Systems

In a world of suffering, the self-interested mind craves compartmentalization, and one of the most interesting frontiers of emerging climate science traces the imprint left on our psychological well-being by the force of global warming, which can overwhelm whatever methods we devise to cope — that is, the mental health effects of a world on fire. Perhaps the most predictable vector is trauma: between a quarter and a half of all those exposed to extreme weather events will experience them as an ongoing negative shock to their mental health.

Grist has called the phenomenon “climate depression,” Scientific American “environmental grief.” And while it may seem intuitive that those contemplating the end of the world find themselves despairing, especially when their calls of alarm have gone almost entirely unheeded, it is also a harrowing forecast of what is in store for the rest of the world, as the devastation of climate change slowly reveals itself. In the sense of psychological distress, which so many of them endure, climate scientists are the canaries in our coal mine. This may be why so many of them seem concerned with the risks of crying wolf about warming: they’ve learned enough about public apathy to worry themselves into knots about just when, and precisely how, to raise the alarm.

There are the more surprising mental health costs. Climate affects both the onset and the severity of depression, The Lancet has found. Rising temperature and humidity are married, in the data, to emergency-room visits for mental health issues. When it’s hotter out, psychiatric hospitals see spikes in proper inpatient admissions, as well. Schizophrenics, especially, are admitted at much higher rates when the temperatures are higher, and, inside those hospitals, ward temperature significantly increases symptom severity in schizophrenic patients. Heat waves bring waves of other things, too: mood disorders, anxiety disorders, dementia.

Systems

As conditions of environmental degradation become more universal, it may, perversely, require more imagination to consider their costs. When the deprived are no longer outlier communities but instead whole regions, whole countries, conditions that once may have seemed inhumane now appear, to a future generation who knows no better, simply “normal”.

Systems

Warming is not just a matter of sea level, and its horrors will not hit nations like the United States first. In fact, the impacts will be greatest in the world’s least developed, most impoverished, and therefore least resilient nations — almost literally a story of the world’s rich drowning the world’s poor with their waste.

Wealth will be a buffer for some countries, but not a safeguard, as Australia is learning already: by far the richest of all the countries staring down the most intense, most immediate warming barrages, it is an early test case of how the world’s affluent societies will bend, or buckle, or rebuild under the pressure of temperature changes likely to hit the rest of the well-off world only later this century.

The wheels of all communities are greased by abundance; baked by deprivation, they stall and crack. The paths are familiar ones, even to those who have only ever known affluence, their lives creamily frictionless but stimulated by entertainments tracing the arc of social decline: market breakdowns, price gouging, the hoarding of goods and services by the well-off and well-armed, the retreat of law enforcement into self-enrichment, and the disappearance of any expectation of justice making survival suddenly a matter of entrepreneurial skill.

More than 140 million people in just three regions of the world will be made climate migrants by 2050, the World Bank projected in a 2018 study, assuming current warming and emissions trends: 86 million in sub-Saharan Africa, 40 million in South Asia, and 17 million in Latin America. The most commonly cited estimate from the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration suggests numbers a bit higher — 200 million, total, by 2050. These figures are quite high — higher than most non-advocates credit. But according to the U.N. IOM, climate change may unleash as many as a billion migrants on the world by 2050. One billion — that is about as many people as live today in North and South America combined. Imagine the two continents suddenly drowned in the sea, the whole New World submerged, and everyone left bobbing at the surface now fighting for a foothold, somewhere, anywhere, and, if someone else is scrambling for the same dry spot, scrambling to get there first.

Climate conflict

The folklore of state conflict casts a long shadow — the patchwork quilt of nations tugged apart into a ghastly, mutually damaging disarray. Climate tugs at the individual threads of conflict, too: personal irritability, interpersonal conflict, domestic violence.

Heat frays everything. It increases violent crime rates, swearing on social media. The hotter it gets, the longer drivers will honk their horns in frustration.

By 2099, one speculative paper tabulated, climate change in the United States would bring about an additional 22,000 murders, 180,000 rapes, 3.5 million assaults, and 3.76 million robberies, burglaries, and acts of larceny. The statistics of the past are more inarguable, and even the arrival of air-conditioning in the developed world in the middle of the last century did little to solve the problem of the summer crime wave.

A team of researchers examining an enormous data set of more than 9,000 American cities found that air pollution levels positively predicted incidents of every single crime category they looked at — from car theft and burglary and larceny up to assault, rape, and murder. And then there are the ways that climate impacts can cascade into violence more circuitously.

Bibliography

In Against the Grain, the political scientist and anthropologist of anarchy James C. Scott gives a more pointed critique of the Neolithic period: wheat cultivation, he argues, is responsible for the arrival of what we now understand as state power, and, with it, bureaucracy and oppression and inequality.

Rio Grande do Sul is:

a. Catch-22 state; 

b. Brittle state 

c. Fragile state 

d. Disappearing state

Climate conflict

For every half degree of warming societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict. In climate science, nothing is simple, but the arithmetic is harrowing: a planet four degrees warmer would have perhaps twice as many wars as we do today. And likely more.

What accounts for the relationship between climate and conflict? Some of it comes down to agriculture and economics: when yields drop and productivity falls, societies can falter, and when droughts and heat waves hit, the shocks can be felt even more deeply, electrifying political fault lines and producing or exposing others no one knew to worry over.

Crisis capitalism

That Western capitalism may owe its dominance to the power of fossil fuels is not anything like consensus economic wisdom, but it also isn’t just a pet theory of the socialist Left. It was the core claim of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence, probably the single most conventionally esteemed account of just how it was that Europe separated itself so dramatically from the rest of the world in the nineteenth century.

Global warming could cultivate emergent forms of eco-socialism on one end of the spectrum, and could also conceivably produce a collapse of faith in anything but the market, on the other. Trade will surely endure, perhaps even thrive, as indeed it did before capitalism — individuals making trades and exchanges outside a single totalizing system to organize the activity. Rent-seeking, too, will continue, with those who can scrambling to accumulate whatever advantages they can buy — the incentive only increasing in a world more barren of resources, and more mournful of recent apparent abundance, now disappeared.

The book The Shock Doctrine focuses on political collapse and crises of the technocrats’ own making. A very clear account of what kind of strategy to expect from the world’s money elite in a time of rolling ecological crisis.

How well will the shock doctrine be sustained through a new climatic regime, one that assaults the economies of the world with extreme weather and natural disaster at an entirely unprecedented rate and — just in the diminishing downtime between hurricanes and floods and heat waves and droughts — also threatens to devastate agricultural yields and cripple worker productivity?

The scramble for shrinking profits by the powerful will only intensify, a further self-entrenchment of the rule of capital; this is the outcome you might extrapolate from a consideration of the last several decades. But over those decades, capitalists could still count as a public-relations ally the promise of rising-tide growth. In fact, despite our many and divergent varieties of markets, that promise has served as something like the basic ideological infrastructure of the world since at least 1989 — and it is no coincidence that carbon emissions have exploded since the end of the Cold War.

Climate change will accelerate two trends already undermining that promise of growth: first, by producing a global economic stagnation that will play, in some areas, like a breathtaking and permanent recession; and second, by punishing the poor much more dramatically than the rich, both globally and within particular polities, showcasing an increasingly stark income inequality, unconscionable already to more and more. In an economic future doubly mangled by those forces, the near-monopoly on social power presently enjoyed by the world’s very wealthy will likely have much more to answer for, to say the least.

The market has justified inequality for generations by pointing to opportunity and invoking the mantra of new prosperity, which it promised would benefit all. This was probably always less credible as a truth claim than it was as propaganda, and, as the Great Recession and the deeply unequal recovery that followed showed unmistakably, income gains in the world’s advanced capitalistic countries have gone, for several decades now, almost entirely to the very wealthiest. That this itself represents a crisis of the entire system is clear not just from the raging populism, on both left and right, sweeping Europe and the United States in the aftermath of the crash, but by skepticism and lacerating self-doubt beaming out from the highest free-market citadels.

In the past, the promise of growth has been the justification for inequality, injustice, and exploitation, it will have many more wounds to salve in the near climate future: disaster, drought, famine, war, global refugeeism and the political disarray it unleashes.

The predictions of economic hardship, remember, are enormous—$551 trillion in damages at just 3.7 degrees of warming.

Present political arrangements, not to mention bankruptcy law, will conspire to limit climate liability — for oil companies, for governments, for nations.

If we do succeed, and pull up short of two or even three degrees, the bigger bill will come due not in the name of liability but in the form of adaptation and mitigation — that is, the cost of building and then administering whatever systems we improvise to undo the damage a century of imperious industrial capitalism has wrought across the only planet on which we all can live.

The cost is large: a decarbonized economy, a perfectly renewable energy system, a reimagined system of agriculture, and perhaps even a meatless planet.

It took New York City forty-five years to build three new stops on a single subway line; the threat of catastrophic climate change means we need to entirely rebuild the world’s infrastructure in considerably less time.

Economic collapse

In 2018, the World Bank estimated that the current path of carbon emissions would sharply diminish the living conditions of 800 million living throughout South Asia. One hundred million, they say, will be dragged into extreme poverty by climate change just over the next decade.

You do not have to believe that economic growth is a mirage produced by fossil fumes to worry that climate change is a threat to it — infact, this proposition forms the cornerstone around which an entire edifice of academic literature has been built over the last decade.

What climate change has in store is not that kind of thing — not a Great Recession or a Great Depression but, in economic terms, a Great Dying.

On Strikes

Capitalism is the name given to that social system under which the land, factories, implements, etc., belong to a small number of landed proprietors and capitalists, while the mass of the people possesses no property, or very little property, and is compelled to hire itself out as workers. The landowners and factory owners hire workers and make them produce wares of this or that kind which they sell on the market. The factory owners, furthermore, pay the workers only such a wage as provides a bare subsistence for them and their families, while everything the worker produces over and above this amount goes into the factory owner’s pocket, as his profit. Under capitalist economy, therefore, the people in their mass are the hired workers of others, they do not work for themselves but work for employers for wages. It is understandable that the employers always try to reduce wages; the less they give the workers, the greater their profit. The workers try to get the highest possible wage in order to provide their families with sufficient and whole some food, to live in good homes, and to dress as other people do and not like beggars. A constant struggle is, therefore, going on between employers and workers over wages; the employer is free to hire whatever worker he thinks fit and, therefore, seeks the cheapest. The worker is free to hire himself out to an employer of his choice, so that he seeks the dearest, the one that will pay him the most. Whether the worker works in the country or in town, whether he hires himself out to a landlord, a rich peasant, a contractor, or a factory owner, he always bargains with the employer, fights with him over the wages.

But is it possible for a single worker to wage a struggle by himself? The number of working people is increasing: peasants are being ruined and flee from the countryside to the town or the factory. The landlords and factory owners are introducing machines that rob the workers of their jobs. In the cities there are increasing numbers of unemployed and in the villages there are more and more beggars; those who are hungry drive wages down lower and lower. It becomes impossible for the worker to fight against the employer by himself. If the worker demands good wages or tries not to consent to a wage cut, the employer tells him to get out, that there are plenty of hungry people at the gates who would be glad to work for low wages.

When the people are ruined to such an extent that there is always a large number of unemployed in the towns and villages, when the factory owners amass huge fortunes and the small proprietors are squeezed out by the millionaires, the individual worker becomes absolutely powerless in face of the capitalist. It then becomes possible for the capitalist to crush the worker completely, to drive him to his death at slave labour and, indeed, not him alone, but his wife and children with him.

Even under slavery or serfdom there was never any oppression of the working people as terrible as that under capitalism when the workers cannot put up a resistance or cannot win the protection of laws that restrict the arbitrary actions of the employers.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

1870 - 1924

Destruction of forests

Illegal mining expands. 

No one can stop the criminals.

Plutocracy

Most politicians are selfish, egotistical swine who don’t really care about the literate culture. We live in an economic system which is stupid and unfair. Our present economic system is more likely to reward people for selfish and unscrupulous behavior than for being decent, caring human beings.

It is representative democracy as a cover for corruption.

Feudalism

Tomorrow, Brazilians will eradicate poverty, hunger, illiteracy, and prostitution. Today they fight against Satan.

Feudalism

Marxist language is not part of the everyday life of young brazilians.

A profissão (?) mais antiga do mundo

Desde que Aspásia, a esposa de Péricles, inventou os prostíbulos - do latim prostitute, comercializar, traficar - até nossos dias, o negócio do sexo evoluiu muito. No século XXI existem milhões de Marias Madalenas e de Valérias Messalinas em todo o planeta. Ao ponto de, nos ambientes mais doutos e eruditos, as rameiras, meretrizes, prostitutas, putas, ninfas, quengas, vadias, cortesãs, biscates, raparigas, vacas, mulheres da vida e outras garotas de vida "fácil" serem denominadas justamente pelo nome dessa imperatriz romana, terceira esposa de Claudio I, conhecida por sua vida licenciosa e promíscua. Sua morte, degolada por um soldado no ano 48, aos 33 anos de idade, reflete perfeitamente a vida intensa, vertiginosa e frequentemente curta de muitas messalinas atuais.

Election season

The fans are excited. Blindly enthusiastic.

"Children of Satan"

Brazilians live in feudalism.

To fire up the crowd

Shouting and insults in the RS political arena. Everything is managed for the people without critical thinking. 

The quality of the text does not matter.

Feudalism

So many scientific references, “doctor” Alckmin invoked god. Darwin, obviously, would never represent the “working class”.

Porque não me ufano

Observem como os representantes políticos estão animando as suas torcidas com discursos rasos e recheados de senso comuns e dancinhas. Manter a plateia infantilizada é um boa tática para a manutenção dos privilégios.

Com tantas referências científicas, o "doutor" Alckmin citou deus. Darwin não representaria jamais a "classe trabalhadora", obviamente. 

Para animar a torcida pouco importa a qualidade do texto. 

Os conceitos de "povo brasileiro", "família", "trabalho" são explorados superficialmente pela direta e pela "esquerda". O discurso que deveria servir para problematizar questões relevantes, vira bordão: família é paixão (mas os filhos notam que os pais só estão juntos por convenção social), deus é amor e misericórdia, pátria, bem, se um dia ela precisar da macacada...

Solution

Brazil is rotting from within.

Might as well burn down this country.

A dead country has no history.

Political project

The youth of the south are facing very serious cognitive problems. They look like retarded children.

Aristocracy of labour

The existence of a labour aristocracy is explained by the super-profits of monopoly, which allows the capitalists to devote a part (and not a small one at that!) to bribe their own workers, to create something like an alliance between the workers of a given nation and their capitalists against the other countries. This "bribery" operates through trusts, the financial oligarchy, high prices, etc. (i.e. something like joint monopolies between a given capitalism and its workers).

Opportunist philistine

Opportunism and social chauvinism represent a majority of the proletariat.

For revolutionaries there's no point in delving deeper for to "real masses", they don't listen. Marxism is not popular among workers.

And second, that the labour parties now irrevocably sold to the bourgeoisie will not disappear. Before nor in some way return to the revolutionary proletariat.

Imperialism and the Split

Lenin's theory of imperialism argues that the "handul of the richest, privileged nations" turned into "parasites on the body of the rest of mankind", i.e. into collective exploiters, and suggests a division of the world into "exploiting" and "proletarian" nations.

Lenin's theory of imperialism argues that the "handul of the richest, privileged nations" turned into "parasites on the body of the rest of mankind", i.e. into collective exploiters, and suggests a division of the world into "exploiting" and "proletarian" nations.

The more general argument about the dangers of "spontaneity" and "selfish" economism in the trade union movement retains all its force. It is indeed one of the most fundamental and permanently illuminating contributions of Lenin to marxism.

Porque não me ufano

O marxismo jamais será popular entre os operários do subdesenvolvido Brasil. O oportunismo e o chauvinismo social representam os operários e não Karl Marx.

O partido dos trabalhadores foi aburguesado, homens e mulheres superegoístas estão sendo favorecidos por um sistema cada vez mais injusto e desigual.

A tendência filistéia oportunista irá corromper os setores da classe de trabalhadores que não foram - ainda - corrompidos. Não haverá nem mesmo uma solidariedade superficial. A maioria será corrompida e estará abertamente vendida à burguesia e ao fascismo.

Aphorism of underdevelopment

In Brazil, it is easier to traffic cocaine than to own a bookstore.

Aphorism of underdevelopment

The political arena has turned into a studio audience show. Literally a dive bar with shouting and insults. The people are well represented.

Poem of underdevelopment

Two hundred twenty-nine thousand 

unemployed people in RS.

Two hundred twenty-nine thousand 

unemployed people in RS.

Two hundred twenty-nine thousand 

unemployed people in RS.

Two hundred twenty-nine thousand 

unemployed people in RS.

Two hundred twenty-nine thousand 

unemployed people in RS.

Two hundred twenty-nine thousand 

unemployed people in RS.

Two hundred twenty-nine thousand 

unemployed people in RS.

No future

The southern states are competing to see will be the most reactionary.

Ecological collapse

The southerner's universe is a succession of errors and shouting.

Conditions of the working class

Thanks to the peculiar position of capitalism - vast colonial possessions and monopolist position in the world markets - the working class tend to be divided into a avoured minority of labour aristocrats and a much larger lower stratum.

The upper stratum becomes bourgeois, while at the same time a section of the proletariat allows itself to be led by people who are bought by the bourgeoisie, or at least are in their pay.

Conditions of the working class

The "law of uneven development" within capitalism - i.e. the diversity of conditions in different industries, regions, etc. of the same economy - a purely "economist" labour movement must tend to fragment the working class into "selfish" ("petty bourgeois") segments each pursuing its own interest, if necessary in alliance with its own employers, at the expense of the rest.

The new insults have arrived

The underdeveloped person does not know how to build a good society.

Pour Marx

In our philosophic memory we recall this as the time of the intellectuals in arms, pursuing error into all its hiding places, as the time when we philosophers wrote no books, but turned every book into politics, and cut the world - arts, literature, philosophy, science - with a single blade into the pitiless blocs of class division.

Louis Althusser 

1918 - 1990

The perversity in power

In Brazil, famine, poverty, illiteracy, prostitution and all misery will never be eradicated. But on the contrary, they will intensify.

Marx

Maxism is today a genuine world movement, for after all, what gives it its most obvious appeal in the world today is, the analysis of the imperialist phase of capitalism.

Politically, that the major problem in non-socialist countries is that of how many and what diferent roads there are to socialism.

The task of marxists is to divide the countries of the world into realistic groupings and to analyze properly the very diferent conditions of progress in each group.

We must go back to marxism as a scientific method.

Marxism is a tool for changing the world by knowledge, which we as politicians then use. It is not a means of scoring debating points in politics.

Waiting for new insults

In Brazil, sharing books brings more detractores than friends.

Waiting for new insults

Judging by the comments (pussy, cock, fuck you, son of a bitch, etc, etc, etc) the impact of universal education is evident.

A country of imbeciles

Stop doing cocaine, you underdeveloped moron.

Lay off the weed, you underdeveloped moron.

Give up alcohol, addicted.

Read, son of a bitch. Do you good.

The dialogue on marxism

Marxism is not a body of finished theories and discoveries, but a process of development; that Marx's own thought, for instance, went on developing throughout his life.

There are no shortcuts to marxism: neither the appeal to Lenin against Stalin, nor to Marx, nor to the young Marx against the older Marx. There is only hard, and long, and in the present circumstances perhaps inconclusive work.

Eric Hobsbawm

1917 - 2012

Ugliness

In Brazil, a writer cannot write about beauty. Can't.
Beauty has died.

Beauty

At any time between 1750 and 1930 if you had asked educated people to describe the aim of poetry, art or music, they would have replied, "beauty". And if you had asked for the point of that, you would have learned that beauty is a value - as important as truth and goodness. Then in the twentieth century, beauty stopped being important. Art increasingly aimed to disturb and to break moral taboos. It was not beauty, but originality, however achieved and at whatever moral cost that won the prizes. Not only has art made a cult of ugliness, architecture too has become soulless and sterile. And it's not just our physical surroundings that have become ugly. Our language, our music and our manners are increasingly raucous, self-centered, and offensive, as though beauty and good taste have no real place in our lives. I think we are losing beauty and with it there is the danger that we will lose the meaning of life.

Roger Scruton

1944 - 2020

Porque não me ufano

Os militantes de esquerda que se encontram muito bem inseridos na estrutura pública nunca fizeram um esforço para derrubar o sistema capitalista, sempre aceitaram de bom grado a existência dessa estrutura. Os politiqueros sequer juntam esforços para melhorar a condições de sua base eleitoral e cada vez mais aceitam as teorias liberal-burguesa bem como suas práticas de extrativismo predatório. Um exemplo notório é do Partido dos Trabalhadores que há décadas tornou-se um partido de tendências neoliberal, podemos arriscar chamá-lo de um partido reformista moderado, infelizmente, tudo é business. Na verdade, na agremiação lulista nunca houve fase radical, de ser um grupo de vanguarda revolucionária enquanto organização de massas, consciência política de classe e desenvolvimento de ideologias anticapitalistas.

Se a revolução não ocorre em países avançados, os únicos que poderiam engendrar um movimento consciente do proletariado a nível de massas, não será um país desorganizado e pobre, sem experiência e tradição revolucionárias como o Brasil que haverá algum movimento de ação transformadora. Nem mesmo a perpetuação da miséria planejada pelas classes dominantes proporciona uma educação revolucionária entre os miseráveis do terceiro mundo.

No mais, nenhum partido brasileiro irá desenvolver um programa para o socialismo baseado na socialização dos meios de produção, distribuição e troca e na planificação. Os subdesenvolvidos não sonham nem mesmo com a qualidade de vida ou com a possibilidade de construir uma boa sociedade para todos.

Karl Marx

The greatest theorist of work. The man who dedicated his life to demonstrating the internal contradictions of capitalism.

Sex work is not work

Under Stalin, there was no room for prostitution.

The uninhabitable earth

The planet's air won't just be warmer; it will likely also be dirtier, more oppressive, and more sickening.

Porque não me ufano

No Brasil não se ganha dinheiro com dignidade. Não se é possível ganhar dinheiro sem ser desonesto. Tudo na periferia está vulgarizado, embrutecido, sujo, feio, barulhento e, assustadoramente, burro. O Brasil é um país sem ideal.

Porque não me ufano

Um proletariado com baixíssima instrução jamais será o coveiro do capital, mas antes o seu instrumento, o seu escravo.

Laboratory of underdevelopment

Terrible universal education.

Shouting and bullshit have become two national characteristics.

A state of illiterates

People are not honest, do not study, and have no ideals.

Only criminals prosper in Brazil.

A state of illiterates

The PL is going to govern Rio Grande do Sul. It gets worse day by day.

Laboratory of underdevelopment

Who will educate the arrogant elderly women?

Laboratory of underdevelopment

God's envoys destroying brazilian cities.

Poor Brazil: illiteracy, misery, noise, shouting, bullshit, unemployment, depravity... quality of life in the sewer system.

Illiteracy

The myth of the developed South.

National illiteracy

Education is already destroyed.

The myth

There no jobs in POA, let alone a revolution.
Let alone revolutionaries.

Men like Brizola no longer exist.

The perversity in power

In Brazil, famine, social alienation, poverty, illiteracy and misery will never be erradicated. No future.

Economic collapse? Only for the poor.

The perversity in power

In Brazil, famine, poverty, illiteracy and misery will never be erradicated.

Nana

However, in the midst of all this luxury, and surrounded by her courtiers, Nana was bored to tears. She had men for every minute of the night, and money all over the house, even among the brushes and combs in the drawers of her dressing-table. But all this had ceased to satisfy her; and she was conscious of a void in her existence, a gap which made her yawn. Her life dragged on without occupation, each day bringing back the same monotonous hours. The next day did not exist: she lived like a bird, sure of having enough to eat, and ready to perch on the first branch she came to. This certainty of being fed caused her to stretch out in languid ease all day, lulled to sleep in conventional idleness and submission as if she were the prisoner of her own profession. Never going out except in her carriage, she began to lose the use of her legs. She reverted to her childish habits, kissing Bijou from morning to night and killing time with stupid pleasures, as she waited for some man or other.

Émile Zola

1840 - 1902