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Thread: Climate Change Thread

  1. #361

    Default Re: Climate Change Thread

    Wooooo!!!

  2. #362

    Default Re: Climate Change Thread

    This Isaac Asimov story about space war makes for surprisingly good climate action allegory:

    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
    IN MAKING THIS STATEMENT - which I do of my own free will - I wish first to make it perfectly clear that I am not in any way trying to gain sympathy, nor do I expect any mitigation of whatever sentence the Court may pronounce. I am writing this in an attempt to refute some of the lying reports broadcast over the prison radio and published in the papers I have been allowed to see. These have given an entirely false picture of the true cause of our defeat, and as the leader of my race's armed forces at the cessation of hostilities I feel it my duty to protest against such libels upon those who served under me.

    I also hope that this statement may explain the reasons for the application I have twice made to the Court, and will now induce it to grant a favor for which I can see no possible grounds of refusal.

    The ultimate cause of our failure was a simple one: despite all statements to the contrary, it was not due to lack of bravery on the part of our men, or to any fault of the Fleet's. We were defeated by one thing only - by the inferior science of our enemies. I repeat - by the inferior science of our enemies.

    When the war opened we had no doubt of our ultimate victory. The combined fleets of our allies greatly exceeded in number and armament those which the enemy could muster against us, and in almost all branches of military science we were their superiors. We were sure that we could maintain this superiority. Our belief proved, alas, to be only too well founded.

    At the opening of the war our main weapons were the long-range homing torpedo, dirigible ball-lightning and the various modifications of the Klydon beam. Every unit of the Fleet was equipped with these and though the enemy possessed similar weapons their installations were generally of lesser power. Moreover, we had behind us a far greater military Research Organization, and with this initial advantage we could not possibly lose.

    The campaign proceeded according to plan until the Battle of the Five Suns. We won this, of course, but the opposition proved stronger than we had expected. It was realized that victory might be more difficult, and more delayed, than had first been imagined. A conference of supreme commanders was therefore called to discuss our future strategy.

    Present for the first time at one of our war conferences was Professor-General Norden, the new Chief of the Research Staff, who had just been appointed to fill the gap left by the death of Malvar, our greatest scientist. Malvar's leadership had been responsible, more than any other single factor, for the efficiency and power of our weapons. His loss was a very serious blow, but no one doubted the brilliance of his successor - though many of us disputed the wisdom of appointing a theoretical scientist to fill a post of such vital importance. But we had been overruled.

    I can well remember the impression Norden made at that conference. The military advisers were worried, and as usual turned to the scientists for help. Would it be possible to improve our existing weapons, they asked, so that our present advantage could be increased still further?

    Norden's reply was quite unexpected. Malvar had often been asked such a question - and he had always done what we requested.

    "Frankly, gentlemen," said Norden, "I doubt it. Our existing weapons have practically reached finality. I don't wish to criticize my predecessor, or the excellent work done by the Research Staff in the last few generations, but do you realize that there has been no basic change in armaments for over a century? It is, I am afraid, the result of a tradition that has become conservative. For too long, the Research Staff has devoted itself to perfecting old weapons instead of developing new ones. It is fortunate for us that our opponents have been no wiser: we cannot assume that this will always be so."

    Norden's words left an uncomfortable impression, as he had no doubt intended. He quickly pressed home the attack.

    "What we want are new weapons - weapons totally different from any that have been employed before. Such weapons can be made: it will take time, of course, but since assuming charge I have replaced some of the older scientists with young men and have directed research into several unexplored fields which show great promise. I believe, in fact, that a revolution in warfare may soon be upon us."

    We were skeptical. There was a bombastic tone in Norden's voice that made us suspicious of his claims. We did not know, then, that he never promised anything that he had not already almost perfected in the laboratory. In the laboratory - that was the operative phrase.

    Norden proved his case less than a month later, when he demonstrated the Sphere of Annihilation, which produced complete disintegration of matter over a radius of several hundred meters. We were intoxicated by the power of the new weapon, and were quite prepared to overlook one fundamental defect - the fact that it was a sphere and hence destroyed its rather complicated generating equipment at the instant of formation. This meant, of course, that it could not be used on warships but only on guided missiles, and a great program was started to convert all homing torpedoes to carry the new weapon. For the time being all further offensives were suspended.

    We realize now that this was our first mistake. I still think that it was a natural one, for it seemed to us then that all our existing weapons had become obsolete overnight, and we already regarded them as almost primitive survivals. What we did not appreciate was the magnitude of the task we were attempting, and the length of time it would take to get the revolutionary super-weapon into battle. Nothing like this had happened for a hundred years and we had no previous experience to guide us.

    The conversion problem proved far more difficult than anticipated. A new class of torpedo had to be designed, as the standard model was too small. This meant in turn that only the larger ships could launch the weapon, but we were prepared to accept this penalty. After six months, the heavy units of the Fleet were being equipped with the Sphere. Training maneuvers and tests had shown that it was operating satisfactorily and we were ready to take it into action. Norden was already being hailed as the architect of victory, and had half promised even more spectacular weapons.

    Then two things happened. One of our battleships disappeared completely on a training flight, and an investigation showed that under certain conditions the ship's long-range radar could trigger the Sphere immediately after it had been launched. The modification needed to overcome this defect was trivial, but it caused a delay of another month and was the source of much bad feeling between the naval staff and the scientists. We were ready for action again - when Norden announced that the radius of effectiveness of the Sphere had now been increased by ten, thus multiplying by a thousand the chances of destroying an enemy ship.

    So the modifications started all over again, but everyone agreed that the delay would be worth it. Meanwhile, however, the enemy had been emboldened by the absence of further attacks and had made an unexpected onslaught. Our ships were short of torpedoes, since none had been coming from the factories, and were forced to retire. So we lost the systems of Kyrane and Floranus, and the planetary fortress of Rhamsandron.

    It was an annoying but not a serious blow, for the recaptured systems had been unfriendly, and difficult to administer. We had no doubt that we could restore the position in the near future, as soon as the new weapon became operational.

    These hopes were only partially fulfilled. When we renewed our offensive, we had to do so with fewer of the Spheres of Annihilation than had been planned, and this was one reason for our limited success. The other reason was more serious.

    While we had been equipping as many of our ships as we could with the irresistible weapon, the enemy had been building feverishly. His ships were of the old pattern with the old weapons - but they now out-numbered ours. When we went into action, we found that the numbers ranged against us were often 100 percent greater than expected, causing target confusion among the automatic weapons and resulting in higher losses than anticipated. The enemy losses were higher still, for once a Sphere had reached its objective, destruction was certain, but the balance had not swung as far in our favor as we had hoped.

    Moreover, while the main fleets had been engaged, the enemy had launched a daring attack on the lightly held systems of Eriston, Duranus, Carmanidora and Pharanidon - recapturing them all. We were thus faced with a threat only fifty light-years from our home planets.

    There was much recrimination at the next meeting of the supreme commanders. Most of the complaints were addressed to Norden-Grand Admiral Taxaris in particular maintaining that thanks to our admittedly irresistible weapon we were now considerably worse off than before. We should, he claimed, have continued to build conventional ships, thus preventing the loss of our numerical superiority.

    Norden was equally angry and called the naval staff ungrateful bunglers. But I could tell that he was worried - as indeed we all were - by the unexpected turn of events. He hinted that there might be a speedy way of remedying the situation.

    We now know that Research had been working on the Battle Analyzer for many years, but at the time it came as a revelation to us and perhaps we were too easily swept off our feet. Norden's argument, also, was seductively convincing. What did it matter, he said, if the enemy had twice as many ships as we - if the efficiency of ours could be doubled or even trebled? For decades the limiting factor in warfare had been not mechanical but biological - it had become more and more difficult for any single mind, or group of minds, to cope with the rapidly changing complexities of battle in three-dimensional space. Norden's mathematicians had analyzed some of the classic engagements of the past, and had shown that even when we had been victorious we had often operated our units at much less than half of their theoretical efficiency.

    The Battle Analyzer would change all this by replacing the operations staff with electronic calculators. The idea was not new, in theory, but until now it had been no more than a Utopian dream. Many of us found it difficult to believe that it was still anything but a dream: after we had run through several very complex dummy battles, however, we were convinced.

    It was decided to install the Analyzer in four of our heaviest ships, so that each of the main fleets could be equipped with one. At this stage, the trouble began - though we did not know it until later.

    The Analyzer contained just short of a million vacuum tubes and needed a team of five hundred technicians to maintain and operate it. It was quite impossible to accommodate the extra staff aboard a battleship, so each of the four units had to be accompanied by a converted liner to carry the technicians not on duty. Installation was also a very slow and tedious business, but by gigantic efforts it was completed in six months.

    Then, to our dismay, we were confronted by another crisis. Nearly five thousand highly skilled men had been selected to serve the Analyzers and had been given an intensive course at the Technical Training Schools. At the end of seven months, 10 percent of them had had nervous breakdowns and only 40 per cent had qualified.

    Once again, everyone started to blame everyone else. Norden, of course, said that the Research Staff could not be held responsible, and so incurred the enmity of the Personnel and Training Commands. It was finally decided that the only thing to do was to use two instead of four Analyzers and to bring the others into action as soon as men could be trained. There was little time to lose, for the enemy was still on the offensive and his morale was rising.

    The first Analyzer fleet was ordered to recapture the system of Eriston. On the way, by one of the hazards of war, the liner carrying the technicians was struck by a roving mine. A warship would have survived, but the liner with its irreplaceable cargo was totally destroyed. So the operation had to be abandoned.

    The other expedition was, at first, more successful. There was no doubt at all that the Analyzer fulfilled its designers' claims, and the enemy was heavily defeated in the first engagements. He withdrew, leaving us in possession of Saphran, Leucon and Hexanerax. But his Intelligence Staff must have noted the change in our tactics and the inexplicable presence of a liner in the heart of our battlefleet. It must have noted, also, that our first fleet had been accompanied by a similar ship - and had withdrawn when it had been destroyed.

    In the next engagement, the enemy used his superior numbers to launch an overwhelming attack on the Analyzer ship and its unarmed consort. The attack was made without regard to losses - both ships were, of course, very heavily protected - and it succeeded. The result was the virtual decapitation of the Fleet, since an effectual transfer to the old operational methods proved impossible. We disengaged under heavy fire, and so lost all our gains and also the systems of Lormyia, Ismarnus, Beronis, Alphanidon and Sideneus.

    At this stage, Grand Admiral Taxaris expressed his disapproval of Norden by committing suicide, and I assumed supreme command.

    The situation was now both serious and infuriating. With stubborn conservatism and complete lack of imagination, the enemy continued to advance with his old-fashioned and inefficient but now vastly more numerous ships. It was galling to realize that if we had only continued building, without seeking new weapons, we would have been in a far more advantageous position. There were many acrimonious conferences at which Norden defended the scientists while everyone else blamed them for all that had happened. The difficulty was that Norden had proved every one of his claims: he had a perfect excuse for all the disasters that had occurred. And we could not now turn back - the search for an irresistible weapon must go on. At first it had been a luxury that would shorten the war. Now it was a necessity if we were to end it victoriously.

    We were on the defensive, and so was Norden. He was more than ever determined to reestablish his prestige and that of the Research Staff. But we had been twice disappointed, and would not make the same mistake again. No doubt Norden's twenty thousand scientists would produce many further weapons: we would remain unimpressed.

    We were wrong. The final weapon was something so fantastic that even now it seems difficult to believe that it ever existed. Its innocent, noncommittal name - The Exponential Field - gave no hint of its real potentialities. Some of Norden's mathematicians had discovered it during a piece of entirely theoretical research into the properties of space, and to everyone's great surprise their results were found to be physically realizable.

    It seems very difficult to explain the operation of the Field to the layman. According to the technical description, it "produces an exponential condition of space, so that a finite distance in normal, linear space may become infinite in pseudo-space." Norden gave an analogy which some of us found useful. It was as if one took a flat disk of rubber - representing a region of normal space - and then pulled its center out to infinity. The circumference of the disk would be unaltered - but its "diameter" would be infinite. That was the sort of thing the generator of the Field did to the space around it.

    As an example, suppose that a ship carrying the generator was surrounded by a ring of hostile machines. If it switched on the Field, each of the enemy ships would think that it - and the ships on the far side of the circle - had suddenly receded into nothingness. Yet the circumference of the circle would be the same as before: only the journey to the center would be of infinite duration, for as one proceeded, distances would appear to become greater and greater as the "scale" of space altered.

    It was a nightmare condition, but a very useful one. Nothing could reach a ship carrying the Field: it might be englobed by an enemy fleet yet would be as inaccessible as if it were at the other side of the Universe. Against this, of course, it could not fight back without switching off the Field, but this still left it at a very great advantage, not only in defense but in offense. For a ship fitted with the Field could approach an enemy fleet undetected and suddenly appear in its midst.

    This time there seemed to be no flaws in the new weapon. Needless to say, we looked for all the possible objections before we committed ourselves again. Fortunately the equipment was fairly simple and did not require a large operating staff. After much debate, we decided to rush it into production, for we realized that time was running short and the war was going against us. We had now lost about the whole of our initial gains and enemy forces had made several raids into our own solar system.

    We managed to hold off the enemy while the Fleet was reequipped and the new battle techniques were worked out. To use the Field operationally it was necessary to locate an enemy formation, set a course that would intercept it, and then switch on the generator for the calculated period of time. On releasing the Field again - if the calculations had been accurate - one would be in the enemy's midst and could do great damage during the resulting confusion, retreating by the same route when necessary.

    The first trial maneuvers proved satisfactory and the equipment seemed quite reliable. Numerous mock attacks were made and the crews became accustomed to the new technique. I was on one of the test flights and can vividly remember my impressions as the Field was switched on. The ships around us seemed to dwindle as if on the surface of an expanding bubble: in an instant they had vanished completely. So had the stars - but presently we could see that the Galaxy was still visible as a faint band of light around the ship. The virtual radius of our pseudo-space was not really infinite, but some hundred thousand light-years, and so the distance to the farthest stars of our system had not been greatly increased - though the nearest had of course totally disappeared. These training maneuvers, however, had to be canceled before they were completed, owing to a whole flock of minor technical troubles in various pieces of equipment, notably the communications circuits. These were annoying, but not important, though it was thought best to return to Base to clear them up.

    At that moment the enemy made what was obviously intended to be a decisive attack against the fortress planet of Iton at the limits of our Solar System. The Fleet had to go into battle before repairs could be made.

    The enemy must have believed that we had mastered the secret of invisibility - as in a sense we had. Our ships appeared suddenly out of no-where and inflicted tremendous damage - for a while. And then something quite baffling and inexplicable happened.

    I was in command of the flagship Hircania when the trouble started. We had been operating as independent units, each against assigned objectives. Our detectors observed an enemy formation at medium range and the navigating officers measured its distance with great accuracy. We set course and switched on the generator.

    The Exponential Field was released at the moment when we should have been passing through the center of the enemy group. To our consternation, we emerged into normal space at a distance of many hundred miles - and when we found the enemy, he had already found us. We retreated, and tried again. This time we were so far away from the enemy that he located us first.

    Obviously, something was seriously wrong. We broke communicator silence and tried to contact the other ships of the Fleet to see if they had experienced the same trouble. Once again we failed - and this time the failure was beyond all reason, for the communication equipment appeared to be working perfectly. We could only assume, fantastic though it seemed, that the rest of the Fleet had been destroyed.

    I do not wish to describe the scenes when the scattered units of the Fleet struggled back to Base. Our casualties had actually been negligible, but the ships were completely demoralized. Almost all had lost touch with one another and had found that their ranging equipment showed inexplicable errors. It was obvious that the Exponential Field was the cause of the troubles, despite the fact that they were only apparent when it was switched off.

    The explanation came too late to do us any good, and Norden's final discomfiture was small consolation for the virtual loss of the war. As I have explained, the Field generators produced a radial distortion of space, distances appearing greater and greater as one approached the center of the artificial pseudo-space. When the Field was switched off, conditions returned to normal.

    But not quite. It was never possible to restore the initial state exactly. Switching the Field on and off was equivalent to an elongation and contraction of the ship carrying the generator, but there was a hysteretic effect, as it were, and the initial condition was never quite reproducible, owing to all the thousands of electrical changes and movements of mass aboard the ship while the Field was on. These asymmetries and distortions were cumulative, and though they seldom amounted to more than a fraction of one per cent, that was quite enough. It meant that the precision ranging equipment and the tuned circuits in the communication apparatus were thrown completely out of adjustment. Any single ship could never detect the change - only when it compared its equipment with that of another vessel, or tried to communicate with it, could it tell what had happened.

    It is impossible to describe the resultant chaos. Not a single component of one ship could be expected with certainty to work aboard another. The very nuts and bolts were no longer interchangeable, and the supply position became quite impossible. Given time, we might even have overcome these difficulties, but the enemy ships were already attacking in thousands with weapons which now seemed centuries behind those that we had invented. Our magnificent Fleet, crippled by our own science, fought on as best it could until it was overwhelmed and forced to surrender. The ships fitted with the Field were still invulnerable, but as fighting units they were almost helpless. Every time they switched on their generators to escape from enemy attack, the permanent distortion of their equipment increased. In a month, it was all over.

    THIS IS THE true story of our defeat, which I give without prejudice to my defense before this Court. I make it, as I have said, to counteract the libels that have been circulating against the men who fought under me, and to show where the true blame for our misfortunes lay.

    Finally, my request, which as the Court will now realize I make in no frivolous manner and which I hope will therefore be granted.

    The Court will be aware that the conditions under which we are housed and the constant surveillance to which we are subjected night and day are somewhat distressing. Yet I am not complaining of this: nor do I complain of the fact that shortage of accommodation has made it necessary to house us in pairs.

    But I cannot be held responsible for my future actions if I am compelled any longer to share my cell with Professor Norden, late Chief of the Research Staff of my armed forces.
    Vitiate Man.

    History repeats the old conceits
    The glib replies, the same defeats


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  3. #363
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    Default Re: Climate Change Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    This Isaac Asimov story about space war makes for surprisingly good climate action allegory:

    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
    IN MAKING THIS STATEMENT - which I do of my own free will - I wish first to make it perfectly clear that I am not in any way trying to gain sympathy, nor do I expect any mitigation of whatever sentence the Court may pronounce. I am writing this in an attempt to refute some of the lying reports broadcast over the prison radio and published in the papers I have been allowed to see. These have given an entirely false picture of the true cause of our defeat, and as the leader of my race's armed forces at the cessation of hostilities I feel it my duty to protest against such libels upon those who served under me.

    I also hope that this statement may explain the reasons for the application I have twice made to the Court, and will now induce it to grant a favor for which I can see no possible grounds of refusal.

    The ultimate cause of our failure was a simple one: despite all statements to the contrary, it was not due to lack of bravery on the part of our men, or to any fault of the Fleet's. We were defeated by one thing only - by the inferior science of our enemies. I repeat - by the inferior science of our enemies.

    When the war opened we had no doubt of our ultimate victory. The combined fleets of our allies greatly exceeded in number and armament those which the enemy could muster against us, and in almost all branches of military science we were their superiors. We were sure that we could maintain this superiority. Our belief proved, alas, to be only too well founded.

    At the opening of the war our main weapons were the long-range homing torpedo, dirigible ball-lightning and the various modifications of the Klydon beam. Every unit of the Fleet was equipped with these and though the enemy possessed similar weapons their installations were generally of lesser power. Moreover, we had behind us a far greater military Research Organization, and with this initial advantage we could not possibly lose.

    The campaign proceeded according to plan until the Battle of the Five Suns. We won this, of course, but the opposition proved stronger than we had expected. It was realized that victory might be more difficult, and more delayed, than had first been imagined. A conference of supreme commanders was therefore called to discuss our future strategy.

    Present for the first time at one of our war conferences was Professor-General Norden, the new Chief of the Research Staff, who had just been appointed to fill the gap left by the death of Malvar, our greatest scientist. Malvar's leadership had been responsible, more than any other single factor, for the efficiency and power of our weapons. His loss was a very serious blow, but no one doubted the brilliance of his successor - though many of us disputed the wisdom of appointing a theoretical scientist to fill a post of such vital importance. But we had been overruled.

    I can well remember the impression Norden made at that conference. The military advisers were worried, and as usual turned to the scientists for help. Would it be possible to improve our existing weapons, they asked, so that our present advantage could be increased still further?

    Norden's reply was quite unexpected. Malvar had often been asked such a question - and he had always done what we requested.

    "Frankly, gentlemen," said Norden, "I doubt it. Our existing weapons have practically reached finality. I don't wish to criticize my predecessor, or the excellent work done by the Research Staff in the last few generations, but do you realize that there has been no basic change in armaments for over a century? It is, I am afraid, the result of a tradition that has become conservative. For too long, the Research Staff has devoted itself to perfecting old weapons instead of developing new ones. It is fortunate for us that our opponents have been no wiser: we cannot assume that this will always be so."

    Norden's words left an uncomfortable impression, as he had no doubt intended. He quickly pressed home the attack.

    "What we want are new weapons - weapons totally different from any that have been employed before. Such weapons can be made: it will take time, of course, but since assuming charge I have replaced some of the older scientists with young men and have directed research into several unexplored fields which show great promise. I believe, in fact, that a revolution in warfare may soon be upon us."

    We were skeptical. There was a bombastic tone in Norden's voice that made us suspicious of his claims. We did not know, then, that he never promised anything that he had not already almost perfected in the laboratory. In the laboratory - that was the operative phrase.

    Norden proved his case less than a month later, when he demonstrated the Sphere of Annihilation, which produced complete disintegration of matter over a radius of several hundred meters. We were intoxicated by the power of the new weapon, and were quite prepared to overlook one fundamental defect - the fact that it was a sphere and hence destroyed its rather complicated generating equipment at the instant of formation. This meant, of course, that it could not be used on warships but only on guided missiles, and a great program was started to convert all homing torpedoes to carry the new weapon. For the time being all further offensives were suspended.

    We realize now that this was our first mistake. I still think that it was a natural one, for it seemed to us then that all our existing weapons had become obsolete overnight, and we already regarded them as almost primitive survivals. What we did not appreciate was the magnitude of the task we were attempting, and the length of time it would take to get the revolutionary super-weapon into battle. Nothing like this had happened for a hundred years and we had no previous experience to guide us.

    The conversion problem proved far more difficult than anticipated. A new class of torpedo had to be designed, as the standard model was too small. This meant in turn that only the larger ships could launch the weapon, but we were prepared to accept this penalty. After six months, the heavy units of the Fleet were being equipped with the Sphere. Training maneuvers and tests had shown that it was operating satisfactorily and we were ready to take it into action. Norden was already being hailed as the architect of victory, and had half promised even more spectacular weapons.

    Then two things happened. One of our battleships disappeared completely on a training flight, and an investigation showed that under certain conditions the ship's long-range radar could trigger the Sphere immediately after it had been launched. The modification needed to overcome this defect was trivial, but it caused a delay of another month and was the source of much bad feeling between the naval staff and the scientists. We were ready for action again - when Norden announced that the radius of effectiveness of the Sphere had now been increased by ten, thus multiplying by a thousand the chances of destroying an enemy ship.

    So the modifications started all over again, but everyone agreed that the delay would be worth it. Meanwhile, however, the enemy had been emboldened by the absence of further attacks and had made an unexpected onslaught. Our ships were short of torpedoes, since none had been coming from the factories, and were forced to retire. So we lost the systems of Kyrane and Floranus, and the planetary fortress of Rhamsandron.

    It was an annoying but not a serious blow, for the recaptured systems had been unfriendly, and difficult to administer. We had no doubt that we could restore the position in the near future, as soon as the new weapon became operational.

    These hopes were only partially fulfilled. When we renewed our offensive, we had to do so with fewer of the Spheres of Annihilation than had been planned, and this was one reason for our limited success. The other reason was more serious.

    While we had been equipping as many of our ships as we could with the irresistible weapon, the enemy had been building feverishly. His ships were of the old pattern with the old weapons - but they now out-numbered ours. When we went into action, we found that the numbers ranged against us were often 100 percent greater than expected, causing target confusion among the automatic weapons and resulting in higher losses than anticipated. The enemy losses were higher still, for once a Sphere had reached its objective, destruction was certain, but the balance had not swung as far in our favor as we had hoped.

    Moreover, while the main fleets had been engaged, the enemy had launched a daring attack on the lightly held systems of Eriston, Duranus, Carmanidora and Pharanidon - recapturing them all. We were thus faced with a threat only fifty light-years from our home planets.

    There was much recrimination at the next meeting of the supreme commanders. Most of the complaints were addressed to Norden-Grand Admiral Taxaris in particular maintaining that thanks to our admittedly irresistible weapon we were now considerably worse off than before. We should, he claimed, have continued to build conventional ships, thus preventing the loss of our numerical superiority.

    Norden was equally angry and called the naval staff ungrateful bunglers. But I could tell that he was worried - as indeed we all were - by the unexpected turn of events. He hinted that there might be a speedy way of remedying the situation.

    We now know that Research had been working on the Battle Analyzer for many years, but at the time it came as a revelation to us and perhaps we were too easily swept off our feet. Norden's argument, also, was seductively convincing. What did it matter, he said, if the enemy had twice as many ships as we - if the efficiency of ours could be doubled or even trebled? For decades the limiting factor in warfare had been not mechanical but biological - it had become more and more difficult for any single mind, or group of minds, to cope with the rapidly changing complexities of battle in three-dimensional space. Norden's mathematicians had analyzed some of the classic engagements of the past, and had shown that even when we had been victorious we had often operated our units at much less than half of their theoretical efficiency.

    The Battle Analyzer would change all this by replacing the operations staff with electronic calculators. The idea was not new, in theory, but until now it had been no more than a Utopian dream. Many of us found it difficult to believe that it was still anything but a dream: after we had run through several very complex dummy battles, however, we were convinced.

    It was decided to install the Analyzer in four of our heaviest ships, so that each of the main fleets could be equipped with one. At this stage, the trouble began - though we did not know it until later.

    The Analyzer contained just short of a million vacuum tubes and needed a team of five hundred technicians to maintain and operate it. It was quite impossible to accommodate the extra staff aboard a battleship, so each of the four units had to be accompanied by a converted liner to carry the technicians not on duty. Installation was also a very slow and tedious business, but by gigantic efforts it was completed in six months.

    Then, to our dismay, we were confronted by another crisis. Nearly five thousand highly skilled men had been selected to serve the Analyzers and had been given an intensive course at the Technical Training Schools. At the end of seven months, 10 percent of them had had nervous breakdowns and only 40 per cent had qualified.

    Once again, everyone started to blame everyone else. Norden, of course, said that the Research Staff could not be held responsible, and so incurred the enmity of the Personnel and Training Commands. It was finally decided that the only thing to do was to use two instead of four Analyzers and to bring the others into action as soon as men could be trained. There was little time to lose, for the enemy was still on the offensive and his morale was rising.

    The first Analyzer fleet was ordered to recapture the system of Eriston. On the way, by one of the hazards of war, the liner carrying the technicians was struck by a roving mine. A warship would have survived, but the liner with its irreplaceable cargo was totally destroyed. So the operation had to be abandoned.

    The other expedition was, at first, more successful. There was no doubt at all that the Analyzer fulfilled its designers' claims, and the enemy was heavily defeated in the first engagements. He withdrew, leaving us in possession of Saphran, Leucon and Hexanerax. But his Intelligence Staff must have noted the change in our tactics and the inexplicable presence of a liner in the heart of our battlefleet. It must have noted, also, that our first fleet had been accompanied by a similar ship - and had withdrawn when it had been destroyed.

    In the next engagement, the enemy used his superior numbers to launch an overwhelming attack on the Analyzer ship and its unarmed consort. The attack was made without regard to losses - both ships were, of course, very heavily protected - and it succeeded. The result was the virtual decapitation of the Fleet, since an effectual transfer to the old operational methods proved impossible. We disengaged under heavy fire, and so lost all our gains and also the systems of Lormyia, Ismarnus, Beronis, Alphanidon and Sideneus.

    At this stage, Grand Admiral Taxaris expressed his disapproval of Norden by committing suicide, and I assumed supreme command.

    The situation was now both serious and infuriating. With stubborn conservatism and complete lack of imagination, the enemy continued to advance with his old-fashioned and inefficient but now vastly more numerous ships. It was galling to realize that if we had only continued building, without seeking new weapons, we would have been in a far more advantageous position. There were many acrimonious conferences at which Norden defended the scientists while everyone else blamed them for all that had happened. The difficulty was that Norden had proved every one of his claims: he had a perfect excuse for all the disasters that had occurred. And we could not now turn back - the search for an irresistible weapon must go on. At first it had been a luxury that would shorten the war. Now it was a necessity if we were to end it victoriously.

    We were on the defensive, and so was Norden. He was more than ever determined to reestablish his prestige and that of the Research Staff. But we had been twice disappointed, and would not make the same mistake again. No doubt Norden's twenty thousand scientists would produce many further weapons: we would remain unimpressed.

    We were wrong. The final weapon was something so fantastic that even now it seems difficult to believe that it ever existed. Its innocent, noncommittal name - The Exponential Field - gave no hint of its real potentialities. Some of Norden's mathematicians had discovered it during a piece of entirely theoretical research into the properties of space, and to everyone's great surprise their results were found to be physically realizable.

    It seems very difficult to explain the operation of the Field to the layman. According to the technical description, it "produces an exponential condition of space, so that a finite distance in normal, linear space may become infinite in pseudo-space." Norden gave an analogy which some of us found useful. It was as if one took a flat disk of rubber - representing a region of normal space - and then pulled its center out to infinity. The circumference of the disk would be unaltered - but its "diameter" would be infinite. That was the sort of thing the generator of the Field did to the space around it.

    As an example, suppose that a ship carrying the generator was surrounded by a ring of hostile machines. If it switched on the Field, each of the enemy ships would think that it - and the ships on the far side of the circle - had suddenly receded into nothingness. Yet the circumference of the circle would be the same as before: only the journey to the center would be of infinite duration, for as one proceeded, distances would appear to become greater and greater as the "scale" of space altered.

    It was a nightmare condition, but a very useful one. Nothing could reach a ship carrying the Field: it might be englobed by an enemy fleet yet would be as inaccessible as if it were at the other side of the Universe. Against this, of course, it could not fight back without switching off the Field, but this still left it at a very great advantage, not only in defense but in offense. For a ship fitted with the Field could approach an enemy fleet undetected and suddenly appear in its midst.

    This time there seemed to be no flaws in the new weapon. Needless to say, we looked for all the possible objections before we committed ourselves again. Fortunately the equipment was fairly simple and did not require a large operating staff. After much debate, we decided to rush it into production, for we realized that time was running short and the war was going against us. We had now lost about the whole of our initial gains and enemy forces had made several raids into our own solar system.

    We managed to hold off the enemy while the Fleet was reequipped and the new battle techniques were worked out. To use the Field operationally it was necessary to locate an enemy formation, set a course that would intercept it, and then switch on the generator for the calculated period of time. On releasing the Field again - if the calculations had been accurate - one would be in the enemy's midst and could do great damage during the resulting confusion, retreating by the same route when necessary.

    The first trial maneuvers proved satisfactory and the equipment seemed quite reliable. Numerous mock attacks were made and the crews became accustomed to the new technique. I was on one of the test flights and can vividly remember my impressions as the Field was switched on. The ships around us seemed to dwindle as if on the surface of an expanding bubble: in an instant they had vanished completely. So had the stars - but presently we could see that the Galaxy was still visible as a faint band of light around the ship. The virtual radius of our pseudo-space was not really infinite, but some hundred thousand light-years, and so the distance to the farthest stars of our system had not been greatly increased - though the nearest had of course totally disappeared. These training maneuvers, however, had to be canceled before they were completed, owing to a whole flock of minor technical troubles in various pieces of equipment, notably the communications circuits. These were annoying, but not important, though it was thought best to return to Base to clear them up.

    At that moment the enemy made what was obviously intended to be a decisive attack against the fortress planet of Iton at the limits of our Solar System. The Fleet had to go into battle before repairs could be made.

    The enemy must have believed that we had mastered the secret of invisibility - as in a sense we had. Our ships appeared suddenly out of no-where and inflicted tremendous damage - for a while. And then something quite baffling and inexplicable happened.

    I was in command of the flagship Hircania when the trouble started. We had been operating as independent units, each against assigned objectives. Our detectors observed an enemy formation at medium range and the navigating officers measured its distance with great accuracy. We set course and switched on the generator.

    The Exponential Field was released at the moment when we should have been passing through the center of the enemy group. To our consternation, we emerged into normal space at a distance of many hundred miles - and when we found the enemy, he had already found us. We retreated, and tried again. This time we were so far away from the enemy that he located us first.

    Obviously, something was seriously wrong. We broke communicator silence and tried to contact the other ships of the Fleet to see if they had experienced the same trouble. Once again we failed - and this time the failure was beyond all reason, for the communication equipment appeared to be working perfectly. We could only assume, fantastic though it seemed, that the rest of the Fleet had been destroyed.

    I do not wish to describe the scenes when the scattered units of the Fleet struggled back to Base. Our casualties had actually been negligible, but the ships were completely demoralized. Almost all had lost touch with one another and had found that their ranging equipment showed inexplicable errors. It was obvious that the Exponential Field was the cause of the troubles, despite the fact that they were only apparent when it was switched off.

    The explanation came too late to do us any good, and Norden's final discomfiture was small consolation for the virtual loss of the war. As I have explained, the Field generators produced a radial distortion of space, distances appearing greater and greater as one approached the center of the artificial pseudo-space. When the Field was switched off, conditions returned to normal.

    But not quite. It was never possible to restore the initial state exactly. Switching the Field on and off was equivalent to an elongation and contraction of the ship carrying the generator, but there was a hysteretic effect, as it were, and the initial condition was never quite reproducible, owing to all the thousands of electrical changes and movements of mass aboard the ship while the Field was on. These asymmetries and distortions were cumulative, and though they seldom amounted to more than a fraction of one per cent, that was quite enough. It meant that the precision ranging equipment and the tuned circuits in the communication apparatus were thrown completely out of adjustment. Any single ship could never detect the change - only when it compared its equipment with that of another vessel, or tried to communicate with it, could it tell what had happened.

    It is impossible to describe the resultant chaos. Not a single component of one ship could be expected with certainty to work aboard another. The very nuts and bolts were no longer interchangeable, and the supply position became quite impossible. Given time, we might even have overcome these difficulties, but the enemy ships were already attacking in thousands with weapons which now seemed centuries behind those that we had invented. Our magnificent Fleet, crippled by our own science, fought on as best it could until it was overwhelmed and forced to surrender. The ships fitted with the Field were still invulnerable, but as fighting units they were almost helpless. Every time they switched on their generators to escape from enemy attack, the permanent distortion of their equipment increased. In a month, it was all over.

    THIS IS THE true story of our defeat, which I give without prejudice to my defense before this Court. I make it, as I have said, to counteract the libels that have been circulating against the men who fought under me, and to show where the true blame for our misfortunes lay.

    Finally, my request, which as the Court will now realize I make in no frivolous manner and which I hope will therefore be granted.

    The Court will be aware that the conditions under which we are housed and the constant surveillance to which we are subjected night and day are somewhat distressing. Yet I am not complaining of this: nor do I complain of the fact that shortage of accommodation has made it necessary to house us in pairs.

    But I cannot be held responsible for my future actions if I am compelled any longer to share my cell with Professor Norden, late Chief of the Research Staff of my armed forces.
    Never knew that Isaac Asimov wrote under penname Arthur Clarke.
    Last edited by Gilrandir; 09-07-2019 at 13:24.
    Quote Originally Posted by Suraknar View Post
    The article exists for a reason yes, I did not write it...

    Member thankful for this post:



  4. #364

    Default Re: Climate Change Thread

    The American Prospect has a whole issue out on the Green New Deal and its practicality and ability to improve living standards, if anyone is interested.

    THE PROSPECT’S SPECIAL VALUE is to connect practical policy and social movement to politics. In the effort to literally save the planet, what seems utopian has to be understood as realism. Radical change is pure realism when it comes to survival. Yet it also needs to become realism as politics. If the Prospect is good at anything, it is in explaining how the radical can become real. In this special issue, we hope to demonstrate that drastic change is not only urgent, but possible.

    The issue is divided into three parts. Part I discusses infrastructure investment as a key part of a Green New Deal. It reminds us what the original New Deal did, and then lays out what an infrastructure and jobs program needs to be today. Part II addresses the challenge of a rapid shift to a post-carbon economy. How fast can it be done? What are the gross and net costs, and the net benefits measured against the escalating costs of inaction? How do we pay for it? What are the relative roles of different levels of governments and citizens? Happily, the pieces by two of the nation’s leading economists who study climate, Jeffrey Sachs and Robert Pollin, agree that the total new cost of financing a green transition is an affordable 2 percent of GDP, factoring in costs and benefits.

    Part III is all about the politics. How do we assemble the majority support to make the utopian thinkable, and then irresistible? And how does the national connect to the global? Our purpose is not to duck the hard questions by putting forth proposals that can be defended as “aspirational,” with the politics glossed over, but to look the hardest questions directly in the eye.

    We cannot fail. Progressives sometimes say, half-joking, that if Trump is re-elected there is always Canada. But if we lose this planet as our home, there is no other.
    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
    In just a few centuries, the human footprint on the Earth has devastated other species of plant and animal life, and is on the verge of making the planet uninhabitable for people. The cumulative interaction of assaults on several natural systems has already brought about consequences far more dire than the most pessimistic scenarios of just a decade ago. These include ice caps shrinking, oceans rising,

    melting permafrost releasing more CO2 and methane, heat producing still more heat, and climate extremes creating ever more devastating storms and fires. Despite the Paris commitments, greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing rather than diminishing. Unless a drastic reversal happens, we will soon pass the point of no return. Pessimists believe we are already there. Even if we succeed, daily life will have to be very different, though in many respects it can be better.

    In order to avert even worse catastrophes, a number of improbable events will have to break just right. The United States, where Donald Trump revels in removing restraints on carbon production, will need to elect a radically progressive president and a working majority in Congress. That alone will take a miracle of popular organizing, leadership, and common purpose. The president and Congress will then need to undertake the largest economic mobilization of national resources since Franklin Roosevelt’s administration.

    A number of people and groups have used the metaphor of a Green New Deal to describe the scale of the needed effort and the large-scale national (now global) solidarity that the New Deal evokes. Our purpose in this special issue of The American Prospect is not to add one more volume to the existing libraries of manifestos and reports, but to demonstrate that an initiative on the scale required is not only urgent but practical. That has to mean practical as policy, as technology, and above all as politics. As we demonstrate in this special report, the needed technologies and strategies exist. The challenge is rallying a national commitment to pursue them. Leadership has to begin in the U.S., because we are both the worst climate offender as well as the one nation capable of spearheading a global reversal.

    For a Green New Deal, or something like it, to end reliance on carbon-based energy, drastically revise how we practice agriculture, end the pillaging of several natural systems and the plundering of natural resources, commit to green infrastructure, broaden and redefine the meaning of prosperity and the good life, as well as pursue a just transition, we will need to square several circles.

    There are aspects of a Green New Deal that command majority support: infrastructure, jobs, and aid to help localities get to zero carbon—incremental reforms whose cumulative dynamics can turn out to be transformative.

    FIRST, CONVERSION TO A SUSTAINABLE economy will require a drastic reduction in the human material toll on the planet. Yet in a democracy, we are asking citizens to approve such a plan at a time when most American families have already suffered declining living standards over four decades. People of color have endured not only continuing discrimination in access to their share of the economy’s stunted opportunities, but have often borne the worst of the carbon economy’s toxic effects right in their own neighborhoods.

    So while some environmentalists would plead for an economy of voluntary simplicity and radical “de-growth,” a strategy of urging citizens to accept what will be widely perceived as a decline in living standards would be an impossibly hard sell. Happily, a shift to a renewable and sustainable economy could actually enhance living standards, properly understood. Green energy would be cheaper and more reliable. Good public transit can improve convenience and relieve people of the need to use cars on ever more congested streets. A shift to energy-efficient and less-sprawled housing could be packaged with an increase in the supply of affordable housing. Greener and better public infrastructure would replace current decaying public systems that citizens experience as inconvenient and forever broken. The scale of needed outlay, even under the most expansive scenarios, is far less than that of World War II, when the military spent almost half of GDP. And the more we can make green changes at the level of the entire economy, the less the cost of change falls on individuals.

    The very process of getting all of this done can create millions of good jobs and remind citizens that the good life includes reliable public systems and amenities as well as increasingly unreliable and often perverse private-market systems. In the same way that the original New Deal required significant restraints on capitalism and enlargement of public spheres and spaces, a Green New Deal necessarily constrains corporate capitalism. Virtually all of the predatory assaults on the natural environment have been driven by corporate power, complemented by neoliberal ideology holding that markets are efficient. As Nicholas Stern once remarked, global climate change is history’s greatest case of market failure. A Green New Deal necessarily means narrowing corporate power, recovering civic and community life, and reclaiming space for our commons.

    The term pork barrel has generally been used as a pejorative, meaning wasteful public projects where the politics entails mutual “logrolling”—you support an outlay for my district and I will support one for yours—and the result is often bridges to nowhere. When Congress swore off earmarking specific projects for congressional districts, it was generally taken as a virtuous reform. But think again.

    The original New Deal, as historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Kevin Baker demonstrate in their articles, was a triumph of regional development policy—pork barrel in the very best sense of the term. It spread the wealth around. Indeed, if we had paid more attention to making sure that some prosperity reached regions and people left behind instead of being concentrated in a few tech and finance hubs, we might not have ended up with Donald Trump as president. When there is regional equity to public works projects, even conservative politicians who don’t like federal programs are more likely to put their qualms aside. In Tennessee, right-wing politicians rail against Washington, but nobody proposes privatizing TVA. Chattanooga today is a digital center because its public power company offers the nation’s cheapest and highest-speed internet. Holyoke, Massachusetts, is a hub for regional high-speed computing because its municipally owned utility offers cheap, green electricity. A Green New Deal is a chance to jump-start regional economic development that is also sustainable.

    A second circle that needs to be squared has to do with speed. Ideally, we should have reached zero fossil fuel extraction and combustion years ago. Ideally, all fossil fuel operations should be shut down immediately. We can demand that, but we can’t will it into happening. As the lead article by Jeffrey Sachs and the discussion of emerging technologies by Mara Prentiss explain, we can in fact get to zero carbon a lot faster and with a lot less economic cost than the naysayers contend, and even faster if we get the politics right. Prentiss demonstrates that most of the needed technologies are available now. Our special issue taken as a whole shows that a Green New Deal can be achieved.

    As Jeff Faux’s piece recounts, we are asking citizens to trust their government to launch an initiative at a massive scale at a moment when trust in government and in all large public systems is at an all-time low. Today, that mistrust is all too appropriate, given the Trump presidency. Yet, as Faux observes, the very process of having highly visible projects that improve people’s lives can cumulatively rebuild public trust. These projects, however, will need to be somewhat front-loaded, to demonstrate benefits in the new administration’s first two years. Otherwise, a new president with grand promises and scant results could suffer the fate of Bill Clinton, whose party lost a record 54 House seats for a Democrat in 1994—until that record was broken in 2010, when Barack Obama’s party lost 63 seats. Notably, the only Democratic president to avoid that midterm curse was Franklin Roosevelt, who managed to deliver a great deal in his first two years. The voters reciprocated by increasing his Democratic majority in 1934 by nine seats in the House and nine in the Senate.

    The challenge is for government to get things done fast, but without running roughshod over the local citizenry. The original New Deal was a mix of big projects led from Washington and completed in record time, mixed with a lot of bottom-up planning. Citizens served on boards of local projects of the WPA, and rural electrification co-ops. Yet as any student of Robert Moses knows, this was also a decade when highways and bridges, as well as Western dams, wiped out entire communities with no community consent. A Green New Deal needs to engage in bottom-up planning, but without endless delays. As transportation planner and engineer Robert Paaswell writes in an original and authoritative piece on why infrastructure investments seem to take forever, the single most important factor causing endless delays in public construction projects is neither citizen involvement nor environmental-impact statements, but unreliable, stop-and-go funding. The great benefit of a Green New Deal is that it would commit the federal government to multiyear, multitrillion-dollar financing, so that serious long-term planning can take place.

    A THIRD CIRCLE THAT HAS TO BE SQUARED is the connection between radical witness and agitation and the need for policies that can be embraced by the next president and enacted by Congress. The alliance between radicals and liberals is always a complex dance. It took militant organizing by radical industrial unions in the 1930s to build a strong labor movement, yet that movement required a rendezvous with President Roosevelt to legislate the Wagner Act of 1935, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and labor’s partnership with government during World War II. In similar fashion, we needed civil disobedience on the ground by the civil rights movement of the 1960s to generate the moral outrage that finally pushed President Lyndon Johnson to press Congress to enact the three great civil rights acts of that decade.

    If anything, the relationship between the climate movement and the needed legislation is even trickier. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement appropriated the Green New Deal metaphor in 2018, literally dozens of reports and policy papers had already used that label. AOC put out a fairly short, schematic policy blueprint that was the most expansive of them all. The value of that initiative was to demonstrate the scale of commitment needed, as well as the intersecting multiple needs. The Sunrise Movement also generated new political energy led by the young demanding action. Yet by including under the Green New Deal banner the entire progressive policy agenda, the AOC version of a Green New Deal also presented a high-profile target.

    AOC’s Green New Deal was attacked by both the right as preposterously grandiose, and by the center as utopian and too expensive. When more than 300 economists issued a statement attacking that version of a Green New Deal, it included many moderately liberal economists who had served with Barack Obama, including former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen. These attacks did damage. When our colleague Stanley Greenberg polled on the popularity of several large-scale progressive policy initiatives, including Medicare for All and free higher public education, most were net positive. The only issue scoring seriously net negative was a Green New Deal, with a net minus 23.

    Some would conclude from this result that the Green New Deal “brand” is hopelessly tarnished for the sin of dreaming big before it has even begun; that even relatively liberal politicians will avoid it. We emphatically disagree. The New Deal, as Nelson Lichtenstein explains in his article, is the only large-scale public initiative in American history with all of the right resonances. Most Americans also have a positive view of the need to move to green, renewable energy. The current attacks on a Green New Deal only demonstrate that we have public-education work to do. Hence this special report.

    While liberals always need to be pressed and prodded by radicals, the practical challenge is getting a Green New Deal through Congress. AOC’s version of a Green New Deal, H. Res. 109, has 95 House co-sponsors. Long ago, when an enthusiast told 1952 presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, “You have the vote of every thinking person,” Governor Stevenson replied, “That’s not enough, madam. I need a majority.” As realists, we need to recognize that a majority of the House and Senate have to legislate a Green New Deal, while even some Democrats are far too cozy with extractive industries. The grassroots pressure of a movement on the march can help, and yet some of the initial bills will necessarily be more incremental than we might like, focusing on aspects of a Green New Deal that can command majority support, such as infrastructure, jobs, and aid to help localities get to zero carbon. This also evokes the original New Deal, which was not a single grand plan, but a series of initiatives that built more support along the way. The French radical theorist André Gorz coined the term non-reformist reform, meaning reforms that seem incremental, but whose cumulative dynamics turn out to be transformational. We need to legislate in that spirit.

    Economic and racial justice must be built into every aspect of a Green New Deal. Here again, as Harold Meyerson’s article explains, crisis presents opportunity. Justice is harder in a climate of struggle over a dwindling supply of good jobs and insufficient funds for resilience and remediation. A just transition means good jobs, not just for the mostly white and male workers in the extractive economy, but for people who never got to share in the environmentally ruinous good times. It means special attention and resources for the communities that have borne the brunt of the toxicity. A Green New Deal at adequate scale can provide these resources for all.

    While we may believe that denial of climate change is limited to oil magnates and Trumpians, it is broader than we think. Mainstream economists keep issuing reports that are ignorant of the science and built on pitifully rosy assumptions. William Nordhaus, the liberal Yale economist who won a Nobel Prize for his work on climate change, uses a model that considers a 3.5 degree Celsius warming acceptable and projects global economic damages at just 2.1 percent of GDP. By contrast, the IPCC and most climate scientists view that degree of warming as catastrophic. Nordhaus thinks we can reach that goal purely with a carbon tax of just $44 per ton. The IPCC calculates that a tax required to cap warming at a barely tolerable 1.5 degrees would have to be at least $135 and as much as $5,500 per ton depending on what other complementary policies were used.

    Complacency is also a form of denial. Though the ravages of climate change are upon us in California’s fires, ever more intense hurricanes, and in the daily flooding of streets in several Southeastern coastal cities, for most Americans daily life goes on. Amid something like normalcy, the projections of general catastrophe within a few decades create a form of cognitive dissonance that can also be disabling. Breaking through that denial also requires leadership and education, and a sense of a Green New Deal not as shared sacrifice but as hopeful, positive possibility. Our closing conversation with Bill McKibben offers something of that hope.



    While less relevant to this thread, one of the articles from the issue I want to boost is a piece on the revolutionary character of the original New Deal and its bottom-up participatory and democratic aspects. It's too beat-by-beat to excerpt, so here's the whole somewhat-long piece.

    In May of 1941, a New Deal agency, the Bonneville Power Authority, paid an itinerant left-wing songwriter $266 for a month’s work. BPA officials hired Woodrow Wilson Guthrie because they were in an extended battle with the private interests who’d denounced as “a socialist boondoggle” the New Deal’s great public-power projects in the river valleys of the Tennessee and the Columbia. Maybe a few catchy jingles and folk songs would help tell the public-power story and humanize the BPA’s image.

    For the first week of his employ, Woody Guthrie was driven up and down the Columbia River to see the great dams, locks, spillways, generators, and irrigation systems still under construction by a federal government newly determined to get billions of kilowatt hours online for Pacific Northwest ship and warplane production. Thousands of workers were crawling over precipitous cliffs and giant concrete bulwarks from Portland to the Canadian border. Guthrie was awestruck and energized. In the back seat of his government car, he began to strum, and he scribbled lyrics on any scrap of paper he could find.

    Back in Portland, nothing had prepared Guthrie’s employers for the poetry that poured out of Woody’s typewriter. At the height of his creative powers, and in an astonishing burst of inventiveness and discipline, he turned out 26 songs in 30 days. These included “Pastures of Plenty,” “Hard Travelin,’” “Roll on, Columbia,” and “The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done,” his tribute to the Grand Coulee Dam. Guthrie saw little distinction between the BPA’s vast government bureaucracy and the working men and women who were making good money doing the hard and sometimes dangerous work. Guthrie loved the Northwest and liked feeling part of something big, important, and progressive.

    Roll on, Columbia, roll on. Your power is turning our darkness to dawn.
    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
    Guthrie’s “Grand Coulee Dam” captured one distinctive strand of the New Deal ethos: the mutually supportive linkages between grand governmental ambitions, the new technologies of the era, and the aspirations of millions of ordinary people for a better life.

    In the misty crystal glitter of that wild and windward spray / Men have fought the pounding waters and met a watery grave / Well, she tore their boats to splinters but she gave men dreams to dream / Of the day the Coulee Dam would cross that wild and wasted stream.

    Uncle Sam took up the challenge in the year of Thirty-three / For the farmer and the factory and all of you and me / He said, “Roll along Columbia. You can ramble to the sea / But river while you’re ramblin’ you can do some work for me.”

    Now in Washington and Oregon you hear the factories hum / Making chrome and making manganese and light aluminum / And there roars a mighty furnace now to fight for Uncle Sam / Spawned upon the King Columbia by the big Grand Coulee Dam.

    Though the songwriter had little in common with David Lilienthal, both men recognized the democratic power unleashed by the New Deal’s great infrastructure projects. Lilienthal, a hard-driving lawyer and utility regulator, was a sharp-elbowed insider who rose to control the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s and 1940s and then went on to run the Atomic Energy Commission and plunge into a lucrative career as an international businessman. But when he published TVA: Democracy on the March in 1944, his story of the TVA was not all that different from one Guthrie might have sung. “We are not carried irresistibly by forces beyond our control,” wrote Lilienthal, “whether they are given some mystic term or described as the ‘laws of economics.’” Like so many New Dealers, the architects of the TVA and other state-funded infrastructure projects were “Dreamers with Shovels,” visionaries ready to get their hands dirty. “The physical achievements that science and technology now make possible may bring no benefits,” Lilienthal wrote, “may indeed be evil, unless they have a moral purpose, unless they are conceived and carried out for the benefit of the people themselves.”

    It would be easy to make the case that the original New Deal, the one inaugurated by President Franklin Roosevelt and then celebrated by Guthrie and Lilienthal, was anything but green. New Dealers wanted to dam the nation’s great rivers, build scores of coal-fired generating plants, drill for more oil, build thousands of miles of new roads, subsidize mortgages for energy-inefficient single-family houses, and in general, make the dirt fly. Remembering Woody long after the songwriter’s death, both Pete Seeger and Studs Terkel recognized that giant, river-plugging projects were no longer in ecological favor. But as Terkel observed just before his own passing, “Twenty-six songs in 30 days. What were they about? They were about the possibilities … About what man could do!”

    This is why architects of the Green New Deal are not labeling their project a “Green New Frontier” or a “Green Great Society.” The New Deal was the most important and progressive reconstruction of American life since the Civil War. It had many silences and failures—most notably in terms of the Faustian bargain Roosevelt struck with the white supremacists in the American South—but the memory of the New Deal remains a potent source of inspiration for all those who want to make a radical change in the structures of American capitalism. And this will be accomplished not merely as a protest movement prodding establishment centrists ever so slightly to the left, but as a new generation of progressives in power, women and men with the same kind of energy and ambition as those who flocked to Washington in 1933 and 1934.

    That newly innovative federal power was sustained by its dialectical reliance on an energized populace, above all those mobilized within a trade union movement that was both a bulwark of New Deal electoral power and a disruptive, plebian prod to its further advancement. Then and now, conservative opponents denounced the growth of federal authority as a “road to serfdom” or worse, but New Deal laws opened space and opportunity for millions of people to make their voices heard and collective power felt, transforming Depression-era statecraft into the basis for a new social and political order. As FDR put it in a 1932 campaign speech, “These unhappy times call for plans that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the pyramid.” Historian Meg Jacobs has called this “state building from the bottom up.”

    Our own idea of a Green New Deal is ambitious, and its costs, both for the nation’s transition to an entirely new energy infrastructure and for the social programs designed to make America a more egalitarian country, are considerable: Estimates range from 10 to 20 trillion dollars over the next decade. A lot of money! Perhaps 2 to 5 percent of the gross domestic product each year. But the New Dealers also spent big money, and they did it when both the entire economy and the federal budget were but a small fraction of that today.

    The memory of the New Deal remains a potent source of inspiration for all those who want to make radical change in the structures of American capitalism.

    The New Deal appropriated $3.3 billion for public works construction, an enormous investment relative to the rest of the federal budget. It amounted to 165 percent of federal revenues in 1933, or 5.9 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product that year. The money was spent in two ways. Under the incorruptible leadership of Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, a Chicago progressive, the Public Works Administration built giant dams, bridges, schools, and other public buildings. Putting the unemployed to work was important, but actually building infrastructure that would last for decades was a prime focus of their work. Using private contractors, the PWA financed, in California alone, such iconic structures as the Oakland Bay Bridge, Shasta Dam, the Pasadena Freeway, and, following the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, the entire school system of Los Angeles County. In all, PWA had projects in almost every one of the nation’s 3,071 counties.

    The second big spending program was for immediate job creation. Emergency job programs in 1933 and 1934 were followed in 1935 by the Works Progress Administration, ably administered by onetime social worker Harry Hopkins, which did lighter construction work and employed men and women directly by the federal government. Although primarily intended as a vast relief effort for employing the unskilled, the WPA’s remarkable array of developments included more than 480 airports, 78,000 bridges, and almost 40,000 public buildings. During the Great Depression, the payrolls of the PWA and the WPA were much larger than those of the largest private enterprises. The WPA alone employed three million people in 1938, equal to about 7 percent of the entire labor force. That would come to nearly ten million today.

    New Deal programs of direct job creation have often been devalued, even by latter-day liberals. There was too much leaning on shovels; and besides, it was World War II that really ended unemployment. But these critiques miss a lot. First, Depression-era economists held to a bizarre definition of employment. Those working for government relief and construction agencies were excluded from the count. Factor them in and unemployment was not 9.9 percent in 1941, but a far more respectable 6.6 percent.

    Second, WPA and PWA employment had a huge and salutary impact on the labor market. African Americans were disproportionate beneficiaries of such projects, especially in places like Cleveland and Chicago where about a third of those working for the WPA were black. That’s an important reason African Americans shifted their political allegiance from Republicans to Democrats in the 1930s. Moreover, government work was sometimes higher-paid than in the private sector. FDR and other New Dealers wanted to keep WPA wages below private norms, but the American pay structure was so miserly and chaotic that there were millions of workers who saw even temporary government pay as a big step up. This was especially true in the rural South, which is one reason local white elites sabotaged these programs and turned so quickly against the New Deal.

    A massive Green New Deal infrastructure program would have much the same impact today, even if official unemployment statistics stand below 4 percent. Many Americans currently counted as employed have lousy, low-paying jobs, so any substantial employment opportunities paying an hourly $15 or more would suck workers out of their part-time, minimum-wage jobs—thereby forcing thousands of employers to dramatically improve the jobs they have on offer.

    Many of the New Deal’s projects amounted to state capitalism. From FDR on down, New Dealers hated the holding companies that monopolized the nation’s private power production and distribution. As with the Silicon Valley mega-firms of our day, vast fortunes were being made from the privatization of what were natural monopolies. Both the BPA and the TVA were experiments in regional planning that would stand athwart such a corporate expropriation.

    The TVA was the most famous and fully realized of New Deal public works. It was a government-owned corporation designed to carry out the comprehensive development of an entire river watershed spanning seven Southern states. Building 20 new dams, the authority tamed the flood-prone rivers of the Tennessee Valley, and in the process became the largest producer of electric power in the United States. With FDR’s staunch backing, Lilienthal led the battle against the private electrical utilities, including Wendell Willkie’s Commonwealth and Southern, that wanted to curb TVA’s dynamic growth. The New Dealers saw the TVA as accomplishing two things that corporate capitalism could not. First, it would provide a “yardstick” to measure the real cost of electrical power. During World War I, when FDR was assistant secretary of the Navy, he complained that he never knew the true cost of the metal plate the federal government bought in such quantity to build its battleships. But the TVA would know how to generate cheap electric power and thereby give state regulators the ammunition to lower rates.

    The TVA was the most fully realized of New Deal public works. It was a government-owned corporation designed to carry out the development of an entire river watershed spanning seven states.

    Naturally, the utilities screamed murder: “It’s not a yardstick; it’s a club,” complained a utility engineer. “They get their money from Uncle Santy and no interest charged … And when they want to take a whole town of customers away from us, they lend the city fathers—or give it to them—the government’s money.”

    What the engineer was actually complaining about were the inefficiencies of private enterprise in an industry that was a natural monopoly. He was arguing private capitalism against state capitalism; corporate autonomy against social democracy. And in the Depression era he was losing the battle. “You can’t blame the people,” he admitted. “They don’t care who freezes their ice cubes. If the government pays the Tennesseans’ power bill, you can’t expect the Tennesseans to complain.”

    Private power’s second big failing was that it was just not profitable to extend electric power lines to much of rural America. The TVA would do that for a good slice of the mid-South, and a separate Rural Electrification Administration would provide loans and expertise for virtually every rural county in the nation. For those who benefited, this was a social revolution. One Wyoming ranch woman referred to the day when the electricity arrived “my Day of Days because lights shone where lights had never been, the electric stove radiated heat, the washer turned, and an electric pump freed me from hauling water. The old hand pump is buried under six feet of snow, let it stay there!” The author of this article grew up in rural Maryland in the 1950s. Adult neighbors remembered well the days before the local electric co-op strung power lines up our gravel road. They voted for FDR in the 1930s and the Democrats in each election afterward.

    And finally, the TVA, BPA, and the other regional planning initiatives of the New Deal were designed to “develop” those rural, Southern, and Western parts of the country left behind by the dynamic growth of the industrial Midwest and the capital-rich Northeast. California and Texas got the most money, but New Deal developmentalism became national policy when FDR declared the American South “the nation’s number one economic problem.” A scarcity of capital and a paucity of governmental taxing power had generated misery and isolation there. By the time his administration released its widely noted “Report on the Economic Conditions of the South” in 1938, FDR and other New Dealers were not just trying to spread the wealth around. Southern Democrats were increasingly conservative, edging away from the New Deal on a variety of fronts, of which hostility to organized labor and maintenance of the Jim Crow order were paramount. Many New Dealers believed that if the federal government could help the South industrialize, opportunities for trade unionism would expand and white supremacy fade. They were more wrong than right about that, but their effort to bridge the rural-urban, North-South divide is one that advocates of a 21st-century Green New Deal should try to emulate.

    Donald Trump’s steadfast support in rural America has many sources, but a bleak, low-wage economy is one that might just be improved with a new round of governmental investment.

    The New Dealers were planners. During the late 1930s and early 1940s the National Resources Planning Board, chaired by FDR’s uncle, Frederic Delano, put out one increasingly radical plan after another, enough to put Elizabeth Warren to shame. There were 220 reports on everything from “Post-Defense Economic Development in Alaska” to “A Development Plan for Puerto Rico.” The most ambitious of its reports was a comprehensive plan for the future, “Security, Work, and Relief Policies,” was submitted to Roosevelt on the eve of the war. It was a fundamentally radical plan, envisioning a fully developed welfare state and the highly progressive taxes to pay for it. Congressional conservatives zeroed out NRPB funding in 1943, but FDR remained loyal to its expansive vision. This became clear in the president’s 1944 State of the Union speech, which Roosevelt biographer James MacGregor Burns has accurately termed “the most radical speech of his life.” Roosevelt proclaimed a “Second Bill of Rights,” which included the right to a job, to food, clothing, medical care, education, and “protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.” “True individual freedom,” proclaimed the president, “cannot exist without economic security and independence.”

    The only problem with FDR’s great speech was that he delivered it in the wrong country, or at least, at the wrong time. By the end of World War II, American politics were drifting steadily to the right, and despite the president’s fourth-term victory, white Southerners and Republicans would be in effective control of Congress for a generation. In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, the aggressively social democratic Beveridge Plan, which created the National Health Service and other welfare state provisions when the Labour Party took power in 1945, was clearly on offer. FDR complained to Labor Secretary Frances Perkins that the British planning scheme ought properly to be called the Roosevelt Plan.

    FDR’s speeches were memorable, but the New Deal resonates today because it was far more than a welfare state planning bureaucracy. The mobilization of millions of workers into trade unions proved the bedrock upon which a generation of reforms depended. State-sanctioned unionization was successful in the 1930s and 1940s not just because a staunch cohort of working-class radicals revolted against industrial autocracy, but because unionism was functional to the New Deal’s larger purposes. And these were two. First, increasing plebian purchasing power would end the downward cycle of wage and price cuts that had turned an economic panic into a worldwide depression; and second, unions would be the key institutions necessary to a democratization and therefore the ultimate legitimization of a refurbished American industrial order. In the early 20th century, the widely invoked phrase “industrial democracy” was not quite the same thing as socialism, but it nevertheless constituted a radical redistribution of power within the workplace and the larger economy.

    Most New Dealers thought that “underconsumption” was why the Great Depression proved so devastating. The American economy was highly productive, but workers’ wages were too low, so companies, even in the booming 1920s, were burdened by “overproduction,” especially in “sick” industries like textiles, coal, and agriculture. As department store magnate Edward Filene put it, “the machinery of production choked with its own product, unemployment spread like pestilence, and the world starved in the midst of plenty.” But even with all its spending plans and job creation programs, the New Deal state was simply too small to generate enough Keynesian stimulus to move the economy ahead. A revolution in the labor law would therefore be essential. The Wagner Act, argued Robert Wagner, the New York senator who pushed through Congress the law that bears his name, would ensure that the “fruits of industry must be distributed more bounteously among the masses of wage-earners who create the bulk of consumer demand.”

    In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt inspected the Chickamauga Dam, a project of the Tennessee Valley Authority, near Chattanooga.

    But higher wages per se were not enough. A democratization of the world of work was also essential. FDR ratified this quest in his June 1936 speech accepting the Democratic National Convention’s renomination. There, President Roosevelt denounced the “economic royalists” who had “carved new dynasties” and “created a new despotism.” Decrying the pervasive influence of the corporations and banks, which had flourished since the late-19th-century merger movement, FDR saw concentrated industrial and financial power as a threat to democracy itself. But he was not only talking about electoral politics. “The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor—these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship.” The metaphorical language deployed by FDR—citing royalists and despots—made clear to all who heard him that the object of presidential scorn was not an economic abstraction, like inequality, financial speculation, or an unpredictable market, but concrete institutions often led by men—Ford, Dupont, Morgan, Sloan, and Whitney—whose names were familiar to many a household. They presided over a set of giant, highly integrated institutions whose regulation and democratization was essential if the New Deal was to truly transform the nation and uplift forgotten America.

    Against fear and dependency, the New Deal and the new unions counterposed “security.” This was an idea—if not a condition—that achieved near hegemony during the 1930s and 1940s. That idea has gotten a bad rap of late—it often is used to mean compliancy, laziness, and deadwood. But the New Dealers knew that security represented a sense of psychological liberation. Conservatives, then and now, condemn employment guarantees, work rules, and seniority rights as debilitating and inefficient fetters on the flexibility managers need to make their enterprises flourish. But from the workers’ point of view, the security achieved through union contracts or employment law represents a form of liberation that is founded on an assurance that their life chances are backstopped by a set of recognized work standards. “What do they want, these millions of newly organized workers?” asked labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse. “Security first of all. They want the right to work.”

    The cultural and ideological impact of the new unionism of the ’30s and ’40s cannot be underestimated. Today, Donald Trump and his base attempt to wrap themselves in flag and nation. But in the 1930s and 1940s, a huge proportion of all those who became unionists were African Americans, Mexicans, or from European immigrant families. And these men and women “captured the flag” during the Depression decade. “Unionism is the spirit of Americanism,” announced a Woonsocket union newspaper that appealed to immigrant workers long marginalized by their Yankee “betters.” Strikers, picketers, and demonstrators almost always marched with large American flags in the van.

    Against fear and dependency, the New Deal and the new unions counterposed “security.” New Dealers knew this meant a sense of psychological liberation.

    As I observed in my history, an emblematic moment came on the day in late 1933 when Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins visited the unorganized steelworkers of Homestead, Pennsylvania, to hear their grievances and explain to them the New Deal’s new labor laws. In a town tightly controlled by the United States Steel Corporation, the burgess (mayor) abruptly cut short a Perkins speech in the city hall when union militants—he called them “undesirable Reds”—sought to make their voices heard. Ushered onto the street, Perkins and her party were temporarily bewildered. Where to continue the meeting? The city park? “You can’t do that,” shouted the red-faced mayor, “there is an ordinance against holding meetings in a public park.” But the secretary of labor would not be stymied, and when she saw an American flag flying above the local post office she quickly led the working-class throng inside. There in the lobby of a federal institution, under a flag representing the power of a self-confident, reformist government, Perkins resumed her speech detailing for a largely immigrant audience their new rights. She later wrote, “We ended the meeting with hand-shaking and expressions of rejoicing that the New Deal wasn’t afraid of the steel trust.”

    The Homestead Post Office meeting points to an even larger dialectic that linked New Deal political mobilizations to the union-building impulse of that era. In the United States today, it is almost impossible to organize a union from scratch because of the intense and well-schooled opposition of local elites, be they factory managers, local politicians, or even elements of the working class fearful about or hostile to collective protest. This was true in the 1930s as well. Despite our vivid memories of the spectacular and sometimes violent strikes that convulsed San Francisco, Minneapolis, and the textile South, most workers, most of the time, feared to form a trade union. They needed the state on their side, not just in the form of a law—the Wagner Act remained in legal limbo for nearly two years after its passage until the Supreme Court upheld it—but in a far more tangible and mobilizing fashion. Thus, in Flint, Michigan, in the fall of 1936, one could hardly fill a living room with those who were committed unionists.

    But those same autoworkers were wildly enthusiastic proponents of Roosevelt and the New Deal. When the president’s motorcade made its winding way through the factory districts of Flint, Pontiac, and Detroit in late October of that election year, workers downed their tools and crowded the windows for a look. A week later, FDR won a smashing victory—taking the largest proportion of the popular vote since the early 19th century—in an election that also saw turnout take a quantum leap upward. In some Midwestern industrial cities, Polish and Italian neighborhoods voted at a rate higher than 90 percent. For these immigrants and offspring of immigrants, a vote for Roosevelt and the New Deal was practically a rite of citizenship. Detroit socialists soon put out a leaflet: “You voted New Deal at the polls and defeated the Auto Barons. Now get a New Deal in the shop.” The sit-down strikes in Flint, Detroit, and elsewhere would do just that in the months that followed.

    The labor movement was not just about power-sharing in the workplace. “Revolution, up and down the river!” headlined a Western Pennsylvania news magazine after newly organized steelworkers and coal miners swept Republicans out of office in late 1937. In company-dominated towns and cities, the emergence of unions in steel, coal, auto, rubber, electrical products, textiles, and lumber had a transformative impact on the distribution of local political power. There laborite ethnics—“Roosevelt Democrats”—took over the Democratic Party and demolished the rule of the corporate-backed Protestant Republicans who had monopolized civic leadership for decades. Journalist Samuel Lubell called this “the revolt of the city.” In Western Pennsylvania steel towns like Aliquippa, Duquesne, Donora, Braddock, Homestead, and Clairton, working-class mayors and city councils now controlled the local police, defended freedom of speech and assembly for unionists, dismantled many Jim Crow traditions, increased taxes on corporate property, and spent those tax dollars paving streets and building schools in blue-collar neighborhoods. These “Little New Deals”—and one could also find them in Toledo, Gary, Wheeling, Kenosha, Tacoma, Lackawanna, Bridgeport, Flint, and Youngstown—not only made the Democratic Party powerful, but gave to its northern wing a social democratic flavor that lasted for two generations. When controversy arose in 1940 over FDR’s third-term bid, Lubell asked a Detroit auto unionist why he was so unconcerned. Came the reply: “I’ll say it even though it doesn’t sound nice. We’ve grown class conscious.”

    This democratic current often infused New Deal programs with a highly participatory spirit. Despite conservative attacks on what they saw as an overweening federal government full of intrusive bureaucrats, the New Deal never had enough employees to directly implement and regulate the new order it sought to construct. The Wagner Act could not function without the active participation of tens of thousands of local trade unions that “policed” the labor law and negotiated new contracts. Hundreds of rural co-ops were formed to take out government-backed loans, construct new electrical transmission systems, buy the power at wholesale prices, and then deliver it to rural households that were both customers and owners. And the Resettlement Administration built and operated scores of migrant labor camps, not unlike the democratically run California camp depicted in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath.

    During World War II, the Office of Price Administration sought to police nothing less than the retail costs millions of consumers would pay for tens of millions of products sold by hundreds of thousands of stores. The OPA employed 60,000, but alone no set of government officials could make such a vast regulatory apparatus actually work. The government therefore recruited and trained almost 300,000 volunteer “price checkers.” They came from trade unions, women’s clubs, and other civic organizations. OPA chief Chester Bowles, a spirited liberal, called the agency’s housewife volunteers “as American as baseball,” even as some merchants and conservative politicians denounced them as a “kitchen Gestapo,” whose enforcement of government price controls at every sales counter and cash register bolstered working-class living standards and put a lid on merchant prices and profits.

    And the New Deal did much to democratize American culture. In the 1930s, almost all newspapers were hostile to labor and the New Deal, and most of the Hollywood moguls were staunch Republicans. There was a radical student movement in some of the largest urban schools, but conservatives had a firm grip on what was taught in virtually every college and university. Still, there were a lot of economically desperate artists, writers, actors, and musicians, and the WPA soon found them jobs and projects that employed their talents. A Federal Writers’ Project published guidebooks and collected folk songs. A Theatre Project employed nearly ten thousand actors who put on plays in both the largest cities and in towns and villages that did not even host a movie theater. Director Hallie Flanagan was a radical and an innovator: “The theatre can quicken, start things, make things happen. Don’t be afraid when people tell you this is a play of protest. Of course, it’s protest, protest against dirt, disease, human misery.” Most of those social realist plays have been forgotten, but a Federal Art Project left a visual legacy that can still be seen across America. Employing as many as 6,000 painters and sculptors, this forerunner of the National Endowment for the Arts commissioned artists to create murals for the walls of federal and state buildings and establish public art centers in remote communities.

    Today, when a government arts program funds a writer, musician, or painter, it is likely to award them with a monetary grant, but in the 1930s the WPA put them on its payroll, just like those workers who paved the roads, constructed the playgrounds, and built the schoolhouses. The idea that creative people should work directly for the government became anathema during the Cold War when intellectuals and propagandists in the West celebrated the singular artistic spirit and denounced as Stalinist or fascist any government efforts to deploy art and literature for a collective purpose. But such fears can stifle and privatize artistic creativity and its popular reception. In contrast, the New Dealers saw no contradiction between their statecraft and its artistic depiction. The work of these government-paid muralists, architects, and sculptors embodied the hope of philosopher John Dewey that “our public buildings may become the outward and visible sign of the inward grace which is the democratic spirit.”

    Today’s advocates of a Green New Deal are right to find in the first New Deal a radical and democratic template for a new set of social and ecological ambitions.

    World War II actually advanced the New Deal project. A generation ago, liberals like I.F. Stone thought that business took advantage of the war to bring social reform to an abrupt halt. He wrote a book entitled Business as Usual denouncing capital’s allegiance to its profit-making prerogatives. FDR himself declared late in 1943 that Dr. Win-the-War had replaced Dr. New Deal for the duration of the conflict. Liberal complaints had a lot of validity. Dollar-a-year business executives—they got a dollar from the government but kept their corporate salaries—came to run many a government procurement agency; labor lost the right to strike and to bargain for higher wages; the Japanese were herded into internment camps; the Army remained segregated; and both the TVA and BPA generated the electricity that helped build the atomic bomb and sustain corporate behemoths like Alcoa and Boeing. Many American radicals thought the war helped create a security-conscious “garrison state” and the “military-industrial complex” that would so distort American democracy.

    All this was true, but the war was hardly a pre–New Deal capitalist restoration. World War II ended the Depression with a massive dose of government-stimulated demand, doubling the gross national product within four years. At the peak of the war, the military commanded about 47 percent of all production and services. Unemployment virtually disappeared by early 1943. Fifteen million workers—a third of the prewar workforce—used their new power to change and upgrade their jobs. Some shifted from one factory department or office to another; at least four million—triple the prewar total—crossed state lines to find better jobs. Washington, D.C., was inundated by tens of thousands of “government girls.” Factory work, especially in defense facilities, grew in prestige and earning power. An innovative “Training Within Industry” (TWI) program, largely pushed forward by liberals and organized labor, upgraded the skills of several million workers. Unlike other job-training programs, workers already held the job for which they were being trained or one very similar to it. This made TWI extremely successful. Thousands of women learned arc welding, an exclusively male trade before the war, and the TWI program taught hundreds of thousands of young people draftsmanship, tooling skills, and production-oriented mathematics. Despite a government-mandated set of wage controls, real wages rose by 27 percent between 1939 and 1945, with wages of those at the bottom of the social scale growing more rapidly than the highly taxed incomes of those at the top. The war boom inaugurated the most progressive redistribution of American wealth in the 20th century.

    The modern civil rights movement began when railroad unionist A. Philip Randolph threatened FDR with a 1941 march on Washington unless the president signed an executive order advancing black and other minority employment in the booming defense industries; and throughout the war, the unions grew and grew, not just in the industrial heartland, but in the South and West as well. The War Labor Board prohibited strikes, but that board, composed of representatives from labor, management, and the government, wanted uniform wages in every industry over which it held jurisdiction. This was a kind of “sectoral bargaining” that raised Southern and small-town wages in dramatic fashion. Agricultural pay in Mississippi leaped upward far more than in any decade since Reconstruction. The historic North-South wage differential in the textile industry began to shrink. Despite rationing—an egalitarian social policy that limited the rich to the same quota of meat and sugar as the poor—people were eating much better during the war, which probably accounted for the dramatic growth in life expectancy: five years for African Americans and three for whites. Infant mortality declined by more than one-third between 1939 and 1945.

    All this helps explain why World War II was the most popular mobilization in American history. Unlike every other multiyear conflict—the Civil War, World War I, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq—public support for the war increased as each year went by. The popular, anti-fascist character of the military struggle explains part of this, but the successful battle on the home front, where working-class empowerment linked itself to a decline in social inequality and a material increase in living standards, also accounts for the golden glow in which subsequent generations have evaluated America’s “good war.”

    One might think that American capitalists could live with all this. After all, during the war the government suspended antitrust laws, paid most of the cost of constructing new defense plants, and lent much of the rest at low interest rates. Cost-plus contracts guaranteed corporate profits on all defense business. The unions refrained from most strikes. And big business got bigger. In 1940, the top 100 companies turned out 30 percent of the nation’s total manufactured goods. By the end of the war, those same 100 companies held 70 percent of all civilian and military manufacturing contracts.

    But the successful conversion of the U.S. economy into the “arsenal of democracy” owed as much to socialism, albeit military-administered, as it did to capitalism. Because of chronic shortages in machinery, raw materials, and labor, the government could not let the cost and pace of either military or civilian production be determined by the free market. That much became clear even in 1941, when I.F. Stone and other liberals denounced Detroit’s failure to convert its auto factories to military production of tanks and aircraft. Henceforth, the armed services would set overall production requirements. From FDR on down, government officials, military and civilian, concluded that the whole economy would have to be centrally planned, and controls placed on the cost of virtually everything, from steel and machine tools to chickens, chocolate, and clothing. Investment in new plant and equipment was dictated by the government, not private enterprisers seeking to game the market.

    The war economy was therefore full of state enterprise, ramped-up regulation, and other New Deal approaches to the administration of economic life. Far exceeding the wildest ambitions of the TVA’s Lilienthal, the federal government purchased and owned countless new industrial plants; it built and administered its own shipyards and factories and managed complex national supply chains. It collected huge amounts of information about its contractors’ costs and business operations, which helped it to strictly control prices and profits. It enforced a set of labor laws and rules that helped to swell union ranks, sometimes by seizing the operations of the most intransigent employers. And this version of state socialism was hugely successful, not only arming U.S. allies and outproducing our enemies, but demonstrating that an effective and intrusive big government remained a potent rival to the economic and ideological hegemony of corporate capitalism.

    At the end of the war, General Motors Chairman Alfred P. Sloan, like most businessmen, could see little distinction between the New Deal and the wartime mobilization effort. He declared, “It took 14 years to rid this country of Prohibition. It is going to take a good while to rid the country of the New Deal, but sooner or later the ax falls and we get a change.”

    Sloan and his heirs got their wish, but today’s advocates of a Green New Deal are right to find in the first New Deal a radical and democratic template for a new set of social and ecological ambitions. It is time to make America over again. As FDR put it in the first hour of his presidency, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”


    How could reading that not stir the spirit like Guthrie's, and tear a cry of "Vstavay, strana ogromnaya!" from the throat?

    Fun fact I learned: "At the peak of the war, the military commanded about 47 percent of all production and services."
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    The glib replies, the same defeats


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    Default Re: Climate Change Thread





    Wooooo!!!

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    I find the idea that an extinct significantly deadly disease ended up all the way up in a pre-industry permanently frozen part of the arctic somewhat dubious.

    Then again, some unlucky medieval ice harvester croaking of the plague mid job and ending up in a glacier somewhere, that seems pretty believable.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Greyblades View Post
    I find the idea that an extinct significantly deadly disease ended up all the way up in a pre-industry permanently frozen part of the arctic somewhat dubious.

    Then again, some unlucky medieval ice harvester croaking of the plague mid job and ending up in a glacier somewhere, that seems pretty believable.
    You are presuming that the recorded medieval outbreaks of these diseases were their inception points. Viruses, in particular, are known to be able to survive inordinate periods of time. Who is to say that the medieval instances of these disease were their first time winging about the world?
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    I was commenting more on the location than the time period: a usually livestock derived virus ending up in the remote areas of the arctic that didnt thaw before modern times? Anyone know how often eskimos encountered these diseases?

    In comparison a human from a agricultural society tooling about a glacier and falling in while infected is a lot more likely.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Greyblades View Post
    I was commenting more on the location than the time period: a usually livestock derived virus ending up in the remote areas of the arctic that didnt thaw before modern times? Anyone know how often eskimos encountered these diseases?

    In comparison a human from a agricultural society tooling about a glacier and falling in while infected is a lot more likely.
    Didn't the Black Death originate in the steppes of Mongolia, where there are still occasional cases of bubonic plague?


    Quote Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh View Post
    You are presuming that the recorded medieval outbreaks of these diseases were their inception points. Viruses, in particular, are known to be able to survive inordinate periods of time. Who is to say that the medieval instances of these disease were their first time winging about the world?
    There's at least one case of bacteria surviving the vacuum of space.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Pannonian View Post
    Didn't the Black Death originate in the steppes of Mongolia, where there are still occasional cases of bubonic plague?
    The origining disease I think; the major outbreak however was in China, beijing specifically. We can blame the mongols for its ease of infection though thier conquests causing major famines throughout the region and the silk road gave it a vector into europe.



    Europe was going through its own famines due to a climate change between the medieval warm period and the little ice age, hence why it turned into such a massive culling.

    I wouldnt be suprised if mongolia did originate it what with their historical nomadic lifestyle, make sense they still have outbreaks now and then due to thier 30% still nomadic population, lot of horses camels and cattle in close proximity when on the steppe.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Greyblades View Post
    The origining disease I think; the major outbreak however was in China, beijing specifically. We can blame the mongols for its ease of infection though thier conquests causing major famines throughout the region and the silk road gave it a vector into europe.



    Europe was going through its own famines due to a climate change between the medieval warm period and the little ice age, hence why it turned into such a massive culling.

    I wouldnt be suprised if mongolia did originate it what with their historical nomadic lifestyle, make sense they still have outbreaks now and then due to thier 30% still nomadic population, lot of horses camels and cattle in close proximity when on the steppe.
    The last I read about it the bubonic plague originated from rodents living on the steppes. A quick look at wiki suggests it's still the current theory. What it shows is that diseases deadly to humans can exist outside human spheres, and every now and then resumes contact. And we know of at least one instance of bacteria surviving the near-absolute zero of extra-planetary vacuum.

  12. #372

    Default Re: Climate Change Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Greyblades View Post
    I find the idea that an extinct significantly deadly disease ended up all the way up in a pre-industry permanently frozen part of the arctic somewhat dubious.

    Then again, some unlucky medieval ice harvester croaking of the plague mid job and ending up in a glacier somewhere, that seems pretty believable.
    Water can flow. It doesn't always stay in one place. And the Arctic isn't the only place with ancient ice. There's ancient ice on the mountaintops at mountain ranges such as the Himalayas and the Alps. And remember that certain regions used to be much warmer long long time ago such as Antarctica.
    Last edited by Shaka_Khan; 01-29-2020 at 02:17.
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  13. #373
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    Quote Originally Posted by Shaka_Khan View Post
    Water can flow. It doesn't always stay in one place. And the Arctic isn't the only place with ancient ice. There's ancient ice on the mountaintops at mountain ranges such as the Himalayas and the Alps. And remember that certain regions used to be much warmer long long time ago such as Antarctica.
    Ah, but what diseases?

    Most of the truly dangerous diseases have developed in the last 1500 years, Bubonic Plague has crossed the species barrier at least twice, once during the Plague of Justinian and once during the Black Death, Syphilis is 500 years old, Cholera perhaps a little less, Smallpox 300, Spanish Flu a bit over a century, HIV and Ebola less than that SARS and Corona-virus are only decades old.

    Dangerous diseases are mostly the result of something crossing a species barrier, that usually means close proximity to animals, and most truly dangerous diseases are not water or airborne because if they were both deadly and easily transmittable we would all be dead.

    So, it is unlikely there is anything waiting in the Arctic Permafrost from before the icecaps formed, the worst we're likely to see is a resurgence of a known disease from the medieval or post-medieval period from the Alps and most of those are very treatable.

    There's a lot to worry about with climate change, but this is a long way down the list.
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    Default Re: Climate Change Thread

    What to worry about with disease and climate change: Degradation of healthcare systems under conditions of climate stress, population movement, and disrupted supply chains for drugs, supplies, and equipment.

    Insects and parasites as disease vectors will also become more intense and widespread.

    It's also always possible that a significant bacterial pandemic spreads at the culmination of antibiotics attrition and bureaucratic mismanagement of emergency protocols. China's massive quarantines in this ongoing Coronavirus outbreak indicate either, to my knowledge, an uncommonly decisive application of caution on the government's part, or the assessed magnitude of the circumstances.
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    Must be quite the epidemic to make even the notoriously inattentive PRC so proactive.

    Quote Originally Posted by Shaka_Khan View Post
    Water can flow. It doesn't always stay in one place. And the Arctic isn't the only place with ancient ice. There's ancient ice on the mountaintops at mountain ranges such as the Himalayas and the Alps. And remember that certain regions used to be much warmer long long time ago such as Antarctica.
    Hence why I mentioned the glaciers as more likely; the areas in the arctic permanently frozen arent habitable to most carriers of human transferable disease and humanity hasnt been around so long as to have seen the land of the poles being anything other than cold.
    Last edited by Greyblades; 01-29-2020 at 05:06.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Greyblades View Post
    Must be quite the epidemic to make even the notoriously inattentive PRC so proactive.

    Hence why I mentioned the glaciers as more likely; the areas in the arctic permanently frozen arent habitable to most carriers of human transferable disease and humanity hasnt been around so long as to have seen the land of the poles being anything other than cold.
    The PRC are notoriously inattentive? They're the torch carriers for science running government, regardless of humanity.

  17. #377

    Default Re: Climate Change Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Pannonian View Post
    The PRC are notoriously inattentive? They're the torch carriers for science running government, regardless of humanity.
    *Chinese laughter*

    Demand for traditional Chinese medicine continues to grow in the western world. The lack of evidence-based testing in the sector is a worry, however – as is the political pressure that seems to be driving its aggressive expansion
    Selling people on the idea that ancient practices are somehow superior – in the absence of any real evidence – may cause people to suffer unnecessary pain and even permanent disability.” But there are powerful engines in play to make us believe otherwise, for there are billions of dollars to be made from alternative therapies. Accordingly, the market is now expanding at a rapid rate, not just in western countries among educated, high-income individuals, but also in developing nations as a far cheaper option for proper medical care. Aristolochic acid is the embodiment of the dangers that alternative medicines pose. Unfortunately, however, in the battle for global health, the opposing side has a great deal at stake. In addition to the formidable financial incentives for growing the TCM market, there are strong political motivations also. Indeed, it would seem that TCM is currently being used as a political tool – a marker of China’s growing prestige and authority around the globe. The WHO’s worrying actions seem to attest to this.
    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
    Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been expanding at a notable rate as of late: in 2016, the sector grossed CNY 860bn ($130bn), then expanded a further 20 percent throughout 2017, according to China Daily. A similar pattern can be seen overseas, too: according to Nature, a weekly science journal, the selling of TCM and other related products to One Belt One Road countries has surged. Between the years 2016 and 2017, exports experienced a whopping 54 percent growth to $295m. Indeed, according to the National Centre for Biotechnology Information, China exported TCM to 185 countries and regions around the world in 2016, with $526m worth exported the US alone – making up 15 percent of China’s annual TCM exports at the time.
    [...]
    The Chinese Government – specifically, President Xi Jinping – is consciously driving the expansion of the TCM market at present. This became all too clear in a speech he gave in spring 2018, during which he also outlined plans to stay on as premier indefinitely. According to sources familiar with the matter, he devoted at least half an hour of his speech strictly to TCM, and explained there was no need to test the efficacy and toxicity of such treatments. The president also revealed a key stratagem in the market’s global expansion: the opening of some 300 TCM centres in various countries around the world. Domestic TCM centres, meanwhile, continue to attract more visitors to China, effectively becoming medical tourism hotspots. Since 2002, for example, some 50,000 foreigners (the majority being from Russian-speaking nations) have visited Sanya, a city in China’s Hainan province, for TCM treatments. Clearly, there is a strong financial incentive for promoting TCM around the globe.
    [...]
    Moreover, Xi’s TCM ambitions have a strong political component. Dr Donald Marcus, Professor of Medicine and Immunology Emeritus at the Baylor College of Medicine, told World Finance: “He’s pushing it very hard for two reasons. One, he’s on a campaign to promote China as a great power and a source of all kinds of wonderful cultural and scientific things. He’s also facing the same problem that Chairman Mao faced, which is that they don’t have enough western-trained doctors to take care of a huge Chinese population, so they’re promoting the idea that TCM is just as good.” He added: “So it’s part of this nationalism push, but also, they’re making a lot of money with it.” Africa, a continent that has a growing dependency on China, is one of the main targets for China’s plans.
    [...]
    “Insofar as it is being adopted, the impetus to try comes from clever marketing and does not come from any evidence whatsoever that TCM is scientifically sound or medically effective,” said Dr Steven L Salzberg, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University. Sadly, by using TCM, unknowing patients are less likely to seek proven treatments, which could in turn worsen their respective ailments. But this tragic tale does not end there. Aristolochic acid, which is derived from aristolochia, a large plant genus, is a common ingredient that has been used in Chinese herbal remedies for thousands of years. Following an outbreak in the Balkans in the late 1950s, it was discovered that not only does aristolochic acid trigger nephropathy, or kidney failure – it can also cause cancer. “The International Agency for Research on Cancer has said it’s one of the most potent carcinogens in humans, but what we didn’t know until this century was just how big a problem it is in places like China and Taiwan, where aristolochic acid is used,” Marcus told World Finance. “Several studies that were done in Taiwan and China in this century found that close to 50 percent of kidney tissues from patients with kidney failure or cancer had the molecular signature of aristolochic acid nephropathy,” Marcus explained. “Those data indicate that tens of millions of people in Asia are at risk for aristolochic acid nephropathy.” While many websites in China once brandished warnings about the dangers of aristolochia, it has been noted that within just weeks of Xi’s aforementioned speech, they had all disappeared.
    [...]
    Last year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) revealed that, by 2022, TCM would be included in its 11th International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems. According to the organisation’s website, the document is “the diagnostic classification standard for all clinical and research purposes”. The work also sets the healthcare agenda for more than 100 nations worldwide. For China’s burgeoning TCM market, this is massive news. It marks the first time that TCM will be recognised by an international body with the prestige of the WHO. It also sets a scene wherein TCM is more commonly used as ‘acceptable’ treatment for various diseases. And yet, there is little to no evidence of the effectiveness, or even simply the safety, of many of the treatments offered by TCM. This is all the more surprising given the high standard of testing that the WHO usually requires. When asked what the WHO could possibly be thinking with such an extraordinary divergence from its standard procedures, Salzberg answered: “The WHO’s endorsement of TCM seems to be the culmination of a campaign by one person – its former director – who mistakenly believes (or seems to believe) that TCM is real medicine.” He is referring to Margaret Chan, who was director of the WHO between 2006 and 2017. “I don’t understand her motives, but scientifically speaking, she’s mistaken.”
    [...]
    Among the scientific community, it is widely acknowledged that aristolochia is a powerful carcinogen, which can also cause irreversible kidney damage. But despite the fact that around 400 papers attesting this had been published by 2014, there is not a single mention of aristolochia in the WHO’s strategic report from the same year. Aside from Xi’s assertion that TCMs need not be tested, as well as the WHO’s glaring omission, matters are made even worse by the fact that labels on TCM products are often incomplete, failing to list all ingredients included. This is particularly worrying given the ubiquity of aristolochia and its horrendous side effects.


    How difficult it should be to think, with all the history behind us, that autocrats are more likely to be steely-eyed scientific rationalists than politically-correct wagermakers.
    Last edited by Montmorency; 01-29-2020 at 22:49.
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  18. #378
    Headless Senior Member Pannonian's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    *Chinese laughter*







    How difficult it should be to think, with all the history behind us, that autocrats are more likely to be steely-eyed scientific rationalists than politically-correct wagermakers.
    You're looking at the wrong metrics. Nationalism is the political drive of the Chinese government. It's their way of controlling the populace with their take on culture (see also their depiction of Japan as an enemy).

  19. #379

    Default Re: Climate Change Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Pannonian View Post
    You're looking at the wrong metrics. Nationalism is the political drive of the Chinese government. It's their way of controlling the populace with their take on culture (see also their depiction of Japan as an enemy).
    Which metrics are you thinking of?
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  20. #380
    Ja mata, TosaInu Forum Administrator edyzmedieval's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    Which metrics are you thinking of?
    These ones are my kind of metrics - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/c...ge-data-green/
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  21. #381
    Headless Senior Member Pannonian's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    Which metrics are you thinking of?
    It makes better sense once you consider that the Chinese government values keeping the country together above almost everything else, that nationalism is their driving principle (and science their guiding principle), and political pragmatism their means by which they achieve their goals. Does TCM work? Yes, it provides a cultural identity with which to bind Chinese people together. It's a tradition by which one reaffirms one's Chinese identity, and via that, their loyalty to the Chinese nation. Not just that, it's also an export business that promotes both the Chinese economy and their soft power, reinforcing the image of China as an exotic nation with ancient wisdom. Does it work to heal people, as measured by the scientific method? Probably not, but that's beside the point for the Chinese government.

  22. #382

    Default Re: Climate Change Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Pannonian View Post
    It makes better sense once you consider that the Chinese government values keeping the country together above almost everything else, that nationalism is their driving principle (and science their guiding principle), and political pragmatism their means by which they achieve their goals. Does TCM work? Yes, it provides a cultural identity with which to bind Chinese people together. It's a tradition by which one reaffirms one's Chinese identity, and via that, their loyalty to the Chinese nation. Not just that, it's also an export business that promotes both the Chinese economy and their soft power, reinforcing the image of China as an exotic nation with ancient wisdom. Does it work to heal people, as measured by the scientific method? Probably not, but that's beside the point for the Chinese government.
    Well, there's a difference between regulated TCM placebos and letting practitioners run wild with unsafe ingredients and a corner of the illegal animal trade. And what you're describing is political wagermaking, or more charitably realpolitik, which doesn't really relate to science per se. What makes you say the Chinese government is particularly science-driven?

    Since this is as good a place as any to post it, here's a tangentially-related piece speculating how China's vaunted AI/digital surveillance apparatus can potentially backfire under the weight of its own biases and vicious feedback loops.

    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
    Reading this tweet by Maciej Ceglowski makes me want to set down a conjecture that I’ve been entertaining for the last couple of years (in part thanks to having read Maciej’s and Kieran’s previous work as well as talking lots to Marion Fourcade).


    The conjecture (and it is no more than a plausible conjecture) is simple, but it straightforwardly contradicts the collective wisdom that is emerging in Washington DC, and other places too. This collective wisdom is that China is becoming a kind of all-efficient Technocratic Leviathan thanks to the combination of machine learning and authoritarianism. Authoritarianism has always been plagued with problems of gathering and collating information and of being sufficiently responsive to its citizens’ needs to remain stable. Now, the story goes, a combination of massive data gathering and machine learning will solve the basic authoritarian dilemma. When every transaction that a citizen engages in is recorded by tiny automatons riding on the devices they carry in their hip pockets, when cameras on every corner collect data on who is going where, who is talking to whom, and uses facial recognition technology to distinguish ethnicity and identify enemies of the state, a new and far more powerful form of authoritarianism will emerge. Authoritarianism then, can emerge as a more efficient competitor that can beat democracy at its home game (some fear this; some welcome it).

    The theory behind this is one of strength reinforcing strength – the strengths of ubiquitous data gathering and analysis reinforcing the strengths of authoritarian repression to create an unstoppable juggernaut of nearly perfectly efficient oppression. Yet there is another story to be told – of weakness reinforcing weakness. Authoritarian states were always particularly prone to the deficiencies identified in James Scott’s Seeing Like a State – the desire to make citizens and their doings legible to the state, by standardizing and categorizing them, and reorganizing collective life in simplified ways, for example by remaking cities so that they were not organic structures that emerged from the doings of their citizens, but instead grand chessboards with ordered squares and boulevards, reducing all complexities to a square of planed wood. The grand state bureaucracies that were built to carry out these operations were responsible for multitudes of horrors, but also for the crumbling of the Stalinist state into a Brezhnevian desuetude, where everyone pretended to be carrying on as normal because everyone else was carrying on too. The deficiencies of state action, and its need to reduce the world into something simpler that it could comprehend and act upon created a kind of feedback loop, in which imperfections of vision and action repeatedly reinforced each other.

    So what might a similar analysis say about the marriage of authoritarianism and machine learning? Something like the following, I think. There are two notable problems with machine learning. One – that while it can do many extraordinary things, it is not nearly as universally effective as the mythology suggests. The other is that it can serve as a magnifier for already existing biases in the data. The patterns that it identifies may be the product of the problematic data that goes in, which is (to the extent that it is accurate) often the product of biased social processes. When this data is then used to make decisions that may plausibly reinforce those processes (by singling e.g. particular groups that are regarded as problematic out for particular police attention, leading them to be more liable to be arrested and so on), the bias may feed upon itself.

    This is a substantial problem in democratic societies, but it is a problem where there are at least some counteracting tendencies. The great advantage of democracy is its openness to contrary opinions and divergent perspectives. This opens up democracy to a specific set of destabilizing attacks but it also means that there are countervailing tendencies to self-reinforcing biases. When there are groups that are victimized by such biases, they may mobilize against it (although they will find it harder to mobilize against algorithms than overt discrimination). When there are obvious inefficiencies or social, political or economic problems that result from biases, then there will be ways for people to point out these inefficiencies or problems.

    These correction tendencies will be weaker in authoritarian societies; in extreme versions of authoritarianism, they may barely even exist. Groups that are discriminated against will have no obvious recourse. Major mistakes may go uncorrected: they may be nearly invisible to a state whose data is polluted both by the means employed to observe and classify it, and the policies implemented on the basis of this data. A plausible feedback loop would see bias leading to error leading to further bias, and no ready ways to correct it. This of course, will be likely to be reinforced by the ordinary politics of authoritarianism, and the typical reluctance to correct leaders, even when their policies are leading to disaster. The flawed ideology of the leader (We must all study Comrade Xi thought to discover the truth!) and of the algorithm (machine learning is magic!) may reinforce each other in highly unfortunate ways.

    In short, there is a very plausible set of mechanisms under which machine learning and related techniques may turn out to be a disaster for authoritarianism, reinforcing its weaknesses rather than its strengths, by increasing its tendency to bad decision making, and reducing further the possibility of negative feedback that could help correct against errors. This disaster would unfold in two ways. The first will involve enormous human costs: self-reinforcing bias will likely increase discrimination against out-groups, of the sort that we are seeing against the Uighur today. The second will involve more ordinary self-ramifying errors, that may lead to widespread planning disasters, which will differ from those described in Scott’s account of High Modernism in that they are not as immediately visible, but that may also be more pernicious, and more damaging to the political health and viability of the regime for just that reason.

    So in short, this conjecture would suggest that the conjunction of AI and authoritarianism (has someone coined the term ‘aithoritarianism’ yet? I’d really prefer not to take the blame), will have more or less the opposite effects of what people expect. It will not be Singapore writ large, and perhaps more brutal. Instead, it will be both more radically monstrous and more radically unstable.

    Like all monotheoretic accounts, you should treat this post with some skepticism – political reality is always more complex and muddier than any abstraction. There are surely other effects (another, particularly interesting one for big countries such as China, is to relax the assumption that the state is a monolith, and to think about the intersection between machine learning and warring bureaucratic factions within the center, and between the center and periphery).Yet I think that it is plausible that it at least maps one significant set of causal relationships, that may push (in combination with, or against, other structural forces) towards very different outcomes than the conventional wisdom imagines. Comments, elaborations, qualifications and disagreements welcome.
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  23. #383
    Headless Senior Member Pannonian's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    Well, there's a difference between regulated TCM placebos and letting practitioners run wild with unsafe ingredients and a corner of the illegal animal trade. And what you're describing is political wagermaking, or more charitably realpolitik, which doesn't really relate to science per se. What makes you say the Chinese government is particularly science-driven?

    Since this is as good a place as any to post it, here's a tangentially-related piece speculating how China's vaunted AI/digital surveillance apparatus can potentially backfire under the weight of its own biases and vicious feedback loops.
    Look at what they're doing with the environment. They have to allow for capitalism to keep the populace from unrest, and Chinese capitalism is rather more ruthlessly destructive than its western counterpart. But on the state side, they are pioneering environmental preservation and restoration methodology. You dismiss their adoption of political pragmatism and any possibility that it may co-exist with science-driven government. That's because you're used to a western mindset, and see things only from that perspective. Read some articles looking at the tensions that exist in the Chinese state, and you may get some greater understanding of how a science-driven central government has to tussle with an adamantly non-science-driven people.

  24. #384

    Default Re: Climate Change Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Pannonian View Post
    Look at what they're doing with the environment. They have to allow for capitalism to keep the populace from unrest, and Chinese capitalism is rather more ruthlessly destructive than its western counterpart. But on the state side, they are pioneering environmental preservation and restoration methodology. You dismiss their adoption of political pragmatism and any possibility that it may co-exist with science-driven government. That's because you're used to a western mindset, and see things only from that perspective. Read some articles looking at the tensions that exist in the Chinese state, and you may get some greater understanding of how a science-driven central government has to tussle with an adamantly non-science-driven people.
    I don't dismiss the possibility, you're just not explaining it clearly. What I can glean from your post is that the Chinese government promotes R&D in environmental preservation and restoration, which does not intrinsically lead to the conclusion that the government is science-driven.

    I do recall that China was retiring or canceling its coal capacity at a healthy clip going into 2017, but apparently decided to put the pedal to the sediment right around the time of Trump's election. I also cited in the other thread that China's healthcare system is more capitalistically-dysfunctional than America's in at least some aspects, which doesn't sound either politically or scientifically-wise.
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  25. #385
    Member Member Greyblades's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Pannonian View Post
    The PRC are notoriously inattentive? They're the torch carriers for science running government, regardless of humanity.
    My impression of china comes from a youtube channel called ADV China; a series made by an american and a south african who lived around about 10-20 years in china until a year or two ago. Thier content has taken a massive turn towards the negative but before they left the jurisdiction of the chinese censors they had to maintain a neutral tone which didnt stop them showing the negative side of china; they were the ones that popularized china's "ghost cities".

    Point being even before they turned they were giving the impression that the chinese system had a massive problem with a "dont rock the boat" mentality and thier most recent videos on the coronavirus portrays it as a consequence of this; preventative measures and forwarning being suppressed. Yes there are the secret police and party politic types but also the local politicians who are massively incentivised to downplay and suppress knowledge of the situation because they are the ones that are low enough on the totem pole to get it in the neck when things get out of control.

    Remember the guys who were in denial over the reactor explosion in the Chernobyl series even when the wreckage was littering the area? Thats what I think is happening in China right now, doesnt matter if they are a science-running-government-over-humanity society if the people on the ground are prone to suppressing important information out of fear of being held responsible.

    China is inattentive, unwittingly so.
    Last edited by Greyblades; 02-01-2020 at 07:13.
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  26. #386

    Default Re: Climate Change Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Greyblades View Post
    My impression of china comes from a youtube channel called ADV China; a series made by an american and a south african who lived around about 10-20 years in china until a year or two ago. Thier content has taken a massive turn towards the negative but before they left the jurisdiction of the chinese censors they had to maintain a neutral tone which didnt stop them showing the negative side of china; they were the ones that popularized china's "ghost cities".

    Point being even before they turned they were giving the impression that the chinese system had a massive problem with a "dont rock the boat" mentality and thier most recent videos on the coronavirus portrays it as a consequence of this; preventative measures and forwarning being suppressed. Yes there are the secret police and party politic types but also the local politicians who are massively incentivised to downplay and suppress knowledge of the situation because they are the ones that are low enough on the totem pole to get it in the neck when things get out of control.

    Remember the guys who were in denial over the reactor explosion in the Chernobyl series even when the wreckage was littering the area? Thats what I think is happening in China right now, doesnt matter if they are a science-running-government-over-humanity society if the people on the ground are prone to suppressing important information out of fear of being held responsible.

    China is inattentive, unwittingly so.
    This is close to the truth. China's government responses quickly and boldly and their planning possibly gives them a degree of tunnel vision.

    Unanticipated incidents show how un-scientific their managerial structure is. scientific forethought would have led to the banning of wildlife markets a long time ago, SARS should have been the end of it back in the early 2000s.

    Quarantine 30 million people in 2020, kill 2/3rd of all pigs in 2019, These are signs of weak systems if they need to go to such extremes.

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    Default Re: Climate Change Thread

    Also, that Communist Party exacerbated the problem by hiding the outbreak and arresting the doctors who tried to alert the public back in December. Even today, the numbers are underreported partly because there aren't enough medical supplies to test all of the patients. And that government is using scapegoats to get the blame away from itself.

    The way I look at it, this has already reached the epidemic level and will eventually spread around the world like the common flu unless drastic measures are taken. These drastic measures include banning travel between more infected countries, which is something that WHO doesn't recommend (yet?). Some of the countries were also late in containing the spread, and I fear that we might see those regions become epidemic regions in the near future.

    This shows how vulnerable the world is to an epidemic. I'm afraid of what might happen if an epidemic of a more dangerous virus begins.
    Last edited by Shaka_Khan; 02-02-2020 at 02:54.
    Wooooo!!!

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    Default Re: Climate Change Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Shaka_Khan View Post
    Also, that Communist Party exacerbated the problem by hiding the outbreak and arresting the doctors who tried to alert the public back in December. Even today, the numbers are underreported partly because there aren't enough medical supplies to test all of the patients. And that government is using scapegoats to get the blame away from itself.

    The way I look at it, this has already reached the epidemic level and will eventually spread around the world like the common flu unless drastic measures are taken. These drastic measures include banning travel between more infected countries, which is something that WHO doesn't recommend (yet?). Some of the countries were also late in containing the spread, and I fear that we might see those regions become epidemic regions in the near future.

    This shows how vulnerable the world is to an epidemic. I'm afraid of what might happen if an epidemic of a more dangerous virus begins.
    It would be bad, but likely less bad than the flu outbreak at the end of WW1. Our ability to support patients and mitigate symptoms allows us to minimize death-rates from any naturally occurring virus. Not that it still wouldn't suck, just saying that a Black Death levels of casualties are unlikely outside of Central Africa or Indonesia.

    Particularly deadly viruses tend to burn out faster as the hosts' deaths minimize the ability of the infection to spread. Viruses that have mutated to insure massive spread (like Rhinoviruses) tend to be less virulent.

    It would take a multi-layer engineered virus to have the kind of earth-changing effect you fear.
    "The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.” -- Milton Friedman

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  29. #389

    Default Re: Climate Change Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh View Post
    It would be bad, but likely less bad than the flu outbreak at the end of WW1. Our ability to support patients and mitigate symptoms allows us to minimize death-rates from any naturally occurring virus. Not that it still wouldn't suck, just saying that a Black Death levels of casualties are unlikely outside of Central Africa or Indonesia.

    Particularly deadly viruses tend to burn out faster as the hosts' deaths minimize the ability of the infection to spread. Viruses that have mutated to insure massive spread (like Rhinoviruses) tend to be less virulent.

    It would take a multi-layer engineered virus to have the kind of earth-changing effect you fear.
    Remember that up to a quarter of the global population was infected by the Spanish Flu. A quarter of the current global population would be ~2 billion. Superior medical infrastructure is moot at the point where it becomes overwhelmed by numbers.
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  30. #390
    Voluntary Suspension Voluntary Suspension Philippus Flavius Homovallumus's Avatar
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    Default Re: Climate Change Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh View Post
    It would be bad, but likely less bad than the flu outbreak at the end of WW1. Our ability to support patients and mitigate symptoms allows us to minimize death-rates from any naturally occurring virus. Not that it still wouldn't suck, just saying that a Black Death levels of casualties are unlikely outside of Central Africa or Indonesia.

    Particularly deadly viruses tend to burn out faster as the hosts' deaths minimize the ability of the infection to spread. Viruses that have mutated to insure massive spread (like Rhinoviruses) tend to be less virulent.

    It would take a multi-layer engineered virus to have the kind of earth-changing effect you fear.
    It's worth pointing out that as bad as the Black Death was it didn't actually cause societal collapse - nor did the Flu, even the Plague od Justinian was a one-two-three punch with sudden climate change and external invasions.

    On the other hand, so long as humanity continues to overpopulate the planet we are playing Russian Roulette with disease - eventually one will come along that does cause societal collapse.
    "If it wears trousers generally I don't pay attention."

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