Perspective is everything

Y'know, generally, when the mobbed-up US Supreme Court justice resigns, that's a good thing.

Political white supremacy in the Anglosphere presently rests on white women preferring to categorize themselves as white, rather than as women.  There's a demographic trend towards identifying as women rather than as white.  Going full-blown women-cattle-and-slaves while there's still a demographic window is not something that represents a position of strength.  (Nor is it something which acts to slow that demographic slide, AND it risks a major shift in the consensus of the matrons.)

The US hegemonic position arose from the Second World War combined with economic supremacy.  (Half the planetary GDP, because the rest of the planet had been burned down, fought over, and economically exhausted by war.) That's gone; Trump's going to have plenty of time to wreck something that was getting mighty tottery.[1]

The US Right is trying to recreate the Confederacy (nigh-certainly with overt slavery, no freedom of speech, and no civil rights including votes for women); this is driven by a great screaming howling whimpering emotional need rather than a careful economic analysis.  It has already done a great deal of damage -- straight up ethnic cleansing does great harm -- but the Confederacy was a low-information, low-control, and low-capability state.  It can't actually do much that requires widespread organization.  As a response to climate change, it is certain to fail.

The international-conspiracy aspects of the rise of fascism are the same desperate need to avoid negative change that usually drives fascism; "I am not getting the status I believe I deserve and I am resorting to violence until I get it".  If you're the leader of a petro-state, you desperately need to avoid change.  Only you can't.  And most of them can't retire, either.

Sometimes a former empire sits there and gnaws on its metaphorical toes for centuries, but that's not really an option this time.  The time of angry weather isn't going to allow a slow fade from former glories.

Most of these people are trying desperately to avoid having to admit they were wrong before they die.  They're not good people, they don't merit much sympathy, they're doing enormous harm, but fundamentally they're in the position of both trying to ignore reality and outstubborn their heirs.  It's not going to work.  The tactical problem is not to limit the damage as to make it not work as soon as possible.

[1] want some moral authority again?  pauperize an awful lot of republicans and get right out in front on decarbonization.  That'll work fine, and it's pretty obvious that will work fine.

OODA, dammit

Habit is what you do when you have no time to think.  (Usually because it's what you would do anyway, but the stress version might just be because this is NOT what you usually do so your brain shorts out and provides an unconsidered behaviour.)

This is where the concept of "pressure" in a tactical situation comes from; you want to have the other side too busy to think, because if they're too busy to think, they're going to do something predictable, and if they're predictable you can plan and deploy a counter, sometimes before you start applying the pressure.

All this stuff about immigration?  Total bullshit.  Neither the president, nor Andrew Scheer, care about immigration.  They care about ethnic cleansing.  The tactical objective is to guarantee white supremacy[0] through a mix of deportation and vote suppression[1].  White supremacy is both a moral system and a loot-sharing mechanism.  Like any other such thing, it gets copies of itself into the future by convincing people that its rules benefit them, and like any other such system it's in competition with all the other possible systems to deliver material benefits.

(Note that the original conditions for white supremacy -- the great European colonial surge on the basis of sailcloth, flintlocks, cannon, and protestantism -- no longer apply, and the material benefits are now all marginal and structural; preferential hiring and wages and such.  Systems under that kind of stress generally become more extreme, to preserve the appearance of the conditions which created them and render them emotionally plausible.)

The current Western system is certain to collapse; climate change isn't going to leave anything standing.  This is not a distant concern.  (Scheer probably knows this.  Trump doesn't.)

So the strategic objective, the thing you do to establish your prefered social system, is what?  Well, presently, the American right are trying to legitimize chattel slavery and they're trying to legitimize genocide, because they've got a nightmare involving millions of Mexicans moving north to find some place they can survive the summer.  The best idea they've got is mass graves.  Pretty much pure Confederacy. (In oh so many ways.  Go read Grant's memoirs if you never have.  They're instructive.  And think about what it says about someone's competence if what they want is the Confederacy.)

Canada has three short-term structural problems -- our economy is too small for the amount of foreign capital trying to hide here; we've got a intractable structural political problem with getting off fossil carbon; wages have been too low for a generation -- and two massive long-term problems; agriculture is going to fail and none of our infrastructure is intended to function in the time of angry weather.

Our "immigration" problem, from the right, is being unable to complete the native genocide so it's harder than people would like to build pipelines and extract bitumen and create vast open-pit mines.  It's having too many people -- that is, visibly frequent -- who aren't easily sunburned, and it's having to acknowledge that the rules as we had them and mostly still have them presuppose a prescriptive culture norm which does not presently apply.  This aligns the Canadians who wish to see white supremacy continue (because they think it's right and they profit from it) with the American right, despite some significant cultural differences.  (Monarchy.  Different myths, notably the lack of a benevolent plantation owner.)

Our real immigration problem?  integrating incomers into the economy with full opportunity; there are very very good reasons why, when we're economically dependent on immigration, to want to get rid of white supremacy.  It makes the essential work of setting up a borders-of-propriety social system in which everyone willing to stay inside the social borders can have a full share something with a strong economic driver.  (Yes, this is hard; there's five thousand years of autocratic and aristocratic norms clogging up everybody's thinking.  Lester and Pierre could contemplate this because as individuals they didn't have meaningful personal insecurities about their competence; that didn't magically grant an understanding of how to do it, and the right hates it because it's an offense before god, pretty literally as they construct god.  It's hard work and we haven't done it especially well.)

When agriculture breaks, three things happen; food is short[2], so we're going to suddenly feel like fewer people is better, the existing economy craters past recovery, and Anglo NorAm starts to experience mass folk migrations.  (Who will likely still have access to motorized vehicles; "there are the first of a couple million dessicated Kansans at the Peace Bridge" values of folk migration.)

Traditional, Code-of-Hammurabi, aristocratic/imperial answer; kill or enslave.  If you lose the battle, settle them into presently unused farmland.

We're not going to be in a position to win the battle, and we're not going to have any farmland.  (We might have some intermittently productive pastoral grasslands.  Regular crops?  Not these thousand years.)

So we had better have a local food supply (no, I don't know what combination of greenhouses, vertical farming, and the unholy automated offspring of a grow op in a submarine is going to work, but if nothing works humans go extinct, so postulate some working approach), and we better have a local industrial base able to replicate the mechanism of that food supply in quantity at speed (with any luck we can do this fast enough that we don't get the folk migrations) without resort to fossil carbon, and we better have a deeply-ingrained habit of saying "you want to be Canadian? THESE ARE THE RULES" and then actually doing it, even though their deme has perverse personal customs like treating handegg, rather than hockey, as sacred rituals.  (I recommend to you all the custom of consider the hijab a variety of hat.)

If we want that for certain, we needed to be getting started around 1980.  If we want a shot at it, we need to get started now.

That's not saying we need to be oblivious to the tactical atrocities of the right; that's saying we need to emotionally accept that the options are mass death, probably to the point of human extinction (general agricultural failure is not something you can recover from afterwards) or a big conscious cultural shift into unknown territory so we can have the system that might work[3] in the no good, awful, wretched bad future we're getting.  And in which we're going to need an amazing amount of work done and a whole bunch of people to do it, because automation has very sharp limitations of known design.

We can get there; we can't get there with business as usual, this social hierarchy, or the rich staying rich.


[0] business-as-usual-to-sustain-prosperity, the Federal Liberal/Trudeau position, is a passive support of white supremacy and the ongoing passive genocide of First Nations.  It's preferable to active genocide but this should not be understood as a positive trait.

[1] Canada remains very, very white, and doesn't have much stress along this axis.  This should not be understood as evidence that we'd do better with it.

[2] lots and lots of people die; maybe everybody dies.  Maybe we get desperate warfare leading to the destruction of everything, or maybe we get people driving as far as they can looking for food.  Or maybe we managed to plan ahead and build enough alternative non-agricultural production.

[3] there can be no rich people in such a system; it might use market mechanisms, but the "I have a lot of money so I get what I want" version of a control system isn't effective and we're not going to have the margin to tolerate it.

The purpose of a system is what it does

So what's Brexit going to do?

Looks like it's going to do two things inescapably; create great food insecurity, and gut The City of London as a world financial centre.

If I thought there was a cohesive English Landowners Party, I could think this was what they wanted; they can get a very cheap labour force out of people who would prefer not to starve, and they can get a permanent shift in the domestic balance of power in their favour.  It's an utter disaster on an international scale, but they might not care.  (Expecting ANY long term agricultural productivity in England as the climate shifts could be considered rather daft, but it'd be a highly plausible daft.)

So the current "what are they thinking?" resolves to Brexit starting to look like something that a bunch of white supremacists used Russian backing and dubious data expertise to enact, and the Landowner's Party grabbed it.  Whatever the cynical participants wanted to extort has gone by the wayside; this is now about bringing back forelock-tugging agrarianism on pain of death.  (Well, by means of death.)  And no one political can figure out how to say so at a profit, and no one political is going to do anything that doesn't profit them.  The opposition can't figure out how to think about the whole thing, because the idea of no more foreigners is just too attractive for words to too much of the electorate, who stop there.  There is no way to champion free movement and win an election.  (It's looking like you might not be able to say the Scots aren't foreign and win an election.)

Globally, converting the UK's not-quite-four-percent of the global economy into despairing noises won't be good.   By itself, not as large as 2008.  In combination with a collapse of the trade regime, though?  That could be pretty thorough.  Lose the trade regime and the ability to impose sanctions won't survive, which is something Russia would want.

Bicycles are light

You know how you can tell no one with any power really wants to solve the problem?

They won't spend money to see what works.

The easiest historical examples are naval propulsion advances where entire classes of battleship get built to test the operational effectiveness of a new kind of steam engine, but still.  "Does this work? let's find out, here's some budget" is the sure and reliable sign of a sincere desire to solve the problem.  No one in Canada with actual power wants to solve the safe bike travel problem.

The problem with city streets is the fixed width.  Much as I like the mental image, coming by with Really Large hydraulic jacks and pushing all the buildings further apart is not a practical approach.

Car Culture is not an engineering problem; it's a law enforcement problem and a politics problem.  (I have been to a public "talk about the bike lanes" meeting where someone spent forty minutes trying to get a city councillor to commit to increasing the free on-street parking on their adjacent-to-the-proposed-bike-lanes residential street.  They were passionate, committed, and overtly and explicitly of the view that anything involving bicycles was irrelevant, it doesn't matter if people interested in bicycles want to talk, here's a chance to get more parking, that's important and I pay taxes.  Nothing like an engineering problem.)

There is, however, an engineering solution for safe bike travel.

Modern construction methods make it very easy to show up, drill a hole, and drop a (remarkably strong) substantial steel pipe upright in the hole.  There's a lot of stuff under some downtown streets but there's pretty much zero chance a team of engineers can't figure out how and where to put the upright. Modern construction methods make it just as easy to get a lot of truss bridge sections to connect between the pipes that are now suddenly bridge pylons. (There are already mixed-use pathway bridges like this all over the place.)  If you happen to have light rail, you do this over the light rail and use the underside of the bridge sections to support the power wires.  You put a roof over the bridge sections; you put up big cable net guard rails with some spring to them.  You make the whole thing six metres or seven metres wide with a raised "dead" centre section between the lanes so people have some place to fix flats or just get out of the flow of traffic while they're trying to read a map or use their phone.  You pick the post heights to smooth out variation in the ground so there's a relatively continuous and slow change in elevation.  You put in elevated roundabouts over major intersections.  (Yes, really; you can even do a search for "elevated bicycle roundabout" and find examples of existing ones.)

You don't put pedestrians up there.  You might put off-to-the-side bits of path for downtown business that want to put a bicycle cafe on the second or third floor.  You might put in some elevators where there just isn't room for enough ramp.  The dead centre means you can nearly always put in one ramp; there are a lot of places you can put in on and off ramps, down to bits of park or public squares or anywhere you're not dropping the bikes straight into vehicle traffic or pedestrians.  Down into distinct protected bike lanes is fine, and you'd expect to do that out in the city periphery where you have enough width for bike lanes down at grade level.  (Though remember that elevated bike lanes are a solution for the "there are cars turning across my bike lane" problem, and it's fairly tough to make that go away when the roads and the bike routes are at the same grade level.)

While you're at it, you change the laws so building owners are required let bicycles inside; the single largest non-squashing barrier to bike commuting is a complete lack of safe storage.  Many office buildings have ferocious "no plebeian bicycles in the building" policies.  Those need to go.

So -- There's room to put in a LOT of this stuff.  (Every road with an LRT line, just for starters.) You want it to be extensive and continuous; you might want some of it to be fast and some of it to be scenic, but let's not worry about that until there's a lot installed.  It's not hard to imagine a few firms who specialize in assembling and maintaining elevated bike paths, and a resulting number of pretty decent construction and engineering jobs.  (It's not hard to imagine a city department that does this, either.) You design the elevated pathway to be bolt-together so when the day comes and you have to remove some because of major road work, you can come back and unbolt them and carry them away with the same machinery that put them up.  You get a tourist attraction.  You get a business sector where you manufacture prefab bridge sections, pylons, LRT wire hangers, battery-powered snow clearing and surface-cleaning machines, springy cable barrier nets, and so on.  You get an expansion in useful downtown restaurant, cafe, and tourist tchotchke retail space.  You do great things to the official livability index.

And, bicycles are light.  Really light.  Even packed in really tight, you're never going to go over a tonne per metre, counting both lanes (that's four hundred-kilo people per each 2m lane and two more hundred-kilo people in the centre section) and that's just not a challenging truss requirement.  You can likely do this in aluminium (won't rust) and you can order the stuff by the kilometre.

Yes, sure, you get some construction, but it's fast construction; someone is coming in with a drill and a crane for a few days to assemble prefab sections, it's not the deep-pit style of construction.  In terms of dollar per person kilometre of commute, it is WAY cheaper than pretty much everything else.  It gives you a place to stash a lot of cabling in an easy-access simple-maintenance location.  There's no inherent requirement to follow a road, so if you need to bridge a divided highway or a river or railroad, you're going to need some fancier pylons and a longer bridge section.  It gets the bike paths OFF the road.

Anyone in a position of power who actually wanted to solve the bike-safety problem would be trying this.

(The first place you do this in Toronto is Queen's Quay, Bathurst to Parliament.)

The Utility of Protest

I think there's some serious cultural lag going on.

Protest is meant to signal lasting anger in the voting or labour populations; one will get you voted out of office, and the other will get you economic costs from strikes or other labour disruptions.  There was a period of time when these were important things.

Neither of those actually apply anymore.  Extra-legal vote manipulation is rife and has no real consequences.  (E.g., Stephen Harper's first majority; the conviction happens to a disposable minion, and none of the election results are questioned.  Or the election results in Ontario when a large fraction of the PC candidates are under investigation for extra-legal campaign practices.)  Election results are primarily driven by media brain-hacks in the month or two months prior to the election.  Getting voted out of office is much less of a risk (for many American politicians, no risk) than the system presumes that it is.

There's no meaningful labour movement.  (Canada still has unions.  No non-fringe figure is willing to get up and argue for collective anything, or that there are legitimate forms of social organization other than corporations.)  There's certainly no meaningful mechanism to impose economic costs on the right wing for doing extra-legal things.  (E.g, Galen Weston, and price fixing bread.)

(The only functioning-as-a-movement unions are police unions, who want no oversight and increasing spending and do not tolerate civil control of the police.  They're effectively the official armed wing of white supremacy as a movement.)

Economic actions such as boycotts don't work.  (Just try figuring out what you can eat that doesn't have give Galen Weston money somewhere in the supply chain.  They will stay rich much longer than you can stay hungry.)

So right now, the whole US Border thing; yes, it's an atrocity.  But the point to the atrocity is to consume the substance of everyone on the left; to cost them time and money and stomach lining, because all of those things are finite and in a long war of attrition (all politics is a long war of attrition) what happens is a function of who keeps the largest choice space through paying the least for what they must do.  This kind of behaviour is meant to collapse the choice space of those on the left and render them politically ineffective due to exhaustion.  (A reference from anti-submarine warfare; you generally do not know where the sub is.  You can figure out what box it's in, so you take steps to make sure it stays in that known volume and then, when that volume is small enough, you kill the box.  This is precisely the long-term approach from the would-be-aristocrats on the right.)

The question for protest is not how to get respect, how to get voices heard, not any of that; the question is how to make this kind of behaviour so unbearably expensive the right wing can't stand to do it.

Taxes in the Time of Angry Weather

I find myself increasingly struck by how there's a party of lowering taxes, everywhere in the Anglosphere.

There's an angle where you can think of this in terms of race and class, and a lot of people have, and said important and sensible things about the rich generally trying to withdraw from society, but I want to raise a different point.

The half-jest is that the gods of civil engineering are drainage, drainage, and drainage.

Climate change -- the climate is surely changing, even if you cannot face facts about the cause, you're stuck with that, because it's measured -- means the drainage isn't right.  It rains more, it rains less; either way, either all the culverts need increasing or wells have to be drilled deeper and water conservation measures need to be installed.  The canals flood or sink until they can't be used.

Climate change means more, and worse, bad weather; a system with more energy in it has extreme weather events which are more destructive.  There's cleanup, and rebuilding.  There's design changes and new infrastructure.

This is going to go on, and on, and on; there is no time in which we can foresee the weather not being angry.  (Yes, yes, if we stop burning fossil carbon we stop the forcing, but for the next thousand years, we still get angry weather.)  Angry weather means increased taxes; all those culverts, and flood events, and people fleeing drought, and it goes on and on.  For there to be a party of lower taxes in this time claiming to be the party of hardheaded practicality is too bitter for a jest.

(You know what an emergency is?  That's when, no matter how rich you are, you're better off if the problem is addressed collectively.  "Climate emergency" is not a popular phrase, but it's not wrong.  No amount of private wealth suffices to maintain for yourself the benefits of civilization in the climate emergency.)