Sense-making the ecological and technofascist debacles – Podcasts etc worth your attention

This year I am going to write something short, mostly daily, about what is going on – “2 cents on the Arrived Ecological Debacle” (2cotAED). I have to write it; you don’t have to read it. If you DO read it, feel free to tell me how wrong I am (and hopefully why). Re: the debacle aspect: in 2004 the English writer Sara Maitland  wrote about the “pending ecological debacle.” The expression stuck with me; it’s a debacle because it was foreseen, warned about and was avoidable. Well, it’s no longer really “pending” is it?

On the ecological debacle, you’ve got Alex “predatory delay” Steffen’s podcast When We Are. Ten minutes-ish each, lots of wisdom and compassion. A good format, worth mimicking (more on that soon).

Over the last week or two we’ve had the news that the annual carbon dioxide increase was an unprecedented 3.6 ppm. The blanket of heat-trapping gases (I haven’t even mentioned the others) keeps getting thicker and thicker, faster and faster. Then just a couple of days ago you’ve got the warmest January ever – the “cooling” is not kicking in, and the FT, BBC Grauniad etc all quote scientists as “mystified etc”. Bluesky people seem less mystified – it’s one of those shituations where you can know too much, and be imprisoned by fancy models. It’s clear that we’re not just circling the drain, we’re going down it, and this is going to accelerate. And gaia helps when there’s another El Nino… And that’s of course only one small part of why a sensible person might be freaking out…

Meanwhile, I can’t get a media outlet interested in my stonking interview with Professor Kevin Anderson.

On the techno fascist coup in the US, I’d say the following things. Number one, if Tom Clancy had tried to write this as a techno-thriller in the 1990s or noughties, his publishers would have kiboshed it; “Tom. People buy your books because the books give them a sense of a plausible world. This is simply going to tank your reputation” . Reality is, of course, outstripping our ability to make it up. Elon Musk makes Ernst Blofeld look sober and plausible.

So then how to maintain one sense of what’s going on? Well, there’s people at Wired and Nathan “Notes on the Crisis” Tankus doing great, essential work. You’ve got Timothy Snyder saying, “yes, of course, it’s a coup.” You’ve got Judith Butler making really good points about sadism and the id and the desire to just demoralize people and to overwhelm them, and that’s what this could be called, the overwhelm. 

And now I’m listening to astonishingly good podcast, ( I’m way late to this party), Letters from an American by Heather Cox Robinson, an historian who is just doing the grunt work of explaining what’s going on today, giving you the sources and giving you some context. All in ten to fifteen minutes.

This is what public intellectuals are supposed to do. This is what she’s doing. 

The Feb 4 one has a beautiful short summation of the post-WW2 societal settlement and how after Brown vs Board of Education and then Eisenhower sending troops to desegregate Little Rock, the anti-consensus people started being able to use race (i.e. white resentment).

Here’s the transcript of that bit –

Musk’s takeover of the US government to override Congress and dictate what programs he considers worthwhile is a logical outcome of 40 years of Republican rhetoric. After World War II, members of both political parties agreed that the government should regulate business,

7:45

provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. The idea was to use tax dollars to create national wealth. The government would hold the economic playing field level by protecting every American’s access to education, health care, transportation and communication, employment, and resources so that anyone could work hard and rise to prosperity.

8:13

Businessmen who opposed regulation and taxes tried to convince voters to abandon this system but had no luck. The liberal consensus, liberal because it used the government to protect individual freedom, and consensus because it enjoyed wide support, won the votes of members of both major political parties. But those opposed to the liberal consensus gained traction after the Supreme

8:42

Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional. Three years later, in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, sent troops to help desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Those trying to tear apart the liberal consensus used the crisis to warn voters

9:10

that the program’s in place to help all Americans build the nation as they rose to prosperity. were really an attempt to redistribute cash from white taxpayers to undeserving racial minorities, especially black Americans. Such programs were, opponents insisted, a form of socialism or even communism. That argument worked to undermine white support for the liberal consensus. Over the years,

9:39

Republican voters increasingly abandoned the idea of using tax money to help Americans build wealth. When majorities continued to support the liberal consensus, Republicans responded by suppressing the vote, rigging the system through gerrymandering, and flooding our political system with dark money and using right-wing media to push propaganda.

I am sure in her longer pieces she talks about the strategy of Massive Resistance and then the Nixon southern strategy.  (Lee Atwater? That turd just said the quiet part out loud). This is a 10 minute recap of the day, not something thesis-y.

So, at least as we go down the plughole, we’re well-informed…