A friend send this alarmist screed on declining birth rates in USA.
I replied:
"Population collapse" is not what happens when birth rates decline but remain above 0.5 children per couple. That's "population adjustment" which can help curb carbon emissions, water depletion, and other looming catastrophes.
"Population collapse" is what happens when we fail to do population adjustment fast enough, and central North American becomes useless for human agriculture and settlement.
Tonight, listening to the CODEPINK presentation on Taiwan and China featuring Carl Zha I learned a lot about the history of Taiwan, China, Japan, and the US going back to the Ming dynasty. Much more complicated than I had imagined.
But in some additional commentary after the main presentation, I learned these things about the Computer Chips situation.
1) Trump banned the sale of chips made in Taiwan to China. Since Taiwan is the worlds largest manufacturer of computer chips, but China is the worlds largest manufacturer of finished goods, you can see how this would be a problem.
2) Trump also banned the sale of computer chips made in China to the USA. Nowadays China is also a big manufacturer of computer chips.
I believe we should end destructive bans on the sales of computer chips from Taiwan and China. We should also seek a more peaceable relationship with China. Even rolling the clock back to 2010 in these regards would be a big step forwards.
A US expat friend of mine (he left USA in the 1980's) repeats endless well known and debunked myths about Cuba, Russia, and the People's Republic of China. But he has inside information, he says, from expats from other countries including China, which is obviously (to him) superior to mine. He also recounts stories he has heard from such expats, and limited personal experiences in places like Cuba as proof of his assertions.
Any such stories and experiences are subject to a huge sampling error. Stories from expats should in no way considered to be "representative" of their home country, simply on first principles, that most people of those countries are not expats. (Or tourists, etc, that you are likely to meet.) Likewise one's own experiences are highly biased by one's own views and those one knows--a self-selecting sample--and how one gets into said country and for what reasons--all of which are surely unrepresentative of the people there. Even firsthand experiences ought to be considered first and foremost as anecdotal evidence and it is wrong to extrapolate from them and say things like "People in Cuba feel..."
But there's more. In addition to being not-very-representative on first principles, such individuals or groups to which they belong or attend may be part of or associated with well known regime change organizations, like the NED.
Shockingly to me, my friend had no idea what I meant by NED. I meant the "National Endowment for Democracy." So I searched for and found this classic article from a classic book:
https://williamblum.org/chapters/rogue-state/trojan-horse-the-national-endowment-for-democracy
An interesting discussion, but no clear answers, not even clear questions.
I think there is a contingency here. Things we might otherwise not need to discuss, we may need to have a dialog about because they actually exist, and their supporters see them in different terms.
As another new person I follow says, we do not need to consider many things on an equal basis. We can dismiss discussion about whether racism or racial supremacism should exist. Racism and racial supremacism are clearly bad things. Do we need to discuss whether white nationalism is racial supremacism? I don't think so, I think it clearly is. But that may be where the dialog would start, because white nationalism clearly exists--people self-identify as that label. A lot of people.
I think that if Israel did not exist, we could dismiss discussions about whether a settler colonial apartheid state should be created in Palestine. Settler colonial apartheid states are a bad idea. But Israel does exist, and since some do not see it in those terms, perhaps some of us need to have a dialog about it, sometimes.
"Dialog" should not include threats, tiki torches, smashing windows, or violence, though sometimes it does. It is not beyond the pale for dialog to include racist speech as well as false accusations of racism--because dialog is the place to argue about such things. (That means, dialog may include both what some regard as antisemitism and what others regard as false accusations of anti-semitism.)
Dialog may include non-violent protest and heckling.
Dialog may include boycotts and divestment.
Dialog (even without threats, etc) isn't always appropriate, and some dialogs should indeed be beyond the pale in education and media. But that is not applicable to the 12 versions of pro- and anti- Zionism that Timothy Burke identifies. These are all taken seriously by some serious scholars.
Belarus is back in the news today, with stories that Belarussian authorities are enabling middle eastern migrants (refugees?) to cross into Poland and other NATO countries. Poland is extremely anti-ME-refugee and hugh clashes ensure. Hard Winter is coming.
Without context, little of this makes any sense. What are ME migrants doing in Belarus???
So I looked up what MoonOfAlabama had to say on the subject. His last essay was from a month ago.
Basically, because of new sanctions against Belarus last year, which preventing the airline from flying to any western european cities, the airline has gone looking for new customers, and what do you know, there are large numbers of Syrians and Iraqi's in Turkey still able to pay the price for a ticket to Belarus, keeping the airline going, and Turkey is not part of the EU, so no sanctions.
Coincidentally, last night I'd stumbled upon a movie, The Weight of Chains, made in Canada in 2011 making an even better case for the role of sanctions and other western policies in the violent breakup of Yugoslavia. Top of the list of those who should have died in the Hague for crimes in the Former Yugoslavia should have been Reagan, GHW Bush, and Clinton (just as Milosevic said). Outline starting in the 1980's, crushing IMF debt deliberately used as wedge by Reagan to destroy "Communism" (actually social democracy, but not aligned with US empire) in Yugoslavia. Any province that defects gets immediate recognition by the US as a sovereign state, forgiveness of debt, and US markets. Well of course this sets off ethnofascists everywhere to define their new "nation" and secede. The Bosnian Muslim leader was as bad as any of them. The west focuses on one oversized retaliatory strike which could be blamed on Serbians (aligned with Russia), instead of the whole picture--which was more than an order of magnitude larger. Other crimes brushed off. I downloaded the HD version which is much better than the one on Youtube. I've never heard the breakup story told this well, even though I've heard this basic outline (the west was at fault) for almost 20 years from most leftists I respect, I never understood it. I imagine most in the west haven't heard this version at all. The success of the movie was sufficient the producer made two on different anti-western-imperialism topics, which I haven't yet checked out.
I've stumbled on a wonderful 50 minute video which carefully deconstructs a very popular (900,000 viewers) "leftist" named Jimmy Dore. If you don't have time for the full 50 minutes I'd still recommend watching the first 11, or even 5. This is not the Jimmy Dore show, but a deconstruction of it, showing how Jimmy Dore lies.
(As a leftist myself, I would call Jimmy Dore an ultra-leftist. Ultra-leftists attack both major political parties "from the left" and insist on not voting for either one. This is a useless strategy. The better strategy is to vote for the one which is better, even slightly better, and save time and effort for other kinds of politics, including in-good-faith primary challenges as Bernie did--ultimately endorsing the winning party candidate, demonstrations, strikes, and other forms of public education. More often than not, refusing to vote for the "lesser-evil" as ultra-leftists call it, leads to far greater evil than expected. I had this experience personally in 1980 and 2000, and I learned my lesson. Noam Chomsky correctly calls the "lesser-evil" the "greater-good" and I agree with what Chomsky says in general and on this topic in particular.)
Jimmy Dore is now filling the ultra-leftist role on Youtube, where in the past 2 years he has become a star. Because I follow most of the left, I've seen lots of people falling for his schtick and occasionally tried to argue back (though, I've also stopped following a lot of people who constantly follow him, and after seeing 2 minutes of him, I have never watched any more Jimmy Dore but I still read what people are saying about him--because he is so popular. I find him to disgusting to bear.)
Dore didn't start out being an anti-vaxxer. As the video below shows, he was initially critical of how only elites were getting the first vaccines, and how people in poor countries weren't, etc. That take was largely correct.
But sometime in the middle of this year, Dore pivoted to disseminating and even originating anti-vaxx content. The video below shows how this is done. Of course, Jimmy Dore doesn't say he is anti-vaxx. He says he has taken the vaccine, but wants people knowing the full story. He has "concerns." That's what they all say. As the video shows, Dore very selectively quotes from articles, leaving out the author's key sentences and ideas, and rearranging bits to make an anti-vaxx story. And sometimes, in one case, adds in words that weren't even in the article in order to give it his slant.
If his goal were merely to inform, why would he do this?
Clearly it's not actually to inform people. Then why? Well if you look at his viewership counts, once he started pushing anti-vax stories his viewer counts went way up. And...he's got a mortgage to pay off. A big mortgage because he lives in LA.
We know know that the stories in the Steele Dossier, a central pillar of Russiagate, came from Chuck Dolan, a Clinton political operative, and not Russian Sources, as Igor Danchenko claimed to the FBI in 2017. Chuck Dolan was a fellow employee of Danchenko's at a political research firm. Journalist Bernhard also concludes that the FBI knew this was false in 2017, but waited until now to charge Danchenko with perjury because the FBI leadership was hostile to Trump.
NYTimes ran a guest editorial advising Democrats to give up on the Biden Agenda, for the sake of the 2022 elections.
(Most I follow are advising the opposite, without passing the Biden Agenda there is no hope for 2022.)
The grey lady identified the authors as advisors to Clinton.
It was not pointed out that one was a Hedge Fund manager and advisor to Trump, and the other ran Democrats for Trump.
This is just one small example of "dump the Left" and "blame the Left" in mainstream media, and the article mentions others, notably Times and many others blaming the loss of centrist Terry McAuliffe on the "Left", when McAuliffe was one of the chief DNC moneymen (and former DNC chair) who worked tirelessly against Bernie and other left Democratic Party primary challengers.
I noticed earlier how the Times described the passage of BIF on Friday, criticizing the 6 progressives who voted against it, without describing the whole story...when the day began (and for months in advance) the plan was to pass both bills in tandem, and then at the moment of truth a handful of centrist democrats refused, hypocritically demanding official budget numbers which would take weeks to prepare, when by all accounts the BIF net cost was larger (not to mention military spending) and they didn't hold that up.
