dagblog - Comments for "The African Anthropocene"

No no no, yu misread me - I

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 22:12:35 +0000

No no no, yu misread me - I was worried Cruz was Hispanic so he'd be part of the Trump build-a-wall target class, rather than a good ol' Southern white boy with an affinity for the good things in life - guns, religion and disturbing relations with wimmin*. And not only is he part of our clan, he's a card-carrying white supremacist. Yeehaw, feel teh stupid. That's right, we can get man to the moon and still have time and impaired brain cells left to shoot up a school-full of teenagers. Seems like a good time to post Kevin Drum's recent update on lead poisoning (which after initial skepticism, I'm coming around to, and would have been a large element in blaming a generation or two of black men for barbarity by nature when they might have been reeling from toxic overload instead).

*did see a fun piece in some UK newspaper this morn about a 35-year-old man performing oral sex on a 19-year-old co-worker, not realizing the window to the office was nearly transparent (and apparently causing a break with his 54-year-old girlfriend to complicate their newfound unemployment). They didn't seem inclined to call him a southern white trash racist idiot, though seemingly a few of the descriptors might fit. Anyway, they'll have time to contemplate, as apparently the grocer wasn't too keen on this type of publicity, even though I could see it as a hit show on Netflix. Why is corporate UK so stodgy?

Broken boys.

artappraiser — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 21:50:14 +0000

In reply to Confirmation from the judges

Broken boys.

Of course, there will always be some broken-beyond-repair boys (and even girls!) And even with poor parenting, they don't all turn out to be Jeffrey Dahmer. I read on Cruz' mom some, a relative or friend said something along the lines that after the husband died, she tried real hard, the best she knew how, to handle those two kids the best she could, but it was tough, they gave her trouble. The other kid was his half-brother. He hasn't shot up a public place yet that we know of. Which brings us back to the nasty genetic topic (really not trying to end up provoking Godwin's Law here). Adoption is scary as hell, people that do it are very brave.

Confirmation from the judges

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 19:32:49 +0000

In reply to I'm not sure I feel

Confirmation from the judges - Cruz was adopted and white, so part of our team, and better still - a white supremacist! I just love it when people do amazingly stupid and brutal things in the name of superiority - contradictions and paradoxes leave me breathless. Apparently he excelled in guns, ROTC, girlfriend problems and loner pouting in his room, and reached his peak achievement early in life. Had I only been so focused on what I wanted to do in life at his age...

Santayana's famous quote was

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 02:48:01 +0000

In reply to Don't you believe it's really

Santayana's famous quote was pithy and humorous, but not much else. Sure, occasionally we repeat, like US stupidity following British and Russian stupidity in Afghanistan. But most times "repeats" aren't really repeats, and knowing which of the dozen lessons from a situation was the actual less is non-trivial. Many people think our lesson from Vietnam was to stay out of foreign conflicts - even though giving Ho Chi Minh, the Chinese & the Soviets free rein in SE Asia would have led to much more communist expansionism and undoubtedly more atrocities on the scale of The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the Stalinist purges, not that our conduct of the war and South Vietnam's and the north's and the Khmer Rough didn't kill a million or so as well. So how does Mr. Santayana make lemonade out of smashed grapefruit? Not so easy. Yeah, it's good to have some acquaintance with history, but which parts of history would tell Larry Page that his Google engine would succeed where others didn't, or tell Hong Kong whether they should put in a convention center when they'd be competing with every other city on the Pacific Rim (spoiler: more people wanted to come to Hong Kong than say Macau or Taiwan, but that wasn't proven until afterwords.)

I'm not sure I feel

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 02:34:00 +0000

In reply to P.S. Going off thread (scuse

I'm not sure I feel threatened by "feminists", even though there are a few oversensitive types (in my view) who would gladly ignore nature and testosterone and all things male - condemning it as "patriarchy" in a pithy takedown. The 1 line I liked out of Andrew was "This is where they are as hostile to Darwin as any creationist." Yes indeed, some are hostile to informed scientific dialogue around uncertainties and even certainties. Larry Summers tried to address what we know and got fired for it. #MeToo started off with some obvious sane reactions, and then partially got sidetracked into more of the "no means no" becoming "you need an enthusiastic yes", an unlikely turn in evolution, at least for a large proportion - we like being wishy-washy, and of course males are partially wired to be pushy and obnoxious. How much, whether that's good, what *should* be restrained, etc, will be debated for some time. Hopefully with some resolution.

I did think that American Psycho was the perfect movie for last year's election cycle - and filmed by a woman, no less - she got it, what made us males bizarre and tantalizing and controlling, why the Trump Alpha does succeed, oblivious to its own flaws.

As for Hillary, I think much of the reaction was mass hysteria and hallucination. Even now the rumors of Hillary drinking her own urine or attacking Bill's mistresses or running pedophilia rings or other supposed nefarious deeds resound - and most of them still don't make sense. Condemned for attacking your husband's mistresses? That used to be obvious, limited only by gun and murder laws. Much else is strange - maybe some kind of Rorschach test of society, but I tend to find her a canary in the coal mine - the more people got wound up about her, the more society was melting down and drawing hardened lines. That's not to say I think you have to like her or you're on the wrong side, more that she's some kind of cultural bellwether. Was she destined to be hated as the first serious female American politician? Forget Denmark et al - as even HIllary noted, we're not Europe - we're still exceptional, with all the plusses and minuses that brings. will we some day tone down our intolerant, dominant maleness as a halfway point between gender equality and still pushy, I-want-to-succeed-at-all-costs maledom?

This whole thing about diluting the achievements of "white males" *is* pretty galling, as it continues on and on. Yes, Columbus and Cortez were assholes, but so were the Aztecs slaughtering other tribes & sacrificing thousands to implacable gods, as were the Florida coastal native tribes that enslaved the shipwreck Cabeza de Vaca for 10 years.as he continually escaped further to the east trying to find his shipmates in Galveston. There simply haven't been a lot of nice tolerant people throughout history except for recent times, and matriarchal periods under Catherine de Medici, Russia's Catherine the Great, or Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth I weren't exactly pacifist sewing clubs without significant bloodletting (including the long imprisonment and beheading of Mary Queen of Scots). And modern liberalism and the recent spate of economic and scientific success are largely from more whitish societies in Europe and the Americas, with a bit of Asian up-and-comingness in a very different environment (and so far still not a leading one philosophically/politically/etc.)

But the last few years has assumed (for some) that the white male dominance had subsided, that soon we'd be speaking Spanish with all the immigrants as somehow an improvement over the guys who invented the transistor and the internet and psychoanalysis and modern agriculture (Norman Borlaug et al), ships to the moon and so on, vs. Latino haciendas and endless revolutions.

Additionally, some people seem to think that human progress is a matter of moderation, rather than annoying people spending all-nighters or long marches trying to make things work and lording it over others. Sure, there might be some balance somewhere, but I've yet to see restraint and calm as the greatest factor to innovation. And yeah, a lot of that comes from testosterone. And Andrew notes that black males tend to have significantly more testosterone than white males, but in this area like with Larry Summers, we have to tiptoe carefully - it's okay to say blacks or females may excel over whites or males in a number of ways, but you're in hot water to imply that there might be any inherent weaknesses or suboptimal characteristics in evolution. It's a bit like Lake Woebegone - all the women are smart, the men good looking, and the children above average. So yeah, we're hostile towards Darwin, because there can easily be societal outrage, now focused as massive social media outrage, over pointing at any less-than-salubrious ideas about any of a dozen or more subsets of humanity - including white males, of course (hey, there was another high school shooting today, by a white male I believe - go team! [oops, his name is Cruz, so while he's probably classified as white even though Hispanic, so don't know if technically he's "ours"]). It's like that Youtube skit between millennial HR hirer (son) and aging boomer (father) - "don't you guys get a trophy for everything you do?" But it's been like that for a while - our society is fragile, so we tamp down some of the more difficult discussions about some of our more obvious failures. A few think the solutions are obvious - throw money at them, or education, or put more of X, Y or Z into power, or.... but a lot of lines look the same no matter what we do. I live in Europe, where stereotypes abound, often one might think for a few good reasons combined with usual exaggerations.

So yes, the current phase is interesting - we seem to be wanting to fix a lot of perceived imbalances in a hurry, often without having the moorings and consensus and the resources to carry it out - in fact, the folks against many of these cheery visions seem to be much better at harnessing the tools of power - perhaps partially due to, we might think, our tactics and strategies in attempting to wield power. It should be no joy to realize that the only reason we have a chance of regaining power in November is because the other side has been so over the top and criminal that the average person has started to think it not sustainable - but with even 3/4 of the outrageousness, they'd happily vote the status quo, i.e. against what we think is the intelligent natural way.

Add a major gender makeover, and things may indeed get loony. Even women can be quite hesitant about other women in power, or maybe we'll overcome that as a holdover from the 60's/90's/since forever...

Yes, the practice of selling

moat — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 01:52:32 +0000

In reply to There are many "neo" aspects

Yes, the practice of selling highly refined petroleum products to first world nations while offering the toxic stuff to one's own populace is awful and has been going on for a long time. Mexico, for instance, was doing that long before NAFTA.

The agricultural market is a good example of where local production can stand against being overwhelmed by imported products. And as you note, that doesn't rule out exchange outside the producing nation.

The Aeon article is helpful in the matter of looking at multiple causes for what is happening.

I started with This is an

artappraiser — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 00:43:07 +0000

In reply to This is an interesting

I started with This is an interesting article about history, about what happened.

Then I confronted you with Africans use cell phones now, too. I heard tell they like them, they connect them to the whole world. There are even <gasp> many African neo-liberals.

Things have changed. History never repeats itself the same way.

Africans are now using the same products that need the African raw materials to be produced. You cannot get rid of what you call "neo-liberalism". Water over the damn.

Heck, you can't even promote local farming worldwide without "imperialist" organizations like the U.N. To talk like Africans are like children that aren't part of the modern world, who depend upon U.S. policy to survive is imperialist in itself. Like we have some control over them. You cannot have it both ways: either you want to influence what they do or you don't. If we don't, someone else will surely try (like China.)

You have a very nuanced new comment downthread, a Brookings link about IMF and World Bank. That's more like it.

Don't you see how your flippant agitprop remarks about "neo-liberalism" are just divisive to no good effect? All you do is feed an artificial ideological division on the left that when one gets down to actual policy is no longer very apparent?

P.S. Going off thread (scuse

artappraiser — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 00:29:24 +0000

In reply to Hmmm, I dunno if I buy that

P.S. Going off thread (scuse please) to further address Peracles' point on the Big Dog:

Strikes me that way because I've been having other thoughts along these lines. First I was reading Sullivan last night on #MeToo, "maleness," (citing his own old "The He Hormone" essay of 2000, happens to be one of my all time favorite links to send to men, never got a bad response from doing that, instead reactions more like "wow") and the nonselective mania right now that might cause counterproductive kickback.

Sullivan pointed to Edsall's op-ed of Jan. 18 Can Democrats Follow #MeToo to Victory? Sullivan called it "brave." One of the main points Edsall and Sullivan are making is how quite a few millennial males may have already been reacting defensively to overly aggressive 4th wave feminism in voting against Hillary. That #MeToo as it is now may just be pile on. I followed links to find myself at various Pew polls of the 2016 election, and sure enough, I saw this trend too.

I recommend checking those two pieces out and reading them with an open mind, thinking on it.

I think a lot of what has been simplistically been thrown into the category "white working class male vote" may not be all about jobs jobs jobs, dumb white trash. It may partly be the dazed and confused millennial male vote, sick and tired of being part of being blamed for all the sins of patriarchy of the past.

Right now while the national discourse is still manic on it, everyone's walking on eggshells, only a gay like Sullivan can start to tippytoe into some nuance. But it's not going to stay that way. It can't with so many men feeling so uncomfortable about it all.

We here (not having any right wing maniac Dagblog participants, though we have some Clintonian economic policy haters) all know how Bill can balance the two: have utter respect and awe for powerful women and the "maleness" thing at the same time. I am thinking Bill could actually could turn out to be an ideal person to address it all when the time is right. Maybe it's Hillary that might have to be sidelined, if she still continues to bear the burden of being first female president robbed of rightful place and slandered by men, one true representative of the feminist hordes. We'll see.

One thing I do know: Bill is a feminist at heart, maybe not in lust. Manages to compartmentalize on that. Maybe others could learn from him.

There are many "neo" aspects

HSG — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 00:07:33 +0000

In reply to There is nothing "neo" about

There are many "neo" aspects to the current ecological crisis in Africa. They include the practice of multinational oil and gas companies to refine their products in such a way that reduced sulfur gasoline and oil are distributed to the west while highly sulfuric petroleum goes to African nations. You might also want to consider the destruction of traditional African agriculture by climate change, desertification, and dumped western foodstuffs. https://www.africanexponent.com/post/7838-how-world-banks-policies-are-d...

For some possible solutions, this Brookings article is interesting. Although Brookings leans neoliberal, the author recognizes that rebuilding Africa's agriculture sector requires small farms that are producing for local markets or a stable purchaser like the U.N.

Cassava production is reliably rising in parts of Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Malawi. In these countries, new processing facilities have been established to meet new demand for cassava as an ingredient in everything from baked goods and beer to paper, board, and plywood. In Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zambia, sustainable increases in crop production are occurring on small-holder farms that have contracts to grow maize and other crops for the U.N. World Food Program. In Ghana, rice yields are rising on small-holder farms that have joined an initiative to grow rice for a domestic food company, which is providing consumers in Ghana with a cheaper alternative to imported rice. Crop clusters around a processor have proved very effective.

Don't you believe it's really

HSG — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 23:50:39 +0000

In reply to This is an interesting

Don't you believe it's really important to understand how the situation in Africa got to be so bad and who's responsible? Didn't Santayana say those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it?