The rise in CO2 is slowly poisoning us all

I’ve been at this climate communication game for a while now, and I’ve heard just about every bad argument the climate science deniers have come up with. There are all sorts, with varying degrees of sophistication, but perhaps the most absurd is the bold assertion that CO2 is not a poison gas. It’s generally paired with the reminder that plants need CO2 to live, and some derision of the notion that rising atmospheric CO2 levels would kill us all. Which has never been the claim.

The “rising CO2 will kill us all” line comes from the disastrous effects of a destabilized climate that we’re now seeing on a yearly basis. The jury’s still out on whether it will kill us all, but it certainly has the potential to destroy civilization as we know it, and our species’ survival is not guaranteed. We have no mystical destiny to reach the stars or anything like that, and rapid global warming is a known recipe for extinction. Nobody was claiming that it would kill us all by poisoning us!

In other news, the rise in atmospheric CO2 is poisoning us.

Rising carbon dioxide levels are being detected within the human body, with new research warning a key blood marker for the gas could near its healthy limit within decades if current trends continue. The findings are especially relevant for children and adolescents, whose developing bodies will experience the longest cumulative exposure to rising atmospheric CO₂.

In a study published in Air Quality, Atmosphere and Health, researchers from The Kids Research Institute Australia, Curtin University and The Australian National University (ANU) analysed more than two decades of U.S. population data and found steady shifts in blood chemistry that closely track the rise in atmospheric CO₂.

Using data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), the team examined blood results from around 7,000 people every two years between 1999 and 2020.

Average levels of serum bicarbonate – a marker closely linked to carbon dioxide in the body – have risen by approximately seven per cent since 1999. Over the same period, average calcium and phosphorus levels have declined.

These changes mirror the rise in atmospheric CO₂, which has increased from about 369 parts per million (ppm) in 2000 to more than 420 ppm today.

Author Associate Professor Alexander Larcombe said the findings suggest the human body may already be compensating for a changing atmosphere.

“What we’re seeing is a gradual shift in blood chemistry that mirrors the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide which is driving climate change,” A/Prof Larcombe said.

I have to admit I didn’t see this one coming, but now that I think it through, I should have. This may be one of those times when the rhetoric of my opponents successfully guided me away from actually considering an angle of the whole thing. Our bodies use chemical reactions to take what we need from our air, water, and food, and get rid of the rest. CO2 is no exception.

And that change in blood chemistry is not without consequences. The associated decline in calcium and phosphorus may not be a big issue now, but these findings present us with a future in which much of humanity will need to be on supplements to counteract the fact that we have literally been poisoning our atmosphere (in a different way from all the other ways we’ve been poisoning our atmosphere).

Bicarbonate plays a central role in maintaining the body’s acid–base balance. When CO₂ levels rise, the body retains more bicarbonate to stabilise blood pH. Over time, however, sustained compensation may carry physiological consequences.

“If current trends continue, modelling indicates average bicarbonate levels could approach the upper limit of today’s accepted healthy range within 50 years,” A/Prof Larcombe said

“Calcium and phosphorus levels could also reach the lower end of their healthy ranges later this century.”

Humans evolved in an atmosphere containing roughly 280–300 ppm of CO₂. The average annual increase over the past decade has been about 2.6 ppm per year, with 2024 recording a 3.5 ppm rise.

Fellow Author Dr Phil Bierwirth, a retired environmental geoscientist who is affiliated with the ANU Emeritus Faculty, said while the study does not prove direct causation, the consistent, population-wide trends are difficult to ignore.

“I actually think that what we are seeing is because our bodies are not adapting,” Dr Bierwirth said.

“It appears we are adapted to a range of CO2 in the air that may now have been surpassed.

“The normal range maintains a delicate balance between how much CO2 is in the air, our blood pH, our breathing rate and bicarbonate levels in the blood.

“As CO2 in the air is now higher than humans have ever experienced, it appears to be building up in our bodies. Maybe we can never adapt such that it is vitally important to limit atmospheric levels of CO2.”

Honestly, it’s getting hard to keep track of all the ways in which we’re poisoning ourselves. That makes it all the more ridiculous when people insist that things like a rise in chronic health problems, or a decline in fertility are solely a matter of personal lifestyle choices like diet. That’s not to say diet isn’t important, but a healthy diet won’t negate the effects of a planetary atmosphere for which we are simply not evolved. Dinosaurs lived with higher CO2 levels than this, but it turns out dinosaurs are not humans, and they had evolved to thrive in that atmosphere.

We need to start thinking about this as if we’re all on an alien planet. If we don’t terraform it to conditions conducive to human life, we’ll have to take medication to counteract the poisons in the air we breathe, or live in sealed environments with limited exposure to unprocessed air. That may sound dramatic for something that can be treated with dietary supplements, but it’s even easier to treat hunger, and we’ve decided instead to use it as a weapon to control or eliminate people.

People used to joke about rich people controlling access to breathable air, but now? Now I’m thinking of a Stargate SG-1 episode in which a nation of Nazi aliens tried to genocide everyone else by poisoning the entire planet’s atmosphere from within a sealed bunker.

A long time ago, I urged people to think about global warming in terms of science fiction, because dealing with it will require such a revolutionary change in our society that it opens up all sorts of possibilities for a new kind of existence. That remains true.

The old world is collapsing, and nothing can save it. If we try to cling on to the past, we’ll be buried under its rubble.

The only hope our species has for a real future is to let go of what we know, and build something new.

The US healthcare system is a crime against humanity.

I suspect most if not all of my readership is on board with universal healthcare, but the Yale School of Public Health just released a new study, and I want to rant about it.

My fellow Americans, I don’t think you’re angry enough about healthcare in the US.

At this point, it’s more or less global common knowledge that the privatized healthcare system of the US costs a huge amount of money, in exchange for generally mediocre results. Those of us who follow this issue have known that tens of thousands of Americans die preventable deaths every year, because of the cost and inefficiency of healthcare. People are priced out of preventative medicine, and they avoid getting health problems checked out because they know they can’t afford treatment anyway, and so minor problems become major, and the price escalates accordingly.

I once heard an ER nurse say that “America doesn’t have a safety net, it has a greased chute. and at the bottom of that chute is one final trip to the emergency room”.

And it’s true. A majority of people manage to keep their heads above the water, but despite some small improvements under Obama’s ACA, it has gotten steadily worse. The US healthcare system was a big part of why my household decided to seek a better life in the lands of hope and opportunity across the Atlantic, and every time I worry it was a waste of the savings we spent to get here, I remember how much I have saved on health insurance, on healthcare, and how much better my health is because I know I can afford to get it checked out. That doesn’t mean things have been easy, but it’s hard to fully appreciate how much of a pyschological burden the US healthcare system is, until you’ve experienced something better. The UK’s NHS has its problems, as does the Irish system, but both of them are very clearly better, except perhaps for those with so much money they can easily fly to any specialist in the world.

But even I, with all my cynicism and experience, underestimated just how bad things had gotten in the US:

A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.

First, to be clear, “preprint” means that this study has not yet gone through the peer review process. It certainly fits my preexisting opinions well, but I’m not competent to assess the research for myself, and those who are have yet to render their verdict. The authors also stress that they did not have data for excess deaths among uninsured adults, and their estimate does not include the logistical costs of transitioning to a universal system.

As I said, it’s been clear that the ACA was a band-aid on a bullet wound, and at best seems to have slowed the rate of decline. The Yale researchers ran a model based on 2024 statistics to see how a system like Medicare for All would play out, compared to the reality. As far as I know, this does not account for the eugenicist nightmare brought to us by RFK. Jr. and the Republican Party.

The model identified five major sources of savings: lower pharmaceutical prices, Medicare-level payments to providers, reduced administrative overhead, less fraudulent billing, and fewer avoidable emergency department visits and hospitalizations. Even under more conservative assumptions about drug prices and fraud reduction, the researchers projected that the savings would reach at least $663 billion a year. Both figures account for an estimated $304 billion in additional spending to meet unmet medical needs, reimburse care that now goes unpaid, and provide universal dental coverage.

A universal healthcare policy would also save tens of thousands of lives, the researchers project. They estimate that adequate coverage for all could avert about 62,863 deaths annually — and that nearly half, or 29,631, would be among people who already hold insurance. These are the underinsured: the more than 45 million working-age adults whose deductibles and cost-sharing put care beyond financial reach anyway. Reversing coverage rollbacks and other health policies enacted since 2025 would avert a further 51,311 deaths each year, the researchers project, bringing the annual total to 114,174.

The study builds on findings Galvani, co-author Meagan Fitzpatrick, and other colleagues published in The Lancet in 2020, which projected that universal health care would save $450 billion and more than 68,000 lives annually. The larger estimates in the new study reflect ballooning health expenditures, a widening gap between commercial and Medicare payment rates, and new estimates on recent policy changes and the underinsured.

The excess deaths and the excess money share the same root causes: Greed and a disregard for human life. Every death enriches the people deciding who gets to live and who doesn’t. Let no defender of this system ever call themselves “pro-life” again, lest their hearing be damaged by derisive laughter.

The US already spends more than enough to cover a universal system, but a huge portion of that currently goes to advertising, to buying politicians, and to buying extra yachts and doomsday bunker mansions for executives and shareholders. We can do better.

And so I’d like to close with this thought exercise for my fellow Americans: Think about how much your health insurance costs. If you get it through your employer, include how much they contribute. How would your life change if that money was going into your pocket instead? What would you do with that money? How would it change your life?

Now add to that an end to medical bills as you know it. No more surprise letters demanding hundreds of dollars for an ambulance ride, or thousands for the treatment once you reach the hospital. No more worrying that if you get that pain checked out it’ll lead to medical bankruptcy. No more worrying that end-of-life medical care will leave your family with nothing.

It wouldn’t solve all of your problems, and no healthcare system is perfect, but imagine if yours was centered around your health and well-being, rather than the greed of a bunch of rich ghouls who get richer every time they deny someone needed care.

The world could be so much better for everyone than it is.

Fight for your scraps or starve, peasants!

I often talk about the importance of solidarity and organizing. I think I talk less about the obstacles to doing that, and the ways in which our society and culture are designed to divide people. Arguably the oldest version of this is patriarchy, in which humanity is divided in two, with one half holding a position of privilege and power over the other. The advantages that men get in this system are ones many men are willing to fight for, while ignoring the ways in which it might harm them. There is incentive to maintain the divide. White supremacy is a far more recent development, but it serves very much the same purpose – a framework for dividing up humanity, to justify and enforce varying levels of inequality and oppression.

The foundational divide in capitalism is between those who work for a living – selling portions of their life to survive – and those who make their money by owning the labor of others, and thus owning the fruits of that labor. Over the last century in the US, there has been a further division of the working class, in which those who could demand a high enough price for their labor were elevated to the “middle class”, which essentially meant “paid enough to live comfortably”.

Add in the moralizing of wealth that comes with the “meritocracy”, and the difference in wealth becomes a difference in worth. Why would those in the lofty heights of the middle class make common cause with the working class? If they want better lives, they should earn them like we did!

There’s also the “job market”. We are required to work a job in order to survive, but we have no right to a job. We must compete with everyone else to get work, and the knowledge is ever-present that for every time we “win”, someone else loses. That is, we are told, the only way it could ever be. This is a lie.

Solidarity and collective action work, and they work very well. They have been the bane of rulers throughout history, and the demon that haunts their nightmares. The power-mad people at the top never stop fearing that those below them will realize just how much they’re being screwed, and will rise up as one. It’s why they want to watch all of us, constantly. It’s why they always act to crush unions and solidarity. It’s why they never stop thinking of new ways to set people against each other.

The latest innovation on this front is the notion of forcing workers to bid for shifts. It’s not enough to have the job anymore, now you have to compete with everyone else for hours, and whoever is willing to work for the least pay, gets the job.

This is, of course, a fantastic deal for the owning class. Workers (no longer “employees”, I think) will bid down their own wages, without any need for pesky negotiations, and if they act as intended, they will blame each other for the constantly-falling wages, rather than working together to demand a better system.

Naturally, this is a recipe for a desperate, stressed work force, with no sense of stability. Having no reliable schedule, they will probably also be poorly rested, and have difficulty organizing their time outside of their unreliable and unpredictable schedule. All of this means workers will make more mistakes, but maybe that won’t matter for some jobs (if we don’t care about the workers’ quality of life). There are plenty of jobs that can probably be done under those conditions, so which body of workers are we talking about here?

As has increasingly become the case with ride-share companies, the “Uber for nurses” model relies on artificial intelligence to set pay rates for work shifts, to surveil performance metrics, and to use that data to determine a worker’s future access to gigs and pay rates. The industry also allows nurses to bid on work shifts, with the lowest pay rate winning the shift.

The model has been lucrative for its promoters. Three nurse gig platforms have reached a $1bn valuation, according to the report, as they have received an influx of investment from private equity firms and are securing government contracts to staff public facilities, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers.

“AI is incorporated into all these human management software systems, and for nurses that means dropping them into all kinds of places, without orientation, without workers’ comp, without any way to protect themselves if they’re sick and they need to cancel,” said Dr Katie J Wells, co-author of the report and a senior fellow at AI Now. “That also means, for a lot of these apps, using AI technologies to facilitate a bidding war against nurses.”

A screenshot of a quick-bid auction from a nurse gig platform, Clipboard Health, states: “You can choose the rate you’d like as a bid, and the lowest bid wins!”

The auction allows gig nurses to make an hourly-wage bid for work shifts at a medical facility, and the lowest-wage bid secures the position.

Clipboard Health also uses disciplinary point systems for gig nurses, including deducting points from nurses for canceling a shift, with more points deducted for less notice being given for the cancellation, and other point deductions for showing up late to shifts.

Oh yeah, for a second I forgot that we live in the bad timeline.

So I’m a little late to this one. The quoted article is from back in April, but the problem hasn’t gone away, and it’s such a perfect demonstration of how workers are set against each other for the benefit of the owning class. The people who rule us see any comfort, security, or happiness among workers as evidence that we’re not being fully exploited, and that is tantamount to theft from the company. The actual wellbeing of the people who work for them is of no concern, so long as those people don’t cause trouble.

As with the rising temperature, this isn’t going to go away on its own. It’s going to keep getting worse until workers are organized and militant enough to force a change. The folks at the top never stop thinking (or paying others to think) about new ways to divide and oppress the people below them, so we must never stop thinking about ways to close those divides and fight all oppression.

If nothing else, the fact that our rulers are so committed to keeping us divided should tell you the importance of solidarity.

Smoke and Sweat: Cities and Communities for a Warming World

I want to lead with a sentiment from near the end of my last post, which is that it’s going to get worse, and we need to radically change society if we want to avoid mass death on a scale that makes the 20th century look like a paradise of human rights, generosity, and abundance.

The planet’s temperature is not only continuing to rise, it’s doing so faster every year. Further, it is not going to stop. Not in my lifetime, not in your lifetime, and absent global action on a scale that seems impossible today, not in the lifetimes of your children, your grandchildren, and probably your great-grandchildren too.

It’s just going to keep getting hotter.

Historically, and even to this day, deaths from cold outnumber deaths from heat. It seems like deaths by cold tend to be distributed seasonally, with cold snaps having little effect on the numbers, where heat waves do result in big spikes. With the rising rate and severity of heat waves, that death toll is going to rise, and because it’s happening during concentrated periods of time, it’s going to place increasing strain on healthcare systems, especially when you remember that every death comes with a larger number of people who just got close to death, and need treatment. The good news is that this seems to be an area in which people have taken action, with measurable results. There are some hard physiological limits for us, but we can actually improve things, even as the temperature rises, if doing so is a priority.

If it’s not a priority, well, it’s just going to keep getting hotter anyway.

There will be fluctuations, year to year, but it’s just going to keep getting hotter. I’m being repetitive on purpose, because it’s just going to keep getting hotter and it feels like a lot of people are still in denial about that. As I’ve said before, we missed the chance to prevent this long-term rise in temperature.

There is no technological fix that will just stop that. There’s no machine we can turn on that will just reset things. In the unlikely event a fascist is reading this, that includes the mass murder machine: simply reducing the population will not solve this. It will leave us will still-high greenhouse gas levels, a huge number of corpses, and a devastated global economy that’s still dependent on fossil fuels. Even if we end emissions and develop a carbon-capture method that’s more efficient than plants, and deploy it everywhere we can as fast as we can, it will still keep warming for a long time to come.

If we magically freeze CO2 levels where they are as you are reading this, it’s going to keep getting hotter, because it takes time for any insulation to reach its “capacity”. In that case, it would probably keep warming for twenty years or so.

And we are not going to do that, because magic isn’t real. There is no god coming to save us, or witch with a spell to heal the earth. It’s just us, and the heat we caused.

The forests will keep burning. And the grasslands, and the tundra, and the peat bogs, and the marshes, and the swamps. Not all at once, but on an on-going basis as ecosystems continue to collapse.

Think about it like a rainforest – a rainforest is a forest in which water is not a limiting factor in any meaningful sense. There is so much water, so much of the time, that no organism has to really expend any effort to stay hydrated. That can happen pretty much anywhere on the planet that’s warm enough for constant rain.

But crucially, the amount of rain required to reach that threshold depends on the rate of evaporation, which depends on the temperature. My current home of Ireland would be a temperate rainforest, absent human meddling. The Amazon basin is a tropical rainforest. Ireland gets roughly four feet of rain per year on average, and the Amazon gets roughly twice that. If the Amazon were to suddenly get Ireland’s rainfall, the ecosystem would dry up and burn, until it stabilized as something closer to a grassland or a dry forest. Increasing the temperature has roughly the same effect. Hotter means more evaporation, which means less available water for the same amount of rainfall, which means it’s going to dry up and burn, until it stabilizes as something closer to a grassland or a dry forest.

That’s what’s happening to the entire planet, so things are going to keep burning. This is one of the feedbacks that climate scientists have been warning about for decades. The current status quo is that most of the world’s ecosystems are going to experience a lot more drought, even if their annual rainfall doesn’t change, and they’re going to burn. Any plant matter that has grown and been maintained by abundant water and low temperatures is now a likely carbon source, and it doesn’t fucking help that the death cultists in the Republican Party are actively poisoning large swathes of American forest, creating large amounts of standing dead wood, ready to burn.

We seriously need to start treating these people as though human extinction is their goal. They seem to have decided that the solution to human carbon emissions is to murder most of the species, because that will lower our fossil fuel use by default. They would rather do that, than give up mega-yachts and private jets.

Do you understand? Whether or not they admit it, the actions they are taking are those of people who are actively trying to slaughter most of us.

—

I’m not trying to induce despair. I promise I’m not. I don’t want you to give up, I just want your actions and decisions to be informed by reality, not the fantasies peddled to us by our rulers and their propagandists. I want you – and all of us – to act, but in order for those actions to have any meaningful effect, we need to choose them based on the reality of the situation.

As a society, we still need to end the use of fossil fuels. That hasn’t changed. The more we continue increasing greenhouse gas levels, the faster the temperature will rise, and the harder it will be to do anything at all.

And we need to reshape, refit, and rebuild most of everything. There’s been a lot of talk lately about the heat up here in the air, but sea level rise is accelerating along with the heat, so those cities that, like much of Florida, cannot be walled off? People are going to leave them anyway, as the encroaching water makes life increasingly impossible. Ideally, we should move them before that, and we should dismantle those cities. Aside from things like copper, I honestly don’t know how practical it is to try to re-use the building materials, but everything else that goes into a modern city makes me think that a flooded Miami would be an ongoing source of pollution for quite a while. We want to build a better world, and to me that means breaking from history, and investing the resources in this before the climate forces our hands.

And for the heat, we need new kind of city. Think “15-minute cities”, but with the capacity to become 5-minute or 1-minute cities for a few weeks at a time. The basic idea has already been done: There are already apartment buildings, here and there all over the world, that contain grocery stores, and fitness centers, and other amenities. With a few adjustments, I think this should become a default for most cities. This would allow most of the population to “shelter in place” from extreme heat, and from the wildfire smoke that will continue to be a problem.

Beyond that, I also think that these buildings should be integrated with mass transit, so that getting from your home to another place in the city requires as little exposure to the elements as possible. This could mean bus terminals and train stops in the buildings, or it could mean a network of enclosed, cooled pathways. Crucially, the current arrangement that many cities have, in which underground rail stations are often several degrees hotter than ambient temperatures, seems like a recipe for disaster in a warming world. I don’t think there’s an easy solution to that problem, but that just means it’s all the more important that we start working on it now.

We also need to abandon the just-in-time economy, and actually invest the resources in maintaining significant emergency supplies for the population. This blog has looked at what that takes on an individual level, and it looks similar at a larger scale – food stores need to be cycled, which means some level of integration with whatever a given city or country’s food distribution system. The same with medical supplies. The same with water, which is still being treated as an infinite resource, even as it is declining around the world.

All of this will cost a lot of money, and a lot of energy. Enough that we probably can’t do it, if we maintain anything close the current level of spending on war I think we should continue to lead with renewables and power storage, but this will probably also require an increase in nuclear energy. That obviously comes with its own issues, the biggest being human malice and human error, but as I keep saying, we have left it so long that extreme measures are increasingly all we have left.

And none of this will happen under the current political and economic regime.

I came to that conclusion some time ago, which is why I have spent so much energy on the question of how to achieve revolutionary change. We’re in a period in which change of that scale is being attempted, but as sort of global counter-revolution to end all revolutions, and all hope of freedom. I don’t think that will work, but we should treat it as a real threat nonetheless, because no matter how many times they fail, they will never stop trying to control everything, and the amount of damage they can do and are doing is apocalyptic.

So organize. It feels counter-intuitive at times, to respond to huge, global problems by focusing on the people around you. Surely helping my elderly neighbor carry something can’t help a global problem, right?

Right. Except…

All of our global problems are the result of all human activity combined. There is a degree to which all of that does come down to what we do, as individuals, we’ve just been misled about how to exercise that power. Environmental action has long been sold to us as a matter of individual consumption and deprivation. In a very Christian sense, the idea is that if we want to make the world better, we must deny ourselves the things that make life enjoyable, and those things are material possessions.

Our focus should not be on that. It should be on empowering ourselves and the people around us. I can’t do a lot by myself, but I’m not by myself, even if it feels that way sometimes. There are other people around, but community takes effort, like just everything else worth doing. If you can’t bring yourself to do anything else, reach out to neighbors, get involved in local doings, and as I keep saying, join local organizations. When the fascists come knocking at your door, it’ll be your neighbors who help you, and who protect you.

And if your whole neighborhood is in trouble, or your city, it will be people already accustomed to helping others, who see the value in doing so, who will come to help. I guess what I’m saying is, most us (myself very much included) need to change how we think about things, and one of the best ways to do that is to change how we go about doing things, and how we live with and around each other.

The Automation of Hope

I used to really like The West Wing. I think I first watched it in college, when I was still at the left end of liberal, in US terms. It presented a vision of the world in which the US government was largely run by people of good will, who simply disagree on certain matters of policy or personal morality. Looking back, it feels like the peak of the “end of history” era, in which the fall of the USSR had signaled the triumph of liberal democracy as the final state of human governance. We had developed the perfect system of governance, and all that remained was to tweak around the edges. A tax rebate here, a new slogan there, and we’re on our way to stability! The process worked, and if we just trusted it, things would just keep getting better.

The rise of neoliberalism presented (many of) us with a new vision of how the world could be made better without any real effort to change it.

In essence, the process of making the future better had been automated so that we could spend our time on more important things, like taking care of our own, short-term needs. “Market forces” shifted from a description of how the interplay of supply and demand can “naturally” manage resources, to a quasi-religious dogma, in which market forces were the only acceptable way to change the world. You want things to get better? Do it using the existing system. You can march and demonstrate, with government approval and within proscribed boundaries. You can participate in electoral democracy, and if you win you can nudge things a little; and if none of that works for you, you can start a business about it, or you can stop complaining.

The idea is that the aggregate of all of human activity, put through the machine of capitalism, will produce superior results for everyone than cruder, more old-fashioned approaches like direct action or some sort of revolution. You don’t do things, you prompt the machine to do them for you, and if you don’t like the results, you don’t try to go around the machine, you prompt better.

It’s a form of utopianism that contains within it a rejection of utopianism. Don’t try to make the world better, because it’s already getting better, and if you interfere, you might hurt the machine and make everything worse.

We could look at US history and see a progression of things getting better, from the abolition of chattel slavery, to women’s suffrage, to the Civil Rights movement, to winning the Cold War. Not only that, but we saved the ozone layer, and ended the use of leaded gasoline, and stopped the acid rain crisis, and we were going to solve climate change any day now! The Utopia Machine works! If you think it’s too slow, or it’s not working, you’re just too impatient, too immature to understand.

I believe utopian thinking is important. It’s good for us to think about what a perfect society might look like, not because we believe we can create such a society, but because it provides us with a lens through which we can inspect the one we have. What does our idea of utopia have that the present situation lacks? Or, if we are considering a particular policy, does it bring us closer to, or farther from that utopia?

We’ve been encouraged to accept that the little nudges made by the Democratic Party have been small steps in the right direction, but as the years have passed, that has felt more and more like climate deniers pointing to periodic dips in temperature as proof that there’s no warming. The Democrats may be better than the Republicans, but they seem to have taken no meaningful action to stop the increasingly obvious Republican project of imposing right-wing authoritarianism on the United States.

The dogma became “better things aren’t possible”. We were told, year after year, that even the good things we had were too expensive. We couldn’t afford a social safety net. We couldn’t afford a public healthcare system. We couldn’t afford retirement. All of that was just out of reach, and “serious” people – the ones who understood the utopia machine – knew that we just had to cut back. The only option was austerity.

At the same time, profits kept rising, the rich kept getting richer and owning more of the economy, and there seemed to be infinite money for war, and for police. To refer back to a recent post, the machinery of oppression was already in place for Trump or someone like him to use, because it was deemed worth the investment.

A huge portion of the US was persuaded to hand over the reins to people who, we were assured, knew better than we did. Our responsibility was to look after ourselves. To make money, and pay bills, and vote. We were able to do that, supposedly, because the professionals were taking care of things. We stopped making the future, and became consumers of futures built and imagined by others.

This is not to say that everybody in the past was an activist. American democracy came out of feudalism, a system in which the people have even less power, and fewer avenues for political involvement. American democracy itself was a sham at the nation’s founding, and for generations after, but the notion of “a government of the people, by the people, for the people” was something that began to seem within reach.

Between the Gilded Age and the end of the Cold War, there were many big changes, driven by big movements. The New Deal, for all it’s often framed as a gift from Roosevelt, was a response by the savvier members of the ruling class to protect the bulk of their power by giving a bit of it away. The Civil Rights movement might have been even scarier, because it threatened to close the working class divide that had been maintained for so long through white supremacy. The US government’s domestic mission during the Cold War years was to break the power of those movements, and to “keep progressives out of government“.

And now, as the US left works to build power, the ruling class is working hard to re-impose something resembling feudalism, in which mass surveillance and the threat of increasingly brutal and sadistic agents of the government will keep the peasantry from ever rising up again. It’s the boot Orwell spoke of, stamping on a human face, forever.

It turns out neoliberalism wasn’t a utopia machine, it was a fascism factory.

—-

So what do we do?

We need to destroy it. We need to build something better, and keep building it. Fortunately, there’s already a playbook for this, and it’s to treat democracy as one of the daily responsibilities of adulthood. That does mean voting in elections, but I believe current events make it clear that that cannot be all we do, especially when we have an obscenely wealthy ruling class that is constantly trying to sow division, and increase its own power at our expense. The working class has immense power, but for it to be exerted, it must be organized. That means unions. It means community groups. It means doing activism as a regular practice, not just to make things better, but also to maintain the capacity to act in coordination.

Part of that is also education, which can be arranged through unions and community organizations. Literacy and numeracy are important, but it goes beyond that. We need a higher level of political and historical education in general, so people can understand the systems that surround them. That’s important if you want to apply pressure to those systems, or to dismantle them altogether.

And here’s the important bit: All of this work, especially when done in community with others, builds hope within the people doing it. It’s not going to make you forget all your problems, and it’s not going to magically cure your depression, but it’s a lot easier to have hope for the future if you’re actually doing something to build that future, and you can see others doing the same. If nothing else, it is a form of exercising power, and it’s a lot easier to feel like a better world is possible if you feel you have even a little power over what happens.

None of this is easy. All of it requires time and effort, and very often money. Not only that, it’s slow to get results, especially in the early stages. It’s like building a rail network: You can’t go anywhere at speed until you’ve done the monumental work of laying the rails. It’s a big ask, especially when everything’s going to shit, and everyone’s worried about their ability to look after themselves and their families. That’s kinda the point. It’s not an accident that it’s getting harder to make ends meet. It’s not a coincidence that that has come along with the rise in fascism. It has both helped to drive some to embrace fascism, and helped to suppress resistance. It’s all very hard.

The thing is, it’s going to get harder from here no matter what you do.

Not only will the fascists not stop their destruction until they are forced to, the planet is warming fast, and it’s hard to overstate how much worse that will make everything. If you can find a way to get involved in collective action, you will be building the power needed to make things easier.

I’m a big fan of modern technology and automation, when it helps people live fuller lives. When it’s being used to force more people into poverty and servitude, on the other hand, I think it’s a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Somewhere along the way, most of us allowed the knowledge and skills of collective power to fade away, while we were under the mistaken impression that we no longer needed them. The good news is that in my lifetime, there have never been more people actively and collectively working to build a better future for themselves.

Post delayed

This week’s blog post, “The Automation of Hope” will be a day or two late, because this week has been unusually busy. If you find you cannot possibly wait to read this fascinating article, or you just want to support my work, I have a draft up for my paying patrons.

Blame Canada!

I had other plans for this week, but they’ll have to wait because some Republican politicians just offered bait too good to pass up.

Many years ago, climate activists began predicting that as anthropogenic global warming became undeniable, those who had worked so hard to keep the temperature rising would start to blame everyone else – including climate activists – for the problem. I’ve seen one version of that pop up over the last few years, in which someone who recently began to accept reality blamed everyone else for not convincing them sooner. We didn’t push hard enough. We pushed too hard. We were too annoying, or too easy to ignore. We didn’t say it right, and so it’s our fault that they weren’t convinced.

Now we’ve got a new version of that, courtesy of the Republican Party of the USA, and their reliably bizarre understanding of science and politics.

Canada has been dealing with massive wildfires recently, primarily fueled by climate change. They’re not alone in this, of course. The US has the same problem, as do many countries all over the planet. Because the whole planet’s temperature is rising. This might not be a huge issue, of course, if it weren’t for the disrespectfulness of smoke. Smoke doesn’t care about borders or immigration policy, which is why all good national leaders know to control their local smoke, so it doesn’t bother anyone else. From the office of Jack Bergman:

Dear Prime Minister Carney,

We write today as members of Michigan’s congressional delegation to raise our voices on an issue that has already drawn letters from our colleagues in past years: wildfire smoke drifting across the border from Canada into our communities. Additionally, last year, Reps. James and Bergman each wrote letters to your government to raise the alarm about wildfire smoke pouring across our border from Canada into our communities. We write jointly this time because a year has passed, the season has come around again, and nothing has changed except that our patience has run out.

Our constituents in Michigan are once again under air quality alerts. Our hospitals are once again treating children, dialysis patients, and older residents for the effects of smoke that did not originate anywhere near them. This is the third consecutive year we have had to write to Canadian officials about a crisis that Canada has the tools to prevent and has chosen not to.

I might be more persuaded of this letter’s sincerity if Republicans gave a single shit about the health of their constituents at any other time. If Michigan had universal healthcare, and a system funded to ensure that everyone had access, then everyone’s baseline level of health would be higher, and the system would have more capacity for emergencies. The Republican party, on the other hand, seems committed to following the advice of famous eugenicist Thomas Malthus. They are building a country in which the poor are denied access to vaccines, safe food, functional infrastructure, safe workplaces – pretty much everything that has been responsible for the increase in human life expectancy over the past century or so.

We were told last year that this would be treated with urgency. It was not. We were told the causes, chronic under-investment in forest thinning, fuel reduction, and prescribed burns, along with inadequate enforcement against arson, were being addressed. They were not, or not adequately enough to matter to the people we represent. Provincial leaders have offered excuses instead of results, and in some cases have openly dismissed the health of American citizens as an inconvenience to their own summer. That attitude is unacceptable from a neighbor and an ally.

It’s true, this is not the first time they’ve complained like this. Canada is very bad for allowing there to be wildfires, which the US would never do, because God-Emperor Donald Trump personally vacuums every forest by hand, and orders all the trees to stand farther apart.

We are done accepting apologies in place of action. If Canada will not manage its forests to prevent these fires, the United States will look elsewhere, and act on our own, to protect our people. That means our own agencies exploring direct involvement in cross-border fuel reduction and firefighting capacity. It means reconsidering how much benefit of the doubt this relationship continues to earn on an issue where American lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction, year after year. Sovereignty comes with responsibility, and the responsibility to prevent a foreseeable disaster from crossing into another country’s airspace has not been met.

Sovereignty comes with responsibility, you see, and the responsibility to prevent a foreseeable disaster from crossing into another’s airspace…

I never cease to be astounded by conservatives’ capacity for projection. The United States is a foreseeable disaster crossing into other countries’ airspace. It has been for decades. Its foreign policy is one foreseeable disaster after another, and every one of them is proudly championed by the Republican Party. But hey, let’s ignore the millions murdered in the name of capitalism and the US empire. I’ll even pretend the US armed forces aren’t one of the biggest polluters on the planet.

The US is the biggest single reason for the lack of appropriate action on climate change. The Republican party is the biggest single reason for the lack of appropriate action on climate change within the US.

That’s not to say other countries don’t pollute, or that everyone else is blameless in all this, but the nations to which we’re often compared on emissions, like China and India, not only have triple our population, they will also never reach the per-person greenhouse gas emissions of the United States. China passed the US as the biggest annual emitter a few years back, but they’ve also been ramping up renewable power faster than anyone else, while working hard on mass transit and electric vehicles.

Further, the bulk of historical emissions (because remember this is a cumulative problem) come from the US, and as the world hegemon after WW2, the US has had far more opportunity to change, in terms of available resources and technology. Had the US begun to do so after the first televised warning about global warming, back in 1956, or even after the congressional hearings in the 1980s, the rest of the world would have followed suit, and the US would have been in a position to help them do so. Instead, the Republican Party declared war on the environment and anyone defending it, and the Democrats mainly provided lip service and a list of excuses. That’s not to say they did nothing, but nothing they did was able to do more than slow the increase.

It’s like when politicians tell you that the economy is doing fine because inflation is down, as though that means prices are down, rather than the reality, which is that prices are just rising more slowly.

So.

For 70 years, we’ve known that we were making the planet hotter. For 70 years, we’ve known that the problems caused by that would be planetary. For 70 years, we’ve known that it would affect every nation on the planet, that the US was the biggest single perpetrator, and that other, poorer countries would almost certainly bear huge costs in resources and lives for a problem that they didn’t cause, and couldn’t have stopped.

Batman fans will be familiar with Uncle Picard’s catchphrase: With great power comes great responsibility. If you have the means to stop harm, or to solve a problem, then you have a responsibility to do so.

Unfortunately, the Republican Party is the party of personal responsibility, which means they only acknowledge their responsibility to their own personal needs and desires. Anything like a responsibility to other people, or to humanity as a whole? That’s communism, and they would like to use the Pentagon to murder it please.

So these are the people – from the very party most responsible for global instability, global warming and everything that comes with it – who are scolding Canada about their responsibility to other nations. Who are demanding immediate, specific action on an environmental issue.

We are asking for specifics, not sentiment. What funded, measurable steps has your government taken since last summer to reduce fuel loads and wildfire risk in the provinces responsible for the smoke reaching the American Midwest? What accountability exists for provincial leaders who treat this as someone else’s problem? And what will genuinely be different by this time next year, rather than another season of statements followed by the same result?

Here’s one specific: We can strap every Republican down, Clockwork Orange-style, and force them to learn climate science and actual world history.

Here’s an even better one: Take the hundreds of billions spent on war, and instead invest in ending the use of fossil fuels to power our society, not just in the US, but across the planet. Do it because it needs to be done, and because we can, and because we’ve spent generations spreading our poison to the corners of the earth, and making life hell for others.

There is no single country, in the last 70 years, that has done more to pollute, and destabilize the whole planet, than the United States. There is no country on the planet that has violated its “Sovereign” responsibility to others anywhere close to as much as the United States. And, before we finish the letter, I’ll add that that there is no country on the planet, in the last 70 years that has more reliably acted in bad faith, seemingly whenever possible.

We remain ready to work with Canada in good faith, as two nations with a long history of standing together. But that history does not entitle Canada to another year of excuses. Our constituents are breathing the consequences of this failure right now, and they deserve better than to be told, again, that it will be handled

I agree on that. Your constituents deserve far better than anything the GOP has offered in my lifetime.

But I have to ask, what do these bold American leaders propose to do, exactly, when they say the US will “look elsewhere”. For what? The Republicans have already been putting tarrifs on Canadian imports, as a display of machismo and as yet another way to steal from the American people, so… what? Are they threatening to build a bubble over the country, so they can source our air from other places? Maybe they think they can bomb the fires into submission?

I think there is merit in international cooperation on issues of ecosystem maintenance, climate adaptation, and controlling emissions, but the Republican Party is violently opposed to all of that. If anything their version of “cooperation” would be strong-arming Canada into letting American corporations clear-cut Canadian forests.

I don’t think these politicians actually believe there is anything Canada can do about the wildfires. Maybe I’m over-estimating their grasp on reality, but I think this is far more likely to be the same fascist trick the Republicans always use: When a problem comes up, find a scapegoat so they don’t have to do anything. They rant non-stop about responsibility because if they can blame everyone else for all the problems they either created or are responsible for solving, then they can focus on their real priority, which is making themselves and their masters richer. Heck, if we go with the hypothesis that they really are trying to turn the US into a Malthusian nightmare, then stopping the smoke is the last thing they’d want to do.

This letter is funny, in that it is deeply silly, but it’s also further evidence that the Republicans will do literally anything other than actually serving their public.

These fires will continue. They will get worse. The world still has a lot of forests, despite the relentless deforestation. The higher the temperature, the more the forests dry out, and the more fires there will be. This is not a problem that can be solved with forest management. It is also not a problem that can be solved by any one nation.

We have entered an era in which a lot of people are going to die, because of the decisions of the ruling class, across generations now. We’ve gotten good at dealing with natural disasters, but they are going to keep getting worse. The Republicans who wrote that letter were complaining about having done the same last year, and the year before. Next year is almost certainly going to be worse, for everyone.

And we’ve barely started. The speed at which the temperature rises keeps increasing, we’ve got decades of warming already baked into the system, and while there is a lot we can do about it, we’re currently at the mercy of people who seem to think they can bully fires into not starting.

Now, for those who are dealing with wildfire smoke, here are a few tips and resources that might be useful.

The first is to filter your air, as much as you can. Any smoke is harmful to not just your lungs, but your cardiovascular system in general, and even your brain. That combined with keeping doors and windows shut can keep your home air safer. For going outside, if you have to, try to pick up some n-95 masks. Even better, make peace with the fact that you now live in a cyberpunk dystopia, and get a respirator, and make sure to get extra filters. They can provide better protection than a disposable mask, and because they’re not disposable, you can personalize them with LEDs and other stuff to make your aesthetic match the genre we’re all forced to live in.

If you can, get air purifiers for your home. Good ones aren’t cheap, but clean air is priceless (currently)

Keep an eye on local air quality. If you’re in the US, the EPA has a tool that the Republicans don’t seem to have destroyed yet, and the AP just told me about this global air monitor powered by community science. If the air quality is bad, cancel plans if you can, and stay indoors. If your home doesn’t provide protection, or you don’t have a home, maybe look for public facilities that do have air filtration, and see if you can spend some of the day there just to give your system a rest. On that same note, don’t exercise more than you absolutely have to, so long as the air quality is bad. I feel like it should be instinctual, but breathing hard when the air is poisonous isn’t going to make you stronger.

And, most importantly, get involved in politics!

This shit is only going to get worse as the temperature rises, and individual people and families will not be able to protect themselves from a global catastrophe. Individual towns, cities, and even some nations won’t either. We need global cooperation. We need governments to be actively investing in adaptation, as well as reducing emissions. That includes enabling people to stay cool indoors when it’s too hot to survive outside, and it also involves ensuring that people have access to clean air, when bits of the planet are on fire.

See what’s happening around you. If you’re in the US, that might be anti-ICE organizing, it might be the local DSA, it might be community groups, or school boards, or something else. The better-organized everyday people are, the more power they have to force politicians and capitalists to behave, lest the workers shut down the economy.

Or, you know, we can just blame Canada.

Writer’s Block?

You get a bit of a ramble this week.

Growing up, I understood writer’s block to be a lack of ideas, and that always seemed odd to me. For whatever reason, I’ve never been short on ideas. Maybe it’s different for some people, but in my case, it tends to be a mixture of other things. Part of it is perfectionism. If I have something worth saying, I want to get it right, especially with how often misunderstandings occur. Some of it is also doubtless an issue of executive function. I’m pretty sure I have ADHD, but I’ve yet to make myself invest the energy and money into what seems to be an iffy and often arduous assessment and diagnosis process. It can be hard to “just do it” when your brain isn’t doing chemicals right.

And I think some of it is because I’ve always had a hard time staying on just one topic (which could relate to the ADHD). More often than not, I see everything as being connected to everything else, and while it’s a perspective I wish more people shared, it does make it hard for me to draw lines around a particular topic.

When I was writing about how the US was oppressive before Trump came along, I left out uncountable examples, some of which I’ve written about before. I also didn’t go into as much detail in making my argument as I could have. Concepts like freedom and oppression don’t have universal definitions, and they so often seem to depend on cultural norms and some level of collective agreement. The US is full of people who would doubtless consider themselves to be free, either because they don’t understand the source of their problems, or because they are like the dog who, never having pulled against its leash, believes it has no bonds. Olayemi Olurin has talked a lot about her work as a public defender, and one of the things she has said is that white people are often difficult clients, because it’s not until they’re in the system that they realize they don’t have a lot of the rights they thought they did. Should I have included a couple paragraphs about that sort of thing? I don’t think so, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no cost in choosing not to.

So I have several drafts that apparently need to age a little before I can finish them, and instead of the intended article, you’re getting this.

And on the note of leaving things out, there was one thing I don’t think I covered well in my recent El Niño piece, which is that this summer, despite all of its records, is not the one to worry about. The heat won’t really hit till this coming winter (for my fellow northern hemisphere types). What we’ve seen this summer is probably better seen as the baseline from which El Niño will raise the temperature. That’s why climate scientists are pretty freaked out. Global warming is already causing crop failures to the tune of billions of dollars (to say nothing of lives lost), and now we’re headed into a major global heat event.

The planet hasn’t seen CO2 levels this high since Lucy’s era four million years ago, and the rate of increase has gone up recently. If we account for amplifying feedbacks, we’re moving past the time when our ancestors looked like apes, and toward the time when our ancestors looked more like rats or squirrels. This is going to affect everything, and it will be used as a weapon against most of humanity, by those who care only about power.

One of the points I’m fumbling around, in a draft that I hope to finish some day soon, is that if we do not change our political and economic systems, humanity will not survive this. We depend on reliable weather patterns that no longer exist. We built for extremes that are starting to seem mild. We developed our societies on the assumptions of infinite natural resources, and an infinitely resilient natural world. We’ve had to deal with problems caused by those assumptions plenty of times, but we’ve only ever tinkered with the system. It’s debatable if that was ever enough, but now it’s definitely not.

We have all the tools we need, but our political and economic systems will not let us use them, because the people running those systems do not value life.

I’ve said all this before, but I’m trying to learn to be OK with repeating myself. I’ve made a small study of rhetoric, and how messaging can be used to change people’s minds, and there seems to be universal agreement that repetition is key. To quote Frank Luntz, who bears more responsibility for the climate crisis than most:

“There’s a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again, and about the time that you’re absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time. And it is so hard but you’ve just got to keep repeating, because we hear so many different things–the noises from outside, the sounds, all the things that are coming into our head, the 200 cable channels and the satellite versus cable, and what we hear from our friends. We as Americans and as humans have very selective hearing and very selective memory. We only hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.”

I don’t know what’s wrong with Luntz’ moral compass that has led him to do so much harm with the tools he has, but he’s absolutely correct about this, and the cacophony he described in that quote has only gotten worse in the 21 years since he said it.

Maybe the thing to do is find a point worth saying again any time the piece I want to publish isn’t ready.

Life is busy

No actual post this week. Thanks to this wonderful world created by US hegemony, I had to spend most of this week’s energy trying to find a new source of income. If anybody wants to cover my rent going forward, I’ll be sure to post more regularly.

The Process is the Punishment: America was already oppressive

I’m going to talk about trauma and PTSD in this one. It’s something I’ve studied a bit for writing and for personal reasons, but while I do my best to get things right, I am not an expert.

The US has long declared itself to be a beacon of freedom and defender of democracy, while simultaneously doing some of the most authoritarian and unjust things imaginable. I think perhaps the best illustration of this is the third verse of the National Anthem:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
⁠That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more?
⁠Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave,
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The slaves in question had taken up with England in the war of 1812, for the promise of freedom should the US be reclaimed by the British Empire. They had no hope for anything but slavery, torture, and early death, so they did what they could to get their freedom, and for that they became immortalized in this song as villains whose fear and death were the righteous outcome of not accepting their slavery. I feel a need to emphasize the level of sadism and cruelty that was routine for the United States, because no horror movie has ever come close to the simple truth of what this country was (extreme content warning for dehumanization and death by torture). The US national anthem was written in 1814, decades before the abolition of chattel slavery, or even the pretense of contrition for the genocide of the Native Americans. It was a land of grotesque, unrelenting oppression, and yet well-to-do white men declared it to be a nation synonymous with freedom, apparently without shame. To quote Frederick Douglas in his 1852 Fourth of July address:

Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?

It many ways, the current Republican party does represent what the US has always been. It claims to defend truth, freedom, and justice, while it actively dismantles the infrastructure of democracy, erases history that clashes with its white supremacist ideology, and rolls back as many rights as possible. Segregation is a matter of living memory, and they want it back.

And at this point, I want to pause and ask: What does oppression actually mean? Like, on a practical, lived sense, what does it look like? I’d argue that at its most basic level, oppression is punishment without due process or recourse, often for words or actions that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in a free society. An oppressive government will fine, imprison, or kill people for saying the wrong thing, for being in the wrong place, for organizing political resistance, for touching the wrong water.

When it comes to ethnic and/or racial oppression, the oppressed group tends to be made a scapegoat for society’s ills. They’re treated as inherently criminal and dangerous, and that treatment is used as proof that they’re inherently criminal and dangerous. In the US, the belief that it’s “the land of the free” has become its own perverse justification. If this is a free country, then clearly it can’t be oppressing Black people, and since law enforcement disproportionately focuses its resources and violence on Black people, well, they must just be inherently criminal and dangerous.

Because that’s the pattern, for Black Americans. Much of the US recently celebrated Juneteenth, in honor of the emancipation proclamation being enforced in Texas. That was a huge step forward, but the moment the war was lost, the former slavers began working to ensure that that “freedom” meant as little for Black people as possible. The KKK was formed to terrorize Black people and keep them down with brutal, sadistic violence, and the so-called Justice system was largely on their side, when it wasn’t just staffed with Klansmen to begin with. Reconstruction was sabotaged and allowed to fail, and a new regime of open, violent white supremacy was imposed. The 1898 Wilmington Massacre is a good microcosm, in which the duly elected government of WIlmington, North Carolina was ousted at gunpoint for being biracial, many Black citizens who didn’t flee in time were killed, and a number of Republicans were exiled from the city. Chattel slavery in the South was not replaced by freedom, but by a different regime of white supremacy, in which the violence was slightly less open and legal.

The end of Segregation was also a huge step forward, but it also came with a quiet adjustment to maintain racial oppression. That’s the period into which I was born, and in which I believed, for much of my life, that the wins of the Civil Rights Movement had marked a turning point for the US, beyond which racism had dwindled away to almost nothing. It was a pretty myth that I absorbed despite being raised in a fairly left-wing environment. The reality is that the United States never stopped being an oppressive nation guided by white supremacy.

This didn’t really sink in, for me, until I really took the time to think though New York City’s Stop and Frisk policy, in which minorities, mostly Black people, were effectively presumed guilty until proven innocent. What do we, as White Americans, fear from an oppressive regime? The invasion of privacy. The inability to go where we please without being harassed. The feeling that every encounter with an agent of the state is dangerous. The fear that we’ll be locked up in some torturous hell-hole and left there to rot without recourse. Dare I say, the fear that we’ll be treated like Black people?

Kalief Browder was 16 when he was accused without evidence of stealing a backpack “full of valuables”, and tossed into Rikers. For those who don’t know, Rikers Island is a prison complex that holds thousands of people in “pre-trial” detention. On the face of it, the notion of such detention is that if someone is deemed a risk to the public, they can be held until the speedy trial to which they have a right. For white people, that’s sometimes how it works, usually depending on their wealth. For black people, well, they tend to be deemed a risk to the public for being black. In most cases where people can’t buy their freedom pending trial, they are slowly tortured into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit: the very thing that legal concepts like habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence were developed to prevent.

Browder was kept in Rikers for three years. He spent roughly two-thirds of that time in solitary confinement, a practice now widely recognized as torture for its devastating effect on human neurology. He was arrested in 2010, and released in 2013, by which time he had attempted suicide three times. In 2015, at age 22, he hanged himself, and died.

After he got out of prison, he made a statement about the effect that his imprisonment had had on him:

People tell me that because I have this case against the city I’m all right. But I’m not all right. I’m messed up. I know that I might see some money from this case, but that’s not going to help me mentally. I’m mentally scarred right now. That’s how I feel. [There] are certain things that changed about me[,] and they might not [change] back. … Before I went to jail, I didn’t know about a lot of stuff, and, now that I’m aware, I’m paranoid. I feel like I was robbed of my happiness.

I want to take a moment to go into what’s going on in this quote.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is what happens when a person’s nervous system locks into defensive mode in response to traumatic conditions. When discussing trauma, it’s important to understand that the exact nature of the reaction is going to change depending on the person’s neurology, on their life before, on the traumatizing incident, and on the conditions in which they lived in the aftermath.

For a personal example, I got a full-blown case of it as a child, after a full kettle of boiling water spilled on me. For a long time I had a strong reaction to boiling water, and if the sound was too close to what I heard while it was pouring on me, I’d get nauseous. In simple terms, my nervous system programmed in an automated response to keep me far away from boiling water, so it wouldn’t go through that again. I got over it with time and support, but I do still have occasional intrusive memories when I’m boiling water.

All that was from a few minutes of indescribable pain, and a couple hours of believing I was going to die.

When you expose someone to repeated or continuous traumatic events, combined with the belief that there is no escape, they’re very likely to develop what’s called Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD). The effects of this tend to be farther-reaching, and more insidious, even when the traumatic events seem comparatively mild. Where the burn left me with boiling water as a severe trigger, CPTSD affects everything in your life. It can make it difficult, or even impossible to feel positive emotions, and it tends to come with anxiety, depression, shame, and various forms of self-hatred. It affects how you see yourself and others, it can be a source of suffering for a victim’s entire life, and it can be a big driver of self-harm and addiction. As with PTSD, the exact nature of the traumatic response will vary from person to person.

CPTSD is common for people who’ve been victims of domestic abuse, emotional neglect in childhood, systematic bullying (peer abuse), war, poverty, oppression, and prison. In all of these cases, the trauma is inflicted through relationships and interactions with other humans. That means that if you have CPTSD, your nervous system usually sees interactions with other people as a threat. It might not be all interactions, but the way CPTSD develops means that it often means most of them. When you’re in a social situation, your nervous system goes on alert at a subconscious level, and that quite literally drains your energy. Being “on alert” like that is a biochemical process that both consumes calories, and causes literal wear on your systems. People with CPTSD often develop other chronic health problems that plague the rest of their lives, and can lead to an earlier death.

All of this can also get worse over time, even without additional traumatizing experiences. The disordered emotional reaction sends the message that even benign or positive social interactions actually went badly. This can lead to self-isolation, and the reinforcement of the disorder as those interactions are interpreted as a continuation of the patterns that created it in the first place. Simply existing in society, untreated, can cause CPTSD to get worse.

You can argue whether the people running our jails know or care about trauma research, but the fact of it is, the US “justice” system depends on traumatizing people into waving their right to a trial. Some people take a plea deal before it gets to that point, but only because the threat is there. Everyone in the US knows that prisons are intentionally horrifying places, where abuse is considered routine.

Prison isn’t the only way for this to happen, either. Forced institutionalization is still a thing in the US, and it seems to require little to no process to force someone into a situation in which they’re forced to take mind-altering drugs, and told that the realities of their lives are delusions. As with solitary confinement, I would consider this to be a vicious and twisted form of psychological torture, and it sounds like something from fiction. In fact, I’ve brought this up in conversation, and been told that “If that was happening in the US, we’d know about it!”

The US is a free country, and therefor oppression cannot be happening.

I’ve written about this before, so I’ll just quote my piece on forced institutionalization from 2022:

In 2014, Kam Brock was pulled over “on suspicion of driving under the influence of marijuana”. People commenting on the story at the time noted that she was a black woman driving a BMW in Harlem, and that she was really pulled over for Driving While Black. This explanation is made stronger, in my view, by the fact that while they didn’t find any drugs on her or in her car, they impounded it anyway, and when she went to pick it up the next morning, they decided she was too emotional, handcuffed and drugged her, and threw her in a mental hospital.

“Next thing you know, the police held onto me, the doctor stuck me with a needle and I was knocked out… I woke up to them taking off my underwear and then went out again. I woke up the next day in a hospital robe.”

She responded pretty reasonably, in my opinion. She told them who she was, and asked to be released.

For eight days.

They had the means to verify what she was saying, but instead they dismissed all of it as delusions, forced her to take powerful psychoactive drugs, and demanded that she convincingly lie about herself before she be released:

According to the New York Daily News, a treatment plan for Ms Brock at the hospital states: ‘Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.’

This was torture. They imprisoned a person, and for nine days they told her she was insane. They forcibly drugged her, and denied her reality over, and over and over again for days. And then, one day, they gave her discharge papers, and put her out the back door of the hospital. A few days later, she got a bill for $13,000 worth of “treatment”. The idea of holding anyone criminally responsible for this nightmare was apparently never even on the table, so she went with the option left to her – she sued them.

And lost in 2019.

Several jurors said that Brock was less credible than three doctors — Elisabeth Lescouflair, Zana Dobroshi and Alan Labor — and NYPD Officer Salvador Diaz, who all determined she was in need of mental health treatment.

The jurors noted that Brock did not call her father or sister to the stand. Both, according to testimony, had told Harlem Hospital staff that Brock had recently been acting erratically.

“We view this verdict as a total vindication for the defendant officer and doctors who sought to help Ms. Brock through her troubling episode. The jury rejected any notion that the actions of these officials was anything but appropriate under the circumstances,” a Law Department spokesman said.

While at the hospital, Brock was injected three times with powerful anti-psychotics. The experience, she said, left her traumatized. She frequently broke down during the six-day trial.

Jurors deliberated for three days before reaching a verdict. At the beginning of deliberations three were in Brock’s favor and five were against, Rella said.

Brock began sobbing as the verdict was read.

“It’s reasonable for them to diagnose me with bipolar even though I’m telling the truth?” Brock said through tears.

“What am I supposed to do? I’m crazy because of this verdict.”

In the United States of America, it is apparently legal for police to decide that you’re “in need of medical treatment”, restrain, drug, and imprison you, and for doctors to keep you prisoner, keep you drugged, and demand that you deny reality because they said so. Not only is it legal, it’s apparently barely newsworthy

In 1979, an attorney named Malcolm Feeley published a case study called The Process is the Punishment. In it, he showed that the process of getting to trial was so onerous that the vast majority of people waved their right to a trial, to avoid an expensive legal process that would end up costing more than the punishment they ended up accepting. It’s a situation in which punishment cannot be escaped, even by the innocent. They can accept the punishment that police and prosecutors decided to inflict upon them, or they can insist on their right to a trial, for which they are punished through legal fees and sometimes pre-trial detention.

That remains the case today. It’s widely acknowledge that if every defendant were to insist on the fair trials to which they have a right under US law, the US legal system would collapse. Rather than trying to fix this problem by investing more in the system so everyone has the rights they’re supposed to, the US punishes people for trying to exercise their rights, as a matter of routine.

That’s the default. 90% of defendants don’t get a trial, and that’s been the case for decades. Meanwhile, US prisons have only gotten worse.

The US was already an oppressive nation, when Trump entered national politics. It never stopped being an oppressive nation, and that’s without considering the endless atrocities of US foreign policy.

There’s a phrase you’ve probably heard from time to time: If it can happen to them, it can happen to anyone! MAGA shitheads liked to say that about Trump’s arrest and conviction, but it’s more correctly applied to the treatment of the people with the least power in society. If they can torture Kalief Browder to death, they can do it to you. If they can declare Kamilah Brock insane for telling them the truth, they can do it to you.

Because this is a society that has already decided this kind of treatment is not only acceptable, it is inevitable and necessary. The only question is who will be at the receiving end, and if you think your whiteness might protect you, you’re only partly right. It protects you until it doesn’t. Until you take up the cause of Black liberation. Until you take action to resist oppression. Until a cop having a bad day decides you’re looking at him funny.

America is a land of trickery and illusions. I don’t like it, but in many ways, a sadistic, abusive con man like Trump is a perfect reflection of what the nation has been, as an institution. The promises of liberty and justice for all were never intended to apply to everyone, and just as we’ve never had democracy without a ruling class putting its thumb on the scale, we’ve never actually had all the rights and freedoms that white folks thought we did. The stated ideals of the country have never been important enough to the nation as a whole, to be worth serious investment.

The fact that that was the normal state of affairs meant that when a fascist came to power, the machinery of oppression was already in place, just waiting to be used on a larger portion of the population, who didn’t understand that their freedom was always a lie.

None of us is free until all of us are free.

Oceanoxia

Exploring an increasingly strange new world

The value of public libraries

Ha ha, meaty overlords, take your punishment

Robot Birdwatching

The Tate brothers are in deep trouble

The Probability Broach: The inevitable deus ex machina

Missouri’s Gerrymandering

Origami: Pacman Ghost

Socks' Adventures: Walking the Wadden

Are Creepypastas Real?