Over on twitter

Nick Harkaway writes:
Why is it not enough to believe in the project? Why this desire that we all accept the virtue of the man?  It is freaking the shit out of me tonight. For the first time, really.

If you -- generic you -- stop using the rhetoric of individual salvation and the expectation of saviours and, really, when you get right down to it, the notion that morality is a useful response to a political problem, you're faced with two horrible prospects; it would work ever so much better to go all quantified and materialistic and co-operative, and it means everything you believe about yourself is wrong. All that constructed context of goodness and worth is just complete and utter froth without any material basis whatsoever.

Sometimes this happens in adolescence; sometimes it never happens. Authoritarians don't like the idea of it, never mind the actuality, because authoritarianisms do not withstand quantified analysis. Tories of various labels hate it because they don't want you to resist effectively.

What's actually happening in UK politics is that the machinery of capitalism requires a source of loot. Having exhausted many traditional sources, with a surprising variety of traditional sources now able to defend themselves, and with functional control of the Oil Empire passing into the hands of those with no traditional reverence for the Anglosphere, the UK gets viewed as a source of loot. The post-imperial hangover makes this too difficult to believe, providing both useful idiots and a sort of disbelieving paralysis preventing appropriate political responses, so the UK is effectively an undefended mass of loot.

It's far more about "is looting and piracy the right way to get rich?" than it is about Europe, and if you want to look at the whole thing as the judgements of the lord being righteous altogether it wouldn't be difficult. (It wouldn't be useful, but it wouldn't be difficult.)

Stray thoughts

One of the things that distresses me about Anglosphere politics generally and Canadian politics specifically and Ontario politics even more specifically; there's nothing even starting to resemble reasonable climate policy.

I had a thought about that; any proposal collapses under the weight of complexity, how do you fairly compensate, wait, how do you define fair, wait, don't people have a right to? and nothing sensible gets articulated.

Some of that's the natural human tendency to want to believe in someone else's fault; some of that's certainly propaganda.  But most of it is looking at the whole thing from the wrong perspective; the realm of optional things, of compromise, of competing desires, of choices.  That it's fundamentally a political question.

It isn't; we're in the realm of necessity.  Looked at that way, it's not even "if you're a grown up, and you realize there's a leak in the roof, do you cancel your planned vacation and put the money into roof repairs?"  It's the much simpler "do you want to die of something other than starvation?"

That's it.  That's the whole thing.  At the individual, personal, human scale, that's climate change policy.

Do you want to die of something other than starvation?