the spotted owl. You know, life will find a way. This is evolution; this is natural selection. So, I can see cherry-picking oil executives being really happy with this book. How do you guard against that?
Daniel Brooks: Anybody can cherry-pick anything, and they will. Our attitude is just basically saying, look, here’s the fundamental response to any of this stuff. It’s, how’s it working out so far? OK? There’s a common adage by tennis coaches that says during a match, you never change your winning game, and you always change your losing game. That’s what we’re saying.
One of the things that’s really important for us to focus on is to understand why it is that human beings are so susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea, and are not. Sal and I say, here are some things that seem to be common to human misbehavior, with respect to their survival. One is that human beings really like drama. Human beings really like magic. And human beings don’t like to hear bad news, especially if it means that they’re personally responsible for the bad news. And that’s a very gross, very superficial thing, but beneath that is a whole bunch of really sophisticated stuff about how human brains work, and the relationship between human beings’ ability to conceptualize the future, but living and experiencing the present.
There seems to be a mismatch within our brain — this is an ongoing sort of sloppy evolutionary phenomenon. So that’s why we spend so much time in the first half of the book talking about human evolution, and that’s why we adopt a nonjudgmental approach to understanding how human beings have gotten themselves into this situation. Because everything that human beings have done for 3 million years has seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s only been in the last 100 or 150 years that human beings have begun to develop ways of thinking that allow us to try to project future consequences and to think about unanticipated consequences, long-term consequences of what we do now. So this is very new for humanity, and as a consequence, it’s ridiculous to place blame on our ancestors for the situation we’re in now.
Everything that people did at any point in time seemed like a good idea at the time; it seemed to solve a problem. If it worked for a while, that was fine, and when it no longer worked, they tried to do something else. But now we seem to be at a point where our ability to survive in the short term is compromised, and what we’re saying is that our way to survive better in the short term, ironically, is now based on a better understanding of how to survive in the long run. We’re hoping that people will begin seriously thinking that our short-term well-being is best served by thinking about our long-term survival.
Peter Watts: What you’ve just stated is essentially that short-term goals and long-term goals are not necessarily the same thing, that one trades off against the other. When you put it that way, it seems perfectly obvious — although I have to say, what you’re advocating for presumes a level of foresight and self-control that our species has, shall we say, not traditionally manifested. But yeah, a widely adhered-to view of evolution is a reactive one— the pool is drying up, and evolution looks at that and says, oh my goodness, the pool is drying up! We should probably get those fish to evolve lungs. Whereas what evolution actually does is say, oh look, the pool is drying up! Good thing that fish over in the corner that everybody picked on has a perforated swim bladder; it might be able to, like, breathe air long enough to make it over to the next pool. Too bad about all those other poor bastards who are going to die. And to hone that down to a specific example that you guys cite in the book, you’re saying “high fitness equals low fitness” — that you need variation to cope with future change.
Daniel Brooks: Right.
Peter Watts: So optimal adaptation to a specific environment implies a lack of variation. When you’re optimally adapted to one specific environment, you are screwed the moment the environment changes. And the idea that high fitness equals low fitness is what I call a counterintuitive obvious point: It is something that seems oxymoronic and even stupid when you first hear it, but when you think about it for more than two seconds, it’s like — who was it that responded to “The Origin of Species” by saying, Of course! How silly of me not to have thought of it myself. I’ve forgotten who said that.
Daniel Brooks: A lot of biology professors, who then wrote articles about how they actually had thought of it for themselves, but nobody paid any attention to that!
Peter Watts: And that might be one of the more essential values of this book — that it reminds us of things we should already know, but never thought about rigorously enough to actually realize.
Shifting gears to another key point in the book, democracy, which you describe as the one form of government that allows the possibility of change without violence. But you also admit — and this is a quote: “Our governance systems, long ago coopted as instruments for amplified personal power, have become nearly useless, at all levels from the United Nations to the local city council. Institutions established during 450 generations of unresolvable conflict cannot facilitate change because they are designed to be agents of social control, maintaining what philosopher John Rawls called ‘the goal of the well-ordered society.’ They were not founded with global climate change, the economics of wellbeing, or conflict resolution in mind.” So what you are essentially saying here is that anyone trying to adopt the Darwinian principles that you and Sal are advocating is going to be going up against established societal structures, which makes you, by definition, an enemy of the state.
Daniel Brooks: Yes.
Peter Watts: And we already live in a world where staging sit-down protests in favor of Native land rights or taking pictures of a factory farm is enough to get you legally defined as a terrorist.
Daniel Brooks: That’s right. Yeah.
Peter Watts: So, how are we not looking at a violent revolution here?
Daniel Brooks: That’s a really good point. I mean, that’s a really critical point. And it’s a point that was addressed in a conference a year ago that I attended, spoke in, in Stockholm, called “The Illusion of Control,” and a virtual conference two years before that called “Buying Time,” where a group of us recognized that the worst thing you could do to try to create social change for survival was to attack social institutions. That the way to cope with social institutions that were non-functional, or perhaps even antithetical to long-term survival, was to ignore them and go around them.
So let me give you an example: I was speaking with member representatives of a rural revitalization NGO in Nebraska a year ago, and they said, “OK, this rural revitalization stuff and climate migration, this sounds like a really good idea. How are we going to get the federal government to support these efforts?” And I said, “They’re not going to.” I said, “You have to understand that in the American situation, the two greatest obstacles to rural revitalization and climate migration are the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party is a party of big cities; they don’t want to lose population. The Republican Party is the population of the rural areas; they don’t want people from the cities moving into their areas. Both parties are going to be against this. This is why Joe Biden is, you know, ‘the‘ climate president,’ but he’s not doing nearly enough. Not even close. Because these people are all locked into the status quo.” And so I told these people, I said, “You don’t ask for permission, and you don’t go to the federal government.
You go to the local towns in these rural areas and you say, ‘What do you need? What do you want?’ You then advertise for the kinds of people you want to come in. You want to have electricity self-sufficiency in your town. You need somebody who knows how to build and maintain a solar farm. Advertise for people like that in the big cities. Get them to come and live in your town. Don’t ask the government; do the right thing. Never ask for permission; just do the right thing. They’re not going to pay any attention to you.” And these people said, “Yes, but then if we’re successful, the politicians will come in and claim credit!” And I said, “So what? Who cares! Let them come in, do a photo op, and then they go back to Washington D.C. and they’ll forget you.”
Peter Watts: Maybe. But in cases where it’s been tried, the power utilities step in and squash such efforts as though they were bugs. Set up solar panels and the utility will charge you for “infrastructure maintenance” because by opting out of the grid, you’re not paying “your fair share.” Drive an electric vehicle and you might be subject to an additional “road tax” because, by not paying for gasoline, you’re not paying for road work. The system actively works to make these initiatives fail. And this power goes beyond just stifling progress. They have control of armed forces; they have a monopoly on state violence. We are not allowed to beat up the cops; the cops are allowed to beat us up.
Daniel Brooks: I suppose I have more faith in human nature than is warranted by the evidence. Sal and I do not think such local initiatives will be easy or that they will mostly succeed — at least not until things are so bad that they are the only workable option. What we are saying is that these local initiatives are the Darwinian response to trouble (move away from trouble, generalize in fitness space, and find something that works), and if we recognize trouble early enough, we can opt to begin surviving now. At the same time, during climate perturbations, lots of organisms do not make it, so we need as many individual efforts as possible to increase the chances that someone will survive.
There is evidence that some people are doing this, sometimes with the blessing of local and state authorities and without arousing the interest of national authorities. What people need to do is have a commitment to survival, decide what their assets are and their local carrying capacity, and then go about doing the right thing as quietly as possible. As for your point about state violence: What happens if the cops in a small town are the people you go to church with?
Peter Watts: That’s an interesting question.
Daniel Brooks: That’s the point. I mean, what we’re trying to find out, one of the experiments that rural revitalization and, and climate migration is going to resolve for us, is, what is the largest human population that can safeguard itself against being taken over by sociopaths? Let me explain what I mean. Generally speaking, the larger the population, the smaller the number of people who actually control the social control institutions. So you have five different language groups in the city, but somehow it turns out that the people in charge of the religion, or the banks, or the governance only represent one of those language groups. They end up controlling everything. This is a breeding ground for sociopaths to take control.
And sure enough, by about 9,000 years ago, when this is all in place, we begin to see religious and governance and economic institutions all support the notion of going to war to take from your neighbors what you want for yourself. And we’ve been at war with ourselves ever since then, and this was not an evolutionary imperative; this was a societal behavioral decision. It’s understandable, in retrospect, as a result of too many people, too high a population density.
So you live in circumstances where people cannot identify the sociopaths before they’ve taken control. And that’s the subtext in the idea that one of the ways that we should deal with the fact that more than 50 percent of human beings now live in large cities in climate-insecure places, is for those people to redistribute themselves away from climate-insecure areas, into population centers of lower density, and cooperating networks of low-density populations, rather than big, condensed cities.
Peter Watts: Let’s follow this move back to the rural environment a bit, because it’s fundamental. I mean, you brought it up, and it is fundamental to the modular post-apocalyptic society you’re talking about.
Daniel Brooks: Sure. Not post-apocalyptic: post-collapse.
Peter Watts: Post-collapse. Fair enough.So, another quote from the book: “Neo-protectionists compliment the ever-larger city’s perspective by suggesting that the biosphere would be best served if humans were maximally separated from the wild lands.”
Daniel Brooks: Right.
Peter Watts: “This makes no sense to most humans, and that is why no post-apocalyptic or dystopian novel or film depicts large cities as places of refuge and safety during a crisis.” Just putting up my hand, I can vouch for that, having written my share of apocalyptic sci-fi.
Daniel Brooks: Nobody’s running to the cities.
Peter Watts: “Any attempt to separate humans from the rest of the biosphere would be detrimental to efforts to preserve either.” And I believe at some other point you reference neo-protectionist arguments that we should put aside half of the natural life —
Daniel Brooks: Yeah. That’s E.O. Wilson’s half —
Peter Watts: And putting aside, for the moment, my sympathies for that sentiment — in defense of the neo-protectionists, all of human history says that whenever we interact with nature, we pretty much fuck it up.
Daniel Brooks: No. It doesn’t say that. First of all, when you talk of most of human history, you’re talking about the last thousand years, 2,000 years, 3,000 years. What has been the actual historical record of humans for the last 3 million years?
Peter Watts: I take your point. And it’s a legitimate point when you talk about a global human population, that you mention, in the millions. But we’re at a population of 8 billion now. So accepting, wholesale, without argument, your argument that cities are basically wasteful, unsustaining, pestholes of disease and so on —
Daniel Brooks: That benefit a few people a lot, and treat the great majority as a disposable workforce.
Peter Watts: Yeah. But we still are dealing with a planet in which 94 percent of mammalian biomass on this planet is us and our livestock, so how does that kind of biomass integrate intimately with what remains of our natural environment without just crushing it — or are you anticipating, like, a massive cull of a —
Daniel Brooks: But, see, you’re repeating a bunch of truisms that are not borne out by the actual evidence. We don’t crush — Homo sapiens doesn’t crush the biosphere. Homo sapiens interacts with the biosphere in ways that alter it. See, evolutionary alteration of the environment does not mean collapse. It means change. This is the neo-protectionist language — that any change is going to collapse the biosphere. That’s bullshit. I mean, what human beings are doing to the biosphere right now is nothing compared to what blue-green algae did to the biosphere 4 billion years ago.
Peter Watts: Absolutely.
Daniel Brooks: And what happened? Us, OK? The Chicxulub asteroid: If it hadn’t killed the dinosaurs, there would be no us.
Peter Watts: I actually, personally, find comfort in the idea that there have been, what, five major extinction events? And that in every single case, there has been a beautiful, diverse —
Daniel Brooks: Because there was sufficient evolutionary potential to survive.
Peter Watts: Exactly.
Daniel Brooks: Not because a whole bunch of new magical mutations showed up.
Peter Watts: Right. But, it took anywhere from 10 to 30 million years for that to happen —
Daniel Brooks: So?
Peter Watts: — and I would argue that most people — I mean, I’m kind of on your side in this, but I’m also increasingly sympathetic to the human extinction movement. I think most people are hoping for recovery in less geological terms, timescale-wise.
Daniel Brooks: This is a really critical point, because this, then, loops back to the whole Asimov’s Foundation thing. Do we wait 30,000 years for the empire to rebuild, or can we do it in 1,000 years? That’s what we’re talking about. We have great confidence that the biosphere is going to restore itself, within — you know, no matter what we do, unless we make the whole planet a cinder, the biosphere’s going to “restore itself” within, you know, 10 million years. Whatever. That’s fine.
And we — you know, some form of humanity — may be part of that, or may not. But the reality is that what we want to do, as human beings, is we want to tip the odds in our favor a little bit. We want to increase the odds that we’re going to be one of those lucky species that survives. And we know enough to be able to do that. We know now enough about evolution to be able to alter our behavior in a way that’s going to increase the odds that we’ll survive.
So the question is, are we going to do that? So this whole business of whether or not, you know, what’s going to happen in 3 million years — you’re right: That’s not important. But what happens tomorrow is not important either. What’s important is what happens in the first generation after 2050. That’s what’s important. That first generation after 2050 is going to determine whether or not technological humanity reemerges from an eclipse, or whether Homo sapiens becomes just another marginal primate species.
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Peter Watts is a Hugo Award-winning science-fiction author and a former marine biologist. His most recent novel is “The Freeze-Frame Revolution” (Tachyon).
Daniel R. Brooks is Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, Senior Research Fellow, H. W. Manter Laboratory of Parasitology, University of Nebraska State Museum, and Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS). He is the co-author of “The Stockholm Paradigm” (University of Chicago Press), “The Major Metaphors of Evolution” (Springer), and, most recently, “A Darwinian Survival Guide.”
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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THE ORIGIN OF ANCIENT BAOBAB TREES
baobab in bloom
The baobab is known as the "upside down tree" or "tree of life”
According to DNA studies, the iconic trees first arose in Madagascar 21 million years ago.
Their seeds were later carried on ocean currents to Australia and also to mainland Africa, evolving into distinct species.
The researchers are calling for greater conservation efforts for the trees, which they say may be closer to extinction than previously thought.
Dr Ilia Leitch, of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, worked on the study, alongside her husband, Prof Andrew Leitch, of Queen Mary University of London.
"We have been able to pinpoint the origin of baobabs, which are an iconic keystone species supporting a wide diversity of animals and plants as well as humans," she told the BBC.
“And the data have enabled us to provide important new insights which will inform their conservation to safeguard their future.”
The researchers studied eight baobab species, six of which are found in Madagascar, one widespread across Africa, and another in north-west Australia.
They are calling for a higher conservation status for two endangered Malagasy species, including the biggest and most famous of Madagascar's baobabs, the giant baobab.
Baobabs are one of the most remarkable trees on earth, deeply intertwined with local cultures and traditions.
They are also known as "mother of the forest" in Malagasy language, the "upside down tree" and the "tree of life”.
The trees can live for thousands of years, growing to a huge size and storing large amounts of water in their trunks to survive through the dry seasons.
Their fruits are regarded as a super food and their trunk can be used to make fibers which are used for ropes or clothing.
baobab fruit
They produce large flowers that open at dusk, attracting bats as pollinators, which travel vast distances to feed on their nectar, and they are important nesting sites for birds.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-69012221
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HOW TWO BRAINS SYNCHRONIZE IN CONVERSATION
Neural coupling refers to the way our brains respond to the characters and events in stories, as if we are experiencing them ourselves. This phenomenon is made possible by the activation of the brain regions associated with empathy and social cognition.
Through the deeper psychology of human communication, we gain a general framework for how to optimize it.
At the heart of this is neural coupling—the shared pattern of brain activity between speaker and listener.
Imagine you’ve just had the best French toast of your life. It was so delicious, so perfect, that you want your best friend to be able to understand just how wonderful it was.
The trouble is, they weren’t with you to experience this extraordinary meal, and you didn’t have your phone on you to take a picture, either. So it's up to you: You must communicate from scratch just how amazing it was.
This is a familiar scenario for humans. We have to communicate if we want to share our experiences. How can you ensure that the message you want to project is interpreted in the way that it was intended? How do you recreate a scene, as you experienced it yourself, in the mind's eye of another person?
This is easier said than done, especially when these messages aren't relayed in person but are mediated through text, email, or social media.
The first step is understanding the psychology of language and communication. At the level of the brain, what enables effective human communication? This ultimately comes down to a phenomenon known as neural coupling.
NEURAL COUPLING
The psychology of language and communication is complex. Scholars have argued for years whether language is contained in a single place in the brain or whether it's more of an emergent phenomenon requiring synchronized activity across multiple regions.
Specific parts of the brain, such as Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, seem to be highly specialized for language. Damage to these regions in adults leads to specific deficits in language ability, known as aphasia. All in all, however, modern neuroscience suggests that there’s no one “language module.” In most speakers, language reliably engages broad swaths of the left hemisphere, especially in the left temporal lobe.
Thankfully, knowledge of specific neuroanatomy isn’t necessary here. It’s not about which specialized regions need to be activated and in what way. In fact, it’s not about what happens in the brain of a single person at all. Instead, the most important insight comes from the very general pattern of brain activity across the two people communicating.
This is the phenomenon of neural coupling.
Neural coupling is the literal synchrony in brain states between speaker and listener. When you’re the speaker, your goal is to replicate the same pattern of brain activity that you have in your head inside the head of your conversational partner.
For any given idea, there’s a unique constellation of neural activity which represents this.
This can be anything, such as a memory from your childhood, a concept, or a recent experience you’ve just had. It could even be, for example, your memory from that delicious French toast breakfast. There’s a unique constellation of activity in your brain that represents this.
Your job as the speaker, then, is to inculcate that same pattern of activity into the brain of the listener. Literally. The more that their brain comes to have the same pattern of activity as your brain, the better they’ve come to understand your message. Neural synchrony is about sharing your internal state in a way that makes it their internal state. The better you are at replicating that same pattern of brain activity in their head, the better the communication.
This neural coupling is crucial. Research using neuroimaging tools, such as fMRI, finds that the degree of neural synchrony between a conversation partner predicts how well they comprehend one another’s messages. We’re all prone to the occasional miscommunication, but the greater the synchrony, the more we’re understood.
Similarly, other research finds that the neural synchrony between a teacher and their students predicts learning outcomes, suggesting that it’s also crucial for memory as well. And impressively, neural coupling between parent and child during playtime even predicts outcomes in child development and learning. Wherever we look in human psychology, neural synchrony helps make our messages clearer, more meaningful, and more memorable.
Optimizing for neural coupling means anticipating how your message will be perceived and ultimately interpreted. People use language in all kinds of ways—different types of vocabulary, different slang, different metaphors, etc. This makes daily conversations interesting, but it also presents a challenge to clear communication. Successful communicators understand their audience and craft their messaging appropriately.
Neural synchrony is a crucial and under-appreciated aspect of marketing psychology.
Think about marketing, for example. This infuses the classic marketing adage of “know your consumer” with a linguistic layer. Think about how your consumers communicate. Do they say, I’ll be right back, or BRB? Are they fans of emojis? Do they use pop culture references? And if so, what kind? By answering these questions you’ll be able to replicate better the same pattern of brain activity that you have in your head into the minds of your audience.
Communication is ultimately about converging brain states.
In the end, it’ll be as easy as whipping up some French toast.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-brain-and-value/202405/how-two-brains-synchronize-in-conversation
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OUR SHRINKING BRAIN
The brains of modern humans are around 13% smaller than those of Homo sapiens who lived 100,000 years ago. Is it because of the changing climate, or some of the skills we've picked up?
Traditionally our "big brain" is thought to be what sets our species apart from other animals. Our capacity for thought and innovation allowed us to create the first art, invent the wheel, and even land on the Moon.
Certainly, when compared with other animals of a similar size, our brains are gigantic. The human brain has nearly quadrupled in size in the six million years since our species last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees. However, studies show this trend toward larger brains has reversed in Homo sapiens. In our species, average brain sizes have shrunk over the course of the last 100,000 years.
For example in a recent 2023 study, Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist and curator emeritus with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, tracked the braincase volumes of ancient hominins through time. He started with the oldest known species, and ended with modern humans.
He found that rapid brain expansion occurred independently in different species of hominins, and at different times across Asia, Europe and Africa. Species whose brains grew over time include Australopithecus afarensis, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo neanderthalensis.
However, the trend for brain enlargement over time was turned on its head with the arrival of modern humans. The skulls of men and women today are on average 12.7% smaller than that of Homo sapiens who lived during the last ice age.
"We have very peculiarly shaped skulls, so early humans are very easy to recognize – and the very first ones have extremely large brains," says Tattersall.
Tattersall's finding replicates those of others. For example in 1934, Gerhardt Von Bonin, a German-born scientist affiliated with the University of Chicago at Illinois, wrote that "there is a definite indication of a decrease [in the human brain] at least in Europe within the last 10,000 or 20,000 years.”
So how can we explain this striking reduction? Tattersall suggests that the shrinkage in brain size began around 100,000 years ago, which corresponds to a period of time in which humans switched from a more intuitive style of thinking to what he terms "symbolic information processing" – or thinking in a more abstract way to better understand your surroundings.
However, the trend for brain enlargement over time was turned on its head with the arrival of modern humans. The skulls of men and women today are on average 12.7% smaller than that of Homo sapiens who lived during the last ice age.
"We have very peculiarly shaped skulls, so early humans are very easy to recognize – and the very first ones have extremely large brains," says Tattersall.
"This was the time when humans began producing symbolic artefacts and engravings with meaningful geometric images," says Tattersall.
Tattersall believes that the catalyst that caused this change in thinking style was the spontaneous invention of language. This led to the neural pathways of the brain being reorganized in a more metabolically efficient way, allowing humans to get more "bang for their buck”.
In other words, as smaller and better organized brains were able to perform more complex computations, metabolically expensive larger brains simply became unnecessary.
"It seems to me that probably our predecessors processed information in a sort of a brute-force way, and intelligence in this context scaled with brain size. So, the bigger your brain, the more you got out of it," says Tattersall.
"But our way of thinking is different. We deconstruct the world around us into a vocabulary of abstract symbols, and reassemble those symbols to ask questions like 'What if?’
"This sort of symbolic thinking must have required a much more complex set of connections inside the brain than was present earlier. My suggestion is that having these extra connections allowed the brain to function in a much more energy-efficient way.”
However other palaeontologists argue that the fossil record shows that brains began shrinking more recently than Tattersall suggests, meaning the change couldn't be linked to language. The date at which Tattersall puts language acquisition at (100,000 years ago) is also contested.
"I love this theory, I think it's actually brilliant," says cognitive scientist Jeff Morgan Stibel from the Natural History Museum in California.
"But we haven't seen the data to show that there was a decline as far back as 100,000 years ago that didn't result at some point in a reversal where brain size began increasing again.
There were declines back then. But then brain size started growing again, so the data doesn't yet match that hypothesis.”
Stibel believes that a changing climate, and not language, could explain our smaller brains. In a 2023 study, he analyzed the skulls of 298 Homo sapiens over the past 50,000 years. He found that human brains have been shrinking for about the last 17,000 years or so – since the end of the last ice age. When he carefully examined the climate record, he found that decreasing brain sizes correlated with periods of climate warming.
"What we saw was, the warmer the climate, the smaller the brain size in humans, and the cooler the climate, the bigger the brain," says Stibel.
Smaller brains could have allowed humans to cool down quickly. It's well known that humans in hot climates have evolved leaner and taller bodies to maximize heat loss. It's possible that our brains could have evolved in a similar fashion.
"These days if get hot we can put on a T-shirt, jump in a pool, or turn on the air conditioning, but 15,000 years ago these options weren't available to us," says Stibel.
"The brain is the largest energy hog of all the organs, as it weighs about 2% of our body mass but consumes over 20% of our resting metabolic energy. So, if the brain is a huge consumer of energy and heat, then it should likely adapt to climate as well. Our theory is that smaller brains dissipate heat better, and have a reduced heat output too.”
The finding suggests that today's rapidly warming planet could cause our brains to shrink even further.
The rise of complex civilizations
Perhaps the most prominent theory put forward to explain our shrinking brains is that it began when our ancestors stopped being hunter-gatherers, laid down roots, and began to build complex societies.
In 2021, Jeremy DeSilva, an anthropologist at Dartmouth College in the US, analysed cranial fossils ranging from Miocene hominid Rudapithecus (9.85 million years ago) to modern humans (300,000 to 100 years ago). He calculated that our brains started shrinking just 3,000 years ago, at around the same time that complex civilizations first began to emerge (although he has since revised his estimate, arguing that the decline in brain size happened between 20,000 and 5,000 years ago).
DeSilva suggests that the birth of complex societies and empires meant that knowledge and tasks could be spread out. People no longer had to know everything, and as individuals no longer had to think as much to survive, their brains reduced in size.
However, this theory too is contested.
"Not all hunter-gatherer societies became complex in the same type of way as, say, the Egyptians did 3,000 years ago, but brain sizes have reduced in these societies too," says Eva Jablonka, professor emeritus at the Cohn Institute for the History of Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
Jablonka argues that if even if brains did shrink when complex societies emerged, it doesn't necessarily follow that smaller brains were necessarily an adaptive response.
"If 3,000 years ago much larger more complex societies emerged, this could correlate with much greater differences in social classes. If, as a consequence the majority of people were poor, then we know that poverty and malnutrition and things like that would compromise the developing brain.”
The arrival of more complex societies – and the invention of written languages like Sumerian – may have also caused brains to shrink in size.
Marta Lahr, from Cambridge University's Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, has also suggested that nutrient deficiency could explain our contracting craniums. In 2013, she analyzed bones and skulls from across Europe, Africa and Asia. She found that the largest-brained Homo sapiens lived 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, and that human brains started to shrink 10,000 years ago.
This is within the timeframe that our ancestors are thought to have stopped being hunter-gatherers and switched to agriculture. She argues that a reliance on farming may have created vitamin and mineral deficiencies, resulting in stunted growth.
Meanwhile some scientists have proposed that human skulls got smaller as a consequence of self-domestication, based on the fact that domesticated species like dogs and cats (which are bred for their friendliness) have brains that are 10-15% smaller than their wild ancestors. If friendlier, more social humans were more successful from an evolutionary perspective, then brains may have shrunk over time. But not all are convinced.
"I don't buy the self-domestication theory," says Jablonka.
“Self-domestication, if it occurred, must have happened something like 800,000 years ago, and there is no evidence whatsoever that human brains shrank at that time.”
So where does that leave us? Unfortunately, to understand why brains shrank, you would need to pinpoint exactly when the shrinkage began. But the fossil record makes this an almost impossible task. Older fossils are harder to find, so the record is heavily skewed towards newer specimens. For some poorly preserved species, we are currently dependent on a few or even a single cranium.
"What we do know is that back in the Pleistocene, human brains were about the same size as Neanderthal brains, which is quite a bit bigger than the average size of human brains today," says Tattersall.
"The average of all Homo sapiens brains that are more than about 20,000 years old, is also high. But when the decrease in size began is a question that is not entirely clear because the record isn't that good. All we know is that back then brains were large, and they're about 13% smaller today.”
Are we becoming less smart?
If brains are shrinking, what does this mean for human intelligence? Depending on which theory you believe, smaller brains could either make us smarter, dumber, or have no effect whatsoever on intelligence.
It's true that brain size isn't everything. Men's brains are around 11% larger than women's brains due to their bigger body size. Yet research has shown that women and men have similar cognitive abilities. There is some contested evidence that smaller brained hominin species, such as Homo floresiensis and Homo naledi, were capable of complex behaviors, suggesting that how a brain is wired is the ultimate determinant of intelligence.
However, in general, having a bigger brain relative to your body size does correlate with intelligence.
"The fact that our brain size is decreasing significantly right now yields the logical conclusion that our capacity for greater intelligence is either shrinking, or at least not growing," says Stibel.
“However, what we have done over the last 10,000 years is created tools and technologies that allow us to offload cognition onto artefacts. We're able to store information in computers, and use machines to calculate things for us. So our brains might be delivering less capacity for intelligence and brainpower, but that doesn't mean that we as a species collectively are growing less smart.” ~
Oriana:
The theory that I find convincing (though it doesn’t mean that it cancels other theories) is that the invention of agriculture also introduced malnutrition. Meat is extremely nutritious, but the average ancient farmer did not eat meat every day (or even every month). After the development of agriculture, the balance had shifted to carbohydrates, The fossil record shows that smaller body size followed, along with a host of diseases.
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~ While human hunter-gatherers from around 7,000 years ago had bones comparable in strength to modern orangutans, farmers from the same area over 6,000 years later had significantly lighter and weaker bones that would have been more susceptible to breaking. ~
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/hunter-gatherer-past-shows-our-fragile-bones-result-from-physical-inactivity-since-invention-of
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EDUCATION: THE GREAT EQUALIZER OR DIVIDER?
~ The notion that schools increase, rather than reduce, children’s differences in life chances appears correct when we consider that children who earn better grades go on to have greater life success. For example, in a U.K. representative sample, students who excelled in their exams were much more likely to go on to university and achieve a first-class degree, whereas less than 10 percent of students who struggled to pass their exams went on to university.
CHILDREN ENTER SCHOOL ON UNEQUAL FOOTING
Before children even enter education, their life experiences differ substantially. Children’s family background (e.g., how educated their parents are or how much household income their family has at their disposal) is a powerful predictor of their school readiness—a combination of children’s school-entry skills, attention skills, and socioemotional skills. Children from more advantaged family backgrounds tend to be better prepared for school (they have higher school readiness) than kids from underresourced families.
We know that preschool education helps better prepare children for school, but for some families the costs of preschool are simply too high to pay. The average cost of part-time preschool (25 hours) for children under the age of 2 years in 2024 is £8,194. In the United Kingdom, families do not gain access to any form of free childcare until children are two years old, when families receive 15 hours free, increasing to 30 hours after the age of three. This is reflected in the proportion of families who utilize preschool childcare when kids are 0 to 4 years old. Three-quarters of upper- and middle-class families send their children to preschool, compared to only half of low-income families.
According to teachers, 39 percent of children enter reception class unable to hold a pencil, 36 percent lack basic numeracy skills, and 25 percent struggle with basic language.
As children’s language develops, they begin building the foundations for literacy, reading, and writing, which are key to doing well in class. But we know children arrive at school with very different language abilities: Some show signs of developmental language disorders, some struggle with reading because they are affected by dyslexia, and some have not been much exposed within their family homes to the language that is typical in school settings. That means that some children are better prepared than others for school. These children are more likely to participate in classroom discussions and to enjoy doing their homework, thereby gaining richer learning experiences than other kids.
PERFORMANCE REMAINS UNEQUAL THROUGHOUT SCHOOL
Children from advantaged family backgrounds do better in exams when they start school and continue to do so as they go through the primary and secondary school years. The differences in children’s school performance actually magnify and get larger as children grow up.
The relationship between family background and school performance has remained stable for almost a century in Britain, with children from more advantaged family backgrounds consistently performing better. This finding suggests that current policies aimed at bridging the gap between children from advantaged and disadvantaged homes have been mostly unsuccessful.
We must therefore ask ourselves whether the current education system, equal opportunities for all, is actually unfair from the very beginning.
Creating equal learning opportunities for all students will not produce fair education systems if students differ in their abilities to utilize these opportunities. To be fair to all, education systems need to adapt to students’ differential learning needs and backgrounds, offering additional help and support to those who need it, and acknowledging that children enter education on very different footing.
In the United Kingdom, the pupil premium reflects this idea: Schools receive additional funding to afford extra educational resources to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds overcome their disadvantages in education. Ofsted has reported that pupil premium has made a positive impact across many U.K. schools, with gaps in attainment between those pupils eligible for free school meals and those who are not slowly closing.
HOW DO WE ACHIEVE BOTH EQUITY AND EQUALITY
Some suggest that aiming for educational adequacy is what is most fair, whereby some inequality in opportunities is acceptable, and at-risk children should be provided with additional support and resources. In theory, this would allow all students to develop the basic competencies necessary to live rich, meaningful, and fulfilling lives. But what society deems as the "basic competencies" remains unanswered.
What we do know is that “equal societies almost always do better,” and ensuring all children have an equal chance to benefit from the opportunities schooling offers and achieve their full potential regardless of barriers needs to be the primary aim of educational policy.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/deciphering-our-differences/202405/education-the-great-equaliser-or-a-divider
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TWO SKILLS MOST NEEDED IN LIFE
I would happily debate with anyone that life comes down to these two crucial skills:
1. The ability to calm down
2. Problem-solving in the face of inevitable challenges.
If you are reading this and feel like what I am saying is obvious, guess what? You are right.
Yet please consider the following:
As you read these words, Bill is losing his cool with his kids and will later regret what he said.
Kelly won't be going to work tomorrow because she just got fired for not being able to navigate work demands.
Brian is now single (and wishes he wasn't) because he did not calm himself with his newfound ex-partner.
Kim is using substances to self-soothe because healthy ways to do so are elusive to her.
Sean blames others and the world as a whole for their disappointments and consequent dissatisfaction because of their inability to manage their emotions and problem-solve.
Now that we have looked at some examples of problematic coping, let's turn to draw inspiration from the experiences of people who exemplify healthy self-soothing and problem-solving.
Consider the story of Emily, a busy professional juggling multiple responsibilities at work and home. When faced with tight deadlines and mounting pressure, Emily has learned to incorporate mindfulness practices into her daily routine. By taking short breaks for meditation and deep breathing exercises, she manages to stay centered and composed even during the most stressful situations. This ability to calm down not only enhances her productivity but also fosters a positive work environment where she can effectively collaborate with her colleagues to tackle complex projects.
Similarly, let's look at the example of John, an entrepreneur who has encountered numerous setbacks on his path to success in his start-up company focused on solar applications in drone technology. Rather than allowing failures to deter him, John approaches each challenge as an opportunity for growth and innovation.
Through strategic problem-solving, he identifies the root causes of setbacks, adapts his strategies accordingly, and perseveres until he achieves his goals. By remaining resilient and resourceful in the face of adversity, John has built a thriving business and earned the respect of his peers in the industry.
Moreover, the intersection of calming down and problem-solving is evident in the story of Sarah, a devoted mother navigating the challenges of parenthood. When confronted with tantrums or conflicts among her children, Sarah relies on her ability to stay calm and composed.
By modeling patience and emotional regulation, she creates a harmonious environment where her children feel safe to express themselves and resolve conflicts amicably. Through open communication and collaborative problem-solving, Sarah fosters strong bonds within her family and instills valuable life skills in her children.
By modeling patience and emotional regulation, she creates a harmonious environment where her children feel safe to express themselves and resolve conflicts amicably. Through open communication and collaborative problem-solving, Sarah fosters strong bonds within her family and instills valuable life skills in her children.
In each of these examples, you can see the transformative power of calming down and problem-solving in action. Whether it's navigating professional challenges, overcoming personal setbacks, fostering harmonious relationships, or driving social change, these skills are indispensable for a fulfilling and impactful life. By drawing inspiration from individuals like Emily, John, Sarah, and Alex, we can cultivate these skills within ourselves and embrace the journey toward personal growth and self-discovery.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/liking-the-child-you-love/202404/the-2-skills-you-need-for-a-great-life
Oriana:
I agree that emotional self-regulation and focusing on problem-solving are essential skills (though not the only ones).
Having those two skills makes a tremendous difference. Personally, I learned to conceal my emotions (when that’s necessary) and keep my mouth shut due to having grown up in an oppressed country. But regardless of politics, school by its very nature teaches you emotional self-regulation (you certainly don’t want to be labeled a cry-baby) and problem-solving (e.g. how to secretly do something forbidden without being detected).
Of course there are more skills that we generally acquire sometimes quite early in life. We learn to how “read” people and stay away from toxic individuals. We also learn how to express affection in an appropriate manner, and how to express a negative emotion without the crazy fury we might have felt at first — once we’ve learned that such fury tends to be self-destructive.
I’ve always admired what used to be labeled the “British cool.” The motto “Stay calm and learn English” fully resonated with me. At the same time, I grew up in an emotionally expressive culture so it wasn’t really possible to overdo the aloofness, given how much children are prone to imitate others.
Another unexpected source of learning how to keep calm was poetry. That’s how I learned about the “artistic distance.” In order to translate memory into a poem, for instance, you have to find images and of course the right words, which requires at least some emotional distance.
One factor not discussed in this article is persistence. It turns out that it’s a genetic trait — but one that’s also shaped by learning over many years. It can be a part of problem solving, but it may also be independent of it. For instance, it takes persistent practice to get good at many things — whether it’s solving equations, cooking, gardening, or writing essays. Emotional skills are also learned. But note that a “math whiz” still has to learn equation-solving, and a “born writer” still takes years to become a “real writer.” Differences in levels of persistence show already in toddlers.
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EARLY RETIREMENT OF OLD VEHICLES WON’T SAVE THE PLANET
Lifespan caps for passenger vehicles have limited effect on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and could drive up costs and material use finds a new study published in Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability. The research shows that although Light-Duty vehicles (LDVs) contribute 17% to the annual greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, imposing a 15-year lifespan cap on LDV fleets under a business-as-usual scenario will not lead to any meaningful reductions in GHG emissions.
To combat delayed uptake of Electric Vehicles (EVs), some have argued for limits on the vehicle’s serviceable years, called a lifespan cap. However, this study finds that life span caps to drive the adoption of EVs could amplify some of the negative effects of EVs including increased usage of critical materials and increased ecotoxicity related to battery production. Also, the costs of accelerated EV deployment are estimated to be very high and often exceed current estimates for the social costs of carbon.
According to the study, lifespan caps are only effective when implemented alongside complementary strategies, such as electricity grid emissions intensity reductions, vehicle fuel consumption improvements, and vehicle production emissions reductions to boost the GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions benefits, while reducing abatement costs.
The team, led by researchers at the University of Toronto, used the Fleet Life Cycle Assessment and Material Flow Estimation (FLAME) model, coupled with comprehensive cost calculations and sensitivity analyses for electric vehicle survival curves and battery degradation, to evaluate the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of vehicle lifespan caps in reducing the GHG emissions of LDV fleets in the US.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1044610
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OLIVE OIL LOWERS THE RISK OF DEMENTIA
Eating at least 7 g of olive oil daily -- about a half tablespoon -- was tied to an adjusted 28% lower risk of dementia-related death (pooled hazard ratio [HR] 0.72, 95% CI 0.64-0.81) compared with never or rarely consuming olive oil (P for trend <0.001) over 28 years of follow-up, reported Anne-Julie Tessier, RD, PhD, of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, and co-authors.
The relationship remained significant after adjusting for diet quality, including adherence to a Mediterranean diet, and after accounting for APOE4 gene status, the researchers reported in JAMA Network.
Replacing 5 g (about 1 teaspoon) of margarine and mayonnaise with the equivalent amount of olive oil daily was associated with an 8-14% lower risk of dementia mortality, they noted. Substitutions for other vegetable oils or butter were not significant.
Onset of most dementia types is gradual and progression is slow, making dementia-related mortality difficult to study, Tessier noted. "To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine diet, specifically olive oil, in relation to dementia death," she told MedPage Today.
"Typically, people who use olive oil for cooking or as a dressing have an overall better quality of their diet, but interestingly, we found the association to be regardless of this factor," Tessier pointed out.
“Current dietary guidelines regarding fats are mainly based on evidence related to cardiovascular health," she added. "Our study contributes to supporting current dietary guidelines recommending choosing vegetable oils such as olive oil, but extends these recommendations to brain-related health.”
A number of observational studies have found relationships between brain health and plant-based diets like the Mediterranean or Mind diet that include olive oil, though some research has suggested diet and dementia may not be related.
"As part of the Mediterranean diet, olive oil may exert anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective effects due to its high content of monounsaturated fatty acids and other compounds with antioxidant properties such as vitamin E and polyphenols," Tessier and colleagues noted.
The researchers followed 60,582 women from the Nurses' Health Study and 31,801 men from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study from 1990 to 2018. Previous research from these cohorts showed that higher olive oil consumption was tied to lower cardiovascular disease risk and lower neurodegenerative diseaseopens in a new tab or window mortality.
Mean baseline age was about 54, and participants were free of cardiovascular disease and cancer at baseline. Dementia death was ascertained from death records.
Every 4 years, participants reported olive oil intake on food frequency questionnaires. Scores on theAlternative Healthy Diet and Alternative Mediterranean Diet scale were used to assess overall diet quality.
Mean olive oil intake was 1.3 g/day at baseline and went up over time. During 28 years of follow-up, 4,751 dementia-related deaths occurred.
The association between dementia-related death and olive oil intake was significant for women (adjusted HR 0.67 (95% CI 0.59-0.77), but not men (HR 0.87, 95% CI 0.69-1.09). Joint analyses showed that participants with high olive oil intake had a low risk for dementia-related mortality, regardless of diet quality scores.
In a subset of about 27,000 participants who were genotyped, the overall results were similar after adjusting for the presence of an APOE4 allele (adjusted HR comparing high vs low olive oil intake of 0.66, 95% CI 0.54-0.81, P for trend <0.001).
Olive oil consumption may lower dementia mortality by improving vascular health, Tessier and colleagues suggested, though incident cardiovascular disease, hypercholesterolemia, hypertension, and diabetes were not significant mediators of the relationship between olive oil and dementia-related death in this study.
The study had several limitations, including the possibility of reverse causation, the researchers acknowledged. While results remained consistent after accounting for socioeconomic status and important covariates, residual confounding may have occurred. The study population was predominantly white and results may not apply to others.
In addition, some margarine and mayonnaise contained considerable levels of partially hydrogenated oils during the course of the study, which the FD warned about in 2013 and subsequently banned.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/dementia/109986
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HEALTH IMPACT OF PLANT-BASED MEAT ANALOGUES
This new research focused on comparing the effects of diets based on plant-based meat analogues (PBMAs) and traditional animal-based meats (ABMs) on the heart health of Singaporeans at a higher risk for type 2 diabetes.
The main question was whether replacing animal meat with PBMAs would improve heart health and reduce the risk of chronic diseases.
In this 8-week study involving 89 participants, half were asked to eat PBMAs, and the other half ate animal meats. The researchers looked at levels of bad cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure, among other health indicators.
The findings showed no significant changes in cholesterol profiles for either diet, but both diets were linked to improvements in some blood sugar markers. There was no clear advantage of one diet over the other in improving heart health. However, in a smaller group that closely monitored their blood sugar, those eating animal meat managed their blood sugar levels better.
Blood pressure improvements were also noted in the animal meat group but not in the PBMA group.
This suggests that the benefits often associated with plant-based diets might not directly apply to PBMAs, as they differ nutritionally from whole plant foods and their impact on heart health.
Differences in nutritional composition, health outcomes
Nutrient analysis showed that the animal meat diet provided more protein, while PBMAs were higher in sodium, potassium, and calcium.
The better blood sugar control seen in the animal meat group might be due to their lower carb and higher protein intake.
Although the study did not look into protein absorption, other research suggests that proteins from PBMAs might not be as easily absorbed as those from animal meats, affecting insulin and gut hormone responses differently.
Although PBMAs are becoming a more popular protein choice, this study’s findings don’t back the idea that these diets offer better heart and metabolic health benefits than diets that include animal meats.
It appears that adding PBMAs to one’s diet might change nutritional intake in ways that could negatively impact blood sugar control.
Why meat alternatives may not be healthy
This suggests that the health advantages typically associated with plant-based diets should not be assumed to apply to PBMAs, given their different nutritional profiles and effects on heart and metabolic health.
These findings highlight an opportunity for the food industry to invest in creating new PBMAs that are not only focused on mimicking the taste and texture of meat but are also nutritionally superior and more easily absorbed by the body.
By shifting some focus towards improving the nutritional value and environmental sustainability of PBMAs, both manufacturers and consumers stand to gain.
Two experts, not involved in this research, spoke to Medical News Today.
Kelsey Costa, MS, RDN, a registered dietitian and founder of Dietitian Insights, said that “according to this study, a diet intervention with plant-based meat analogues did not show significant cardiometabolic health benefits over 8 weeks compared with omnivorous diets.”
“While this result may be unexpected to some, is not surprising that no benefits were observed when an unhealthy type of ultra-processed food was compared to animal-based foods,” she told us.
That is likely because “plant-based meat analogues would fall into the less-healthy plant-based diet index category, which would not likely improve cardiometabolic health and may instead increase risk,” Costa explained.
— “Beyond the limited duration and small sample size, one major issue with this study’s methodology was that the plant-based meat alternatives selected for this study were reportedly high in sodium and contained reheated seed oils,” she added.
“So, despite extensive fortifications of essential nutrients like vitamins B12 and D, iron, and zinc, the negative cardiometabolic effects of sodium and the potential oxidative stress from consuming reheated oils may outweigh any potential benefits from these particular plant-based meat analogues used in this study.
While there are potentially healthier plant-based meat alternatives on the market than the ones used in this study, consumers should keep in mind that these alternatives are often still heavily processed foods and should not be relied upon as the main source of protein in a healthy diet.” ~ Kelsey Costa, MS, RDN
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ending on beauty:
Lying there, I asked myself
almost every hour, why
was my life worth living?
. . . When the pigeons took off
together from a rooftop
outside my window, my body
seemed sensitive to the shiver
of light in their wings.
~ Robert Cording, Larch
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