Från "Kristus-mördare" till helvetet i Auschwitz

SVT bjöd tydligen in en imam för att diskutera "påskens budskap" med ärkebiskopen (vad hen nu heter), vilket ledde till förutsägbart negativa reaktioner från SD-väljarna. Eller var det Ebba Buschs klasskompisar från Bibelskolan?

Och ja, jag håller med om kritiken. Fast av lite andra orsaker...

Tänk om SVT faktiskt bjudit in en ortodox judisk rabbin för att diskutera påsken med en kristen. *Verkligen* diskutera frågan.

Det hade varit grejer, det. Inte något diplomatiskt meningsutbyte mellan en muslim och Sveriges mest islamofila biskop... 

LOL. 

PS. Det här inlägget *kanske* är ironiskt. 

Hunan Henry

Henry Kissinger wants to thaw US relations with China and strike a real "balance of power" with the PRC. He doesn´t mention Russia, though. So presumably he simply wants to reset the US-Chinese alliance he himself helped to develop back in the 1970´s, an alliance directed against the Soviet Union. That is, Russia. Or am I missing something here?

Endless US-China contest risks catastrophic conflict, Henry Kissinger warns

On the spiral of humanity

Some stray pessimistic reflections... 

There doesn´t seem to be any strict or hard teleology in human history. Determinism isn´t the same thing as teleology (which requires inherent meaning in history, or perhaps meaning imposed from the outside, by an external divine force). 

History seems to consist of long periods av deterministic BAU, interfoliated by contingent events during which a completely different outcome would have changed the course of history radically (for better or for worse). 

Examples of such contingent events could include the decision of the Arabs to listen to an obscure Judaizing preacher named Muhammad, the Great Plague in Europe circa 1350, the non-resistance of the American Native population to European diseases, the decision of a certain Chinese emperor to "burn the ships", the birth of a very smart and ruthless revolutionary known in underground circles as "Nikolai Lenin", the Nazi defeats at Stalingrad and El-Alamein, the fact that Oppenheimer and the Rosenbergs gave Stalin the secrets of the A-bomb, the US decisions to attack Iraq and Libya, and (perhaps) COVID-19 (if it was released from a lab, either deliberately or as a mistake). I´m less sure about the battle of Salamis...

There are also events which aren´t "contingent" in the above sense, but nevertheless have a profound impact on human history. One example is the existence of enormous deposits of oil and coal, and its exact distribution. Another is naturally occuring climate change, including the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. (Perhaps the pandemics mentioned above belong more in this category?) Another is the fact that certain seabirds shit a lot at small islands off the South American coast. 

At the same time, there *is* a kind of long-term direction in human history. For all we know, humans have *never* lived in "harmony" with Nature. Nor have they been able to control their population growth, despite valiant attempts to do so. Over time, the human population tends to grow. Since humans have a certain kind of dynamic intelligence, probably unique in the evolutionary tree, we can respond to population growth by technological innovations. We can expand our food production. Over the long run, this will lead to increased complexity and the formation of so-called high cultures. Note how high cultures arose independently of each other (as far as we know) in both the Old World and the New. Even in areas where no high cultures developed due to a variety of factors, such as Australia (before the White conquest), there was a tendency towards increased complexity in other ways. I´m less sure if "modernity" is inevitable, or just another (somewhat weird) high culture arising contingently from the ashes of the West Roman Empire and the soil of Medieval Europe, but its super-high degree of complexity arriving very late in the game proves my point regardless. 

Of course, this means that humans also have a built-in tendency to overshoot their resource base. So far, no known civilization has managed to solve this problem once and for all, and ours is no better in this regard (despite the dreams of cornucopians). There is zero indication that the world will stop using fossil fuels, certainly not before 2028 (the supposed year of no return), or even considerably cut the emissions. Fusion power will never be developed, there will be no manned mission to Mars, CCS doesn´t work either, and "electrification" is just a gimmick to make copper mining great again. Overpopulation is a stark reality. Modern civilization is therefore heading for decline, indeed, in many places, it is declining already. It might even crash and burn!

This seems to be the "Art Wesen" of Homo sapiens sapiens. Can humanity change? Maybe. I don´t see why it should be intrinsically impossible. However, it also seems highly unlikely. At least in the present epoch! 

The idea that we have somehow moved closer to "socialism", "a global society", "social justice", "the new consciousness" or whatever is the utopia du jour, is simply a conceit. Of course we haven´t. Even apart from the fact that most people promising a golden age of globalism, alter-globalization or anti-globalization are just grifters representing certain vested interests (or perhaps would-be such). In reality, very little seems to have changed since the late 19th century, except (of course) two world wars, even more people, even more environmental destruction, and tolerance towards trans-womyn being the law of the land. And, I suppose, drone deliveries ordered through Android phones. Otherwise, it´s still the liberal-global English-speaking Empire with its domesticated labor movement and hypocritical abolitionist elite versus Islam, India, China and Russia. And continental Europe? The more things change...

Human history seem to move in cycles, which in turn form a slowly moving upward spiral. However, this spiral isn´t really going anywhere either. Except maybe down. 

None of this is incompatible with a spiritual perspective. However, it *is* problematic if you are a very consistent materialist and/or atheist. 

Veckans Strasser

Dansk socialdemokrati.  

"På 23 år blev invandrarhatet det politiskt normala"

Jag är däremot pigg som en nötkärna

LOL. Om ni undrar varför jag inte länkat till detta tidigare, så beror det på att jag faktiskt inte sett det förrän nu. 

Ett ganska bra exempel på hur medelklassvänstern dumpat sista ledet och mest bara blivit medelklass. Eller "etablissemang", om man så vill. Den här tantens ungdomsprotester var bara vägröjare för den globo-liberala kastens hegemoni inom senkapitalismen. 

Sedan kan man naturligtvis tycka att QAnon är skvatt vansinniga, men det är en annan sak. Dessutom kan man ju fråga sig *varför* dissidenter numera dras till tokhögern snarare än till "sociala rättvisefrågor". Just för att sådana som krönikören på sin ålders höst försvarar etablissemanget, kanske?

"Jag är trött på att tvingas försvara etablissemanget"

 

This week´s safe space

 

Chimp out

Since I don´t have anything else to write about, listen to this (from all-knowing Wikipedia): 

"In traditional and non-scientific use, the term "ape" excludes humans, and can include tailless primates taxonomically considered monkeys (such as the Barbary ape and the black ape), and is thus not equivalent to the scientific taxon Hominoidea."  

Even worse, "cladistically speaking", humans and apes *are* monkeys. So now what? 

And all this time I assumed that "ape" means ape and "monkey" means "all the other damn creatures throwing feces at one another", but apparently the chimp out is worse than I expected... 

Famine food

So I´ve been reading some more in "The Archeology of Global Change", a volume published by the Smithsonian in 2004. This time about the Hohokam. I´m not sure if the proponents of the "noble savage" myth include this particular culture in their list of Native American peoples who were supposedly "natural conservationists". The Hohokam, after all, were a kind of high culture. Or at least a proto-high culture. So perhaps environmental degradation is expected in their case?

The Hohokam culture existed from 1000 BC to 1500 AD. The place was the arid Sonora desert in what is today the US state of Arizona. The Hohokam are mostly known for their 500 miles long canal system which irrigated their main agricultural fields. The peak population is apparently difficult to gauge, with estimates ranging from 25,000 to 150,000. The Hohokam also grew food (specifically agave) on marginal lands, at so-called rockpile fields. There is no doubt that the Hohokam were a clever group of people, and while the exact causes of their demise is unknown, it might not have been environmental degradation, but rather European diseases (which reached Arizona long before the actual Europeans). That being said, the Hohokam certainly didn´t live in some kind of Edenic balance with nature. 

The Hohokam hunted and consumed ungulates, but the abundance of these animals decrease in the archeological record over time, suggesting overhunting. One way to get meat was trade, either with Hohokam settlements in the marginal areas, or with Native peoples elsewhere. Another was long-distance hunting expeditions by the Hohokam themselves. This hunting was not for everyone, but was probably in the hands of hunting specialists, with their own buildings, access to animal-like outfits (perhaps used to sneak up on the game animals), and weapons made from obsidian (a material not readily available to the Hohokam). 

When ungulates became scarcer, the Hohokam turned more and more to lagomorphs, fish, beaver and muskrat. The lagomorphs and fish were always part of the local diet, but apparently the size of the fish decreased with time, suggesting that this resource was being over-exploited. Beaver and muskrat only shows up relatively late in the archeological record, despite both being edible animals. Perhaps there were cultural taboos against eating them? There are apparently such taboos among the present-day Native population in the area. If so, beaver and muskrat would be "famine food", animals hunted only when the Natives were forced to choose between eating and ideology. (They chose eating). Yet, at some archeological sites, the former inhabitants suffered from "subsistence stress and iron-deficiency anemia", suggesting that they nevertheless didn´t get enough protein. 

During the mid-19th century, wildlife in the Southwest was relatively abundant and diverse, something not seen in the archeological record. This suggests that the animals recovered after the downfall of the Hohokam culture. Widlife becomes scarce again due to White American hunting during the early 20th century. At the same time, modern human activity has allowed the spread of animal species which never lived in Arizona before. So when conservationists talk about preserving an original "Nature", what exactly do they have in mind? Nature is always changing, often in response to human interventions, including those of the Hohokam...

An ally we don´t need

After Trump´s breathlessly stupid decision to dump the Kurdish-dominated SDF from the US payroll, instead relying on Erdogan´s Islamist regime in Turkey to "fight ISIS" in the region, we are left with guys like these. Yes, al-Qaeda is alive and kicking in Idlib province, under the tutelage of Turkish troops. And soon presumably US troops, as well? This is an ally we definitely *don´t* need. I think the people of MENA would actually agree! Not to mention the Americans who lost a loved one on 9/11... 

Washington brings Syria´s Al-Qaeda in from the cold

Caught in the web of evolution

Come and meet your Redeemer!

A quote from the All-Knowing Wikipedia: "Tetrapods emerged within lobe-finned fishes, so cladistically they are fish as well." Tetrapods include humans, so "cladistically" this means that you´re fish. Fish of the clade Sarcopterygii, to be more exact. 

I´m sure you would rather be descended from ants, cockroaches or other such cool creatures, but naah, you´re fish. The fossil of one of your distant cousins (cladistically speaking) has actually been found in northern Canada. Yes, that would be the famous Tiktaalik, the name of which simply means "large freshwater fish" in the local Inuit language (linguistically speaking). 

That´s what you are, human-oid. You´re just a large freshwater fish with a terrible attitude. Cladistically speaking, of course.

Personally, I´m a kind of lily. But you knew that already, I assume.