Wiki’s take on Jean Raspail’s prophetic novel, The Camp of the Saints:
The Camp of the Saints is a novel about population migration and its consequences. In Calcutta India, the Belgian government announces a policy in which Indian babies will be adopted and raised in Belgium. The policy is reversed after the Belgian consulate is inundated with poverty-stricken parents eager to give up their infant children.
An Indian “wise man” then rallies the masses to make a mass exodus to live in Europe. Most of the story centers on the French Riviera, where almost no one remains except for the military and a few civilians, including a retired professor who has been watching the huge fleet of run-down freighters approaching the French coast.
The story alternates between the French reaction to the mass immigration and the attitude of the immigrants. They have no desire to assimilate into French culture but want the goods that are in short supply in their native India. Although the novel focuses on France, the rest of the West shares its fate.
Near the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of the United Kingdom must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman, and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia. The one holdout until the end of the novel is Switzerland, but by then international pressure isolating it as a rogue state for not opening its borders forces it to capitulate.
The novel was published 42 years ago but it is suddenly back in the news again, ‘Camp of The Saints’ Seen Mirrored In Pope’s Message.
Pope Francis is urging America to throw open her borders to thousands of impoverished migrants, in part to atone for the “sins of the colonial era.
“We must not repeat the sins and the errors of the past. We must resolve now to live as nobly and as justly as possible,” he declared before a joint session of Congress. “Thousands of persons are led to travel north in search of a better life for themselves and for their loved ones, in search of greater opportunities…We must not be taken aback by their numbers.”
Indeed, as the Pope addressed the nation today it is clear that the immigration issue has hit a boiling point. Headlines blare:
European Migrant Crisis: Austria, Germany Near Tipping Point… As Europe Grasps For Answers, More Migrants Flood Its Border… Pope Francis Urges Congress To Embrace Migrants… Western and UN Aid Falling Far Short… Five More Fleets On The Way, From Africa, India and Asia… Refugee Fleet Is Headed For Europe, For France…
The last three headlines, however, are ripped not from today’s papers, but from the pages of a controversial 1973 French novel by Jean Raspail, which many say has predicted with shocking accuracy the events unfolding today.
The novel, which has been translated into English, is entitled Camp of the Saints, and posits that the liberalism of the West would cause Western nations to throw open their doors to so many migrants that it would spell the doom of liberal society itself. Raspail’s thesis, quite simply, is that liberalism is inadequate to defend liberalism.
Being a lifelong liberal myself, I find that last sentence shockingly true. We love all mankind and that love will be the roots of our downfall. I see the shocking pictures of the tens of thousands fleeing the war torn areas of the Middle East. They are not fleeing into other overpopulated countries like India or Pakistan but into the relatively low population countries of Europe. And of course the US has volunteered to take its “fair share” of the masses. But they will not stop coming. Overpopulation, by its very nature, breeds war and insurrection.
Garrett Hardin thrashed this straw for the last 40 years of his life. He saw clearly what was happening and tried to warn the world. But he was the Cassandra of his time, the only ones who paid any attention to his message were those who were already aware of the problem.
Hardin wrote The Tragedy of the Commons in 1968, three years after his first major work, Nature and Man’s Fate. Harding ended most of his works with a few paragraphs or pages describing what we must do to avoid disaster. Here are the last two paragraphs of The Tragedy of the Commons:
The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.
The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. “Freedom is the recognition of necessity”–and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.
Many others have written on the overpopulation and food supply problem. Lester Brown is one of the most prolific writers on the subject. Lester also ends his work with “What we must do”. He even wrote one entire book and 4 revisions of that book on the subject of what we must do to save civilization:
Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (Substantially Revised).
I have some very bad news for Lester and all the other authors who write of the actions required to avoid any future disasters brought about by overpopulation, global warming or depletion of natural resources: The vast majority of people just don’t believe a damn word of it.
Francis Bacon wrote: “Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.” And that is what the vast majority of people do. Only a tiny minority of people are capable of looking at the facts and are able to then believe what they would very much desire to be untrue, what they would desire not to believe.
Denial of the undesirable consequences of overpopulation, or any other nasty problems looming in our future, is innate for the vast majority of the human race, it is of our very nature. It is just what we do and there is no way to change that fact. If there are some very nasty facts out there, something that suggests that our future, and particularly the future of our children an grandchildren will not be as we would like it to be, we will simply deny those facts. We will go even further than that, we will organize resistance groups, create institutions and experts that will legitimize our denial.
This means of course that, in the minds of the vast majority of the people, the problems do not exist. We will do nothing because in our minds there is nothing that needs to be done.
________________________________________________________
Notice: The thread on JODI Data and Giant Field Depletion is still open. Please post all comments on oil and other subjects there and limit posts on this thread to the subjects mentioned in this post.
Europe is going to be in trouble. In the long-term this situation is unlikely to improve, and in and all likelihood will probably worsen. It’s sad politicians don’t have more insight into population dynamics.
Hi Ron,
Great post as usual but there is a typo in the first paragraph.It looks like you left out a couple of words you intended to be there.
Yeah, I have fixed it now.
Thanks
There is also one in the 3:rd last paragraph:
“Only a tiny minority of people are capable of looking at the facts and are ABLE TO believe what they would very much desire to be untrue, what they would desire not to believe.”
“able to” is missing in that sentence.
Thanks, fixed it.
Ron
An item from The Garrett Hardin Society. Note especially the section on abortion. I attended the 1969 California Conference on Abortion, co-chaired by Dr. Hardin and was privileged to hear him speak on other occasions. In 1969 I was reasonably certain that abortion would never become legal in the US. Was wrong. http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/tributes/tr_bajerna_2003dec.html
So it sounds possible that we hit “peak civilization” before we hit “peak oil.”
Does anyone have a good answer why countries do not enforce their borders better? Is it because to do so is too mean (or something along those lines)?
“Does anyone have a good answer why countries do not enforce their borders better? Is it because to do so is too mean (or something along those lines)?”
Simple: Because the gov’ts do not want to. Most Western nations have a severe problem with aging populations and excessive entitlements. Bureaucrats are betting that a wave of new immigrants will be assimilated into western culture and replace aging workers. Without new workers there won’t be enough workers to support the promised entitlements.
The problem is that it does not work that way at all. Its just the opposite: These immigrants do no adopt western culture. The also do not replace aging workers and are a burden by increasing wealth fare. These People lack the education and language to take over western workers jobs. It would take at least a generation for these immigrants to adopt (basically their children will adopt western culture & language, The parents stick to their own culture and either remain on wealth fare or very low wage, unskilled jobs that contribute nothing in taxes)
Article about Frances Muslim “No Go” Zones:
http://www.google.com/url?url=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2541635/Murders-rapes-going-unreported-no-zones-police-minority-communities-launch-justice-systems.html&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&sa=U&ved=0CFAQFjAJahUKEwiElrXDv5PIAhXEGj4KHXSzAXY&sig2=lSD7RRmJLF6_bq9pp5_V_w&usg=AFQjCNEKu54jVBJLqws-v6y1tLQ7P9uk9g
Also watch this documentary. Melting Pots don’t work long term and lead to genocide.
Niall ferguson’s (History Professor) “war of the world” Documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5AbQF1jJ_A
The problem is that it does not work that way at all. Its just the opposite: These immigrants do no adopt western culture. The also do not replace aging workers and are a burden by increasing wealth fare. These People lack the education and language to take over western workers jobs. It would take at least a generation for these immigrants to adopt (basically their children will adopt western culture & language, The parents stick to their own culture and either remain on wealth fare or very low wage, unskilled jobs that contribute nothing in taxes)
I think you are fractally wrong and underestimate the willingness and the capacity of immigrants to integrate into the societies they emigrate to. This despite the enormous obstacles they have to face. May I strongly suggest you watch the talk I link to below and perhaps rethink how you see this issue.
Note: I think I understand why you think the way you do. I’m personally struggling with the reactions of my immediate family who live in Germany and Hungary with regards to the what is happening with the wave of Syrian immigrants streaming into Europe right now. These are not easy issues to deal with and they will only get harder but the alternative is repeating the mistakes of history that eventually led to WWII and I think we can all do better. Best hopes!
https://www.ted.com/talks/anand_giridharadas_a_tale_of_two_americas_and_the_mini_mart_where_they_collided
Guys. Don’t be so general. I live in Sweden and we have lots of imigrants here. I see those born here unable to adapt, and those recently arrived here already on the way to do it. They are individuals.
I would prefer to find other solutions than to lock up borders. Yes, I know that is highly unlikely. But in a perfect world, people would be free to come and go, and we wouldn’t have too many people, and we wouldn’t have so many people who cling to dogmatic cultural beliefs and lifestyles which add to cultural tensions.
Imagine yourself afoot in a desert, surrounded by 50 very thirsty people and you hold the only canteen. Such a scenario in different versions may be thrust upon many of use in the not so distant future.
Hard decisions can be postponed for only so long, because at some point you may no longer have the ability to make those decisions.
Here’s a more realistic scenario. You are afoot in the desert with 49 others. They all have at least 1 canteen. 20 of them have 2 canteens, 10 have 3 canteens, and 3 of them have 4 canteens. 4 of them have camels and lots of money, but they only have 1 canteen each. A canteen lasts a day and you can see that you are about a day and a half away from water. 3 of them have maps. You are one of the ones with a map but only 1 canteen. You don’t know who the other two with maps are. The problem is survivable but requires information and cooperation.
If you are literally surrounded by 50 thirsty people and you are the only one with a canteen, you will probably not make it out alive unless you also have an armored personnel carrier at your disposal (in which case, what are you doing in the desert).
Humans got where they are today (and remember: this seemed like a good idea at the time) through cooperation, not competition. Using the “competition” paradigm to get us out of our resource scarcity dilemma is using the wrong paradigm.
Raspail’s thesis, quite simply, is that liberalism is inadequate to defend liberalism.
Ron says: “Being a lifelong liberal myself, I find that last sentence shockingly true.”
I have always respected your views, even if many differed than mine. My respect [even if you were unable to detect it] has increased significantly.
I have had no children, so, of course, no grandchildren [by choice, same wife for 49 years]. To me, it would be very scary if we would have had children/grandchildren. I turned 74 yesterday.
PS: I think that conservatism is inadequate to defend conservatism. So, where are we going?
Given those two premises, dictatorship seems the most likely answer.
Clueless wrote:” think that conservatism is inadequate to defend conservatism. So, where are we going?”
In my opinion, back to nationism and genocide (ie the early 20th Century). There will be a backlash when workers and retirees are burdened by costs of supporting all these immigrants. You can’t get a more abrasive culture clash between Muslims and Westerners. its like mixing gasoline and fire. You would think that after all the trouble France has with its Muslim immigrants that they would have learned something.
One important consideration: If Muslims have a difficult time living together (ie Sunni vs Shia and other lesser factions) how the hell will they live in Western societies which are completely alien to them?
Seems your liberalism silently implies what Liberalism itself has always silently implied:
having your cake, and your neighbor’s cake, and eating it alone; with a sprinkling of “we all love humanity” as salve to feel good about it while propping it as a thought-stopper to the neighbor you left without his cake.
Disingenuous given that enough time has passed and enough evidence collected that show Liberalism is all about removing other countries’ protections of its people, their industries, and resources so “developed” ones have easier access to rob them blind. With a salve of “personal liberty and freedom” as a thought-stopper –as long as it doesn’t get in the way of “opening” a country’s economy to vulture capit…oops…liberalism.
Like the director of Human Rights First said, your “fair share” of 100,000 refugees by 2017 the US committed to is “simply not enough to address this crisis”, “…simply not enough…” specially in light of how our policies foment the misery and carnage in those “war torn areas of the Middle East.”
But is certainly enough for the aims of Neoliberalism (the overtly-sociopath younger brother of quietly sociopathic Liberalism): allow in just enough migrants to weaken local labor so it is advantageous to the lobbying industries/corporations; WIN-WIN: cheap labor and weakened middle-class, yippee.
Is unfortunate how great works are reduced to support narrow definitions of reality where they’re meant as humanity-expanding gifts were the reader to consider the full implications of the works.
It not only happens with “The Tragedy of the Commons” but, also with “The Limits to Growth” and, others written about the same time still unread by most but maligned all the same to serve a few.
Love your work on energy, fossil fuels, and its implications to humanity though.
But amazing dichotomy between that and this. Maybe is imbibing breitbart too much? 😉
Simon, a person could call liberalism “sociopathic” only if they had no cognitive abilities whatsoever and hadn’t a fucking clue to what either word, sociopathic or liberalism, means. A sociopath is one who has no conscience and cares only about himself. A liberal is one who cares for everyone, and sometimes cares so much that it often overrides his better judgement.
You sound like a man who absolute hates humanity. There is a name for such a person, it is “misanthrope”. Is that you?
Hello simon,
If you haven’t already read it, you should take a look at George Orwell’s essay titled “Rudyard Kipling.”
simon,
And if you’re interested in more of an empirical analysis, you might take a look at Azar Gat’s War in Human Civilization.
As it turns out, liberalism, in practice as opposed to in theory, has proved to be nothing but a head-fake. It’s the new evangelicism, the post 18th-century rationale for conquest and plunder that took the place of “doing God’s work”: “spreading the faith” and “saving the savages” in pre-Enlightenemt times.
“Even a small-time gang of hoodlums has its own melodramatic ideology and pathological romanticism,” notes the psychologist Andrew M. Lobaczewski. “Human nature demands that vile matters be haloed by an over-compensatory mystique in order to silence one’s conscience and to deceive consciousness and critical faculties, whether one’s own or those of others.”
If the gang is “stripped of its ideology,” Lobaczewski adds, “nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive.”
As Gat concludes:
So Wall Street may pull its money from oil and put it into water.
Investors Are Mining for Water, the Next Hot Commodity – The New York Times: But tapping cash, as opposed to actual water, has never been a problem for Cadiz. “I think there’s plenty of money out there,” Mr. Slater said.
Real profits may be nearly as scarce as snow in the High Sierra, but Wall Street, as it is wont to do, smells profit as California endures its worst drought in decades.
This will be an attempt to respond to the spirit of the article on immigration. I won’t deal with immigration per se, the threat immigrants pose to established welfare states, the threat immigrants pose to the welfare state’s culture, or many of the other issues surrounding immigration.
What I will try to do is lay out some general design issues in terms of building a sustainable community which includes both humans and the natural world. I will make reference to Peter Whybrow’s article at Resilence.org
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-09-24/wisdom-re-tuning-for-a-sustainable-future
I won’t go into that article in depth, but will rely mostly on the quote from Friedrich Hayek:
Mankind achieved civilization by developing and learning to follow rules that often forbade to do what his instincts demanded…Man is not born wise, rational and good, but has to be taught to become so. Man became intelligent because there was tradition (habits) between instinct and reason…
The second resource is the current book The Narcissist You Know: Defending Yourself Against Extreme Narcissists in an All-About-Me Age. Written by Joseph Burgo, PhD and professional psychiatrist.
The third resource is the graphically illustrated talk on left brain and right brain which can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI
renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how our ‘divided brain’ has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society.
the left and right hemispheres focus on either the short term or the long term, and decisions are a result of balancing.
My basic idea is that the structure of our society plays a large role in facilitating, or impeding, our ability to develop realistic rules (following Hayek) and balancing short and long term (following McGilchrist) and preventing the Extreme Narcissists from ruining life for the rest of us. I will glancingly refer to Edo Japan and the role that social structure plays in controlling population.
Burgo’s book mostly advises us to flee the 5 percent of the population who are Extreme Narcissists: ‘The Extreme Narcissist of every stripe almost never seeks psychological treatment and rarely changes. Protecting oneself by staying as far away from them as possible often makes the most sense.’ But Burgo’s case histories of celebrity Extreme Narcissists should be sobering for the reflective: Tiger Woods, Madonna, Lance Armstrong, and Donald Trump all make his list. These are people who have become rich and famous, and one of them might become President. I suggest that it is particularly easy for relatively rich societies to give birth to Extreme Narcissists and also to afford to be able to ‘stay away from them’. Dmitry Orlov suggests that it is a Russian national characteristic to simply avoid nasty people…which derives from the abundant land and other resources in Russia. In my neighborhood, I don’t actually produce much of anything in partnership with my neighbors…so I can walk away from them and suffer no material consequences. Contrast with Wendell Berry’s stories about small farming communities in Kentucky in a by-gone age. Two farmers choose each other to work with for chores such as weeding. When two people have both freedom of choice but also the whip of necessity to actually produce something, then Extreme Narcissism is likely to cure itself. Or, more likely, never become a problem to begin with. When a child on a subsistence farm begins to grow up, they also acquire responsibilities on the farm. If they don’t produce, they don’t eat. Consequently, the child’s development from infancy includes both learning to curb narcissism but also to balance the left brain/ right brain, short term and long term, considerations that McGilchrist talks about.
In Edo Japan (from roughly 1600 to 1850) there were very few fossil fuels and not much in the way of metals. Yet the society was able to achieve a high level of civilization with a stable population. They did not do it with democracy at the national level, and no one would confuse it with a welfare state. But part of the social structure was farming research and education, and the requirement that each farm or village feed itself, as well as produce a surplus for the royalty and the cities. Consequently, while production increased, it was not limitless, and practices such as infanticide were common. They spoke of ‘sending the child back’, which resonates with their Buddhist notions that souls are immortal, and are reborn….perhaps the soul would be reborn into a more promising situation.
It is easy for me to imagine a hunter-gatherer society or a subsistence farming society where the necessity for real productive labor from an early age shapes the way people develop community standards, discourage narcissism or deal with those who display it, and develop an ability to balance short and long term. All without thinking too much about it. I can read Burgo’s book, and hundreds of others with similar messages, and believe that they are giving me lots of good advice. But in the rush of daily events, we mostly listen to hormones and neurotransmitters. If we have had experiences from a young age which have helped us mould those hormonal and neurotransmitter responses, then our behavior will not require much conscious thinking. But if we have been raised on a diet of gossip about Tiger Woods, Madonna, Lance Armstrong, and Donald Trump, then we are forced to rely on the very weak reed of rational thought. (Nate Hagens talks intelligently about hormones and neurotransmitters. Someone else calculated the weight of the testosterone and dopamine which ‘controls the world’…it’s not a lot.)
Similarly, if we have been raised in an environment where politicians promise us that ‘America’s best years are yet to come’, then population control will not be on our radar. We are very far from Lyndon Johnson’s explosion regarding more foreign aid to Mexico: ‘Not until they do something about their population growth.’
I am reminded of the recently published study which is very much in the lineage of The Limits to Growth,
Natural Resources in a Planetary Perspective
by Harald Sverdrup & K. Vala Ragnarsdóttir
The study can be found at Geochemical Perspectives, and a free PDF can be downloaded. The authors are husband and wife, and the husband reports that his wife Vala was pleased that we seem to be reaching the limits to growth, and thus will avoid some of the worst effects of yet more growth.
Evolution is designed to work with replication and selection. Unfortunately, humans have been gifted with replication but not much in the way of selection over the last millennia and especially the last few hundred years. If Sverdrup and Ragnarsdottir (and others) are correct, each of us are about to be visited by the necessity to do some serious work to avoid becoming the victims of Selection. Ironically, the survivors may be happier, better balanced humans.
Don Stewart
The real problem with immigration:
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2006/03/the-real-problem-with-immigration-and-the-real-solution
Let me explain why I don’t agree with the article. First, a preamble: Over the last 20 years or so we have seen a blurring of the lines which differentiate between illegal aliens and legal immigrants or foreign residents. Politicians and the media have blurred the line.
It’s evident to me that illegal immigration harms the nation as a whole. If the country feels it requires immigration then it should be legal immigration, and those who do receive the resident visa should be screened for security, health, and utility reasons.
However, a simple model shows illegal immigration, or legal immigration which emphasizes low skill immigrants, tends to increase poverty and inequality. The illegal low skill immigrant competes for low skill jobs, the they help employers keep the total low skill worker population pool as an low pay underclass. Thus immigration has to be calibrated to avoid the oversupply of workers at the bottom.
Republican elites will encourage illegal immigration because it does help their businesses and profits.
They understand very well how this works, and they have absolutely no problem putting a Mexican to work on a job competing with a Chinese counterpart, a Chinese worker who is in turn exploited by a heartless “communist” dictatorship.
Democrats, on the other hand, like to emphasize massive illegal immigration (if they can they’ll make it legal) because illegal immigration is mostly low educational level, underfed, low IQ originating in the poorest sectors in Mexico and Central America. What the USA gets isn’t even representative of the average person in those countries, they are getting a skewed sample: the more adventuresome, and desperate, coming out of very violent and extremely poor regions.
The answer as I see it is to have legal immigration, and design the entry process to allow people who help long term. This means immigration should involve a crime free, healthy, relatively young, smart, hard working, and compatible people. I couldn’t care less about their color or religion, but they do need to bring value.
I feel strong enough about these points I went ahead and put in a blog post about the subject
http://21stcenturysocialcritic.blogspot.com.es/2015/09/illegal-versus-legal-immigration.html
I don’t know whether I agree with the article or not. I did not read it. It was written by The Heritage Foundation. I never read anything from any ultra right wing think tank.
If you don’t keep an eye on your enemies, how do you expect to know what they are up to?
Here are some excerpts from this article.
” The biggest challenge for policymakers is distinguishing illusory immigration problems from real problems. One thing is quite clear: The favored approach of recent years-a policy of benign neglect-is no longer tenable.”
”from both sides of the aisle are now considering what to do about immigration policy. Their various efforts have focused on a wide variety of changes in current policy, including improving border security, strengthening employer verification of employment, establishing a new temporary guest worker program, and offering some level of amnesty to illegal immigrants currently living in the United States. ”
“” to achieve results, immigration reform must be comprehensive. A lopsided, ideological approach that focuses exclusively on border security while ignoring migrant workers (or vice versa) is bound to fail. If Congress passes another law that glosses over the fundamental contradictions in the status quo, then the status quo will not change.””
”The Real Problem
Illegal immigration into the United States is massive in scale. More than 10 million undocumented aliens currently reside in the U.S., and that population is growing by 700,000 per year.[1] On one hand, the presence of so many aliens is a powerful testament to the attractiveness of America. On the other hand, it is a sign of how dangerously open our borders are.”
”Typical illegal aliens come to America primarily for better jobs and in the process add value to the U.S. economy. However, they also take away value by weakening the legal and national security environment.”
” Even though they pose no direct security threat, the presence of millions of undocumented migrants distorts the law, distracts resources, and effectively creates a cover for terrorists and criminals.”
”In other words, the real problem presented by illegal immigration is security, not the supposed threat to the economy. Indeed, efforts to curtail the economic influx of migrants actually worsen the security dilemma by driving many migrant workers underground, thereby encouraging the culture of illegality.”
” A non-citizen guest worker program is an essential component of securing the border, but only if it is the right program.”
” the evidence indicates that worker migration is a net plus economically.”
”The argument that immigrants harm the American economy should be dismissed out of hand.”
”but it is folly to blame immigrants for hurting the economy at a time when the economy is simply not hurting.”
This was published in 2005. TEN years ago.
The main portion of this position paper is all about having documentation and control over who comes and goes and while I am not well informed about border controls in other countries it appears to me that the proposals are basically in line with the rules used in European countries that allow in guest workers from outside the EU.
Incidentally I am personally opposed to allowing very many immigrants into the country, except for well qualified professionals. More doctors might help lower the cost of medical care.
Wages for laborers are too damned low as it is.
The overall impact is probably positive but it is most certainly negative for the people who matter the most to me.
Money is not in short supply (most of it is lent to billionaires and firms leaving the rest of us to scramble to service the tycoons’ debts). Lending less money to tycoons leaves more money to pay young girls not to have babies.
The easiest, least coercive way to get someone to do something you want them to do is to pay them. A solution to the overpopulation problem is for governments (US and others) to pay young girls US$1,000 each for every year they are not pregnant. It isn’t hard to tell if a girl is pregnant or not, whether a girl has given birth or not. Monitoring the program = bookkeeping exercise.
1 billion girls x $1,000US = $1 trillion, far less than aggregate spending on automobiles each year. As money spent on cars is simply thrown away (fuel capital exhausted into the atmosphere), the same spent on the girls would keep the capital in the ground, even if the girls spent the money on a car and fuel! Their absent children would not spend anything. (Pay them another $1,000 for every year they don’t own or drive a car.)
– There is no such thing as a ‘money shortage’, banks (or better, governments) can produce more money on demand.
– At the same time, a thousand cash US dollars is a lot of money in most corners of the world … including the US.
– The current network of health agencies, NGOs, development funders and interest groups provide transmission channels.
– Payments provide more security and opportunity for the girls than do children, which are increasingly costly to feed, clothe, educate, etc. Money also provides more security to girls than does migration.
– Paying money to girls would improve their social standing and economic power. This is not a gift policy but a fair exchange with girls as equal partners engaged in a vital project with world-changing consequences.
– Obsolete administrative structures are breaking down under the stress of ‘progress’ including those that encourage large families.
– Results of payments would be seen at once … in the form of lowered birth rates.
– Payments would be a capital investment in truest sense: children not born = capital that is not consumed.
– The biggest obstacle is ‘population ideology’: the economic theory that increased population supports growth which in turn supports additional humans in a self-reinforcing ‘virtuous’ cycle.
– NOTE; the machine population, particularly cars is much more costly than human population. On a consumption basis, each car wastes the same energy/resources as 20- or more humans.
Keep in mind.
– Humans are overpopulated by three (3) orders of magnitude when other large animals are taken into comparison. For instance, there were estimated to be 7 million bison in North America before they were hunted to near extinction. 5 million wildebeests, -5 million caribou, etc. We have a long way to fall … to 7 million.
– Our population and that of our machines have ballooned due to access to fossil fuel and machine-building machinery. Once these things are in decline, so are we …
– Look for a short-term population bottleneck of the sort hominids have endured repeatedly since the Pleistocene. This bottleneck will occur whether we set out to control ourselves and our population or not:
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/1/2.full
– Migration — to the west and elsewhere — cannot solve resource depletion, only shuffle it around.
– Raspail’s novel underestimates the ability of military force to clear areas w/ firepower. One ground attack aircraft can sink an entire fleet of ships, even very large ones; if the deed is done over the horizon under a media blackout, nobody would ever know. Minefields are likewise very effective at keeping vulnerable (non-armored vehicles) groups at bay for very low cost.
– Modern countries have a proven tendency toward genocide particularly European modern countries. When push comes to shove, Europeans will massacre migrants just like they wiped out natives in the Americas during the 16th century, each other in the 17th century, Asians and Africans in the 18th and 19th centuries and each other again during the 20th.
– Any immigration ‘crisis’ would be short-lived under almost all circumstances. The absence of food = death of all those doing without in a few weeks. Absence of water = death of all those without in a few days. Food and water shortages in 2015 are not frequent but not unheard of, either. The issue is always whether migrants can gain enough to sustain them as they escape to an area with supplies. So far evidence in eastern/central Africa is that many migrants starve- or succumb to water shortages and accompanying disease before they get very far. Shortages exist now across much of central Africa …
http://www.fao.org/giews/English/hotspots/map.htm
A migration crisis would be averted by simply embargoing aid to affected countries (as is underway locally in Syria and elsewhere.)
– Biggest migrant crisis is to come: internal migration from areas inundated by rising water, from drought areas or from areas burned over by fires. Consider the cost of five million Californians moving to other states at once or a hundred- million Chinese doing the same thing. Internal migration is rarely considered as anything other than an economic advance … even when empirical evidence insists otherwise.
– The same population overload exists in developed countries as well as in others: Italy and UK are overpopulated relative to food supply, arable land and water access.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRQts8uPEVo
A solution to the overpopulation problem is for governments (US and others) to pay young girls US$1,000 each for every year they are not pregnant. It isn’t hard to tell if a girl is pregnant or not, whether a girl has given birth or not. Monitoring the program = bookkeeping exercise.
Are you serious? That comes to $2.74 a day. That would hardly deter anyone from getting pregnant and most certainly would not deter anyone from having sex, which is the primary cause of pregnancy. And the problem is worldwide, not just a US problem.
It would deter a hell of a lot of pregnancies in places where people are living on that much or less cash money. I would say give it to them half up front when they get an iid implanted- which is actually quite a safe procedure which can be done by nurses with minimal training. Give them the rest in installments.
Giving a thousand bucks to even a hard up girl in the USA would not have much effect- except maybe to get her to thinking about the pill or an iud maybe.
To a lot of folks $.75 is a day’s wage. What matters is the marginal price. Those who a) want more money, and b) those whose intention is to to get pregnant will make a different kind of cost calculation.
BTW: If you spent more time with old people you would quickly learn the worth of 15¢.
: )
Currently we pay poor girls to have babies. This is how many people (women and their male sperm donors) support themselves. They get paid significantly more if their child is handicapped, so they have a strong incentive to badger their doctors to declare that their child has ADHD. So, those least able to support themselves or their children are being incentivized to have more kids. These people tend to be less capable and less motivated and are likely to produce children of similar capabilities. From an evolutionary standpoint, we are favoring the least functional. We are doing the opposite of what Steve suggests. Wonder how that will turn out.
Steve wrote:
“A solution to the overpopulation problem is for governments (US and others) to pay young girls US$1,000 each for every year they are not pregnant. It isn’t hard to tell if a girl is pregnant or not, whether a girl has given birth or not. Monitoring the program = bookkeeping exercise.”
Unfortunately gov’ts want increased populations. Western nations have decreasing populations, so much, that gov’ts want immigrants to replace them so the promised entitlements can be paid. The West also has a habit of promoting population growth, by dumping excess food production on third world nations. Humans, like other mammals, multiply when there is is plenty of food. Dumping food also helps create unsustainable systems since a region can support much large populations than they could with cultivating farm land in their own region.
FWIW: It appears the best way to reduce pregnancies is to educate women. The most educated women have the fewest children.
From a economic perspective, the answer is to just raise interest rates. Low interest rates fuel growth, and higher rates suppress growth. Less economic grow would result in fewer children since parents would have less financial resources to raise lots of children. The same also applies to Oil consumption. High interest rates would have slowed demand increases for energy and permitted the remaining supply to be extended.
Why would five million Californians wish to move elsewhere?
Why would five million Californians wish to move elsewhere?
Lack of water?
California just entered its fourth year in drought. Experts say it’s the worst the state has seen in 1,200 years.
Dwindling reservoirs, shrinking lakes, and dried-up farm fields are everywhere — and the drought shows no sign of stopping.
The state’s snowpack, which typically provides about a third of the water for its farms and residents, remains at its lowest level in history.
http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-of-california-drought-2015-5
..
California only has to redirect water from agriculture to other uses if that’s required. Agricultural users should plant less water intensive crops, or they can use treated sewage. However, the current El Niño should bring heavy rains.
Fernando ,
When you get right down to it, you probably know about as much about agriculture as I do about oil- which is to say, hardly anything, compared to people who work in that profession.
There is not enough “treated sewage” water to even scratch the surface of the irrigation problem, and people downstream of sewage treatment plants suck it right into their own water plants and clean it up a second time and DRINK IT.
There is hardly any high volume call at all for crops that grow in arid areas, with the possible exception of olives and maybe a couple of other specialty crops.
It takes a LONG time to establish an olive grove, and if the snow and rain come back, a field of green beans or tomatoes pays off the SAME year. Twice double cropping,which is sop, and sometimes three or four times in one year although I do not keep up with California practices and doubt there is much in the way of four crop farming excepting the very best spots.
You are dead on about the water and the cities though.
The state has plenty of water so far as the urban population is concerned even WITH the drought- if the cities take it away from the farmers.
It is as sure as sunrise that they WILL take it, if the drought persists. But the farmers are going to put up a fight that will be the political equivalent of the ALAMO- they WILL NOT give up easily. The law as it is written is on their side, and while they are peons compared to the Silicon Valley types, they are still quite rich enough to hire ANY law firms they please- and as many as they please.
The farmers and farm hands and associated businesses, such as machinery dealers, will lose the fight if the drought persists.They dominate the voter rolls ten or twenty to one , enough said.
BUT that sure would be GOOD for people in MY neck of the woods. If California farming goes out, I will come out of retirement and hire some help and get back in growing veggies.
some thoughts from Charles Eisenstein…
“It is quite insane to make life unlivable in another country, and then when people don’t want to live there, to attempt to keep them out by force. Wouldn’t it be better to enact policies that don’t make life unlivable there? Then there wouldn’t be an immigration problem to begin with.
….
If we are truly concerned about immigration, instead of building higher walls and tighter border security, why not make conditions more tolerable in the places being are desperate to leave?”
http://charleseisenstein.net/on-immigration/
” Population decline is welcome news, but it needs to be considered in a larger context. Population stability or decline is not an environmental panacea if it is accompanied by continued growth in consumption.”
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/blog/concern-overpopulation-red-herring-consumption-problem-sustainability
Wouldn’t it be better to enact policies that don’t make life unlivable there?
Really now, just how would we go about doing that? Our policies are making life unlivable in Syria? I would submit Ezrydermik, that is not our policies that is making life unlivable in Syria.
Well, I’ll agree that it’s not just our policies, there is plenty of blame to go around, but I submit that we (our government esp security groups like CIA, military, State Dept., etc) has done a great deal to make life unlivable in Syria and has been for quite awhile. Some direct and some indirect…
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/world/middleeast/sale-of-us-arms-fuels-the-wars-of-arab-states.html?_r=0
http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Before-And-Beyond-The-Syri-by-Alon-Ben-Meir-Assad_Iran_Isis_Putin-150925-565.html
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Underlying-Reasons-for-the-by-michael-payne-Assad_Competition_Control_Crisis-150924-275.html
http://www.mintpressnews.com/MyMPN/the-west-created-perpetuates-the-syrian-civil-war/
and….
“Wouldn’t it be better to enact policies that don’t make life unlivable there?” is Charles’ writing, not mine. I don’t think he specified Syria but was more general.
““Wouldn’t it be better to enact policies that don’t make life unlivable there?”
Yes, We should have never gotten involved in Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and so on. The US is like a novice trying to repair a broken widget. The more the novice tinkers with it, the worst it becomes!
Carlos Fuentes compares the modern-day U.S. to late 16th-century Spain:
[I]mperial Spain under Phillip III came to resemble a nation of bankrupts, beggars, and bandits. Inflation, devaluation, and the substitution of copper for gold and silver followed, and this in the nation that had conquered Mexico and Peru.
Spain also became the first example of an anomaly that the United States runs the risk of repeating as our own century ends; that of being a poor empire, debt-ridden, incapable of solving its internal problems while insistent on playing an imperial role overseas, but begging alms from other, surplus-wealthy nations in order to finance its expensive role as a world policeman….
Spain at her height could do anything. She could exhaust her treasury and forget her poor, her bankrupts, her devalued currency, her incompetent economy, her overvalued currency, her recessions and depressions, her debts both internal and foreign, her deficit spending, her negative trade balance, as long as she could keep herself as the head of the mission against the infidel, the Islamic threat and the Protestant threat. But eventually reality caught up and imposed the limits that imperial folly had so easily hurdled over.
The Spanish writer Fernando Diaz Plaja finds a provocative parallel in this situation between Spain and the United States. Both, at the height of their influence, joined military and economic force to an obsessive belief in their own moral justification. Whether against Protestantism, in the case of Spain, or against communism, in the case of the United States, the nation overextended its power, postponed solving internal problems, and sacrificed generations. And even when the enemy ceased to be menacing, the desire to use power persisted, inebriating, addictive.
ezrydermike,
The U.S. and its NATO allies face the same dilemma that Great Britain did in the first part of the 20th century. To substitute violence for moral and intellectual probity can bring victory, but the price is very high. And this is especially true when the victor happens to enjoy domestically the blessings of constitutional government.
Henry Steele Commager was entirely right: “If we subvert world order and destroy world peace we must inevitably subvert and destroy our own political institutions first.”
Or as Lord Cromer put it, the “much-feared boomerang effect” of the “government of subject races” on the home government during Britain’s imperialist era meant that rule by violence in faraway lands would end by affecting the government of England, that the last “subject race” would be the English themselves.
But as George Orwell noted, the English ruling class did not take that route.
The USA did encourage a Sunni rebellion against Assad, but cut off assistance when the rebels turned out to have a huge radical component. USA policy was pretty dumb, because the Sunni areas in Iraq were armed to the teeth and radicalized by the abuses carried out by the Shiite dominated regime the USA occupation installed in Baghdad. These radical Sunni cadres had been trained in urban warfare by a decade of relentless fighting against USA forces. Bush made a huge blunder when he invaded Iraq, Obama compounded it when he encouraged a Sunni rebellion in Syria, a rebellion by Sunnis who were closely related and fairly seamlessly organized with their Sunni relatives in Iraq.
I know this will upset the audience, but it gets worse: USA has an anti Iran mania developed thanks to relentless Israel lobby propaganda and political influence.
The Israeli right wing has decided peace with the Palestinians isn’t feasible. They are working towards a “final solution” which requires a quiet Lebanese border. But that border area is controlled by Hezbollah Shiites, whose main support flows through Assad’s Syria, coming from Iran via the Shiite dominated Iraq installed in power by Bush. Hezbollah are very tough fighters, thus Israel is keen on weakening Iran and taking out Assad. Which explains Obama’s stupid moves. Obama tried to satisfy Israeli needs by undermining Assad, but it backfired big time.
Obama’s handlers realized their whole game was crumbling, so they took remedial action. If we look at the game board with objective eyes we have to conclude the Shiites are the lesser evil. This means the USA has to patch up with Iran, look the other way as the Russians help Assad, and tell Netanyahu to shut up (something the guy isn’t about to accept, which explains the relentless campaign coming from neocon strongholds).
Did the USA screw up by undermining Assad? You bet. Is Obama pursuing an effective path out of the mess Bush and he created? Time will tell. I have very low expectations.
As recent reports are beginning to reveal, Obama’s blunders and miscalculations are perhpas every bit as wrong-headed, and consequential, as Bush’s:
Russia proposed more than three years ago that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, could step down as part of a peace deal, according to a senior negotiator involved in back-channel discussions at the time.
Former Finnish president and Nobel peace prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari said western powers failed to seize on the proposal. Since it was made, in 2012, tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions uprooted, causing the world’s gravest refugee crisis since the second world war.
Ahtisaari held talks with envoys from the five permanent members of the UN security council in February 2012. He said that during those discussions, the Russian ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, laid out a three-point plan, which included a proposal for Assad to cede power at some point after peace talks had started between the regime and the opposition.
But he said that the US, Britain and France were so convinced that the Syrian dictator was about to fall, they ignored the proposal….
At the time of Ahtisaari’s visit to New York, the death toll from the Syrian conflict was estimated to be about 7,500. The UN believes that toll passed 220,000 at the beginning of this year, and continues to climb. The chaos has led to the rise of Islamic State. Over 11 million Syrians have been forced out of their homes.
“We should have prevented this from happening because this is a self-made disaster, this flow of refugees to our countries in Europe,” Ahtisaari said. “I don’t see any other option but to take good care of these poor people … We are paying the bills we have caused ourselves.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/15/west-ignored-russian-offer-in-2012-to-have-syrias-assad-step-aside
U.S.-trained Syrian rebels gave equipment to Nusra: U.S. military
Sat Sep 26, 2015
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/26/us-mideast-crisis-usa-equipment-idUSKCN0RP2HO20150926
Syrian rebels trained by the United States gave some of their equipment to the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front in exchange for safe passage, a U.S. military spokesman said on Friday, the latest blow to a troubled U.S. effort to train local partners to fight Islamic State militants.
The rebels surrendered six pick-up trucks and some ammunition, or about one-quarter of their issued equipment, to a suspected Nusra intermediary on Sept. 21-22 in exchange for safe passage, said Colonel Patrick Ryder, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, in a statement.
“If accurate, the report of NSF members providing equipment to al Nusra Front is very concerning and a violation of Syria train and equip program guidelines,” Ryder said, …
The news was the most recent sign of trouble in a fledgling military effort to train fighters to take on the Islamic State militant group in Syria.
A US president named Busch dissolved the Iraq army. Many of these officers joined ISIS and became high ranking leaders there. They are the sole reason ISIS is far less unprofessional than other islamist groups, and a far bigger problem.
This is only part of the reason why ISIS exists, and ISIS is only part of the problem in Syria. But it is a part of the explanation to why it became so bad there.
Over the last 50 years it has become quite clear that socialism/communism create poverty and lead to enormous Hunan rights abuses. It seems to me the left has now hitched its fortunes to the de-development, shrink-the-economy bandwagon to create a playing field where communist dictatorships can flourish. I was shocked when I read the UN’s Christiana Figueres, a lady born in a very rich family with very good political connections (and of course a leftist) praise Chinese dictatorship as the solution to the world’s problems.
I’d like to quote from an article in Nature to show you what I’m picking up:
“Democratic nations seem to have failed us in the climate arena so far. The past decade’s climate summits in Copenhagen, Cancun, Durban and Warsaw were political washouts. Expectations for the next meeting in Paris this December are low.
Academics increasingly point to democracy as a reason for failure. NASA climate researcher James Hansen was quoted in 2009 in The Guardian as saying: “the democratic process doesn’t quite seem to be working”1. In a special issue of the journal Environmental Politics in 2010, political scientist Mark Beeson argued2 that forms of ‘good’ authoritarianism “may become not only justifiable, but essential for the survival of humanity in anything approaching a civilised form”.
http://www.nature.com/news/climate-policy-democracy-is-not-an-inconvenience-1.18393?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews
Abbey weighs in.
In a world of identity politics (which was a major cause of the Left’s decline in influence), and the PC Police everywhere, this was widely criticized:
http://compassrosebooks.blogspot.com/2009/10/edward-abbey-on-immigration.html
The United States has been fully settled, and more than full, for at least a century. We have nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by allowing the old boat to be swamped.
I see immigrants who bring more to the US than some of the locals. Not just at the top end (e.g., Silicon Valley, research universities, medicine), but also at the lower end (e.g. service workers). My personal experience with immigrants has been positive; I haven’t had any negative experiences.
Lots of good immigrant friends.
However, we are in population overshoot, and many come from anti-nature Catholic or Islamic cultures, immersed in superstition, and not having the nature centered values of this Earthling.
“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
– Denis Diderot
I realize that saying no immigrants allowed is easier than to say we want some but not others, but I think we’ll lose something if we restrict the future of America to only those who are born here or those who are born overseas to American parents.
Then you have never been desperate for a job of the sort poorly educated people in this country depend on to pay their bills. I personally not that many years ago had a job in a factory ( mine was a GOOD job as this area goes but I have many skills that made me a very valuable person to have around- skills seldom possessed by just ONE individual ) where the percentage of newcomers increased year after year.
The local people were used to earning enough to live two plus kids to a house and not actually trying to KILL THEMSELVES working faster and faster day after day. The new folks are willing to live two or three to a room, and work as hard and as fast as they are physically able. Management of course was and is tickled pink to keep on upping production.
Incidentally that furniture factory is still in operation. It’s just about the only one left nearby out of a couple of dozen thirty years ago. I worked there for a while during bad years on the farm. There was a time when you could walk into a factory around here and get a try out for a machine operators job on the spot. Not anymore.
But I went to grade school on the same bus with the plant manager and he knew about my background and was willing to have me on board even as a rolling stone working odd hours when most of the maintenance mechanics were gone home for the evening or weekend.
It IS a Darwinian world.
Some of those brown skinned girls are now marrying freckle faced Irish guys- and vice versa of course. Some of both kinds just ”take up” together and have families.
Hardly anybody except the old folks gives a shit anymore. Bastardry has lost it’s sting.
Even if we close the borders now we waspish sort will be only one of the two or three largest ethnic groups in half a century. No big deal. The Earth will continue to orbit the sun and eventually the sun will vaporize this planet.
The local people were used to earning enough to live two plus kids to a house and not actually trying to KILL THEMSELVES working faster and faster day after day. The new folks are willing to live two or three to a room, and work as hard and as fast as they are physically able. Management of course was and is tickled pink to keep on upping production.
Have immigrants lowered wages? I’m sure in many cases they have.
But if we didn’t have them here, wouldn’t many of those jobs just go overseas?
Seems like US workers are competing with the world’s workers, whether the world’s workers live in the US or in a foreign country. So to avoid loss of jobs for US workers, wouldn’t you need to find a way to prevent corporations from using overseas workers?
Even in some jobs which might seem to be location-based (e.g., construction, medical care), jobs can be sent overseas when possible. For example, you can get prefab construction. You can have medical tourism.
So I think the jobs issue involves more than immigration.
Boomer II said:
Not when the hunt is on for scapegoats, and the lords of capital want to distract attention away from themselves and their own role in causing the unemployment and low wages.
Yes, I think there is a lot of truth to that. The immigration debate, especially in US politics, is serving as a distraction from other issues that some folks don’t want to deal with.
The American Idea and Today’s G.O.P. – The New York Times: As a definitive report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recently found, today’s immigrants are assimilating as fast as previous ones. They are learning English. They are healthier than native-born Americans. Immigrant men age 18 to 39 are incarcerated at roughly one-fourth the rate of American men.
Let’s be very clear
Syrian Immigrants ≠ Indian H1B/Latin American workers
I think there is an obvious religious angle here that is being overlooked in the name of keeping the debate politically correct. But it does not matter, Europe will soon face what India had to face for 800 years.
We did very well relatively compared to other regions that faced similar onslaught but I am not so sure about Europe, they are so drunk on liberalism that they seem to have forgotten basic rules of human societies.
Immigrants come in all forms. Some contribute positively to their new countries and some may contribute negatively.
That’s why I think that while saying no immigrants of any kind may be the easiest to conceptualize, I don’t think it is necessarily in the best interests of a country. I also don’t think that restricting immigrants based on country of origin, religion, or race is the best way to decide who gets in and who doesn’t. I would imagine that there are desirable people in every category.
Of course, I am not making policy. But I personally don’t advocate whipping up a frenzy against immigration around the world.
“I don’t think it is necessarily in the best interests of a country. I also don’t think that restricting immigrants based on country of origin, religion, or race is the best way to decide who gets in and who doesn’t”
On the contrary it’s critical that one does it.
“I would imagine that there are desirable people in every category”
This is exactly the kind of political correctness I am talking about.
Well but I don’t want to whine about it anymore, I have made my point.
But Silicon Valley, for example, has had important contributions from immigrants from both India and Pakistan. Should the US have kept them out?
And should we have kept out Jews from Germany before WWII?
Or more recently doctors and researchers from various Asian countries?
What religious groups do you want us to ban across the board? No Muslims? No Hindus? No Jews?
As I said, perhaps it is easier to ban all immigrants no matter how well educated, no matter how wealthy, and no matter what contributions they can make.
But if we want to continue to invite in people who make contributions, do we really want to limit people from specific countries or from specific religions or from specific racial groups?
Was the US justified in rounding up Japanese Americans and putting them into camps during WWII?
I’m not being politically correct. I am being practical. The US was founded on immigrant contributions. If we banned people from coming to the US hundreds of years ago, we would have a much different country.
You are stretching my argument, I am not advising any pogroms here, my country and my religion is one of the most tolerant in the world and I share those values. But even that has it’s limits.
What I am saying is that don’t meddle in other people’s affairs and keep a closed eye on who comes in. As far as deciding whom to keep or not is your country’s and your communities choice, it’s none of my business. I was just saying that history should be your guide. The entire goal is to avoid violence or any other kind of adverse actions later.
Blocking all kinds of migration (as you said) is certainly easier to implement but it’s counterproductive. Of course it beats accepting anybody and everybody any day.
Dealing with a flood of new people will be a challenge for any country.
It’s certainly a worthy discussion topic.
However, it is my inclination to find better solutions than to erect walls and throw people (especially vulnerable people) out of a country.
I see income inequality, resource depletion, and loss of jobs as international problems which may require some international ideas.
That being said, I do believe smaller, more cohesive communities are easier to govern than big, diverse ones. So trying to keep communities small rather than letting them grow big has its benefits. I’m looking for ways to do that with as little violence as possible.
I suppose it helps to better understand the triggers for violence and to eliminate those as much as possible rather than to physically restrict people’s movement from place to place.
Also, I think erecting an infrastructure and maintaining a defense system to stop immigrants may end up wasting valuable resources more than it will protect those resources.
wiseindian says:
…don’t meddle in other people’s affairs…
This mirrors what Edward Abbey says above:
If we truly wish to help them we must stop meddling in their domestic troubles and permit them to carry out the social, political, and moral revolution which is both necessary and inevitable.
And in this I am in complete agreement.
But of course this is hardly what the United States government does.
The United States government, for instance, spends billions of dollars to meddle in the internal affairs of Mexico and other central American countries through the Merida Initiative, the “Strategy for Engagement in Central America” and the “Central America Regional Security Initiative.”
The US’s imperial enterprise in Latin America is of course haloed over with high-sounding rhetoric like “U.S. assistance focuses on (1) disrupting organized criminal groups, (2) institutionalizing the rule of law, (3) creating a 21st century border, and (4) building strong and resilient communities.”
https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R41349.pdf
But the reality of what the U.S. pays for in Mexico and Central America is something very different from what all Congress’s flowery wordsmithing would have us believe:
The number of contemporary ‘disappearances’ in Guatemala over the past 10 years—25,000 people, or 2,500 per year—is already the same as the estimates of those who disappeared during the height of Guatemala’s civil war. In Honduras, more citizens have been disappeared, tortured and murdered by police and military forces since the 2009 coup than during the entire 1980s, when the CIA-trained ‘Battalion 3-16’ death squad kept the population in terror.
This means that for the average Central American citizen, ‘boots on the ground’ doesn’t mean security, it means terror. How can Central Americans be expected to believe that the same uniforms that torture and disappear their loved ones will now protect them?
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/15371/comment-page-1#comment-635535
Hi Boomer II,
Irrational prejudices like racism, religious and anti-religious bigotry, homophobia, etc. have no basis in factual reality.
These irrational prejudices are, however, quite useful to political and economic entrepreneurs in their practice of group-making.
The desire to create and reify groups on the part of these ethnopolitical entrepreneurs provides the most plausible explanation as to why most people prefer fiction over fact, and why everyday people are encouraged to prefer fiction over fact.
Yale University professor Dan Kahan runs a blog called “Cultural Cognition Project” where he and other researchers explore why and how group solidarity and allegiance cause human beings to depart from factual reality.
http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/
What Kahan and the other researchers who contribute to his blog have found might surprise you.
As it turns out, human reason and human intelligence are seldom used for the purpose of searching for factual truth. Quite the opposite, the most intelligent and informed amongst us are typically the most adept, and prone, to distort reality in order to evoke, summon and call groups into being. As Ro.g.ers B.r.u.b.aker has noted, “their categories are for doing — designed to stir, summon, justify, mobilize, kindle and energize.”
Neuroscientists and psychologists have settled in much the same place as the social scientists. As the phsychologist Jonathan Haidt concludes, “we did not evolve language and reasoning because they helped us to find truth; we evolved these skills because they were useful to their bearers, and among their greatest benefits were reputation management and manipulation.”
Haidt adds that sometimes we can use controlled processes to override our initial intuitions in order to search for factual reality, but concludes “this happens rarely.”
http://edge.org/conversation/moral-psychology-and-the-misunderstanding-of-religion
Every low wage low skill job that goes overseas means in the end one more person on welfare or in jail here inside the USA.
This is somewhat of a tragedy of the commons sort of problem, in that the people who send jobs over seas make profits by doing so that are much larger than their contribution to supporting the welfare state.
IF we had a sensible government, we would have kept our industries at home. We could have controlled the pollution better, our enemies real and potential would be relatively weaker, we would be relatively stronger, and the higher cost of goods made here in the USA by higher paid unskilled and semi skilled workers would be the greatest bargain conceivable.
ONLY a FUCKING IDIOT would rather have a cheap shirt made overseas in place of a more expensive shirt made domestically- when the externalized cost of the cheap shirt includes supporting the people who used to make shirts on welfare and locking them up for robbing, stealing, dealing. Some of them are just making babies because sex is the cheapest possible entertainment-except for drugs of course.
Dope is actually cheaper than legal booze and beer. It can be cheaper than cable tv too.You can’t get cable turned on unless somebody in the house has credit, and they turn it off when the bill is not paid. Your friendly local dealer will be glad to have you on a cash as you go basis – and you can owe him ten and still get some.If you pay the last ten you owe him, he will charge the current purchase.
OF course liberals are hypocrites in a lot of cases because they see immigrants as democratic voters and future taxpayers needed to support the old age welfare state they created. Conservatives are hypocrites who say they want growth but really want cheap help.
And of course both words mean little anymore except as insults.
It is damned near idiotic to even use these words anymore.
All my older acquaintances think I am a pink panty wearing tree hugging whale loving idiot- and the younger ones believe I am a Neanderthal ready to rape any good looking girl in a mini skirt and blame it on her.They are AMAZED to hear me say something environmentally sensible unless they ACTUALLY KNOW ME WELL.
OFM I know you quite well from your voluminous posts sharing your views here. If you review your above post for elements of disgust you will find your words are literally dripping with that emotion at a great many points. These are also points where the high quality cognition, for which you are justly respected, ceases to exist. I would urge you to review the URL included just above where you shared your comments:
http://edge.org/conversation/moral-psychology-and-the-misunderstanding-of-religion
I have not the slightest desire to show you where in my opinion you are wrong. I think if you review the points where you express your disgust, and ask yourself if there is a more humane interpretation of what is real, you will find your own deeper humanity. Anyhow that is my suggestion.
Bullshit.
I am an honest partisan when it comes to my local people, the ones I grew up with, and do not mind showing my colors.
I am PROUD of my partisan colors.
There are certainly people smarter than I am , and better educated, within specialties, but taken all around I am ready to debate ANYBODY on the big picture issues.
I exaggerate deliberately in choosing my words to get my points across. They call my style artistic license if they like it, and demagoguery if they don’t.
If you know very much about what modern biologists know then you will understand that while I am a self acknowledged partisan , I am also on ROCK SOLID ground.
I have spent YEARS reading the work of top shelf historians and biologists and great writers. A good many of the more recent ones hold professorships at Ivy League universities. EO Wilson, Pinker , Gould in the last year , at least six volumes among these three.
I sometimes disagree with Glenn S but to borrow from his last upthread comment:
”Neuroscientists and psychologists have settled in much the same place as the social scientists. As the phsychologist Jonathan Haidt concludes, “we did not evolve language and reasoning because they helped us to find truth; we evolved these skills because they were useful to their bearers, and among their greatest benefits were reputation management and manipulation.”
(Incidentally the more he posts the more I find myself thinking he is smarter than I originally thought. Smarter than the average bear by a mile and maybe smarter than I am. )
NOTE that last borrowed line .
IN PLAINER LANGUAGE IT READS ”DECEPTION” AND MANIPULATION. SOP behavior.
Now let’s separate my UNDERSTANDING of humanity – as outlined in my many comments from my day to day life as a human being.
I haven’t ripped the panties off a girl in mini since back in the sixties. It WAS her fault, she TOLD me to HURRY. Lol , true story,been whispering in her ear what I was going to do for half an hour on the way home from eating out riding with another couple, us in the back. Those were THE DAYS. It took both of us to get the door unlocked for fumbling the keys.
Now if a woman has it and flaunts it I AM going to look – to my heart’s content. So long as she isn’t accompanied by a man apt to kick my old fat ass.
Looking is as close as I will ever get again to the kind of woman I am PROGRAMMED to want. Old women don’t have kids. The whole sex thing is about having kids.
I am one of the few I know who will ADMIT what I think and believe.
Most of us PRETEND.
We lie cheat betray cooperate steal give alms make friends murder because we are WHAT WE ARE.
Animals.
We rationalize every goddamned thing we do. And within the limits of ”getting away with it” we do pretty damned much as we please..
It pleases me to be a “cooperator”. It pleases others to be a “taker”. Life works for both kinds. Both kinds are necessary. I despise that sort , they have contempt for me as a potential victim.
There are damned few people who can look deep into the “soul” of our kind and come away without being bitter and disillusioned but I can and do walk away from this understanding just like a lawyer in court walks away from his low life client’s legal case.
Except in this forum. This forum IS my courtroom courtesy of our gracious host Ron P and the audience is my jury and my sorry client is the human race, one portion or another of it , depending on which of my soapboxes I am using any given day.
So – ONE day the English people are the scum of the earth, they drove my people out of Ireland starving.
ANOTHER day the English people are noble, they put a stop to Indian men burning their wives at their own funerals and gave India the priceless gift of rule of law.
If you were to know me personally without having encountered me in war paint trying to stir up a fight in this forum, you would without a doubt think of me as a perfectly conventional old fuddy ruddy retired country school pedagogue, known to volunteer at most any sort of community endeavor and always willing to pick up anybody walking.
Between times commenting here I am passing the time today watching a Yale U online course on the history of the Roman Empire.
Every comment is composed hoping to draw criticism. I am painting an intellectual landscape and want to discover any weak spots in my thinking asap so as to do a better job on the book I am plugging away at.
If I ever finish it, it will be a future history novel on the grand scale, well supplied with saints and demons of the human variety.
Incidentally being a PROFESSIONAL farmer , meaning university trained, I know a hell of a lot about CONTROLLING problems early before they get out of hand in semi synthetic simplified ecosystems such as a farm.
If you want to keep a noxious weed out of your fields, you do not wait until it is smothering your crops. You get on the job IMMEDIATELY as soon as you find the weed.
They teach you the same thing in medical school. You control a contagious disease by isolating it and stamping it out IMMEDIATELY if at all possible.
Countries are artificial ecosystems in one sense. In another they are super colonies or super tribes.
New, fresh blood is good – in limited amounts. Too much may displace local people. This may actually be GOOD for the country or super tribe but it can also be very bad, especially for down and out locals. I speak for them in large part because nobody else bothers in such discussions as this one. In large part because I was born among them.
The ultimate threat to humanity is overshoot.
My embedded or nested local tribe and my super tribe are already in overshoot. Good sense dictates limiting population growth any way we can without resorting to violence.
Cutting off immigration would put us well down the road towards the demographic hump and help us get over the hump without destroying so much more of the environment -without destroying things that can never be replaced.
NOW PLEASE explain to me where I have missed the boat to enlightenment. I am EAGER to hear what you have to say.
“ANOTHER day the English people are noble, they put a stop to Indian men burning their wives at their own funerals and gave India the priceless gift of rule of law”
OFM,
Wow. You really need to dig up some history books and read them, actually maybe it’s our fault that we don’t publish enough books on Indian history. Maybe Indian govt needs to buy a slot on CNN.
The whole campaign against Sati (wife burning) was run by an Indian called Raja Rammohan Roy not by the English. The English helped him and for that we are thankful but it pales in comparison to what they did elsewhere. Moreover in Sati it’s the wife’s choice to jump on the pyre, no one forces her. It comes from the old practice of “Jauhar” where women folk commit suicide to escape rape at the hands of foreign muslim invaders.
“and gave India the priceless gift of rule of law”
This is such BS that it doesn’t even deserve a reply. Buy a copy of “Arthashastra” (Treatise on Law and Finance) from Amazon. When it was written the English were probably doing rock and cave paintings.
When the English invaded this country the Marathas and Sikhs were the biggest empires in the country, they had European style set piece artillery and French doctors at their disposal, elaborate financial and educational systems, textbooks on law, court systems and everything a modern state needs. And yet you make it sound as if we were some savages waiting to be civilized.
The only thing we didn’t have was unity and for that India and other Asian countries paid for dearly.
Edward Abbey said:
What is this guy Abbey, some kind of Nazi Wanna Be?
Yes he is. I missed this post the first time. I would have deleted it.
Please, no one quote this guy again.
Abbey is one of the greatest of all environmental writers but I will refrain from quoting him. I believe in property rights and this IS Ron’s blog.
Nobody is right all the time.
I am sure I know a lot of things that just ain’t true myself. The oldest commencement joke ever told to graduating physicians is that half of what they have been taught is wrong- but WHICH HALF?
Anybody who wants a fuller and deeper perspective on the reality of the environment and the welfare state is missing the boat if they write Abbey off.
Hopefully, the guy I just quoted is not hiding any, say, ‘controversial prejudices’ of their own somewhere. ‘u^
“They are not fleeing into other overpopulated countries like India or Pakistan but into the relatively low population countries of Europe.” India has about the same population density as Holland and Belgium. Pakistan has about the same population density as Britain, Germany and Italy.
Yeah, I should have phrased that better. India has the highest population density of any of them but that is not what the immigrants are looking at. They are looking for places where they might have a better opportunity, a better life for them and their families. India, Pakistan or any of the even less populated Middle Eastern countries are definitely not that place. So they flee to Europe just as Latin Americans migrate to the USA.
Pakistan will be the first large country over the cliff, in IMHO.
Ecologically devastated, in population overshoot, dependent on external energy sources while still in a industrial agricultural model, water challenged, with a ignorant superstition centered population.
Oh, and run by a corrupt military.
I recently found this book in our local library. Among other things Kenneally correlates various studies of DNA with human and pre-human migrations over time. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/books/review/christine-kenneallys-invisible-history-of-the-human-race.html?_r=0
Excerpts from some comments on the prior post:
One can’t help but wonder if what Europe is experiencing in regard to migrants and refugees from the Middle East and North Africa is a preview of what may happen in the Americas if civil unrest/civil war gets much worse in South and Central America. Of course, it’s already happening in the Americas, but my point is that it could get a lot worse.
EU chief fears union will COLLAPSE over migrant crisis
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/607595/Migrant-crisis-EU-lost-control-borders-danger-collapse
Europe and the US are like lifeboats. If we accept everyone that wants to come, we sink. I doubt we will be able to enact the hard policies that will keep the lifeboats above water. Europe is showing it can’t. As our US political parties increasingly pander for the minority vote, we will likely further reduce the effectiveness of our restrictions on illegal immigration. At some point we will reach a tipping point – hispanics, want to see more hispanic immigrants, chinese want to see more chinese, etc. and and the political pressure will build.
The United States should accept millions of immigrants and all the men up to the age of 60 be required to serve in the military. That military force then be used to civilize the world. Starting with Syria.
The U.S. has already implemented such a policy:
So far 107,398 persons have taken the US up on its offer of citizenship in exchange for military service.
You know what’s funny about the timing of the implementation of that policy to incentivize military service via citizenship, is it occurred not long after the debut of the movie ‘Star Troopers’, in which citizenship is guaranteed by military service. I don’t know for certain the two are connected but the timing is interestingly coincidental. As they say, ‘Life imitates art’.
Sounds a lot like what happened in the Roman Empire in its waning days…
Late Roman army (284–476 AD) continuing as East Roman army (476–641 AD)[edit]
The Late Roman army (284–476 AD and its continuation, in the surviving eastern half of the empire, as the East Roman army to 641). In this phase, crystallised by the reforms of the emperor Diocletian (ruled 284–305 AD), the Roman army returned to regular annual conscription of citizens, while admitting large numbers of non-citizen barbarian volunteers. However, soldiers remained 25-year professionals and did not return to the short-term levies of the Republic. The old dual organisation of legions and auxilia was abandoned, with citizens and non-citizens now serving in the same units. The old legions were broken up into cohort or even smaller sizes. At the same time, a substantial proportion of the army’s effectives were stationed in the interior of the empire, in the form of comitatus praesentales, armies that escorted the emperors.
Source Wikipedia
That policy is no big deal. I’m a us citizen and a former inmigrant, so let me lay out for you how it works:
Foreign born living in the USA are either in country legally or illegally. Within the legal alien population origin we have the group possessing a RESIDENT visa. That visa gives the holder the SAME rights and obligations as a us citizen, except for the right to vote. This includes the obligation to serve in the armed forces if called to do so (I know because I was enrolled in the selective service when I was 18, it was my duty to join before I became a citizen).
The USA armed forces aren’t allowed to enlist an illegal. Therefore the foreign born who are active armed forces members are legal residents. And legal residence also allows the individual to obtain USA citizenship, subject to exactly the same conditions listed above: clean record, speak English, know USA history and civics, pledge allegiance, etc.
I would like to add that in inmigrant families there’s a common perception that it helps if they have at least one member in the police, the reserves or the active armed forces (for example I have a grandson serving in the Army, my son studied and specialized in how to detect and respond to terrorist attacks, etc).
As far as I can see the only special deal these persons are getting is the shorter wait time, they seem to have waived the five year waiting period. But also imposed a FIVE year commitment to serve or the deal is off. So the change is mostly intended to get more motivated soldiers. It’s no big deal.
I do wish to remind you that there’s a huge propaganda effort to confuse the people, there’s no mention of legal versus illegal alien. The legal aliens supposed to be carefully screened. Evidently the system fails on occasion. Illegal residents aren’t screened at all. But the powers that be want that flood of ILLEGALs. The right wants cheap labor, the left wands underclass & uneducated voters they think will vote for their commie ideas.
It’s ironic that it used to be we’d hear about countries that would gun down people trying to escape.
And now we’ve got an increasing number of people expecting to gun down people trying to get in.
Any excuse to kill people, I suppose.
And I’m guessing that some of the same people who thought the Communists were terrible for building walls and then killing escapees, now want to build their own walls and kill people for climbing over them.
Do you suppose, then, that the solution is to have more countries become Communist and build walls to keep in their citizens, and then we’ll go fight those countries and welcome anyone who escapes?
There’s no reason to shoot anybody. A simple arrest and 30 days in a nice restricted environment should do as a deterrent. Repeat offenders can be rewarded with 60 days. The key is to remove the financial incentives.
The key is to remove the financial incentives.
Says the man, who was by his own admission, an economic refugee from Cuba and communism… I do find that a tad ironic!
I’m a us citizen, expressing what I think is best for the nation. My background is irrelevant, and I wasn’t an economic refugee. I was expelled from school when I was 13 years old for speaking out about the lack of food. A few months later the secret police got around to come looking for me, so I hid for a while and my dad paid to have me sent to Spain. There were 8000 of us, all minors.
Your attempt to discriminate against me doesn’t work. I’m used to racists, bigots, and communists attacking me because I’m a cuban refugee. It’s part of our lives.
Your attempt to discriminate against me doesn’t work.
My finding it ironic, that someone who is an immigrant proclaims to wanting to keep other immigrants out of the US, doesn’t in any way, constitute discrimination on my part.
All I’m doing is pointing out that perhaps you are just keeping up the fine old tradition of almost every other immigrant group throughout history, who once they have gotten theirs, strongly oppose anyone else getting some as well. Apparently the more things change the more they stay the same.
If you want a good laugh about the subject of discrimination from the perspective of a very funny black American journalist then watch this. And I absolutely promise you, you will laugh!
https://www.ted.com/talks/rich_benjamin_my_road_trip_through_the_whitest_towns_in_america?language=en
When French fur traders landed themselves on the North American continent, they did the best they could to make a go of it. Plenty of fur bearing animals in the new world, the big village, Canada.
When roaming around the areas now known as Manitoba and Saskatchewan, they would occasionally interact with the natives. Turned out, they got along fairly well, the French fur traders also noticed the native young women and were happy to hang around with them from time to time. The children became known as metis.
People can and do get along.
Some words that support the notion that we do cooperate.
Alabama, Ohio, Illinois, Mississippi, Iowa, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Wisconsin, South Dakota, North Dakota, Michigan, Minnesota, Manitoba, Utah, Kansas, Massachusetts, Saskatchewan, Kentucky, Tennessee, Nebraska, Wyoming.
All words of Native American origin. A prudent use of words, no matter where they originate.
Can’t we all just get along?
History shows we can’t. We are here because we were able to defeat and if necessary consume the other guys.
I suppose gypsy hunts will return to Europe now. Not that they ever went away.
Not until Pancho Villa absconded 60,000 head of cattle from Randolf Hearst did anybody get upset, then after that, General Pershing made a trip to Mexico. Dwight Eisenhower went along for the ride and next thing you know, there’s an interstate highway system and people are migrating from all points and places on the planet, it has become the norm.
Pancho Villa starred as himself as a Mexican revolutionary, made money on a film while fighting the war and filming the war at the same time. Hilarious, you can’t make up stuff like that.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/uncovering-the-truth-behind-the-myth-of-pancho-villa-movie-star-110349996/
Well, we stole the Southwest from Mexico,and the Mexicans of that day stole it from the so called Indians who were there before them and from the Spanish who were there before them but AFTER the so called Indians. I could look up who stole it from who before that but I no longer trust my memory and I never did actually STUDY Mexican history. The Incas and Aztecs had good strong right arm title for a while, not that far to the south, but not all the way up to the Rio Grande as best my memory serves.
I always thought Pancho was a decent enough guy as dictators, revolutionaries, and bandits go.
No doubt the poor folks who ate some of those cows thought he was a decent enough guy, he didn’t ever have enough soldiers at any one time to eat that many and SOME beef and leather MUST have “trickled down” to the peons – the ones that didn’t get hung or shot out of hand. Hanging a man is a lot of fun but it gets to be a CHORE after a while and shooting him is a lot less trouble.
I fail to see any good reason to think any better of a human being than a hyena but I do anyway. I was PROGRAMMED that way, it’s NOT MY FAULT. 😉
Incidentally female hyenas wouldn’t take kindly to being called bitches given that they do have BALLS – or at least adequate facsimiles thereof and they are apparently as tough as the males. I am not making this up either.
HOPEFULLY the regulars here will all recognize sarcasm when it is served up by the shovel full.
Fernando,
I think that’s a true enough statement, that “We are here because we were able to defeat and if necessary consume the other guys.”
However, I believe the problems which confront mankind now — global warming, resource depletion, destruction of the seas, nuclear self-immolation, etc. — are of such a nature that a more transcendent level of cooperation will be required. That is, at least, if the human species is to survive.
Is the evolution of such a transcendent level of cooperation possible?
The evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson believes it is: “Confront a human group with a novel problem, even one that never existed in the so-called ancestral environment, and its members may well come up with a workable solution.”
And the sort of major cultural transitions required to address today’s problems are not unheard of, such as that which Peter Turchin describes here:
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-candles-in-the-dark/peter-turchin
An argument which holds that things in the future will invariably be as they have been in the past relies on a rhetological fallacy known as “appeal to tradition: Claiming something is true because it’s (apparently) always been that way.”
But, as Stephen Toulmin has pointed out, this sort of “cosmopolitical argument” began losing its credibility and power to persuade beginning in the 18th century.
The other guys will eat the pansies who try to transcend. I’ve seen too much and studied enough to convince myself the best solution is to talk softly and carry a large caliber rifle.
The problems we face will be solved by “involuntary population reduction”.
Fernando,
The “best solution is to talk softly and carry a large caliber rifle”?
Just exactly how will such a beligerent “solution” keep us from blowing ourselves to Kingdom Cum with nuclear armaments?
If the world balkanizes now into various power blocks, how will that help us to solve problems like global warming and the destruction of the seas which require global solutions, with everyone’s cooperation?
I don’t think a top down global solution for global warming is feasible. Nor is it desirable. Global warming just doesn’t rank that high on my list.
A top down solution for nuclear warfare isn’t feasible either. Nothing you listed is really solvable the way you propose it. Utopian world government will not happen, it isn’t desirable, and it should be opposed.
That’s because you are an obvious crank Fernando.
All you have to do is open your mouth or write something down. You can take the crank out of the bedroom, but you can’t take the crank out of the crank. It’s that obvious.
No Thomas Lee, what should be obvious is that people like you can’t have a blog discussion without throwing insults. But in me you are dealing with a person who was regularly insulted and denigrated from an early age by communists who didn’t like my family’s lack of support for their abuses. As far as I’m concerned you can keep on trolling.
An argument which holds that things in the future will invariably be as they have been in the past relies on a rhetological fallacy known as “appeal to tradition: Claiming something is true because it’s (apparently) always been that way.”
Tell that to a chemist and he will laugh his ass off. The same exact chemicals under precisely the same conditions always react the same way.
Now humans are more flexible in our behavior than any other creatures but we nevertheless compete with other species for space and resources- until we get crowded and then we start competing with each other. The more things change the more they stay the same.
The rules of the game are somewhat elastic when it comes to humanity because we are able to form alliances between formerly competing groups in order to compete with STILL OTHER groups and alliances of groups.
Now the question becomes – can all of humanity, or nearly all of humanity, morph into JUST ONE SUPERGROUP ?
I believe this might be theoretically possible , but I have not yet seen any evidence that it is even remotely likely to actually happen.
Now if the Little Green Men from Alpha Centuari mistakenly program a fleet of hundred feet tall bullet proof robots to go around stomping on cars due to believing cars are the dominant life form here – well maybe we would all morph into one supergroup.
I am a big believer in evolutionary psychology, but my own gut instinct is to believe that the universe operates on positive and negative plus and minus hot and cold up and down attracting and repelling forces..
I doubt a group of humans CAN actually bond together effectively without at least the PERCEPTION that the group distinguishes insiders from outsiders and protects insiders from outsiders after some fashion.
The signs of being an insider may be no more obvious than dressing just right or eating just right or laughing at a certain custom of outsiders- and the protection may be no more than a doorman who does not allow people who are NOT dressed just right into the restaurant- but at the opposite end, it ranges right up to aircraft carriers and ICBM’s.
This is a very deep subject. I wonder if we will ever know the answers.
I doubt we will all ever be members of a one and only supergroup when it comes to taking any sort of concerted action- but we MIGHT get together to the extent necessary to avoid the very worst aspects of the coming crash.
It is a lot more likely imo that some people and some countries will cheat like hell as soon as it becomes possible to do so.
A flat out CBN war might wipe out every last one of us but anything short of that will probably leave a few survivors scattered here and there in places where survival is possible.
Even the worst war might leave a few people someplace alive to repopulate the planet. Down around the tip of South America maybe.The bombs, the bugs and the poisons will be aimed almost exclusively at well populated spots north of the equator and the worst of the fallout will fall out without ever reaching that far south.
Mother Nature doesn’t give a shit. She has plenty of microbes buried thousands of feet inside solid rock all over the planet to use as feed stock to get things rolling again. Time means nothing to her.
old Farmer Mac says:
OFM, I invite you to gather up your courage and make the leap from the 17th century to the 21st. It’s really not all as bad out there as what you might think.
The philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin describes the centuries-old, and now obsolete, world which you cherish in this way:
Across the spectrum from physics to psychology, no branch of the natural sciences any longer relied on support from the 17th-century faith in the rationality of Nature… From 1890 to 1910, the physicists J.J. Thomson, Albert Einstein, and Max Planck broke the links between current physical theory and earlier Newtonian orthodoxy. The new physics so created — particles smaller than the lightest atom, space and time that lack sharp-edged distinctness, matter and energy that seemed interchangeable — undercut the last pretence that Euclidian geometry and Newtonian mechanics are certain, final, and indespensible to the rational understanding of Nature….
Nostalgia for the Modern Cosmopolis exposes us to the frailty of the image of Nature on which it rests: of a stable physical system of bodies moving in fixed orbits around a single, central source of power — the Sun and the planets as a model for the Sun King and his subjects. This model served constructive ends in the 17th century, but the rigidity it imposed on rational practice in a world of independent and separate agents is no longer appropriate in the 20th century, which is a time of increasing interdependence, cultural diversity and historical change. Intellectual and social patterns that had the virtue of being stable and predictable in earlier times turn out, in our time, to have the vice of being stereotyped and unadaptable. By continuing to impose on thought and action all the demands of unreconstructed Modernity — rigor, exactitude, and system — we risk making our ideas and institutions not just stable but sclerotic, and being unable to modify them in reasonable ways to meet the fresh demands of novel situations.
Across the spectrum from physics to psychology, no branch of the natural sciences any longer relied on support from the 17th-century faith in the rationality of Nature… From 1890 to 1910, the physicists J.J. Thomson, Albert Einstein, and Max Planck broke the links between current physical theory and earlier Newtonian orthodoxy. The new physics so created — particles smaller than the lightest atom, space and time that lack sharp-edged distinctness, matter and energy that seemed interchangeable — undercut the last pretence that Euclidian geometry and Newtonian mechanics are certain, final, and indespensible to the rational understanding of Nature….
Aside from the fact that, so called ‘New Physics’ was just a better description of reality than the models described by Euclidian Geometry and Newtonian Mechanics, and therefore did not CREATE any new particles whatsoever. It might also be wise to remember that despite the fact that we now know that a brick wall is mostly comprised of empty space, slamming into one at 100 mph will still turn any of us into one hell of a bloody mess… albeit a bloody mess comprised mostly of empty space!
Come on Glenn,
You are smarter than that. LOL.
The theories of physics and the branch of physics we call chemistry have been REFINED to such an extent that we can actually talk about older theories- which are after all only MODELS of reality – being overturned. But really the new stuff is only a more refined model of reality.
The same old exact reactants under the same old exact conditions STILL REACT EXACTLY THE SAME OLD WAY.
People have not had TIME ENOUGH to evolve to act in noticeably different ways from the ways people reacted in similar circumstances a century ago or a thousand years ago or ten thousand years ago. When we get right down to the nitty gritty, I doubt we would find anything unusual in the behavior of a man or woman who lived twenty or thirty thousand years ago, under circumstances familiar to that person and to us. Go back twice that far, and you might start seeing some real differences, but maybe not even then.Modern humanity supposedly emerged in that time frame.
THERE IS NO REASON to think or assume that evolutionary forces are changing our behavior NOTICEABLY. The old friend and foe programming has SERVED US WELL for as far back as we can see or think- even troops of chimps fight wars and defend territories. So did our ancestors , I would bet ten thousand to one on it.
The PROGRAMMING IS THERE, but given that our behavior is unusually flexible and we are capable of complex learning, we can change our minds about the IDENTITY of strangers and acquaintances and move them from one side of the balance to the other -GIVEN sufficient reasons and evidence for doing so.
I certainly have no personal problem dealing with people of other kinds, for instance marrying a Jewish woman even though my family is hard core Baptist – at least the old folks , the ones who are still alive.
People who do not feel threatened by people who are different usually have the luxury of feeling that way because they are NOT threatened.
A SOCIAL WORKER gets her living out of people with troubles. I have a social worker in my family.
A laborer who finds his warm weather seasonal job has been taken by an immigrant half his age next spring has an entirely different perspective I assure you. I have relatives in that situation too.
The social worker really doesn’t REALLY give a shit. If she did, she would stay past five o’clock and give out her personal phone number and be helping on the soup line on her own time. She has not and will not do these things.She takes her vacation days, she made sure she bought a house in a neighborhood free of poor people and immigrants. If she had money enough I do not doubt she would move into a GATED community. IF she had money enough she would put her kid in a private school.
The real pain comes in for ME when I am making so little that cutthroat competition means I either hire the new guy in his twenties who can do more and will do more for LESS money than the old guy in his fifties – or close my nickel and dime business. Oh well… I was ready to retire ANYWAY.
I quit farming except for a hobby level operation.
Now I see Fred’s comment below but electrons are cheap so I will post this one anyway, having already typed it.
When spring comes I may see if a few of the older guys who used to have plenty of work want to go in on shares on a field of tomatoes or something. If they do, I will cut them a hell of a deal because I really do give a shit.
I hire them as often as I can afford to pay them to help me with firewood and such. They are proud and it shames them to accept charity.
I doubt a group of humans CAN actually bond together effectively without at least the PERCEPTION that the group distinguishes insiders from outsiders and protects insiders from outsiders after some fashion.
I didn’t used to believe that, but when I noticed that both liberals and conservatives divide people up into Us and Them, I began to wonder if we’re not hardwired to classify everyone as an Us or a Them.
I believe it is possible to intellectually overcome this bias, and keep an open mind about everyone and to welcome everyone, but I think it takes mental work.
Now, I believe that human survival would likely be accomplished more easily by mutual cooperation, but I see some groups of humans who seem unable to find a solution other than killing the enemy. And they always seem to need an enemy.
I was thinking about my riff on immigrants and Communists. I think the hard right haters need someone to fight. Who they blame might shift from Communists to Muslims to someone else, but they are always fighting someone. Their threat alert is always going off.
I sometimes wish all the violent people would just go off and fight their wars and kill each other off and leave the rest of us alone.
Interesting article about German electric energy system
http://www.vox.com/2015/9/24/9366341/germany-coal-renewables-energiewende
Great post and very provacative. Very timely.
As I read through the comments I realized just what a rarified bunch of followers Ron’s blog attracts. The range of ideas, when I compare them to the absolute ignorance uttered daily by the political class I see in the media, is inspiring. And OFM ‘ a shucks, down here on the farm we’… doesn’t fool me for a bit. I am forwarding on the post, comments, and link to some friends.
My only addition are a couple of points/questions. Is this another facet/consequence to the end of ‘Globilization’? Was globilization, itself, merely a stay at home version of conquest and colonialism? Wouldn’t most of us migrate out of hell to save ourselves and family? And, am I just cynical when I take offense when the Pope speaks of the poor and migrants with such piousness? I looked up pious in the dictionary to make sure I used the right word when I should have used another, and in every case the definition added something like this: “characterized by a hypocritical concern with virtue or religious devotion; sanctimonious.” This isn’t about slinging mud on Catholics, but when I think of their stand on birth control and abortion I see in my mind sprawling Phillipino slums or the 21.2 million people of Mexico City to just to name two examples of unfetterd procreation based upon Catholic decree. I picture the gold that must abound the Vatican, and how the wealth and power of ‘holy’ ruling cabal will remain untouched and continue to grow, that is until Italy itself falls to these forces and the Vatican island is surrounded by collapse. I also believe that the leadership of a country has a responsibility to its citizens and duty to ensure the country survives all manner of onslaught, including safe borders. Does this mean more razor wire fences and mine fields?
And for myself, I imagine The Great Depression of where my parents came. If a poor hungry homeless man knocked at our door we would feed him, for sure. If he needed a bed and some meals for a few days, a hot shower, that would also happen. Could he move in and live with us? No. (I am just being honest).
This isn’t the thirties, Dorothy. Everything is speeding up. The crisis, migration, dissemination of news and communication, the power of the weapons and marshalling of zealots are all amplified in noise and frequency. The answer must come soon and I believe it will be in more fences before not too much longer. It has to, or Europe will be overwhelmed. And, it might just be the final bullet into the goal of the EU along with debt and culture conflict. We either retreat into our shell-like political borders, or become further involved in the violence and desperation. It looks like the beginning of a wildfire, and yes it can turn very bad and even worse.
I really do believe it will culminate in the end of globilization. Out migrations won’t be the cause, but it is certainly part of the resulting disease that could eventually kill the host.
regards
One thing seems rather clear to me, and that is that there exists a global, elite governing class which has managed to solve its collective action problems. It truly has no country.
But will the world now balkanize in reaction to this, breaking into several parts?
This would undoubtedly ring the death knell for globalization.
Or will the lower orders of society now play catch up, and learn to solve their collective action problems as well?
now available on Netflix….
Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret is a groundbreaking feature-length environmental documentary following intrepid filmmaker Kip Andersen as he uncovers the most destructive industry facing the planet today – and investigates why the world’s leading environmental organizations are too afraid to talk about it.
Animal agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation, water consumption and pollution, is responsible for more greenhouse gases than the transportation industry, and is a primary driver of rainforest destruction, species extinction, habitat loss, topsoil erosion, ocean “dead zones,” and virtually every other environmental ill. Yet it goes on, almost entirely unchallenged.
As Andersen approaches leaders in the environmental movement, he increasingly uncovers what appears to be an intentional refusal to discuss the issue of animal agriculture, while industry whistleblowers and watchdogs warn him of the risks to his freedom and even his life if he dares to persist.
As eye-opening as Blackfish and as inspiring as An Inconvenient Truth, this shocking yet humorous documentary reveals the absolutely devastating environmental impact large-scale factory farming has on our planet, and offers a path to global sustainability for a growing population.
http://www.cowspiracy.com/
We may destroy the Earth only home in order to do so, but we will not likely EVER give up eating meat.
We have canine teeth and stereoscopic depth perceptive vision.
The inescapable implications of this observation are clear. We were born to eat meat.
It is possible to live without meat of course- but in the natural world, meaning the world without a lot of various foods brought to us from far away places, it is VERY hard to be a hard core vegetarian.
we also have an appendix, prehensile tails and male pattern baldness. perhaps we can overcome. I imagine most people in the world today eat very little meat.
I have yet to see my first human with a prehensile tail. Please tell me where I can find one. This I gotta see.
Article about Venezuelan plan to ship gas to Trinidad LNG plant
http://www.ogj.com/articles/2015/09/venezuela-gas-from-loran-manatee-to-be-processed-at-point-fortin-lng.html
This implies Trinidad’s gas fields are starting to decline, they have space to feed gas from Venezuela. Now we must wait several years to see what happens.
Germany in a state of SIEGE: Merkel was cheered when she opened the floodgates to migrants. Now, with gangs of men roaming the streets and young German women being told to cover up, the mood’s changing
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3249667/Germany-state-SIEGE-Merkel-cheered-opened-floodgates-migrants-gangs-men-roaming-streets-young-German-women-told-cover-mood-s-changing.html
Jeffrey,
I read the linked article and came away with the distinct impression that it was written with the explicit intent of stirring up anti immigration sentiment to serve someone’s political agenda!
While I certainly don’t want to minimize or dismiss the seriousness of the this issue either to the countries in Europe who have allowed these people to enter nor the problems that exist in their countries of origin from which these refugees are coming, I think a very big reality check is in order.
Let’s get real! Germany is NOT under seige, OK?! My brother and sister both live there and my 83 year old mother is there on vacation. They are enjoying Octoberfest at the moment. Next week they are traveling through Austria to Hungary to visit my nephew, who BTW is US born, and has emigrated to Hungary and is raising his young daughters there. My sister just bought a vacation home on the shores of the lake Balaton in Hungary. Oh, and before I forget, my German brother in law is a social worker who works with Turkish immigrants… so perhaps my views on this matter are somewhat biased but I’m pretty sure that there are no gangs in the streets of Germany threatening young German women nor is anyone telling them to change the way they dress. At least that is what my three beautiful young German nieces are telling me…
While there are certainly real problems all over the world the last thing we need is to lose our sense of perspective by reading and even worse believing highly misleading sensationalist articles such as the one you have posted! The Daily Mail happens to be a tabloid that is often criticized for it’s sensationalist style…
Cheers!
Fred Magyar
EU chief fears union will COLLAPSE over migrant crisis
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/607595/Migrant-crisis-EU-lost-control-borders-danger-collapse
Fred:
You always make too much sense and your writing skills are nonpareil.
Which makes you dangerous.
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” – George Orwell.
Winston Smith must have been your mentor and editor. har
Also:
“The Camp of the Saints is a novel about population migration and its consequences. In Calcutta India, the Belgian government announces a policy in which Indian babies will be adopted and raised in Belgium. The policy is reversed after the Belgian consulate is inundated with poverty-stricken parents eager to give up their infant children.”
Compare that to the reality:
“1830: Using the method introduced by Maria Theresa in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the previous century, authorities in Nordhausen attempt to bring about the eventual extinction of the Romani population by forcibly and permanently removing children from their families for placement with non-Romanies.”
http://www.radoc.net/radoc.php?doc=art_e_holocaust_chronology&lang=en&articles=true
Ronald, I can assure you that many within my own extended family would like to deny the truths which you cite about the attempts to exterminate the Romani from Hungary and much of Europe. I’m often ostracized and considered to be the black sheep of my family because I usually lay my cards on the table face up.
I am also not blind to, or naive about the fact that the current Hungarian, neo facist ultra right wing government makes no bones about wanting to allow that extermination to continue. These are dark truths and we must shine some very bright lights on them. I would be the last one to suggest that all is well in Europe. These are dark times around the world, not just in Europe. And we are going to need all hands on deck to keep this ship from sinking in very stormy seas.
That having been said, The Daily Mail and who ever is behind the article that Jeffrey posted needs to be exposed for what it is, an anti basic human rights diatribe and an instigation of xenophobia by creating an environment of fear, emphasizing an us vs them mentality. To suggest that the refugees coming into Europe and into these camps are powerful and threaten anyone is ludicrous.
The Daily Mail is a pathetic rag!
Dammit Fred,
You ought to be ashamed to burn so much jet fuel gallivanting around.
Methinks if I were a politician I would try to get all the poor people to vote for me by taxiing jet fuel at five bucks a gallon and buying them some gasoline with the proceeds.
LOL.
I have a standing invitation to Hawaii for a couple of months and would be on a plane next week if I were free to travel. And after that I might just fire up my old truck and go exploring, for as far as it lasts. Take a bus or plane back home or buy another. That old trap might make it all the up to Alaska.
Just to be a gadfly- HOW MANY immigrants do you think Germany should admit?A million? FIVE million?
Once the gates are open, closing them may prove to be a damned sight harder than opening them.
The political backlash that will eventually erupt is apt to be a lot bigger problem than actually looking after the immigrants themselves.
I find it hard to believe that allowing a large number of immigrants into Germany or any other western European country is going to solve any problems back in the countries they come from.
Dammit Fred,
You ought to be ashamed to burn so much jet fuel gallivanting around.
LOL!, I’m walking and taking public transport in Sao Paulo to atone for my sins.
When I get back to Florida sometime in December I’ll be back on my bamboo bike and my kayak. I have my driving down to less than 5000 miles per year and I think I can bring it down even more.
Just to be a gadfly- HOW MANY immigrants do you think Germany should admit?A million? FIVE million?
To be honest OFM I haven’t a clue but one thing is for sure the immigrants will keep trying to get to Europe for better or worse by hook or by crook and Europe had better figure out how to integrate them into their societies. Walls ain’t gonna work!
From the BBC
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34185353
Germany can cope with at least 500,000 asylum seekers a year for several years, Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has said.
Germany expects more than 800,000 asylum-seekers in 2015 alone – four times the 2014 figure.
Mr Gabriel reiterated that other EU states should share the burden.
Call me crazy but I would strongly suggest that Brazil is a country that could easily take a few million with the help of the international community. Though I would make it a requirement that all immigrants need to play soccer and learn how to play drums and dance to Samba music, clothing mostly optional… if the immigrants don’t want to be part of a new paradigm and accept things like women’s or gay rights they can stay where they. But truth be told, all immigrant groups that have come to Brazil in the past have been assimilated quite well.
Let me end on this note (pun intended) We are all living in a changing world and the old paradigms are not working so we need completely new ways of doing things. We can all give up or start killing each other but there are incredible people doing incredible things all over the world. watch this talk to the end to see a thousand people from all over the world that came together using some incredible technology to support the victims of the Fukshima disaster back in 2011. Personally I am torn at times between doom and hope.
Here is an example of the kind of thing that gives me some hope…
https://www.ted.com/talks/ge_wang_the_diy_orchestra_of_the_future#t-935383
Hang in there Fred.
I have never actually SEEN a bamboo bike, just pictures. I wonder if they are really any less resource intensive than an ordinary bike , considering the relatively small amount of metal saved.
Hopefully you will be able to do well by doing good and get an environmentally sane business up and running.
I suppose the Germans can handle a half a million a year but at some point there comes a political backlash.
Now as to walls working or not working – that depends on who is doing the deciding if walls work.
If the people of Western Europe decide there will be few or no immigrants – well then there will be few or none. They are after all armed and organized , where as the immigrants are not.
If the people of a country are really willing to work together in allowing a lot of immigrants into their country, more power to them.
But if the country is already in turmoil, and resource stressed , etc, a large influx of new people might tip the balance towards chaos.
The thought of a million or two more people in Germany hardly interests me- but suppose they let in ten million , and the tide just keeps on rolling in?
What will they do then?
I hate to be so pessimistic but I just can’t see the stream of immigrants ever stopping until Sand Country is EMPTIED. Who would WANT to stay there considering the turmoil and troubles ? Who can see an END to the troubles?
My cynical side says the troubles are permanent .Peace might be possible in a place such as Syria- eventually.
But given the population, the resource base , the climate , etc- Is there any real hope for the people except to LEAVE?
Perhaps some actual data on immigration might be helpful. For example I live in a country that, on the following list, has a high level of immigration, 25% of people born in another country. I struggle to see the problem:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/which-countries-have-the-most-immigrants/?ex_cid=538twitter
I don’t think the majority cheered. I follow the Twitter of a couple of German and Austrian communists, they were definitely cheering. On the other hand my German neighbors were aghast. They thought Merkel was crazy. This led me to write the following:
http://21stcenturysocialcritic.blogspot.com.es/2015/09/german-boat-builder-opens-factory-in.html
The Pope’s remarks and the distorting comments I heard on CNN led me to write the following
http://21stcenturysocialcritic.blogspot.com.es/2015/09/illegal-versus-legal-immigration.html
I live in Vienna, which has been welcoming about 10000 refugees per day. Most of these people will just stay for a few days or weeks before moving on to Germany or other countries. Austria is a little wealthier than Germany, more multicultural and has similarly low unemployment, but probably refugees see a clear advantage in going to a larger country which can offer a larger variety of employment opportunities. I would say most people here fully support the refugees and have contributed to their well-being by greeting trains, volunteering time to work in reception centers or by donating money or supplies. Austria, in spite of its Sound-of-Music plus high-end-ski-resort plus Mozart-Beethoven-Schubert-Haydn-Strauss image, and has one of the largest foreign-born populations in the EU, a little over 15% (more than the USA), but the numbers in Vienna are far higher, maybe 1/3 or so. When I take the streetcar to work in the morning it seems the majority are speaking a foreign language. I would estimate French, Arabic and Russian are the most common, but also English, Turkish, Hungarian and other Eastern European languages. Austria, and Vienna in particular, has clearly benefited from the immigrants and is one of the wealthiest, safest, most intellectually and culturally vibrant and pleasant places to work and live in the world. Like the immigrants before them, the Syrians et al. are clearly very highly motivated and will work hard to prove themselves worthy of the hospitality offered to them.
Those of you in the USA should keep in mind that you are all, almost without exception, illegal immigrants, and those of you in the southwest, doubly illegal. The fact that you killed or expelled most of the natives, stole their land and made yourselves retroactively legal is not really a good position for claiming a moral or legal high-ground.
How’s the Vienna lager in Vienna?
Didn’t the Pilgrims from somewhere in Europe decide to leave to avoid persecutions of one kind or another? Got the hell out of there, the place was a living hell everywhere you went, no safe quarters, no refuge anywhere, just more suffering and misery, might as well head out to a new world, a better one, so sail away.
Besides, over a period of time, the religious nuts that landed at Plymouth Rock were starving, having a tough go of it, might not make it, winter was setting in, but the hardy natives were compassionate enough to invite them over for Thanksgiving dinner and had a feast, more than what those illegal immigrants would have received in the old country.
Always better to lend a helping hand.
It behooves anybody capable of thinking to think about how the “hardy natives” were repaid for their hospitality.
If I were on the scene at a European border I would break down and try to adopt a couple of refugee kids and bring them home with me.
But I am still able to put my brain in gear when it comes to understanding the big picture and the lessons of history.
We talk a lot about collapse and overshoot and the destruction of the environment in this forum.
Does anybody who REALLY takes overshoot and environmental destruction SERIOUSLY advocate allowing large scale immigration into his country?
Like the immigrants before them, the Syrians et al. are clearly very highly motivated and will work hard to prove themselves worthy of the hospitality offered to them.
I agree with you, Mark! By coincidence I’m currently working with a Syrian immigrant business owner in Sao Paulo Brazil. However given what we know about history and human nature we should all be extra careful so as not allow what happened in Europe before and during the first and second world wars to ever happen again. Let’s also not pretend that there is no xenophobia or anti immigrant sentiment being stirred up by certain groups even today. Sure Americans aren’t exactly in a position to claim the moral high ground but despite what you say about the situation on the ground in Vienna, Europeans are human too! In any case, right about now I wouldn’t mind a good cup of coffee and a slice of Linzer Torte… 🙂
Cheers!
Fred Magyar
Well, in regard to more recent history, Austrians welcomed the Nazis with open arms:
http://www2.needham.k12.ma.us/nhs/cur/wwII/06/p5/JCS/Images/Anschluss.jpg
How did that work out for Europe?
Austrians would like the world to think that Beethoven was Austrian and that Hitler was German, but of course it is the other way around. But more to the point, Germans and Austrians recognize–and are ashamed of–that part of their history. But are Americans also ashamed of their founding story, from the genocide of the dozens of Native American nations, to the mass enslavement of West Africans, or the Anschluss of the bulk of Mexico? Are they ashamed of the carpet bombing of south east Asia? The proxy wars in Central and South America and the Middle East?
I do not believe most Americans feel we have an equivalent to Hitler in our history. The infamous names that come to mind from my public school history classes would be 1) Benedict Arnold 2) John Wilkes Booth and 3) William Calley. Now these names are a pale substitute for Hitler, but general history classes tend not to demonize too many Americans as I recall. I would say that even Hitler was not demonized as much as he could have been in my classes – the Japanese were painted as more villainous.
some of us are
To return to the topic at hand, my point was that Austrians have shown, within the memory of people still alive today, shall we say “Poor judgment” on who they allow into their country–welcoming, with open arms, one of the worst mass murderers in history.
One can’t help but wonder if Austrians and Europeans in general will, in future years, bitterly regret their decision to open their borders to predominantly Islamic refugees and migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.
London’s Culture War: Inside the Conflict Between Far-Right EDL and Pro-Islamic Radicals
April 16, 2014
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/04/londons-culture-war-inside-the-conflict-between-far-right-edl-and-pro-islamic-radicals/
In both the USA and Europe murders are disproportionately committed by Christians. And in the USA, religious fundamentalism and the desire to impose religious law is clearly a Christian monopoly.
Before this thread devolves into an Austrians vs Americans and who between them are the better humans, at least in their OWN opinions, it might be interesting to check out this site.
http://www.goodcountry.org/overall
The Good Country Index, a new way of looking at the world.
The idea of the Good Country Index is pretty simple: to measure what each country on earth contributes to the common good of humanity, and what it takes away. Using a wide range of data from the U.N. and other international organisations, we’ve given each country a balance-sheet to show at a glance whether it’s a net creditor to mankind, a burden on the planet, or something in between.
It’s important to explain that we are not making any moral judgments about countries. What I mean by a Good Country is something much simpler: it’s a country that contributes to the greater good.
Here’s a quote from the man behind this idea:
“We tried it your way and it didn’t work, let’s try something new”
Simon Anholt
I’ll leave it to the readers to look at the over all rankings for themselves. However both the US and Austria rank quite low in a particular criteria that to me personally is a very critical one and I think both of these countries need to improve in it…
Cheers!
Of course, what’s ironic about your attacks on the US is that the Soviet Union, Great Britain (and Commonwealth countries, e.g., Canada), the US and other allies suffered millions of total combined casualties (with most of the casualties suffered by the Soviet Union), defeating the very same mass murderer that the Austrians welcomed with open arms.
And then in the post-war era, US forces prevented the Soviet Union from seizing control of Western Europe.
So, given the history experienced by people still alive today, I am less than impressed by sanctimonious arguments from Western Europeans about how noble they are in welcoming millions of people from an Islamic culture that is intent on imposing Sharia Law by force.
As noted up the thread, I suspect that Austria and Western Europe in general will bitterly regret their decision to open their borders to predominantly Islamic refugees and migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.
“So, given the history experienced by people still alive today, I am less than impressed by sanctimonious arguments from Western Europeans about how noble they are in welcoming millions of people from an Islamic culture that is intent on imposing Sharia Law by force.”
PC and holier than thou hypocrisy be damned. I am with Jeffrey one hundred percent of the way.
At one time immigrants moving to new countries were more or less compelled by necessity to abandon most of their old culture and assimilate.
This is no longer true. There are now places where you just don’t go in a couple of French cities. The immigrants DID NOT ASSIMILATE. They have no intention of assimilating.
There were places I would go only if compelled by utter necessity in the vicinity I used to live in and around Richmond Va.
Most of the minority population there then and now were /are model citizens – but there were some neighborhoods where some of them were determined to hold and defend their turf against all outsiders and they succeeded , at least to the point that cops would go there only in force..
One such neighborhood was Oregon Hill near downtown- this one held by redneck WHITE people. You seldom EVER saw a black face in Oregon Hill. I lived there for a while in a house I owned because it was handy to the university and I saw gentrification coming.
Peaceful coexistence IS possible and may be possible in the future. But given all the OTHER problems most societies are facing these days, taking on ANOTHER potentially monumental problem is worse than careless or mistaken policy.
Open borders would be an INSANE policy.
I wonder how many ISIS supporters are hidden among the millions of migrants from Islamic countries?
Nuclear TSUNAMI: ISIS wants to wipe hundreds of millions from face of the earth
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/607737/ISIS-plan-Islamic-nuclear-holocaust-wipe-hundreds-millions-from-face-earth
Other than the people in ISIS, I don’t think you’ll find many people who support it.
So if there was some way to get rid of ISIS, I think you would find lots of international support for the effort.
But as Cheney’s plan showed us, we haven’t yet figured out how to turn the Mideast into a nice, peace-loving region.
Now maybe if the United States launched an all-out-war, and was prepared to pay for it and then occupy the region for decades, something might change. But we don’t have any recent history to suggest that (1) the US wants to involve itself in that sort of thing and (2) that it would work.
Identifying bad guys and then actually eliminating them and the conditions which give them power are two different matters.
”And in the USA, religious fundamentalism and the desire to impose religious law is clearly a Christian monopoly.”
DUH
JUST MAYBE this is because for now at least Christians are in the majority in the USA .Ya think ?
I know quite a few Christians of the fundamentalist sort and generally speaking they are not very politically active. If left alone to manage their own affairs in their own communities you would not hear a hell of a lot from them.
Now of course if you insist that they change their OWN way of life to accommodate a new culture and a new morality, they are going to fight back any way they can.
The local bible thumpers could hardly care LESS what gays and lesbians do in SAN FRANCISCO. They do care what goes in THIS community.
The real question is WHO DECIDES. The real question has always been WHO DECIDES.
Mother Nature doesn’t give a shit. Mother Nature is INCAPABLE of giving a shit. People will ALWAYS form up into communities and decide what goes and what does not.
Murder and kidnapping have been perfectly acceptable practices in some societies and no doubt will be again. Slavery has been acceptable and will be again. Sex with rather youngish children has been acceptable and will be again.
Sexual taboos off all sorts have come and gone. They will come again. They will go again.
Personally my own position is that I do not give a hoot being too old to be in the market – although the built in programming is still there and I still enjoy eyeballing hot young (female ) blossoms. LOL.
The old folks that do believe in the usual sexual taboos are fast dieing off. The war has basically been won in this country, all that is left are the mopping up operations.
Good sense dictates that you should always think long and hard about what you WANT- because you MAY GET IT.
My former inlaws, the parents of my once upon a time hot young blossom Jewish wife back in the Dark Ages MOVED from the BIG APPLE to a little town near Jesse Helms home about twenty five or thirty years ago.
I had a VERY hard time not choking on my drink for trying not to laugh when I got the news during a family dinner in their home.
They were as liberal as liberal can get – but they decided they had had enough of the consequences thereof and moved to the state they most often made fun of the entire time I knew them.
The migration crisis facing Europe didn’t unfold overnight. For weeks, the world’s eyes have been fixed upon the tens of thousands of migrants and refugees arriving on the continent’s doorstep seeking safety, stability or a better life. But the crisis was years in the making, with a brutal civil war in Syria adding millions of refugees to those fleeing from conflicts elsewhere, including Afghanistan, Iraq and Nigeria.
…
We took a look at the toll conflicts have taken on five countries that are contributing nearly three quarters of those seeking refuge in Europe — Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Iraq and Somalia. While migrants from other nations may be fleeing repressive regimes and political persecution or seeking better economic opportunities, the people from these countries are fleeing civil wars and insurgencies.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/foreign-affairs-defense/obama-at-war/how-europes-refugee-crisis-was-years-in-the-making/
” contributing nearly three quarters of those seeking refuge in Europe — Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Iraq and Somalia”
Missing Libya. A lot of immigrants are fleeing Libya and the surrounding regions. A lot of them are leaving for economic reasons too and and jumping on the bandwagon. The Arab spring originated because of economic problems. Civil war and anarchy are a cause of economic problems and of course bad US foriegn policies. The Feds ZIRP and easy money also contributed.
Europe has a far better wealth fare system than the Middle east and thats why many are headed there. More than 90% of these immigrants will remain jobless for a very long time. The EU is already squeeze with high youth unemployment, adding a few million more is not going to help.
In my opinion this is going to topple the weaker EU members (Italy, Spain, France) as the sudden large strains pushes their financial problems over the edge. There will also be mass riots and looting as these immigrants start talking whatever they can. It’s looking like the 1920’s in the EU all over again. Coming up Next up: Nationalism and Police states that try to address the problems.
from PEW Research, a new report on immigration to the US…
Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065
Views of Immigration’s Impact on U.S. Society Mixed
http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/09/28/modern-immigration-wave-brings-59-million-to-u-s-driving-population-growth-and-change-through-2065/
Population growth is also economic growth. Property developers are getting rich, consumption is increasing and politicians congratulate themselves for creating jobs. The world over, the population bubble is misrepresented as progress.
Libertarians who promote the open border policies, seem blissfully unaware of the staggering size of the population bubble. The Syrian population grows by about 1200 people every day. A few hundred thousand refugees are a drop in the ocean. That is just the number of the world’s daily population growth. If you let too many into the life boat, it will sink.
To the very small extend that NGOs and charities have any effect, they focus on saving lives, not on preventing too many. Family planning is nowhere to be seen in the charity agenda. The moment better health care and better living conditions are brought to a third world country, one should deal with family planning as a condition.
The upcoming peak oil event will be the ultimate family planner just like increasing oil production over the last 150 years has been the ultimate reason for increased population.
People who promote open border policies between countries such as those of Western Europe are onto a good thing.
People who promote open border policies between first world and so called third world countries are posturing “holier than thou” idiots incapable of the slightest bit of critical thinking.
I have yet to meet one that would not for a substantial period of time suffer no significant consequences if he got his wish. They all have jobs and lives that would not be noticeably impacted for a few years and they don’t think about anything farther off into the future than their own next raise or vacation or byline..
I notice that a Saudi has been selected at the leader for the UN panel on human rights. That’s almost as bad as selecting “pol pot”!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/09/28/why-one-of-the-worlds-worst-human-rights-offenders-is-leading-a-un-human-rights-panel/
Cuba is the country that has been most on our minds here in the states , except for Mexico, when it comes to immigrants.
It appears after reading this long and much detailed piece that Fernando has a pretty good understanding of what is going on in the opening up of Cuba.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-09-30/want-to-invest-in-cuba-meet-your-partner-castro-s-son-in-law
Ordinarily I take articles such as this one with plenty of salt- but something tells me this time the author is telling it pretty much like it is.
Those interested in only in sound bites need not click the link. It will take a few minutes to read it and digest it.
So- up until now I have played the hard core isolationist tune, hoping somebody would shoot some holes in it. So far, maybe a couple of minor flesh wounds.
Obviously enough Western Europe is going to have to come up with a workable plan to deal with the refugees.
Who has something to say about the elements of such a plan?What will be the criteria for screening immigrants for instance? How many can be dealt with on a monthly or annual basis without stretching the already stretched welfare net too far in some countries?
What sort of employment can be found for them?
Will their children be REQUIRED to go to schools that teach only in the language of their adopted country ?
I could go on for a while.
ANY links to articles dealing with this sort of question will be greatly appreciated.
I posted a link over at the other thread that goes into considerable detail about what is actually going on in Cuba. It does relate somewhat to energy as Cuba might be self sufficient in oil and or gas someday and might be a way station for sub sea cables to other islands nearby.
If relations with Cuba are successfully normalized, it is reasonable to expect a LARGE number of Cubans to come to the US- as many as can get in legally or not.
Normal relations will mean the Cuban government will not devote a hell of a lot of resources to stopping people from getting in small boats or on planes and leaving for good.
Off topic but I though a few people might be interested:
Meet the American Vigilantes Who Are Fighting ISIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/magazine/meet-the-american-vigilantes-who-are-fighting-isis.html
I am fascinated by the concept of genetical digitalisation. In essence, code the DNA of say 20 individuals of a species into digital format, then at a later time recreate those individuals and bring back the extinct species. Genetic technology is developing faster than computer technology right now. In the future when earth is a scorched desert and the climate is about to revert back to 280 PPM CO2 they can begun to restore the ecosystems, one species at a time. If we begin to store DNA on harddrives right now. That way all will not be lost.
Turning this boat around today seems impossible to me. Most things will die.
If we begin to store DNA on harddrives right now.
JW, you cannot store DNA on hard drives. You can store the sequence on hard drives but that is just a record, nothing more. From that sequence you cannot recreate the actual DNA.
You can store the actual DNA molecule by freezing it.
Yes off course. A slip from my side. The A in DNA is for Acid. I was meaning the code in the DNA. The terminology don’t always get right from my part.
This was a future technology speculation. We can’t do this part right now.
Peak Oil Barrel has, so far, been a pretty good replacement for TOD. However, extended discussions of books that are embraced by white supremacists means that, for me, it no longer can serve as a legitimate source for discussion. People move around, they always have and they always will. Environmental migrants will be a huge problem for wealthy nations (who, it should be noted, contributed mightily to the problems that are pushing people out of North Africa and the Middle East – not the least of which is climate change). The best solution to high birth rates is education of young women but even that will have little effect if core causes of societal collapse are not addressed in the poorer nations.
I must have missed this extended discussion of books written by white supremacists unless maybe you are talking about the book discussed in this post.
Please feel free to bury your head and your intellect in the sands of political correctness..
There will likely come a day when you regret it.
Life itself is not tidy and nice and wishing will not make it so. Pretending will not make it so.
Sticking up for equal rights for everybody is an admirable thing to do and I try to do my part in that endeavor myself.
But I for one intend to face up to reality. None of us are perfect. Historical figure are more the product of their time and place in history than otherwise.
I am occasionally accused of being a commie or nazi or facist because I will refuse to take part in the censorship of ideas or the effort to forget history we may not agree with.Mostly I just ignore such people as being too stupid to talk to about any serious subject. If you want to understand an issue, the only way to gain that understanding is to study it.
Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. This does not mean he did not contribute in a substantial and meaningful way to the founding of this nation that eventually freed its slaves in part because of his work.
Edward Abbey is rightfully credited with being one of the founding fathers of the deep ecology movement.
Only a fool would deny that history, or try to censor it, although the owner of a particular publication or forum or website is within his rights to do so in his own forum or publication.He has no right to call for censorship across the board.
Refusing to read and discuss Abbey’s work is about as stupid as refusing to read and discuss the work of the people who created the Magna Carta , or founded the USA.
None of them were perfect.
Nobody will ever be perfect.