The future of Automation: It's grim.

Preface

There follow some thoughts on the future of automation with regards to AI, specifically in light of ChatGPT and the absolute smashing of the Turing Test.

I have a strong feeling that these fucking things will be the death of us all, and that we must smash, destroy, and otherwise render inoperative the bastards before the billionaires use them to replace us so they can turf us out into the streets and watch us starve to death.

A note to anyone who thinks the billionaires are not liable to become homicidally inclined:

I'm no narcissistic leftie who thinks he's a great humanitarian, I'm a grumpy bastard like everyone else in this dystopia. So, like a lot of people, I often find myself in bad moods. Moods when I feel that people aren't really up to much. Usually a friend snaps me out of it, or in some other way my bubble of anomie is punctured by the reality of social life. 

Pictured: Your Reporter

 Now, imagine being in the worst, most arrogant, shitty mood you've ever been in, but with no friends to snap you out of it, no friends at all - just a gaggle of sycophants and yes-men. Imagine if your only social contact was with other arrogant, rich bastards, or with servants whose entire livelihood depends on telling you what you want to hear.

Now imagine having increasing amounts of power, not just over your own business interests, but over the political life of the country, even the world. Imagine how the Kochs must feel. You! Insect! Print my manifesto: "Why all plebs are scum"! You! Other serf! Put it in Journal Of The Institute of Freedom, the Magazine of Human Affairs, and The Wall Street Journal!

Yes Mastur, Oi Loves 'ee Mastur!

Such a person would find it hard, if not impossible, for their mind to stay out of some of the darker corners of human thought. Such a person, vested with unlimited executive power, would find it impossible to avoid a drift towards increasingly nasty ideological territory - as we've already found to our cost.

Now imagine how they will react when they are told that their operations will be rendered so efficient that they'll be able to fire 50%, or 70%, or 90% of their workforce. That they need never worry about bad PR again, as a robot will take care of company communications, instantly whitewashing their every shitty descision and lying so well they make Rupert Murdoch look like St Francis of Assisi. 

And now imagine how they will feel when they learn that most people don't have jobs and can't get them. What do you think they will think? "Let's give these fellas a second chance"? Uh huh. More like "Get these poors offa my lawn, and FAST!"

The future of automation

It's increasingly clear that with automation, most people are going to end up surplus to requirements.  Never mind the cab drivers made unemployed by driverless taxis, why would you even have taxis in the first place? Who  could even afford a taxi in a world where nobody except the very, very rich has a job anyway?

The whole world could be made to work without people. And without people, fewer things would need to be done. It's a vicious cycle, entire sections of the economy will close down as more and more population blocs are laid off. And then... what then?

I imagine that more civilized sections of the world - certainly Western Europe - would offer people a social settlement, something along the lines of: Here's a nice little flat and a stipend of money, on the condition that you do not riot and avoid reproducing. Doing either of those things will get you evicted and cut off. Now fuck off and keep your mouth shut if you know what's good for you.

Less civilized regions - Perhaps the USA, certainly Russia, would opt for some variation on the theme of mass extermination. People are too much trouble to keep alive, and beyond a few key technicians and the billionaires who paid for the fucking things to be developed, human beings are unnecessary to the running of machines. Inimical even.

The hoary fear of demographic collapse looks completely different from this point of view. From this point of view, Russia, Japan and South Korea are in excellent shape demographically, because the vast population that would otherwise be about to become a burden on the welfare rolls simply don't exist in the first place, and what humans are left are swiftly dying off anyway - Japanese and South Koreans are getting old, and Russians are drinking, fighting, and purging each other to death in time honoured fashion on top of this.

Seen through the lens of AI, the environmental apocalypse comes off as rather a damp squib, as human populations are about to become completely surplus to requirements just as the Earths carrying capacity has been exhausted by humans anyway.

I can see a case for mass genocide being made by AI to the ruling classes at some point soon. Have to find a tasteful way to do it, of course, and none of that overt racial selection. But in principle, yes, the ruling class, the people with all the money and power, won't need us around much longer - machines can do our jobs a lot better, and without a human social ecology to feed, the economy becomes orders of magnitude simpler anyway.

What is a city from the point of view of a billionaire? Ultimately, it's an anthill that provides said billionaire with a pool of labour and maybe some consumers, most of which wastefully serve each other in various inefficient ways.

Take human leisure facilities. From a billionaire's point of view, bars and nightclubs need to be abolished as they make workers inefficient, drunk, and hung over. As do eateries and restaurants, fast food joints and corner shops - they make people fat and inefficient, worse, all this consumption makes work-units sick, which affects the bottom line, ether in the form of taxes (that billionaires don't pay but resent anyway) or in the form of company insurance / internal medical resources.

From a billionaires point of view, a much more efficient way of handling the labour pool is to do away with personal freedom and private life entirely, starve most of the humans to death, and have the rest of them as dedicated worker drones - some of them involved in the manufacture of products, others in high-tech maintenance, others still in logistics or legal and clerical capacities, but none of them servicing each other beyond the bare minimum required to keep them alive.

After all, the billionaires are the worlds owners, society has decided that they are the most important people in the world, and in AI they have possibly found a perfect partner - a servant that is willing, intelligent, able to do most of the highly paid work of planning and thinking, and which requires no pay and no inefficient leisure facilities to maintain itself.

What we are going to see with AI then, is that the fucking things are going to become embodied. First they need to either fix the comms lag between the servers and the application, or miniaturize computer technology still further - shouldn't take more than a few years, couple of decades at most - then they can plant those dinky cool AIs in robot bodies and bang - instant, universal worker drone that will do just about anyone's job to a standard level of competence. And then watch the economy collapse as people are put out of work, and yet more become unemployed as the industries that served those people collapse in turn.

Economic collapse works on a domino principle, one domino topples the next, and the next, and the next, until the entire world is a wreck and a handful of rich bastards control everything.

That is the future of automation. If we don't poison ourselves or blow each other up or get fried by global warming anyway.

Why don't we have dictators?

Maybe the reason that dictatorship never really took off in the Anglo-Saxon world is that our ruling classes don't need to impose a dictatorship - they already have absolute control over the country.

Even Mao-Tse Tung, Stalin and Hitler did not go as far as to make swimming illegal. David Cameron did. (He also passed laws which would see the following activities criminalized: Skateboarding, walking dogs, passing out leaflets, busking, running, cycling, sleeping and sitting down, as well as napping, shouting, climbing trees, and feeding the birds.)

Boating on the boating lake is a serious crime!

 

Comfortably nested and sclerotic, the British ruling class face no external threats and no internal rivals. Unlike Fascists, they don't have to resort to mass murder to preserve the existing order, and unlike Communists, they do not have to purge an existing order themselves. They are the existing order, one which has existed since 1066 and shows no sign of losing power a millennium later. Open warfare, mass genocide, political purges, civil wars? That stuff were all settled centuries ago. We just don't do that anymore.

Literally - our last genocide was over a hundred years ago, and nobody even remembers it. Even the notoriously tenacious IRA have called it a day and quit. (fortunately - I am NOT an apologist for terrorism!)

All our rulers have to deal with these days are a few working class Johnnies, who are for the most part shut up in large cities away from "decent folk" (ie, rich people). If we stray out of our little bantustans a few Bobbies will suffice to herd us back where we belong but otherwise, all's good in the hood for those toffee nosed fuckers.

Remember the Beanfield!

Also, people don't fight for their rights - so they have none. Britain is so depressingly tame; beneath the radical pose, our activists are pussies when it comes right down to it. After all these years, they still don't understand that class conflict takes place in the terrain of everyday life, not the battlefield of the Spectacle. You can have all the riots you like, we'll still have to go to work in the morning, live in overpriced, rabbit-hutch accommodation, play in controlled, contrived corporate nightmares little different to our workplaces.

And we'll be happy. That's their secret. Somehow, for some reason, most people in this country are happy with their lot. The government treats them like shit, but they love it. They enjoy being treated with contempt - unless of course the people dishing it out aren't in power. Then they get pissy - not so much because they feel insulted by how patronizing liberals and socialists can be, but because liberals and socialists are "getting above their station". They're upsetting the "natural order" which my overly-deferential countryfolk worship like a god - constantly and unconsciously.

How fucked up do you have to be to admire these things?

All of which changes our entire problem from a political one to a personal one: How do I exist in such a suffocating society when I'm the only one who actually feels suffocated by it? Drugs suit some people. Others, insanity. Still others play revolutionary, like those role-playing games that are so popular: LARPers, as they say.

But let's deconstruct this problem we have with deferentialness. I think it comes down to the rural mentality. Anglo-Saxons never really urbanized psychologically, even as they were among the first mass urban societies since ancient times. Perhaps it came too early. In Britain they speak with provincial accents even in the middle of big cities, while in the US they do not entirely retain the same rustic mentality, elections there are rigged to ensure their large rural population has enough political power to decide a Presidential election even with three million fewer votes than the "loser". Meanwhile Australia is still actually a predominantly rural society - as is Canada. 

Culturally, Anglo deference shares the same origins: The British peasantry. We have never quite shaken that off. The Russians and French murdered their aristocracy, the German Kaiser abdicated in disgrace, and the other Euro-monarchs have all succumbed to some degree of humility, made some concession to democracy, if not outright Republicanism - but we have always worshipped the royals, the aristocracy, and the rich, and that is our main problem: We have a peasants' worldview.

On the nose. PS: Please don't sue me!

 

Perhaps the greatest irony of modern anti-racism is that, far from considering themselves a master race, the problem with white people is that they are so submissive to those in power that they cannot countenance anyone overthrowing their masters for any reason - and will fight tooth and nail to retain their own chains, let alone those of other people. Of course the bastards are racist - they're even bigoted against themselves!

Until that stops, until we see working class consciousness and working class unity, nothing will ever change. People in Anglo-Saxon societies will continue to be dominated by the same arseholes who have run the show for a thousand years: The rich.

Until then, like the song says: Pray for daylight. Or you could always make it happen!

https://iww.org.uk/

https://www.acorntheunion.org.uk/contact

A Spectacular stock market? Or, Guy Debord finally gets his day in the sun!

The Economist published a fascinating editorial that, fortunately, I believe disproves itsself. The thesis of which is that the Situationists were right and political economy is now completely spectacular. 

The thesis, written in an offhand way in an article about overvalued markets, goes like this: On top of the already notorious spectacular politics, we have a spectacular stock market which provides only the illusion of a free market, but whose real purpose is to provide bread-and-circuses style entertainment and a way for ordinary people to feel as if they are participating and can even "beat the system" - as seen in movements such as /r/WallStreetBets.

Such a theory has consequences: It follows from this that in reality, the economy is completely divided up between the big corporations and politicians, effectively it is a planned economy, though not a socialist one. This not only isn't theoretical, it isn't even a secret - the economy is openly manipulated by governments and corporations - as we all know, the real conspiracies take place in plain sight.

Spectacular stock markets, therefore, are basically a safety valve, one which replaces Leftist activism and even improves on it by preventing people from thinking outside of the system and potentially making participants rich. 

Spectacular Leftism (as opposed to actual organizing, such as trade union activism) had a very real problem, in that, by definition, it must not only not promise to make most participants wealthy, it actively promises to make participants poor. 

 I used to hang around with crusties myself because I actually was poor, rather than a wannabe, and I can tell you from brutal experience that "activism" of this sort promises a penitents' life of cold water, abandoned buildings, and regular beatings while stockmarket "activism" (or just participation) promises to buy you a house, put your kids through college, pay for your granny's operation, etc, etc, etc.

So anyway: It's all a lie, the stock market is bread and circuses, they've done an end run around us, and blah, blah, blah. It's got legs, I guess.

However, if this were entirely true, it would not be in the editorial page of The Economist. People may conspire in plain sight these days, but they  do not like to admit certain things even to themselves, such as "our profession is a complete fucking joke and we are all being taken for fools by even more powerful elitists than ourselves."

Situationism / Debordism is all very well and good, but like a lot of left wing philosophy it has the potential of turning into a weapon of the system, a weapon against change. It has a self defeating core that says "Hey guys you're all actually in the Matrix, nothing you do can actually change anything, it's all the Spectacle, don't even bother" - that's a counsel of despair, and anyone who promotes despair is not your friend.

I mean, it was in The Economist!

The City as Theme Park - thoughts on the Yuppie Problem.

If the 20th century gave us the decline of the city and the rise of the suburb, the 21st century showcases the city as a sort of live-in theme park for the rich, in which all you have to do is turn up and pay up, and everything is provided for you.

Let's role play. Pretend you're a "young professional" (ie, yuppie).  You buy your yuppie flat, which costs you enough money that you don't have to live around poor people, and are surrounded by other yuppies. You go shopping in a small supermarket built into the estate or tower block a la JG Ballard. (Well, not exactly...)

You rarely, if ever, rub shoulders with the natives. But that's OK, because just like when Great-Grandfather went to India, these latter-day Indians, the "natives" of the city don't matter - you do.

Your cultural life is curated - You spend your leisure time at huge, overhyped, corporate cultural events staged in corporate venues for corporate profit. You get your information about these from corporate media. You know nothing about the citys' rich cultural history and traditions, though of course you came here for the "culture" and the "music", you don't really want to want to know about anything that requires you to do any work - you're a consumer, after all, and that's what you do. Consume. They put on the fun, you pay them, and you "have" the fun.

I've long asked myself: How is it that yuppies can both get a massive music festival thrown for them at everyone elses expense, and also get to have all the cool clubs shut down or restricted because they make too much noise?

Because the city is a theme park, and theme parks do not support independent businesses. They are run by corporate, just like modern cities - and this means that very soon, you'll be about as likely to find a traditional pub or club in a big city as you are to find a lemonade stand at Disney World.

At least, it would get that bad if there weren't serious problems with this system.

For a start, the life cycle of the yuppie is such that all the residents of the high-priced high rises and other abominations they've replaced so many city buildings with, will move to the suburbs in around 10 years. They have to do this in order to spawn - you can't bring up a kid in an adult theme park, it's just not desirable, and yuppies always get what they want.

This means that corporates need  to constantly attract new buyers for yuppie flats, there is a continual churn and turn-over. This may be difficult to maintain in a world which is rapidly running short of resources; not many people will be attracted to live in high rises when power cuts become routine, and not many will want to shop at inflexible corporate supermarkets when food rationing is taking place - not when they can, say, buy stuff at a farm shop instead. Or even grow it themselves in a big, look-at-me-I'm-so-sustainable, prepper-survivalist kind of way.

There's also problems with civil disorder - the post-Lockdown riots took place right in the middle of Yuptown, potentially depressing property prices - and at one point, even starting fires outside their buildings!

I predict that now that things are starting to go to shit, the yuppies will run like rats from a sinking ship. They will leave Bristol, Brighton, Manchester, and Liverpool in droves and flee to the countryside and the suburbs as if their lives depended on it, because they do. They'll be Farmer Palmer's problem, not ours.

Afghanistan: What happens next may surprise you

 The Chinese embassy in Kabul signalled on Sunday that it had been contact with the Taliban and would be staying put. Russia said it saw no need to evacuate its embassy for the time being. Turkey said its embassy would continue operations.
-South China Morning Post, 16 / 8 / 2021:
Afghanistan: US lowers flag at Kabul embassy as Taliban seize power

"You can't buy an Arab, but you can rent one."
-Israeli proverb.

I think the Taliban are going to sell out.

The entire country of Afghanistan is one massive Lithium mine. Lithium is the wonder metal in Lithium batteries - Lithium is the reason electric cars do 200 miles rather than 50 (if that), and the reason phones are slim, lightweight devices rather than the "bricks" people of a certain age remember having in the late 90s. They're also the reason laptop computers are portable rather than transportable, and the reason the kids all have little speakers that fit in a coat pocket  instead of massive ghetto blasters you carry on your shoulder.

Enough Gen-Xing now. Lithium is a vital part of the modern world, and the growth in demand for electric vehicles means that lithium will likely be the new oil... and Afghanistan is its' Saudi Arabia. The people that run Saudi Arabia hate everyone as well, they are also primitivist fascists, but while they might hate us, they just love our money......

So it is with Afghanistan. The Turks, Chinese and Russians are forming a loose alliance, a counterpoint to NATO which defends *their* "way of life". They need Afghanistan for the same reason we've needed Saudi Arabia - and I don't think they'll take kindly to dope pushers and terrorists setting up shop there. But they know how much the Taliban shit up the West, and having a well-muzzled attack dog on hand does tend to make negotiating with hostile others a lot less... difficult.

But anyway - that war is over, America lost already - the Taliban have no need to fight it all over again and risk everything they've gained.

Besides, the '80s-era Mujihadeen must be getting on in years now. Bin Laden was in his 20s when he went to Afghanistan, and would be in his sixties now. So are his confederates. When you're young, you're radical, you want to defeat superpowers, topple skyscrapers and defy the West from your mountain lair - but when you reach a certain age, you want to chill out, relax, have a bit of fun, repress your own people for a change! And a Lithium deal would allow them to do that. China and Russia don't need to guarantee security, but I know for a fact the Turks could sell them some lovely drones that would make short work of any interlopers - and the Chinese electronics industry will pay handsomely for all that lovely lith under their feet.

They'll do business, and before you know it, the country will be turned into a billion phones for Chinese teenage girls to watch their favourite K-Pop bands on, and a billion cars for their Dads to drive to work in. 

 I hope so anyway, because the alternative is too horrible to even contemplate.

Further reading:

https://nypost.com/2021/07/05/china-ramping-up-afghanistan-involvement-amid-us-withdrawal/

https://thediplomat.com/2021/08/china-in-afghanistan-trade-and-terrorism/

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/beware-taliban-promises-afghanistan-envoy-china-warns-2021-08-06/

https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/China-moves-swiftly-to-exploit-the-void-in-Afghanistan

Military technology, the rise and fall of empires, and the attack of the drones.

The Post-Imperial Age

It occurs to me that we live in a post-imperial age.

It's not just any specific empire that is obsolete, but imperialism generally. Technology has made military imperialism completely impossible to sustain.

The Americans and Russians both tried it and were slapped down by the same technological forces. Essentially, nuclear bombs and automatic wepaons have rendered imperialism obsolete.

 

The Mongol Empire was one of the largest empires even known, and the only one to ever encompass the territories in China, mid-Eurasia, the Middle East, AND Europe.

If you tried that now, you'd have about four sets of nuclear weapons headed your way along with about a billion people ready to shoot holes in you.

Nuclear bombs make it impossible to attack well-armed countries, and automatic weapons have made it impossible to conquer poorly armed countries. You can still take territory, but as the USA and the USSR found out, you can't keep it.

In the days of the Mongol Empire, before firearms, the basic infantry unit was a swordsman and the basic cavalry unit was a horseman. You generally had to be male (because they were all male-dominated cultures), you had to be young and fit, and you had to undergo years of training. This made it a simple matter of numbers, you spam the enemy with superior manpower, and you win because all the military units have to be so well trained, there are no partisans in the woods waiting to strike. Even historically difficult regions such as the Middle East and Afghanistan were easily subdued by the literal hordes commanded by the Mongols.

Today, anyone can be a soldier. You could easily raise a company-strength unit from my tower block alone - you just take someone between the age of 15 and 60, give them an automatic rifle, and you've got a soldier. This makes retaining territory impossible- the Mongols would have been constantly harassed by guerillas until they collapsed economically.


The Drone Age

I wonder what drones will do to upset this? Today it is possible for a single infantryman to deploy a weapon which can fly off and intelligently, autonomously attack a target consisting of up to a small platoon, definitely something at squad level - or perhaps a single lightly armoured vehicle. Air assets can also be attacked by a lone infantry soldier (and have been this vulnerable since the 1980s), but perhaps not intelligently - drones are good for fighting enemies on the ground, at least so far.

Drones are cheap, but unlike automatic rifles require access to some sort of high tech manufacturing - the main powers doing interesting things with drones today are Turkey, Israel, and Iran (and their clients). So we'll see a resurgence of mid-sized powers jumping up and making gains.

What do drones do against guerillas? Do they upset the current balance of power? I think we'll find out in the next few years; if someone takes over Afghanistan, Iraq calms down, and the Palestinians sue for peace, we'll know that drones have effetively decimated their guerilla armies. Drones could prove quiet devastating to morale; imagine the scene, you're a militant, you're dug in to some well defended area in Sadr City, Gaza, or Tora Bora, quite happily sitting there on a big pile of weapons and supplies, and then one day, BANG - everything explodes. You don't see it coming, and if you survive the attack you have no idea what's happening. Perhaps you think there's been an air attack - a missile has struck you, it's bad, but it appears to be over now.

Then your enemies, the bastards, stroll in with rifles and shoot all of the survivors. A hasty defence is mounted, but even if it's effective for a short time, all your foes have to do is trot over to their supply vehicles, grab more quadcopters, toss them into the air, and you get blown up all over again. Repeat until you are all dead.

So what might a post-drone world look like?

* The endless, miserable Israel / Palestine conflict would finally be over. Some sort of humiliating peace will be imposed, which will suck for the Palestinians, but at least the rest of us won't have to put up with their whining.

* Afghanistan will finally be opened up for development, probably by the Chinese. They're already making diplomatic inroads, and the people there are desperate for the Taliban to fuck off and die. So if someone turns up and kills them all with drones (and I'm talking about modern ones, not the stupid barbaric sledgehammers the Americans used to ruin so many weddings), there will be much gratitude among the populace towards any conquerers - especially if they're not Western or Russian.

* Iraq will finally stabilize. They might even get some sort of remotely functional democracy going. They may ally with the Iranians, or they may go Western, or even hang out with the Chinese or the Turks - it depends on who successfully markets their drones to them first.

* Geopolitically, the beneficiaries of this are likely to be states which do not have the same sort of moral compunction about using autonomous wepaons to kill. In the West there is a bit of a taboo about this, it comes from the experience of landmines, which persisted in the environment for decades after WWI and WWII, and the successful campaigns against cluster bombs, which can act as mine-laying devices. But drones are not landmines; drones open up areas to conquest while landmines are an "area denial" weapon, which act to close regions off.

So we'll see a rise of mid-size military powers and non-Western actors. Russia may win, but it may lose huge if it doesn't get its shit together fast. I can see the Ukreanians pushing them out successfully, leading to a Cuban Missile Crisis type situation when Ukreanian troops reach the Russian border.


Drones VS Nukes

Nuclear wepaons are interesting. They're the only kind of weapon whereby you can only win a war by NOT using them. Seen that way, there have been several nuclear wars, we just don't notice them because the bombs never actually get dropped, someone somewhere climbs down. The most recent one I'm aware of is North Korea VS the USA, which the North Koreans effectively won - they printed a lot of bluster, threatened everyone, *someone* set off that air raid warning system in Hawaii, and the next thing you knew, Trump and Kim are the best of friends!

Drones don't effect nuclear weapons, but the only way to defeat a drone swarm, other than impossibly superior numbers (perhaps a drone swarm of your own) is to pop a nuke a few miles up. The electromagnetic pulse would effectively disable their electronics, and as long as the detonation was high up enough, it wouldn't even have to kill anyone.

Imagine the Ukranian Army scores a whole load of good shit from the Turks or someone. They rush off into battle, chase those Russian assholes back accross the border, and... keep coming. The Russians panic, Dead Hand is hastily switched off, then on, then off again, and a Rockechiki somewhere goes "I know what to do!" presses the button, and seveal tens of miles above Western Russia, there's a flash of light and all the drones fall from the sky.

This would cause a lot of hot air and talk, but little could actually be done. After all, Russia would have nuked itsself, in self defence, and nobody would be directly killed by the bomb. But it would obviously lower the bar for the use of nukes, and, until cheap, workable electromagnetic pulse weapons are developed, after such an event there's a risk nuclear weapons would be seen as part of the armoury, rather than a tool for politicians.

EMP bombs VS Drones

However, we're more likely to see EMP and directed-energy weapons turned against drones. A microwave device that sits on a Humvee has already been developed, all it needs to fight drones is the requisite AI.

People in the know probably know there is a window of time in which mid-level powers can use drones effectively, before the real big spenders learn how to blast them out of the sky, probably with microwave weapons or possibly E-Bombs.

Scenario: Falklands War II

I wouldn't be at all surprised, for instance, if a second Falklands War took place. I can see a situation arising where Argentina falls to the far Right, as have so many other nations, and they decide to grab the islands with a surprise attack. Drones are cheap - the Azerbaijani military budget is on the same scale (3 billion or so) as Argentine spending; it is not at all economically inconceivable.

The military garrison would be overwhelmed by a surprise drone attack - Drones are too small to be targeted by radar and too numerous to shoot down. It would be a horribly one-sided battle; even if the British military garrison saw it coming there would be little they could do. Yes, we have all sorts of amazing American weapons, but these weapons are obsolete, useless against the new technology which allows a soldier to take out a squad, a squad to take out a platoon, a platoon to take out a company... and so on.

Without an answer to the drones, any reconquest attempt would be doomed to failure. The only conventional attack that might have any chance of success would be a full-on carpet bombing of the area, which would tend to kill the very people we're trying to save (ie, the islanders). Argentine troops would garrison themselves in a civilian area, making such an attack unlikely; if it did take place we'd win, but at the cost of turning Port Stanley into a pile of rubble. I don't think that would happen.

So we try to take the islands back with a ground invasion a la 1982. And the Argentinians would simply throw their quadcopters into the air and wait for our guys to die. And that would be that; the end of Anglo military superiority, a fitting footnote to the fall of Afghanistan.

I'm not a military expert; I'm just a dickhead on the internet, so these ramblings are probably not worth the server they're stored on. But it's a thought; the whole world might be about to turn upside-down - and this is just a lay analysis of military affairs. Who knows what else will emerge from the rise of AI? A return to planned economies? Endless dictatorship? The manipulation of public opinion has already been more or less perfected, which strongly implies this. Then again, people might wise up and reclaim democracy from our new AI autocrats - and that's what I hope for. 

One thing is certain: Things are not going to stay the same.

Further Reading:

https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2021/06/turkish-drone-sets-international-buzz-over-killer-robots

https://www.overtdefense.com/2021/06/02/the-turkish-kargu-2-carries-out-the-first-autonomous-drone-attack-un-report-says/

https://www.dw.com/en/artificial-intelligence-cyber-warfare-drones-future/a-57769444

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/29/uk-defence-secretary-hails-azerbaijans-use-of-drones-in-conflict

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_X_9oWLmfU

 

Colston: Correcting some misunderstandings

 (This is an old Reddit post, with slight edits and a little extra at the start)

It's a year since the Colston statue was toppled, starting a transatlantic iconoclast movement that, some argue, went a bit nuts. (At one point someone even started a petition against a statue of Ghandi ffs!) I would like to set the record straight as to how it all started, because a lot of people now describe this movement as some kind of ultra-woke, cancel culture nonsense, when in fact, it started as a VERY good thing indeed.

In many ways, this was a very local affair. Here in Bristol, England, half the city is named after Colston - streets, schools, even pubs and office towers... And the man was a horrible shit. A mass murderer who ran a corporation called The Royal African Company - a company which trafficked in human misery and made fortunes out of mass murder and slavery, a man whose crimes rival those of any Nazi - but which he gets away with because he did it long ago. OK, he did it long ago, does that mean we have to deify the bastard?

Local businessmen had erected the statue and made him into a city father over a century after his death - and continued to defend him well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Year after year you'd hear these bloated borgeous scumbags defending a man who belonged in an unmarked grave following execution, not on a plinth in the centre of town. The council did nothing to address the widely held issues people had with the guy, and eventually, local people took matters into their own hands.

You can't understand the Colston affair without understanding Bristol's local politics. The city has a sizeable black community and a long history of inter-racial solidarity dating back to World War 2, and the powers that be, from the Merchant Venturers (dodgy local freemason types who kept bits of Colstons' corpse around to worship) to our useless centrist council, did sod all about it. To understand what Colston meant to black people, it was as if they'd kept a statue of Eichmann up in the middle of Warsaw "because history".

Bristol was in many ways built on slavery and black people know this. It's part of local black culture to curse our status as a "slave port" - especially Afro-Carribeans, the literal descendants of those enslaved by Colston. There has been the bare minimum of official acknowlegments of the citys' part in this crime against humanity, until recently the only acknowlegements of it were: a tiny plaque in an out of the way part of the Docks, a mural nobody noticed, and a footbridge patronizingly named after some bastards' house slave - this in a country that is obsessed with history!

I backed the toppling of Colston and still do. It was a great moment for my city, where people came together in solidarity to do something that had needed to be done for a long, long time. This wasn't "cancel culture", this was grass roots, democracy at work. People had tried everything, and nobody did anything about it. And then one day... they did.

This isn't America (thank God). Colston wasn't George Washington, he was a grubby, nasty piece of shit who would be hunted down like a dog if he did what he did today. He didn't deserve a statue, he deserves to be used as a toilet. Yeeting him into the docks was the best thing that Bristol did in a long time. Nothing "stupidpol" about it - quite the opposite, that day there was an incredible atmosphere of solidarity and love, I haven't seen anything like it before or since. Please don't assume we're as stupid and ahistorical as Americans - we know exactly what we're doing.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Normies VS NEETS: Why do people hate the unemployed?

(This is another repost of an overly long Reddit comment that was too good to lose. Might put it in a magazine or something later)

Very Short Answer: Resentment.

 

Short Answer: They want to be like us, but they don't have the guts. It's easier to resent those who have escaped the system than to resent the system itsself.

 

Long TL;DR Answer: Resentment. Also they just like having someone to dunk on. If you're a wagie it's a bit like being a woman in medieval culture - you're looked up to in theory, but in practice you are treated like dirt. You're essential to society, which literally needs you to reproduce itsself - yet you're society's bitch.

 

It is a peculiar quirk of the human mind that it likes to take short cuts. The mind concentrates on what appears in front of it, that's how magic tricks work. In a slave society, people see slavery and subjugation as normal - even their own! It's cope - if you can't escape, you make a virtue out of necessity and come to see your own subjugation as not only normal but necessary. (Examples: Black Republicans. Working class Tories. Female ISIS recruits.)

 

So the system enslaves people, but people don't resent those who enslave them, they admire them - instead, they resent free people, whom they see as "unfairly" escaping the "natural" conditions of bondage.

 

Thus, if you're a wagie, when someone comes along who is the same as you yet has managed to escape slavery, you're gonna hate those fuckers.

And much like medieval women, who fetishized "purity" and "motherhood" (because they had no choice) and despised "prostitutes" and "witches", wage-slaves fetishize "hard work" and "productivity", and also despise the "lazy" and "antisocial" NEETs.

 

Because NEETs, like the witches and whores of ye olden times, represent what society's slave class wants yet can never have - freedom.

 

Look at what they say about us "They don't work yet they got better stuff than what we have!". Of course this isn't true, what they actually resent is that we don't really care about having what they have. We know what's really valuable - our right to choose to do what we want with our lives.

Medieval witches flew around on broomsticks - a powerful symbol of magic and freedom. We're the witches of industrial society, flying away from their prison-world on broomsticks of imagination!

 

And that's why they hate us.

So much to post about, thank god nobody reads this shit

 So let's do a quick run-down of wot I reckon will happen:

Nobody will be punished for the U.S. coup attempt.

Nobody high-up, that is. Obviously Kyle and Karen Assault-Weapon McTaserBalls are gonna get the book thrown at them. That's what they're for - they're basically cover for the attempted coup.

Trump will get away with it, and so will his confederates. As a result, couping your way to power will be seen as risk-free, and there will be another attempt, either four years from now or eight years from now. It won't end well.

The Coronavirus will probably go on for a good few years.

Not enough people will take the vaccine for it to provide herd immunity. As a result, the virus will mutate until the vaccine is no longer effective. It might even become more deadly, though I think it is as likely to become more transmissible and less deadly.

The post-Coronavirus world will be vicious for Westerners.

Westerners are used to being rich and in charge. This is now over. The post-pandemic world will be divided into the places that handled it well, and the places that didn't. 

Those that didn't will become the new "second-world", relegated to developing country status. Our economic ideology means that we will never be able to pull ourselves out of it, because the rich will call in their loans long before we can finish the job of fixing the economy. After all, unrestricted pillage and corruption is working fine for them.

It will be a horrible new world of vicious competition for resources, particularly for ordinary people. I just can't see the rich relaxing their stranglehold on democracy now they have so much power; they are able to brainwash people into going out to work in the middle of a pandemic, hell, they (or more likely, the Russians) even get people to turn down vaccinations! Which brings me to

Politics is over, and so is this blog.

I probably won't be blogging anymore, at least not on this page. The situation is just so utterly fucked, I don't see politics having any power to change anything for the better anymore. Politics is over, it was over as soon as people lost the ability to think for themselves. 

Political freedom only means anything if you have free will, and we don't have free will anymore.  Instead, we have become a society of meat robots prey to weaponized memes, conspiracy theory bullshit, and out-and-out brainwashing.

How did Mander describe us? "A mass of Manchurian Candidates", indeed.

Fuck that noise.

Leftist failings and the possibility of Anarcho-Social Democracy

Some problems and a possible solution

OK, I know I'm always going on about this, but really...

WHY ARE OUR GUYS SO DUMB?

Take this article for example. Let me show you why it is a stupid article.

1. She allows herself to be photographed looking like she has just been sucking on a delicious lemon.

This really is a beginner's mistake. Presentation is vital; would you read anything written by someone who constantly scowls disapprovingly at you?

2. She mistakes privileges for rights and rights for privileges.

The title says it all (and yes, I have said the same thing on this very blog). But that is wrong. It is bad framing. Being alive should never be considered a privilege, and as soon as you do so, you lose.

Is there such a thing as "white privilege"? Well, yes, you could put it that way, perhaps, although it is grammatically incorrect, at least in white-majority countries. 

But it is not helpful to frame it in this way, especially when you are speaking in terms of life and death. I repeat: Being alive should never be considered a privilege; modern juristictions and successful activists speak instead of "human rights". This article mentions the phrase "privilege" 11 times. It mentions "rights" not at all. Although at the bottom of the page, it says "all rights reserved."

Perhaps it was  bad interview. If someone had printed an interview with me and it came accross like that, with its sour portrait and its endless scolding of an entire group of people, I would ask to have it taken down. If they refused, I would then approach a lawyer.

Claudia Rankine clearly isn't a stupid person. I am sure they don't hand out PhDs to morons. But intellectuals, especially American intellectuals, seem especially prone to behaving like idiots. It's as if their intelligence works against itsself; they get so wrapped up in signifiers and concocting new forms of jargon that have to be explained at length, that they forget that their function as activists isn't to show everyone how clever they are and flex their intellectual muscles, it's to help with "the work", to stop these horrific human rights abuses in their tracks.

Again, America is a huge part of the problem. Americans have a really hard time understanding the concept of universal rights, "the Commons" - something we all share and all have as a birthright. Even though universal human rights were supposedly enshrined in their Constitution, that document is the oldest that I know of that confuses rights with privileges - notoriously, the right to have a gun is enshrined before the right to a fair trial, the right not to be enslaved, the right to vote, the rights of women to vote, the right to life itsself, and even the right to your own property, practically a religion over there, is not considered as important as the right to bear arms. Everywhere else in the world, having a gun is like having a car, it's a dangerous weapon and in the wrong hands can kill even the person who owns it, so they are subject to stringent controls and licensing. Not so in the USA.

Americans also don't understand the concept of wealth held in common, even abstract concepts such as human rights, because to them everything is private. They think that if one person gains, another must lose. Everything is a zero-sum game to them. So that explains that- the capitalistic culture of the US is a form of ideology, in the Slavoj Zizek sense, which tends to taint everything a person does. To use the language of the Social Justice activists, the problem is systemic and unconcious.

But that doesn't explain why the Left has been so stupid in the past.

I've been either a left-wing activist or a keen supporter or at least a sympathetic observer of the Left for thirty years. I went to my first protest in 1990; I went to my last protest in 2019.

Since then I've seen big wins - like the Poll Tax campaign, gay rights, and local victories for squatters and the homeless - morph into terrible, horrible losses.

I've watched the Left, or as they were then, the environmental movement, screw up in the 1990s. As a result, the environment is fucked.

I've watched the Left screw up the anti-war movement in the 2000s. As a result, the government can basically bomb the shit out of anyone they feel like.

I've watched the Left screw up the anti-capitalist movement in the late noughties and early 2010s. As a result, capitalism has, as Umair Haque puts it, gone full Soviet - the government spends endless amounts of cash propping up the stock market and big business while the people literally go hungry on breadlines.

Now the Left are screwing up on human rights and ethnic minority issues, as a result, the American police are a literal death squad and racist attitudes are entrenched at all levels of society, and not just in the USA. The news is grim for sexual minorities as well; even many Leftists of the previous generation are openly hostile to Transgender people, including people whom I know personally.

This isn't just an American problem - I've watched all this happen in the UK as well. I've watched as black activists framed their cause in terms of resentment for whites, I've seen anti-capitalism degenerate into a pointless conspiracy theory jerk-off, I've observed the anti-war movement rapidly turn into an anti-Semitic bandwagon of sympathy for terrorists, and I've been there when environmentalists sat around and got stoned, got in peoples' way, or just smashed things up for the cameras.

It has driven me to despair. I no longer believe the Left will be relevant in my lifetime except as a straw man for the Right to knock down, a sort of controlled opposition.

I think the only hopeful strategy remaining is to elect social-democratic and liberal parties (which the Left also oppose unless they're in charge of them). We can then leverage our protests to get what we want from them, as they are more likely to resort to reform than the Right (who simply repress protest with brutal violence).

ANARCHO-SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

This is the meaning of Anarcho-Social Democracy. "Anarcho-", which means "going to demonstrations, drinking a lot, listening to punk rock and dressing all in black", means you're not confined to any particular leftwing party or ideology. This decentralization has disadvantages, but the great advantage is that it is hard for any one group or party to monopolize power. It also means that anyone, anywhere, can join in, from liberals to socialists to sympathetic capitalists (depending on the issue of course). Anarchism is, generally speaking, inclusive.

Social democracy, because, well, you have a vote, it's the only formal power you have, so you might as well use it to elect a somewhat more sympathetic government than we would have otherwise. It's not much, granted, but it exists and you'd be stupid not to excercise this right.

Some thoughts on the origins of Anglo authoritarianism, or How Sausages Are Made.

Evolutionary psychology is often considered a Right-wing discourse - a reactionary, racist pseudo-science that defends the status quo and allows vast swathes of people to be written off. It could well be misused as such. But scientific truth is true whether it's ideologically convenient for you or not, so I have to ask myself... what if there's something to it?

What follows is the culmination of my own darkest thoughts, and an attempt to answer the classic question: "Why the hell do poor working class people keep voting Tory, why do they support the rich, attack other poor people, and generally assist in their own oppression?"

In no way do I want any of it to be true.

Growing up, I noticed a few things. The white kids were either posh, or thick. If you weren't thick, you were automatically "posh", "middle class", "a keener"...and this was a BAD thing. The black kids didn't have that sort of divide; they were just black. Where we established a pecking order of bullies and bullied, they stuck together - if you were racist, they'd all kick the shit out of you. Fair do's.

Later, at college, I noticed that the computer science and technology department, where all ambitious and intelligent people went, had a disproportionate number of black students, who were far more hard-working and studious than the gang of dole-ites and stoners who made up my own affinity group. This was surprising to me because at the time (the 1990s), black people were being encouraged by the media and popular culture to get involved in crime and were very much stereotyped as criminals.

Have you ever wondered why the English working classes are so stupid? Why white, working class people in particular are so slavish, so devoted to drudgery and back breaking work? Why those who do break the habit of work  are so utterly irresponsible, why when they can't work, they smash up nice flats and go on drugs, why they get pissed up all the time? Why they seem to have no creativity and no culture other than patriotism and vapid celebrity bullshit?

This isn't some eugenicist, far-right twaddle (though I admit it sounds bad). I know I'm a misanthrope, but statistics show that white boys do worse at school and have done for years (even though they get better jobs when they grow up anyway). Why?

Because the industrial revolution was a crime against humanity.

It was bred into them. Literally. Nineteenth century industrialisation was like a breeding programme for stupid people.

In order to get a workforce, ordinary folk were run off of their land in the Enclosures and herded into giant cities. The only way of making a living there was basically to work yourself to death in a factory. These jobs were not only back breakingly hard... they were BORING.

Think of it. Every day, except possibly Sunday, you screw in bolts on an assembly line... or something equally mind numbing. It's noisy, hot, and crowded. If you make a mistake, you either (a) cause an accident, in which case you die, or are crippled and cannot work, or (b) get fired, in which case you die.

This is because chronic unemployment was a killer in those days - instead of going on the dole you had a choice between a life of crime and the Workhouse...

Most crimes were punished by removal from the gene pool - either via the death penalty or transportation to a penal colony.

The Workhouse was essentially a proto-concentration camp (complete with mass graves) in which, among other things, husbands and wives were split up and inmates were NOT allowed to have sex. So for non-criminals, chronic unemployment also resulted in removal from the gene pool... and intelligence strongly implied unemployment, because nobody with half a brain could have possibly lasted in those jobs for longer than a few weeks at most. Certainly not long enough to have children.

And if you were just smart enough to escape? You were also out of the gene pool. You either went to America, or (far less often) you became middle class, leaving your old life behind.

Thus, selection pressure changed the English proletariat. It blunted their sensoria, as those sensitive to the clamour and noise of the factory would have been bred out, it diminished their intelligence and shaped their minds as those who couldn't fit into the drudgery of work ended up unemployed, and so forth.

This explains so much of people's everyday behaviour - not only the popularity of extremely loud, atonal music and noisy vehicle engines, but also people's credulity, the way people have total faith in absolutely ridiculous lies, our vapid culture, our emotional attachment to the State... because submissive and stupid people got to be genetically successful, while rebellious and / or intelligent people were not.

And this explains the failure of social democracy over here (and its success on the Continent). In Europe, they didn't have anything like our industrialization.

European industrialization took place piecemeal and evolved over centuries, rather than being imposed over a couple of decades. European ruling classes were not able to brutalize and enslave anything like that number of their own people until the Fascist and Communist regimes of the 20th century, if at all.

This is why the French working class are so radical - they had no Fascism OR Communism. Indeed, they enjoy a great culture and recent history of Resistance to Fascism in place of our authoritarian "Battle of Britain" siege mentality.

So in Europe they do not have a docile, submissive working class. In Europe, if you give someone a free flat, they do not smash it up, or sell it on and join the yuppies - they have solidarity, not individualism. In Europe, if you try and take away peoples' rights, they protest and often successfully put a stop to that sort of malarkey.

Because in Europe, the working classes have not been bred to be slaves.

This is the tragic thing about working class racism. What our ruling classes did to Africans was some truly Nazi-like evil, and what they did to their own people was some Brave New World bullshit as well - It's not a competition!

Nominally free, 19th century Englishmen would have no escape except death or emigration. Nominally free, the smart ones died, were transported, or left for a new life in the Colonies, while the dumb ones bred... and bred... and bred... and bred....
 

The UK population quadrupled over the 19th century, and that of England trebled

And now we're a country awash with dummies, whose only use is as a nominally privileged, docile labour force (akin to the Kulaks of old) and voting bloc for reactionary politicians (we call them the "Gammons" over here).

What do you think the ruling classes are going to do with them, when things get tough? What did they do in the past? Ever hear of World War One? The Trenches? Ypres? Millions of people were murdered by the system in a few short years - that's how these scum solve the population problem, they hurl it into some meat grinder of a war. Or encourage them to catch some disease...

This is an unpleasant theory, I know. I don't like it either. But it explains so much - particularly, it explains the affinity of Anglo culture generally for neoliberal capitalism and the far Right. Because Anglos have been stupefied by a kind of selective breeding that took place during our period of industrialization; Eugenics in reverse.

It bears repeating, and social justice activists must understand this: Anglos have a terrible history not just of enslaving others, but also each other. We are cannibals, and the horrific thing about it is, this strategy has been extraordinarily successful. 330 million Americans, 68 million Brits, 30 million Australians and New Zealanders, 37 million Canadians... that's nearly half a billion people who think they are free, but who are deeply, genetically, unfree. Some Brave New World bullshit indeed...

I always wondered why I was different. It's really lonely being working class, or at least, not middle class, and smart, or at least not stupid. Now I know why - my great grandfather and great grandmother came here from Egypt, whose populations were not subject to the same selection pressures, my grandmother was a second-generation immigrant. My grandfather was Welsh and came to England in the 1930s; not much is known about my mothers' family, but they appear to be somewhat French and lower middle class. My people are the smart Anglos - immigrants who anglicised (Great Grandfather Mahmoud changed his name to Richard and shagged his way through three continents before copping it in Canada), smart but sociopathic and thus easily able to climb the greasy pole... apart from my immediate family, who come from a black-sheep progenitor, and that's how I got here.

It's like the Anthropic Principle in reverse; I'm here to observe this stuff because my ancestors weren't part of it. They weren't part of that horrific extermination of thought and mind that took place in the 19th centurty.


WHAT THIS MEANS FOR LEFTIST PRAXIS

It's no coincidence, then, that the Communist Manifesto was written here - by two Germans.

So - What does this mean for Leftist praxis? Nothing good. It's possible this rigid social system is ripe for revolution, but it's bound to end in Soviet-style tears, because the English proletariat are not the superior ubermensch they think they are - they're the descendants of industrial slaves, who have literally been bred to be stupid and authoritarian. Like the Russians, they will recreate the system all over again.

And that, as they say, is why I drink. That's the reason, if I'm forced to define myself ideologically at all, why I'm some weird combination of social democrat and post-left anarchist.

Sure, it'd be great revenge if Big Daddy Stalin came back from the dead and mashed up the fuckers who screwed up this country so bad that people literally believe in the Flat Earth - but what's the point of a revolution if it's just going to change the face of the man who kills you?

A critique of the Left, from a Leftist perspective

I come here not to bury Leftism, but to critique it. You may not like what you are about to read, but you need to understand what you are doing wrong so you can do it right. So here's my critique of Leftism, from a Leftist or at least Left-sympathetic point of view... it's UK-centric I'm afraid, so note that, for instance, our SWP is not necessarily the same as your SWP.

I may update it as others critique my critique, in order to make it better. This isn't "changing history" so I can "win", I don't want to "win", this isn't about me personally - I want to help improve leftist discourse because I want the Left to win. Sincerely!  So, let's get into it...

Considering the opportunities they've had of late, I find it bizarre how much the Left keeps getting it wrong.

Oh come on, Ron. You knew this was coming.

 In street demonstrations for example, they either go for organized violence to such an insane degree that they lose public sympathy, as in the Black Bloc, or they just sit there and let the cops beat the shit out of them. Or march from A-B in a despondent, miserable fashion while Black Bloc'ers smash up a few shops so the media can have their daily dose of riot porn, changing nothing.

As I've said before, this isn't a good look.

In the past the understanding was that demonstrations were to be peaceful but if the authorities started something, people have a right to defend themselves, but now there's no sense of proportion or reality, it's all pure ideology - you're either out to riot or you're out to get beaten up / wander around miserably. But whichever it is, the choice is always completely self-defeating. Or like the Corbyn campaign last year... it's as if the Left are afraid of winning.

No! Really? Say it isn't so!

Consider the case of renewable energy. For decades, Left wingers have been enthusiastic boosters of renewables, yet today they have begun to talk down success stories and wallow in defeatism. What's with that?

Wikipedia describes self-defeating personality disorder as "a proposed personality disorder... never formally admitted into the (DSM-III-R) manual."

Here's a pretty good Knowing Better video on the subject:

(Why yes, I do recognize myself in this description!)

A diagnosis would have needed at least five traits... here are six traits which Leftists and the Left exhibit time and time again, with examples:

1. chooses people and situations that lead to disappointment, failure, or mistreatment even when better options are clearly available (EG: Specifically allying with Muslim religious fanatics and terrorists in the 00s, this went far beyond sticking up for religious minorities and well into the territory of collaborating with extreme reactionaries. This isn't just a Western thing either - they did it in Iran in the late 70s with predictable results)
2. incites angry or rejecting responses from others and then feels hurt, defeated, or humiliated (EG: Consistently making fun of working class people, despite same being their traditional constituency and indeed the whole point of Marxism)
3. rejects opportunities for pleasure, or is reluctant to acknowledge enjoying themselves (EG: Corbyn's aseticism, the misery and anhedonia which comprise the majority of SWP demonstrations)
4. fails to accomplish tasks crucial to their personal objectives despite having demonstrated ability to do so (EG: The way Corbyn and Sanders both failed at the last hurdles, and how Corbyn's chosen successor, Rebecca Long-Bailey, also failed miserably - precisely because Left-wing Labour members refused to vote for her!)
5. is uninterested in or rejects people who consistently treat them well (Example:  the constant abuse and harassment of left wing activists by left-wing activists, a problem brilliantly dissected at length by the YouTuber Contrapoints discussing her own "cancellation" in this video).
6. engages in excessive self-sacrifice that is unsolicited by the intended recipients of the sacrifice (A classic example of this is the Lefts' consistent rallying around Palestinian nationalists, despite same being utterly uninterested in Socialism and Socialism being an overtly internationalist, working class ideology. Another is their die-hard support of the BBC, a rightwing State broadcaster dominated by political conservatives.)

I say again, I come here not to bury Leftism, but to critique it - society needs the Left's ideas, their commitment to fairness and decency, their optimism about the human future... but we don't need their self-defeat, their misery, their palling up with utter bastards. We don't need Tankies and Trots, TERFs and SWERFs - we need something that has not been seen before, at least not recently... and I think we're going to get it.

I do think the Left will get better. Many of my earlier comments already feel dated to me (mainly cos I gave up on demos a couple of years ago and don't know what's happening now), and there is a new generation of people who grew up in the 21st century, a hardscrabble, tough time, totally unlike the self-indulgence of the late 20th, particularly the 1960s. They're willing to ask tough questions, including of themselves - OK, the endless agonizing can get a bit much sometimes, but they're good kids and they are facing far worse conditions than we (GenX) did.

There are new leaders as well - in particular I see a lot of potential in young women like Rebecca Long-Bailey and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represent that new generation. This ain't over... but it does take time to fix something that's broken, and I'd say to a lot of people in the old guard, myself included, sometimes you have to know when you're part of the problem and butt out. 

Which I have done by and large, apart from whining screeds like this one :-D