A state of illiterates

The brazilian south lacks the conditions to produce a Carl Sagan.

Hunger

Even with the remarkable gains of the last decades, we do not presently live in a world without hunger. Far from it: most estimates put the number of undernourished at 800 million globally, with as many as 100 million hungry because of climate shocks. What is called “hidden hunger” — micronutrient and dietary deficiencies — is considerably higher, affecting well over 1 billion people.

A country of illiterates

An unimaginable portrait in southern Brazil

Poor education (anti-intellectualism) 

is also a form of fascism.

A city of illiterates

Universal education in Porto Alegre is deteriorating. Worse every day. Education in Porto Alegre serves to perpetuate misery and vulgarization.

Education for the poor: vulgarization, destruction of subjectivity.
Education for the rich: knowledge, development of consciousness.

Listen to the southerner's linguistic experience. It says it all.

Don't even cultivate readers. And it is urgent to privatize schools.

Bibliography

Someday, perhaps not long from now, the inhabitants of a hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet than the one on which I lived may wonder what you and I were thinking, or whether we thought at all. Of course we did it to ourselves; we had always been intellectually lazy, and the less asked of us, the less we had to say. We all livedfor money, and that is what we died for.

The Malthusian tragic

Inability to see any remaining innocence in the quotidian life of the well-to-do West, given the devastation that wealth has imposed on the world of natural wonder it conquered and the suffering of those, elsewhere on the planet, left behind in the race to endless material comforts. And asked, functionally, to pay for them.

A state of half-ignorance and half-indifference is a much more persuasive climate sickness than true denial or true fatalism.

Climate change

Global food production accounts for about a third of all emissions. To avoid dangerous climate change, Greenpeace has estimated that the world needs to cut its meat and dairy consumption in half by 2050.

Hunger

Norman Borlaug with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, developed a new collection of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties that are now credited with saving the lives of a billion people worldwide.

Underdeveloped country

Peace-and-love little Lula trivialized the word "future" in his speech.

What is missing is an equitable distribution of that "future".

Climate change

Global warming is more than just one input in an equation to determine carrying capacity; it is the set of conditions under which all of our experiments to improve that capacity will be conducted. In this way, climate change appears to be not merely one challenge among many facing a planet already struggling with civil strife and war and horrifying inequality and far too many other insoluble hardships to iterate, but the all-encompassing stage on which all those challenges will be met — a whole sphere, in other words, which literally contains within it all of the world’s future problems and all of its possible solutions.

Heat death

Relying on carbon capture globally could require large-scale scrubbing plantations nearly everywhere on Earth — the planet transformed into something like an air-recycling plant orbiting the sun, an industrial satellite tracing a parabola through the solar system.

Cities only magnify the problem of high temperature. Asphalt and concrete and everything else that makes a city dense, including human flesh, absorb ambient heat, essentially storing it for a time like a slow-release poison pill the concrete and asphalt of cities absorb so much heat during the day that when it is released, at night, it can raise the local temperature as much as 22 degrees Fahrenheit, turning what could be bearably hot days into deadly ones — as in the Chicago heat wave of 1995, which killed 739 people, the direct-heat effects compounded by broken public health infrastructure. That commonly cited figure only reflects immediate deaths; of the many thousands more who visited hospitals during the heat wave, almost half died within the year. Others merely suffered permanent brain damage. Scientists call this the “heat island” effect — each city its own enclosed space, and hotter the more crowded it is.

Climate change won’t likely slow that pattern by much, but it will make the great migrations it reflects more perilous, with many millions of the world’s ambitious flooding into cities whose calendars are dotted with days of deadly heat, gathering in those new megalopolises like moths to a flame.

By 2050, 255,000 are expected to die globally from direct heat effects. Already, as many as 1 billion are at risk for heat stress worldwide, and a third of the world’s population is subject to deadly heat waves at least twenty days each year.

Heat death is among the cruelest punishments to a human body, just as painful and disorienting as hypothermia. First comes “heat exhaustion,” mostly a mark of dehydration: profuse sweating, nausea, headache. After a certain point, though, water won’t help, your core temperature rising as your body sends blood outward to the skin, hoping desperately to cool it down. The skin often reddens; internal organs begin to fail. Eventually you could stop sweating. The brain, too, stops working properly, and sometimes, after a period of agitation and combativeness, the episode is punctuated with a lethal heart attack. “When it comes to extreme heat”, Langewiesche has written, “you can no more escape the conditions than you can shed your skin”.

Heat eath

At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. Then, it was one of the worst weather events in Continental history, killing 35,000 Europeans, including 14,000 French; perversely, the infirm fared relatively well, William Langewiesche has written, most of them watched over in the nursing homes and hospitals of those well-off countries, and it was the comparatively healthy elderly who accounted for most of the dead, many left behind by vacationing families escaping the heat, with some corpses rotting for weeks before the families returned.

It will get worse the number of days warmer than what were once the warmest days of the year could grow by a factor of 100 by 2080. Possibly by a factor of 250. By the end of the century, the World Bank has estimated, the coolest months in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely to be warmer than the warmest months at the end of the twentieth century.

In 2010, 55,000 died in a Russian heat wave that killed 700 people in Moscow each day. In 2016, in the midst of a heat wave that baked the Middle East for several months, temperatures in Iraq broke 100 degrees Fahrenheit in May, 110 in June, and 120 in July, with temperatures dipping below 100, most days, only at night. In 2018, the hottest temperature likely ever recorded in April was registered in southeast Pakistan. In 2016, a string of days topped 120 — in May. In Saudi Arabia, where summer temperatures often approach that mark, 700,000 barrels of oil are burned each day in the summer, mostly to power the nation’s air-conditioning.

In the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population — including over a quarter of the men — has chronic kidney disease, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago. With dialysis, which is expensive, those with kidney failure can expect to live five years; without it, life expectancy is measured in weeks. Of course, heat stress promises to assail us in places other than our kidneys, too.

Utter improbability of anything as advanced as human intelligence evolving anywhere in a universe as inhospitable to life as this one: every uninhabitable planet out there is a reminder of just how unique a set of circumstances is required to produce a climate equilibrium supportive of life. No intelligent life that we know of ever evolved, anywhere in the universe, outside of the narrow Goldilocks range of temperatures that enclosed all of human evolution, and that we have now left behind, probably permanently.

When will the planet warm by two degrees, and when by three? How much sea-level rise will be here by 2030? Which cities will flood, which forests will dry out, which breadbaskets will become husks?

Three-quarters of a century since global warming was first recognized as a problem, we have made no meaningful adjustment to our production or consumption of energy to account for it and protect ourselves.

To keep the planet under 2 degrees of warming, all signatory nations have to significantly better their pledges. Renewed Chinese commitments are, at this point, just rhetorical, too; the country already has the world’s largest footprint.

China commands half of the planet’s coal-power capacity, with plants that only operate. If the world as a whole followed the Chinese example, it would bring five degrees of warming by 2100.

Heat death

Humans, like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means having to continually cool off, as panting dogs do. For that, the temperature needs to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, drawing heat off the skin so the engine can keep pumping. At seven degrees of warming, that would become impossible for portions of the planet’s equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the problem. And the effect would be fast: after a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out.

At eleven or twelve degrees Celsius of warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat. But at just five degrees whole parts of the globe would be literally unsurvivable for humans.

Human futilitarianism

The problem, it turns out, is not an overabundance of humans but a dearth of humanity. Climate change and the Anthropocene are the triumph of an undead species, a mindless shuffle toward extinction, but this is only a lopsided imitation of what we really are. This is why political depression is important: zombies don’t feel sad, and they certainly don’t feel helpless; they just are. Political depression is, at root, the experience of a creature that is being prevented from being itself. Yes, political depressives feel as if they don’t know how to be human; buried in the despair and self-doubt is an important realization. If humanity is the capacity to act meaningfully within our surroundings, then we are not really, or not yet, human.

[...]

Humans will be extinct within ten years.

History after progress

Mad Max regions are already here, where "here" is part of Somalia or Iraq or South Sudan at various points in the las decade, including points when the planet's geopolitcs seemed, at a glance from Los Angeles or London, stable.

Deep time of cascading

Pleasure districts like Miami Beach, built just decades ago, will disappear, as will many of the military installations erected around the world since World War II to defend and secure the wealth that gave rise to them. Much older cities, like Amsterdam, are also under threat from flooding, with extraordinary infrastructure needed already today to keep them above water, infrastructure unavailable to defend the temples and villages of Bangladesh. Farmlands that had produced the same strains of grain or grapes for centuries or more will adapt, if they are lucky, to entirely new crops; in Sicily, the breadbasket of the ancient world, farmers are already turning to tropical fruits. Arctic ice that formed over millions of years will be unleashed as water, literally changing the face of the planet and remodeling shipping routes responsible for the very idea of globalization. And mass migrations will sever communities numbering in the millions — even tens of millions — from their ancestral homelands, which will disappear forever.

History after progress

There is no good thing in the world that will be made more abundant, or spread more widely, by global warming. The list of the bad things that will proliferate is innumerable.

If the planet reaches three or four or five degress of warming, the world will be convulsed with human suffering at such a scale - so many million refugees, half again as many wars, droughts and famines, and economic growth made impossible on so much of the planet - that its citizens will have difficulty regarding the recent past as a course of progress or even a phase in a cycle, or in fact anything but a true and substantial reverse.

Empire

China now pulls criminals out of pop concerts with facial recognition software and deploys domestic-spy drones indistinguishable from birds. This is not an aspiring empire likely to tolerate no-man's-lands within its sphere.

History after progress

Climate change does make us all prisoners of the Industrial Revolution, and suggests a carceral model of history.

Disorientingly, climate change will also send us hurtling forward into an uncharted future — so long forward, if it proceeds unchecked, and into such a distant future, that we can hardly imagine the scale. This is not the “techno-shock” first experienced by Victorians encountering an accelerating pace of progress and feeling overwhelmed by just how much was changing within a single lifetime.

Politics of consumption

The term “neoliberalism” was sold, for decades, on the promise of growth, a sort of total political philosophy, extending a single, simple ideological tarpaulin so far and wide that it enclosed the earth like a rubbery blanket of greenhouse gas.

The forces that unleashed climate change — namely, “the unchecked wisdom of the market” — were nevertheless presented as the forces that would save the planet from its ravages. It is how “philanthrocapitalism”, which seeks profits alongside human benefits, has replaced the loss-leader model of moral philanthropy among the very rich; how the winners of our increasingly winner-take-all tournament economy use philanthropy to buttress their own status; how “effective altruism”, which measures even not-for-profit charity by metrics of return borrowed from finance, has transformed the culture of giving well beyond the billionaire class; and how the “moral economy”, a rhetorical wedge that once expressed a radical critique of capitalism, became the calling card of do-gooder capitalists like Bill Gates. It is also, on the other end of the pecking order, how struggling citizens are asked to be entrepreneurs, indeed to demonstrate their value as citizens with the hard work of entrepreneurship, in an exhausting social system defined above all else by relentless competition.

No future

Independent meditation, ayahuasca trips, hydroponic weed, crystals, microdosed LSD, prayers, the climate continues to careen toward visible degradation.

Feudalism

 

In the life of a brazilian, there is nothing but bullshit and god. All mixed together.

Politics of Consumption

The climate crisis demands political commitment weil beyond the easy engagement of rhetorical sympathies, comfortable partisan tribalism, and ehtical consumption.

Liberal environmentalist that they live hypocritically eat meat, flying, and voting liberal.

The structure of a political and economic order that not only permits the disparity but feeds and profits from it.

Screen addiction

A psychologically useful coping mechanism for living, still within the consumptive bourgeois tradition, in a dramatically degraded natural world.

Alienation

Staring into the screen so we don't have to see the planet die.

Global decarbonization

More than 10,000 people die each day, globally, from the small-particulate pollution produced by burning carbon. Globally, pollution kills as many as nine million each year.

Ethnocide

STF (rapporteur Flávio Dino) authorizes mining on Indigenous land: malaria cases will go off.

It would be more convenient to drop a plutonium bomb on the Indigenous people.

Global decarbonization

China recently poured more concrete in three years than the United States used in the entire twentieth century. Making concrete, production of which ranks today as the second most carbon-intensive industry in the world.

Planet of slum

The only alternative for Brazilians: live with potholes and service delays.

Slum

Brazilian wife reading trivial Twitter threads while your spouse is speaking, children scream and neighbor plays vulgar music.

Dirty infrastructure

The transition from dirty electricity to clean sources is not the whole challenge. It’s just the lowest-hanging fruit: smaller than the challenge of electrifying almost everything that uses power, by which he means anything that runs on much dirtier gas engines. That task, he continues, is smaller than the challenge of reducing energy demand, which is smaller than the challenge of reinventing how goods and services are provided — given that global supply chains are built with dirty infrastructure and labor markets everywhere are still powered by dirty energy. There is also the need to get to zero emissions from all other sources — deforestation, agriculture, livestock, landfills. And the need to protect all human systems from the coming onslaught of natural disasters and extreme weather. And the need to erect a system of global government, or at least international cooperation, to coordinate such a project. All of which is a smaller task, than the monumental cultural undertaking of imagining together a thriving, dynamic, sustainable future that feels not only possible, but worth fighting for.

Posthumanity

As delighted as you may by Netflix and Amazon and Instagram and Google Maps, rapid technology change transformed nearly every aspect of everyday life, and yet yielding little or tangible improvement in any conventional measures of economic well-being.

Posthumanity

We are, in other words, billions of dollars and thousands of dramatic breakthroughs later, precisely where we started when hippies were affixing solar panels to their geodesic domes. That is because the market has not responded to these developments by seamlessly retiring dirty energy sources and replacing them with clean ones. It has responded by simply adding the new capacity to the same system.

The cryptocurrency now produces as much CO2 each year as a million transatlantic flights.

Rio Grande do Sul:

Immoral behaviors

ghetto mentality.

Porto Alegre: the city of misery

The unemployed christian woman looks at the shit on the sidewalk and says:

- People say it's money.

Completely lost.

The writer and misery

Brazil's underdeveloped types, who have no respect for the life of the mind, are much closer to Hitler than to Stalin.

The underdeveloped worker cannot develop their consciousness. It goes against the rules of poverty.

The writer and communism

Under Stalin, the writer and the literary work played a vital role in Communist strategy. Literature was being honored.

Writers have always been aware of their special position in Communist ideology. They have taken Communism seriously because it has taken them seriously. Thus a history of the relations between Communism and modem literature is, in certain vital respects, a history of both.

There is hardly a major writer in 20th century who has not been touched at some stage in his life and art by Communism.

The alliance between literature and Communism remains both intimate. Literature is indeed the most dangerous of trades.

A withdrawal from Marxism leaving the imagination of the writer bruised.

In the lives of such writers as Camus, Steinbeck, or Silone, Marxism has played a liberating role.

The deep influence of Marxist ideas on Western aesthetics and literary theory. 'Whether explicitly or unconsciously, our whole contemporary view of art is penetrated with a Marxist awareness of social context and historical dynamism. Even the most Alexandrine of ''new critics" owes to the Marxist tradition some realization of the economic or social milieu that lies behind poetic style. Indeed, it may well be in aesthetics, rather than in actual literature, that Marxism has made its most solid contribution.

The Marxist or Communist element in the work of art is a code to express a personal radicalism.

Zei

Melancholic woman let’s move to Lisbon.

Now is the time for fearlessness!
There are a million reasons you can do it

Hey gothic girl, ragazza punk time flies by. 

We got the same intellect.

You have no money, fine!

I see people come and go, living low, in penury
It is time building a real home.

We're looking for a love that was never in our hearts.

Fill up the world with me.

The writer and communism

1984 is not a parable of the totalitarian rule of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao Tse-tung. The polemic of the fable is not unilinear. Orwell's critique bears simultaneously on the police state and on capitalist consumer society, with its illiteracy of values and its conformities. "Newspeak," the language of Orwell's nightmare, is the verbiage of commercial advertisement and massmedia. The tragic strength of 1984 derives precisely from Orwell's refusal to see things in black and white. Our own acquisitive society appalled him. He noted in it germs of inhumanity. Orwell came back from Catalonia with a kind of bleak, stoic faith in a humane socialism which neither East nor West is prepared to adopt on any but the most limited scale. To make of 1984 a pamphlet in the intellectual cold war is to misread and diminish the book.

The writer and communism

One of the striking differences between Fascism and Communism is this : Fascism has inspired no great work of art. Communism, on the contrary, has been a central force in much of the finest of modern literature; and personal encounter with Communism has marked the consciousness and career of many of the major writers of the age.

Why this difference? No doubt, Fascism is too vile and scurrilous an ideology to produce those charities of the imagination which are essential to literate art. Communism is a vision of human possibility rich in moral demand. Fascism is the ultimate code of the hoodlum. Fascism tyrannizes through contempt of man.

There is also a more specific difference. Hitler and Goebbels were cunning manipulators of language; but they had scant respect for the life of the mind. Communism, by contrast, is a creed penetrated from the very moment of its historical origin by a sense of the values of intellect and art. In Marx and Engels this sense is explicit. They were intellectuals to the core.

A city of illiterates

Porto Alegre: the province without a Marxist bookstore.

There's more to life than war and greed

Authoritarian globalist agenda: peddlers of destruction, financial suffocation, greed, fictitious enemies, you're living in a plutocracy.

Politics in Brazil: greed over everything else.

Poor women

Porto Alegre has turned into a slaughterhouse.

Is the monkey breathing

The argentine woman changed Buenos Aires for Porto Alegre. 

She must be crazy. Demented.

POA

The elderly woman behind the counter in a small town was a reactionary.

The false principle of our education

I keep saying, 170 years after Max Stirner:

— No, school is not life.

Feudalism

Universal education in Brazil is deteriorating.

The buffalo

But it was spring, and, tightening the fist in her coat pocket, she’d kill those monkeys levitating in their cage, monkeys happy as weeds, monkeys leaping about gently, the female monkey with her resigned, loving gaze, and the other female suckling her young. She’d kill them with fifteen dry bullets: the woman’s teeth clenched until her jaw ached. The nakedness of the monkeys. The world that saw no danger in being naked. She’d kill the nakedness of the monkeys. One monkey stared back at her as he gripped the bars, his emaciated arms outstretched in a crucifix, his bare chest exposed without pride. But she wouldn’t aim at his chest, she’d shoot the monkey between the eyes, she’d shoot between those eyes that were staring at her without blinking. Suddenly the woman averted her face: because the monkey’s pupils were covered with a gelatinous white veil, in his eyes the sweetness of sickness, he was an old monkey — the woman averted her face, trapping between her teeth a feeling she hadn’t come looking for, she quickened her step, even so, turned her head in alarm back toward the monkey with its arms outstretched: he kept staring straight ahead. “Oh no, not this,” she thought. And as she fled, she said: “God, teach me only how to hate.”

Clarice Lispector

1920 - 1977

Feudalism

SP almost a theocracy.

The perversity in power

Note: in Brazil, the State is not used to eliminate inequalities.

Misery

Brazil is a poor and disorganized country.

The perversity in power

The number of cyclist killings in Brazil is alarming.

Posthumanity

How to rearrange atoms to create water or oxygen?

Posthumanity

If the Earth goes, we’ll live in spaceships?
We’ll have 3D printers to print our food?

Posthumanity

Climate change does threaten the very basis of life on this planet, but a dramatically degraded environment here will still be much, much closer to livability than anything we might be able to hack out of the dry red soil of Mars. Even in summer, at the equator of that planet, nighttime temperatures are a hundred degrees Fahrenheit below zero; there is no water on its surface, and no plant life. Conceivably, given sufficient funding, a small enclosed colony could be built there, or on another planet; but the costs would be so much higher than for an equivalent artificial ecosystem on Earth, and therefore the scale so much more limited, that anyone proposing space travel as a solution to global warming must be suffering from their own climate delusion. To imagine such a colony could offer material prosperity as abundant as tech plutocrats enjoy in Atherton is to live even more deeply in the narcissism of that delusion—as though it were only as difficult to smuggle luxury to Mars as to Burning Man.

The faith takes a different form among the laity, unable to afford that ticket into space. But articles of faith are offered, considerately, at different price points: smartphones, streaming services, rideshares, and the internet itself, more or less free. And each glimmers with some promise of escape from the struggles and strife of a degraded world.

Existential threat

Human extinction scenarios are everywhere. The humans aren’t burdened with environmental wreckage and the problem of navigating it.

Crisis capitalism

We see the way that perspectives on climate change map neatly onto existing and familiar perspectives on capitalism — from burn-it-all-down leftists to naively optimistic and blinkered technocrats to rent-seeking, kleptocratic, growth-is-the-only-value conservatives — we tend to think of climate as somehow being contained within, or governed by, capitalism. In fact, the opposite: capitalism is endangered by climate.

The belief that the grandest task before technologists is not to engineer prosperity and well-being for humanity but to build a kind of portal through which we might pass into another, possibly eternal kind of existence, a technological rapture in which conceivably many — the billions lacking access to broadband, to begin with — would be left behind. It would be very hard, after all, to upload your brain to the cloud when you’re buying pay-as-you-go data by the SIM card.

The south is fascist

Xenophobia is a provincial characteristic of Porto Alegre.

Posthumanity

Sam Altman made a down payment on a brain-upload program that would extract his mind from this world.