Category: History

problematic marriage klaxon

The “You’re Dead To Me” history podcast has a “problematic marriage klaxon.” They ring it, typically, when talking about a child-bride being sold off to some rich old man. However, despite how uncomfortable those historic marriages may make me or us, I am not always certain that those arrangements, then, were all that problematic.

When reading Jane Austen, or more crucially when adapting her books for film, the age and circumstances of the, often children in our eyes, makes adaptation… tricky. Same for Shakespeare. You cannot faithfully make a dramatic film of Romeo and Juliette with actors of the appropriate age without that creeping to the edge of child pornography.

We today however do not have to wring our hands about how problematic it is for an older man to interfere with an underaged child. That, now, is statutory rape and it is unambiguously a criminal offence. Men who take advantage of children, rich men who use underaged girls, they are rapists, pedophiles… criminals.

And while the victims should be entitled to some kind of justice whether that man is uncle Jimbo in Nose-pick Arkansas or the rich son of some esteemed captain of industry, I think it is especially important to punish the men who have the most power to do the most harm.

Perhaps the zeal with which we prosecute and the severity of the punishment should scale with privilege and responsibility and the position of trust, rather than be overlooked because of those things.

Two fer the ONE

The problem with religious “belief” is twofold.

First, if you teach, usually young children, to BELIEVE one untrue nonsense, then you have equipped them to be credulous of anything.

Second, we are use to “religious” people living within the constraints of modern secular societies that were necessary to end centuries of religious violence. Intolerance is a feature of all mythological belief systems because, if you sincerely believe that there is “evil” and your doctrine stands against that evil, if you are certain that heresy is a threat, if you think that people who do not conform or agree or fall in line are the “other,” then essentially being at war with all those others is inevitable.

We should not be surprised, as we watch fundamentalist Christians in the US, having been given consent to throw off all external constraint, a la “Heart of Darkness,” have reproduced a hideously medieval atmosphere of religious persecution. That tendency to violence is a feature, not a bug. We just got used to several decades of most deeply beliefy religious folk being restrained by secularism.

You’ve met people, right?

My mum was a long-time Sunday school teacher. She was one of my Sunday school teachers. She taught stuff to vulnerable kids, as if that stuff was history, that had been proved to be fiction 80 years before she was even born.

But she told those lies just as she had been lied to about it in her turn. And she was never even slightly resentful, any time reality conflicted with that received myth, that she had been lied to. She never was angry with the lying liars.

Nope. Far from it. What she was angry about was if anyone told her she had been lied to. She’d get mad at the revelation that she had been taught… lies.

And in there we can find the reason the world has taken this insane turn to the Reich. People are not bothered much about the lies they have internalized, or the liars that lied to them. What makes them angry, what makes them violent and genocidal, is being told they were lied to.

And that is the human nature that we need better secular education to counter. Because once a person has grown to adulthood believing a load of nonsense, they are forever going to be painfully resistant to correcting their misconceptions.

PRATT Chernobyl

Someone ‘what about Chernobyl’-ed me. “Chernobyl is still uninhabitable.”

That is an interesting misconception. So let me address it on two grounds.

First, while initially it was thought that the accident would render the exclusion zone uninhabitable, what actually happened is that in the absence of human settlement the area has recovered a diverse ecosystem, with even large rare mammals finding sanctuary in the accidental nature preserve. The presence of human settlement was actually worse for the environment, than the disaster. Which is a real slap in the face.

In fact the undamaged reactors remained in operation for many years and today the exclusion zone is a tourist attraction. But I advise you not to go near the elephant’s foot.

Secondly, while horrific, the increased mortality from the disaster is something between 4000 and 15,000 over a period of about 70 years. That number will be rapidly decreasing because the Russian invasion of Ukraine is causing so many more deaths. If a Russian drone kills you today, you cannot get thyroid cancer in 20 years.

But to put the 4–15 thousand in context, particulate matter from German coal-fired mostly-electricity generation kills about 75,000 people in Europe EVERY year. And closing the last two nuclear plants in Germany was expected to increase that number by about 1000, per year. Closing Germany’s nuclear power plants has conservatively killed so many more people than Chernobyl ever will.

But here is a thought… Don’t build an unsafe archaic RMBK reactor. Problem solved.

But… again, for what it is worth if you are able to understand actual statistics, here is a graph.
It is NOT building nuclear power that is killing people.

Due Process

The law, courts, justice system only works in a lawful society where those systems have not already failed and broken down. The reason you want to protect those institutions, keeping them effective, is that when they fail, as we can see daily, corruption and criminality on the part of the powerful, run unchecked.

A consequence of this however is that having failed, as often lauded “checks&balances” have comprehensively done in the US, there can be no expectation that the corrupt criminals in power will ever be held accountable by the existing institutions that they have subverted.

That is how in a period of restoration a country will resort to The Nurenberg Trials. In South Africa that is what The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was for.

Someday, unless US democracy is in fact dead, it will not be the existing law or courts of justice that decide on the punishment of this evil kakistocracy. It will be some special tribunal. And, of necessity, the protections these criminals have availed themselves of, by subverting the courts and the justice system will not be able to apply to the outlaws.

Overpopulation — war

A no-doubt well-intentioned person was having a rant about how war should be “illegal.” That it is a crime. But their argument had a couple of serious problems. The first of these was that the causes of wars are not a consequence of any overpopulation.

There is a seriously problematic conceit here. The idea that, “This earth has more than enough to sustain this population of humanity.” That is a delusion often floated by “optimists.” But this population is burning the Earth’s habitability at both ends. The consequences of even this intensive resource and land use has been devastating and continues year by torturous year to degrade the ecology we utterly depend on for our survival.

When you put our population in perspective, for instance comparing the biomass of mammals, it is delusional to suggest that one species and its livestock would represent NINTY-SIX percent (96%) of the biomass of the entire Class of animal. We are egregiously overpopulated and nothing like this many of us is sustainable. And fighting over resources, fighting over forced migrations, fighting over privilege, is inevitable because we are animals competing for our survival. That doesn’t make war good or right. It just makes it another inevitable consequence of severe overpopulation.

We keep trying to solve the symptoms of overpopulation, because we absolutely do not want to acknowledge that root cause. In fact few topics are apt to attract more outraged abuse than acknowledging that we are overpopulated.

The second problem was suggesting that the aggressor and the victim are somehow inevitably equally in the wrong. This bothsidesism is obscene. Arguing that there is never a “righteous side and a “bad” side to these conflicts,” is victim blaming. And it is bullshit.

I heard some of this horrifying crap in 2022. People suggesting that the moral choice for Ukraine was to lay down their arms to “save lives.” However Ukraine is defending itself, and failing in that will result in genocide and more war. There should be nothing but contempt for the idea that defending your nation, could be in the same moral category as invading another country to seize their territory on some propaganda pretext.

And because there can absolutely be a righteous side and a “bad” side, we morally and practically NEED to do everything in our power to aid Ukraine in its defence. If we do not, then sooner or later it will be other Eastern European countries under attack. Chamberlain appeasement always generates MORE war.

You cannot fix this by telling everyone to just stop. To suggest such a thing betrays the discernment of a child.

Things are blowing up again.

During the first world war, so many shells (bombs) were fired that they will be picking up the unexploded munitions for centuries. The bombs would fall. The bombed would crawl into their holes and dugouts and wait. And then when the bombs stopped, they would come out and continue to defend their positions.

That is why the “strategy” of shelling positions for hours before a charge of infantry was so futile. That is much of the reason those charges were so ineffective and why so many men died. The futility of the shelling was why the lines so thoroughly stagnated.

During the second world war, campaigns of dropping carpets of bombs certainly reduced cities and people to rubble, but were remarkably ineffective at weakening hardened military and industrial targets which were built to withstand.

In Vietnam endless bombing and defoliation raids had almost no effect on the Viet Cong who, in the end won their war of “liberation,” from United States imperialism.

But hey, I am sure that bombings will 100% accomplish military objectives in world war three. It’s a given.