…since she couldn’t just ask elon to look on it like twitter & had to come up with it the “old-fashioned” way…the UK’s first female chancellor laid out a budget yesterday that aims to raise £40million

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/30/uk-labour-first-budget-what-and-how

…short version

…you don’t have to listen to the whole 20min thing…but it’s…interesting…how rishi sounds like he’s having such a good time…& they practiced a little call & response thing about all the stuff that’s “up”…& put some glee on it when they said the books had been “fiddled”

…funny how one of those fiddles…holding the income points that tip you into the next tax band & saying that they haven’t raised that even though they’ll raise the take because more people will qualify for higher rates…is just his lot’s trick repeated…& essentially the whole thing labour have been saying is…basically…that the tories played the country…offered a bunch of “jam tomorrow” promises without even trying to incorporate them into spending…which they seperately juiced so that they could compound how fucked they could leave those books…honestly…you only need the first couple of minutes of that clip & you can see he hasn’t looked that happy in years…this might actually be rishi in his element…but…compared to what else is going on…who really cares?

So Russia just fined Google $2.5 decillion.
byu/Coexistocrates inDamnthatsinteresting

https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/29/russian_court_fines_google/

…tempted to say it might put some things in perspective…like budgets…I mean…if you say you want a company…even one with a market cap in the $2trillion+ league…to pay a fine that’s

To put that into perspective, the World Bank estimates global GDP as around $100 trillion, which is peanuts compared to the prospective fine. Google would therefore have to find more money than exists on Earth to pay Moscow – but on Tuesday fell a little short of that mark when it posted $88 billion quarterly revenue.

…well…I guess you could say that says a few things…in a statement of intent sort of a way?

Musk first outlined his highly aggressive target at a raucous campaign rally in New York last weekend, promising to identify “at least $2 trillion in cuts” as part of a formal review of federal agencies that he would conduct if Trump wins next week’s election.

But the audacious pledge, which drew rapt applause, belied a harsh fiscal reality: Slashing the budget that steeply would require decimating an array of government services, including food, health care and housing aid — and it could erode funding for programs that lawmakers in both parties say they want to protect, from defense to Social Security.

By Tuesday, Musk appeared to acknowledge the economic risks of his proposal. On X, the social media site he owns, the tech mogul agreed with another user’s post that argued his federal review — and other Trump policies — risked a “severe overreaction in the economy,” causing financial markets to “tumble” before the country’s fiscal standing later improves.

“Sounds about right,” Musk wrote in response.

In the 2024 fiscal year, the U.S. government spent more than $6.75 trillion, according to the Treasury Department. For Musk to reach his target, particularly in a single year, his review would need to find a way to eliminate about one-third of all federal spending.

The $2 trillion cut would be virtually impossible to achieve, unless Musk extracts savings in areas long considered sacrosanct in Washington, including spending on the military and benefit programs like Social Security. Otherwise, the cuts to many domestic programs could exceed 80 percent next year, including for air safety, food inspections, infrastructure repairs and more, according to experts across the political spectrum.

…but…if all the magic-manic-pixie-dream-tariffs are going to bring in so much money & everything’ll be cheaper after all the foreigners get slung out…I thought there wouldn’t even be a federal deficit…because the US would file for chapter 11 & the adminsitration would get a new “Immunity Inc.” logo & elections would be one of the line items that got cut…so…totally doable, right…definitely not the kind of crap that’s just rishi’s one-weird-trick in a different suit…or black maga cap…that wouldn’t be exceptional enough for elon…right?

First is the matter of Musk’s timeline: He has not specified if he plans to slash $2 trillion immediately, or over a longer period, since budget experts generally assess fiscal impacts over a 10-year window. If he tries to find all of those savings in a single fiscal year, the consequences could prove catastrophic.

When Congress haggles over federal spending — often bringing the nation mere hours from a government shutdown — it often focuses on what’s known as discretionary spending. That money includes many programs at agencies like the Education Department, the Department of Labor and the Pentagon, which has awarded lucrative contracts to Musk’s SpaceX.

But discretionary spending amounted to about $1.6 trillion in the 2024 fiscal year, meaning even if Musk could cut nearly every dollar at most federal agencies — ending some federal college aid, wiping out funds for federal law enforcement and consumer protection and more — it still would not be enough to reach his goal.

Adding to the challenge, some Republicans historically have argued that defense funding should be off limits from any spending cuts, potentially forcing Musk to seek more savings elsewhere. Nor is the SpaceX chief likely to scrounge enough simply by focusing on federal waste and fraud alone, a frequent target of conservatives’ ire, which can sum up to about $300 billion annually, according to some estimates by government watchdogs.

…let’s be honest…I’d rather watch an actual dog & pony show…provided it was the family-friendly variety & not whatever horrowshow google would probably serve up if you asked the internet for examples

“The idea that one can cut $2 trillion in wasteful and unnecessary programs is absolutely absurd,” said Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a center-right think tank. “There’s a long history of the fantasy that one smart businessman will just identify trillions in waste, but that’s just not how it works.”
[…]
By his math, Goldwein said that Musk would have to slash all spending, including defense and entitlements, by one third to accomplish his goal in a single year — or, by an unfathomable 80 percent, if these and other politically sensitive programs were off the table. That aligned with similar estimates from the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which has opposed past GOP cuts.
[…]
Even stretching those savings out over a decade, the typical Washington long-term budget window, would mean spending reductions ranging between 25 and 60 percent, Goldwein said.

Republicans learned firsthand how difficult it can be to translate calls for severe austerity into spending reductions that voters can stomach. Soon after taking control of the House last year, far-right lawmakers tried but failed to secure a smaller demand — $130 billion in cuts — over the objections of fellow GOP members who thought it could severely harm their districts (and reelection prospects).

…I know it’s late in the game to be saying this sort of thing…but

This time, Trump has signaled that he could try to bypass Congress altogether for spending decisions — unilaterally seeking to cut some funding in a move that could trigger a high-stakes constitutional showdown.

In the meantime, the former president has endorsed new tax breaks, particularly for businesses, contributing to a broader economic agenda that could add about $8 trillion to the debt, according to CRFB.

“If he were saving $2 trillion over a decade, that would reduce it to $6 trillion,” Goldwein said, “which would be a meaningful improvement but still bad.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/29/elon-musk-2-trillion-budget-cuts-trump-election/

…uhhh

…can you jump chekhov’s gun?

One of the questions about the 2024 election that’s been sticking in my craw for a long time is this: Why do Republicans poll worse in every swing-state Senate race – they’ve trailed in virtually every poll in them – than in the presidential race?

That’s not usually how it works; Trump has actually generally underperformed GOP Senate candidates.

Well, a new North Carolina poll makes clear that it’s not just Senate races. The Elon University-YouGov poll showed the presidential race tied in the state. But Democrats not only lead the governor’s race by 21 points (thanks to GOP Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s demonstrated problems); they lead in four other statewide races by between five and eight points.

It seems unlikely that we’ll see so many swing-state voters split their tickets; we’ve seen fewer and fewer ticket-splitters in presidential election years.

The real question: Does it suggest a more Democratic-leaning electorate than we might appreciate – or at least more of an opening for Harris, since voters seem prepared to vote Democratic in other races? Or does it suggest that Republicans might ultimately win more Senate seats than current polls suggest, after they close those gaps?

It could be something we’re talking a lot about in a little over a week.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/29/campaign-moment/

…or not…depending on how good you’ve got at burying your head in the sand?

Today, exactly one week before the election, he will begin researching both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and make a decision about whom to support. He’s not sure where he’ll land—he is conservative on some social issues, but he doesn’t like Trump’s character.

Jarrell represents a set of Americans who, out of anxiety, exhaustion, or discouragement, are mostly tuning out campaign coverage yet will ultimately participate in the election. They’re political ostriches who, at the last minute, will take their head out of the sand. “For a decade now, people have started talking about news fatigue,” Ken Doctor, a news-industry analyst, told me. “People are tired of being bombarded with the news. And then it kind of matured into news avoidance.” This tendency escalated with the increasing ubiquity of both online news and Donald Trump, Doctor said.

Jarrell started purposefully ignoring campaign coverage after he noticed that his parishioners would come to him in the lead-up to elections and describe genuine fear about one candidate or the other taking the White House. He decided to recommend this strategy, of abstaining from the news until the final week of the race, to his parishioners, and to follow it himself.

“How much energy did America collectively spend imagining a Biden-Trump election only in July to have Biden drop out?” Jarrell said to me. “If you wait ’til the last week, that’s still enough time to make an informed decision, but you haven’t wasted all that emotional energy stressing about something that may not even come to pass.”

…maybe someone could break out the crayons & draw me a picture…but…how can I put this?

A sizable percentage of Americans seems to feel similarly. A 2022 Reuters Institute report found that 42 percent of Americans “sometimes or often actively avoid the news,” up from 38 percent in 2017. The most common reasons people gave for avoiding the news were that it focused too much on politics and COVID, that it was biased, or that it made them feel unhappy or fatigued. In April, the Pew Research Center reported that 62 percent of Americans were already worn out by coverage of campaigns and candidates. A May poll by NORC at the University of Chicago found that 49 percent of those surveyed either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I’m tired of receiving and processing news about the 2024 presidential election.” Not caring about politics is a hallmark of what political scientists call “low information” citizens, but unlike many in the low-information camp, political ostriches do intend to vote. They just don’t feel the need to follow the news in order to do so.

…truth…justice…& the pursuit of happiness…pursuit…is not…at the end of the day…or the beginning…or anywhere in between…a passive sort of a thing…you literally got to get after it…& if it had an opposite…I’mma-skip-all-the-bits-of-reality-that-make-me-unhappy…seems like it might be in the running to fit that cap?

In Jacksonville, Florida, 31-year-old Tawna Barker didn’t watch the debates, and on social media, she scrolls past political news, skipping what she feels are “inflammatory, heavily one-sided articles.” She plans to vote for a third-party candidate. “Neither [Trump nor Harris] really seems like they’re actually going to do anything to help us,” she told me.

…I’m not saying tawna is single-handedly winning the case for why we can’t have nice things

Cheryl Wilson Obermiller, a 66-year-old near Kansas City, Missouri, told me that she and her husband have swapped watching the news for taking walks or watching, say, Masterpiece Theater. She finds the news inflammatory, addictive, and occasionally insulting to people like her—she’s voting for Trump. She asks herself, “Am I wasting time watching politics when I could be helping my neighbor? And I think that’s something we all have to consider. Am I watching politics that are feeding in me an attitude that would make me look down on or dislike people?”

Obermiller still spends about an hour a day either reading or watching the news, down from about four to six hours several years ago. She gets the news that she does consume through Facebook groups and from Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld, “because I think he’s funny, even though a lot of times he says things that I kind of laugh about but I think are kind of mean,” she said.

…your neighbor, cheryl? …are you for fucking real, cheryl? …I’m not sure “your neighbor” could get you to think about them if they showed up in the shape of a SWAT team wake-up call follwed by a ride on the mass-deportation roller coaster for your whole family…but…fuck me if you don’t have me feeling like the atlantic might not be the thing I should be mad at right now…if that’s not too “kind of mean” for your delicate sensibilities?

Ignoring political news has become easier in recent years. Nearly half of Americans don’t subscribe to any news sources. Those seeking to dodge campaign coverage can choose to spend their time on apolitical TikToks and Instagram reels, and watch Netflix instead of CNN. “For people who are not interested in politics, which is most people, it’s actually easier than ever to not watch news shows, to not have the algorithm in your social-media feeds give you political information,” David Broockman, a political scientist at UC Berkeley, told me.

…not to be…awkward…but…that “ignoring”…sounds like it doesn’t prevent…absorption, let’s call it…of what seeps through…just…any awareness of it…or self-awareness…kind of a two-fer, that one

Broockman found in a recent study that just 15 percent of Americans watch at least eight hours of “partisan” TV, such as Fox or MSNBC, each month. “However little you think voters care about politics, you will still always overestimate how much they care,” Broockman said. This helps explain why both Trump and Harris are appearing on podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience and Call Her Daddy—they’re trying to get around people’s “I hate politics” filters.

If people are tuning out, it might not matter much for the election results. Most people already know whom they’re going to vote for; the universe of truly undecided voters is very small—likely less than 15 percent of the electorate. “The vast, vast, vast majority of voters settle into who they’re voting for, for whatever reasons they are, and then that’s kind of that, and there’s no information that they can get that is going to bump them off,” Dan Judy, a Republican pollster with North Star Opinion Research, told me. “There’s really a small number in most political campaigns of voters who are truly persuadable.” The willfully tuned-out will likely end up voting for whichever party they’ve always supported, but they will have suffered less agita in the process.

…as philosophies go…fuck you all, god’ll sort it out…kinda makes me wanna send the pastor on to his eternal reward on a fast-track program…tbh?

Jarrell, the pastor, feels that his approach to the news has made him more serene, and has given him more time to focus on his church and his family. “I believe that there’s a loving God in control of the universe,” he said, “and no matter who’s in the Oval Office, God’s still in heaven. And things are going to be okay.” That’s a hope he shares, surely, with Americans of all political persuasions.

Meet the Ostrich Voters [The Atlantic]

…maybe it’s not a happy thought…but…lotta souls out there who don’t get the privilege of a comfort zone on the sidelines built of blissfully wilful ignorance on this

Voters in 10 states will cast ballots next week to expand their state’s abortion protections or maintain the status quo. Arkansans won’t be among them.

But for seven weeks this summer, it looked like Arkansas voters would have an opportunity to change the state’s constitution to roll back one of the strictest abortion bans in the country.

There are few places in the US where it is more dangerous to be a pregnant woman than in Arkansas. The state had the worst maternal mortality rate in the country, according to data collected by the CDC from 2018-2021. It showed that about 44 mothers die for every 100,000 live births. An Arkansas maternal mortality review board, which reviews such data, found that 95% of pregnancy-related deaths in that period were considered preventable. The Guardian’s reporting has not identified specific cases in which the state’s ban on abortion has led directly to a death, but abortion rights advocates believe the risks are high.

In July, a dedicated network of about 800 grassroots organizers in Arkansas had collected the necessary signatures to get a measure on the 5 November ballot that – if passed – would have changed Arkansas’s constitution to protect the right to abortion for any reason up to 18 weeks of pregnancy. It also would have legalized exceptions for abortion after 18 weeks, including in cases involving rape, incest, fatal fetal anomalies, and life and health of the mother.

…but cheryl getting to not be upset by anything that might make it uncomfortable for her to vote for herr orangenfuhrer…that’s the important thing…she’s…entitled…right?

To the dismay and shock of the grassroots organizers, however, the Arkansas initiative was ultimately quashed before it ever reached voters. A paperwork error by organizers prompted a legal challenge by Arkansas’s secretary of state, John Thurston, who rejected the abortion amendment. On 22 August, the Arkansas supreme court upheld his decision.

For Arkansas women, there is no end in sight.

A Guardian investigation into the ballot’s demise tells a more complicated story than just a bureaucratic screw-up, revealing a confluence of rightwing actors working in parallel to ensure it never got to voters: a reclusive donor who has helped shape the anti-abortion movement across the US; the inner circle of the Arkansas governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has proclaimed Arkansas “the most pro-life state in the country”; and judges who are supposed to be non-partisan but are deeply aligned with the state’s Republican party.

“Everyone knew there was going to be a pretty organized and well-funded effort to keep it off the ballot, said Ashley Hudson, a rising Democratic star who represents west Little Rock in the Arkansas state legislature. “Is it collusion, directly? I don’t know. But I think there are a lot of people with aligned interests.”

A Guardian investigation into the ballot’s demise reveals a confluence of rightwing actors working in parallel to ensure the measure was quashed before it ever reached voters [Guardian]

…while we’re on the subject of “aligned interests”, though

…wait…I’m only just now hearing this…me & cheryl have been spending a lot of time with this pastor, you see…no…not like that…get your head out of the gutter…but…apparently…while loads of americans are happier not looking…or listening…or seeing…or…it seems…thinking…there’s no shortage of interested parties?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2024/10/29/what-donald-trump-win-mean-for-your-money

[spoiler alert: …capital gains tax in the context of a budget by a labour lady chancellor is not like capital gains tax in the context of a permatanned multiple-bankrupt trying to beggar a nation…not for the telegraph…although even that bastion of the monied classes can’t help noting his plan for that won’t give the middle classes much in the way of magic beans…but the rich will make out like bandits…IKR? …nobody saw that coming…total surprise]

…yeah…not done…even if we all kinda wish I were?

[…some folks would consider that fair warning…others…well…they wouldn’t have got this far…but at least they’d be happy about it?]

…won’t someone think of the poor billionaires?

The number of China’s dollar billionaires has fallen by more than a third in the past three years, according to a “rich list” compiled by research group Hurun, as government crackdowns, weakness in parts of the economy and depressed equity markets take their toll.

Since hitting a peak of 1,185 in 2021, Hurun said the number of dollar billionaires had been reduced to 753, with the 36 per cent decline exceeding a 10 per cent fall in the renminbi’s value against the dollar over the same period.

In the past year alone, the number of dollar billionaires in China declined by 16 per cent, when the renminbi depreciated only 2.5 per cent against the dollar.

China loses third of billionaires as economy falters [FT]

…no wonder all the other countries want to stick their oar in

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/24/trump-campaign-iran-hack

…well…that’s just one rotten apple

Trump campaign immediately blamed Biden White House and Kamala Harris for Chinese government-linked hack [Guardian]

…& we’re shooting fish in this barrel

Survey in seven battleground states finds most fear Trump supporters would use violence to install him in power [Guardian]

…in a gamification sense

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/oct/29/strava-problem-fitness-app-locate-worlds-most-powerful-people

…don’t panic

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/oct/31/is-your-smartphone-being-tracked-heres-how-to-tell

…it…probably doesn’t apply to you…so…ignorance is bliss…hey, presto…no worries…checks notes…errrr

Factchecking the most pervasive myths and lies about US elections [Guardian]

…I know…lies, damn lies…& statistics

US identified 500 cases where its weapons harmed Gaza civilians but hasn’t taken action [Guardian]

…& when you’re marginalized

How can I vote for Kamala Harris if she supports Israel’s war? Here is my answer [Guardian]

…well…not mine…that’d be bernie sanders…but…when you boil it down?

Trump says Netanyahu is doing a good job and Biden is holding him back. Even on this issue, Trump is worse

…we seem to be on the same page?

Way back in the 1960s “the personal is political” was a powerful slogan capturing the reality of power dynamics within marriages. Today, an equally meaningful slogan might be that “the technological is political”, to reflect the way that a small number of global corporations have acquired political clout within liberal democracies. If anyone doubted that, then the recent appearance of Elon Musk alongside Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania provided useful confirmation of how technology has moved centre-stage in American politics. Musk may be a manchild with a bad tweeting habit, but he also owns the company that is providing internet connectivity to Ukrainian troops on the battlefield; and his rocket has been chosen by Nasa to be the vehicle to land the next Americans on the moon.

There was a time when the tech industry wasn’t much interested in politics. It didn’t need to be because politics at the time wasn’t interested in it. Accordingly, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple grew to their gargantuan proportions in a remarkably permissive political environment. When democratic governments were not being dazzled by the technology, they were asleep at the wheel; and antitrust regulators had been captured by the legalistic doctrine peddled by Robert Bork and his enablers in the University of Chicago Law School – the doctrine that there was little wrong with corporate dominance unless it was harming consumers. The test for harm was price-gouging, and since Google’s and Facebook’s services were “free”, where was the harm, exactly? And though Amazon’s products weren’t free, the company was ruthlessly undercutting competitors’ prices and pandering to customers’ need for next-day delivery. Again: where was the harm in that?

…cui bono da pro bono?

The most dramatic evidence of how Silicon Valley lost its political virginity, though, comes from the extraordinary amounts of money that cryptocurrency companies have been putting into the election campaign. The New Yorker reports that crypto companies have already sunk “more than a hundred million dollars” into so-called SuperPACS supporting crypto-friendly candidates.

The interesting thing is that this money seems to be aimed not so much at influencing who wins the presidency as at ensuring that the “right” people get elected to the House and the Senate. This suggests a level of political nous that would have been disdained by the early pioneers of the tech industry in the 1960s. Technology might not have been political then; but it sure is just now.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/20/as-silicon-valley-eyes-us-election-elon-musk-is-not-the-only-tech-bro-to-worry-about

…what’s that? …correlation is not causation, you say?

A new report by the Commonwealth Fund finds some US states have firearm death rates comparable to countries in conflict, and even states with the fewest firearms deaths are far higher than peer developed democracies.

For instance, Mississippi’s rate of firearm-related violence (28.5 per 100,000 people) was nearly double that of Haiti (15.1 per 100,000) in 2021, when mercenaries assassinated the country’s president, unleashing a fresh round of gang warfare which pushed the country into a state of civil war.

Rhode Island, which has the lowest firearm death rate in the US (three per 100,000) is still 23 times higher than the United Kingdom (0.13 per 100,000) and nearly 1.3 times higher than France (2.3 per 100,000).

…cheryl don’t need your fucking contextual misery…you evil radical leftist communist…damn your soul & hope you die…get out of here with your politically motivated facts & figures…bitch

The US overall is in the 93rd percentile of all countries and territories for overall firearm mortality, at 13.5 deaths per 100,000 people, the Commonwealth report found.

“No country we compare ourselves to has the rates and absolute deaths like we do in the US,” said Evan Gumas, a research associate at the Commonwealth Fund in international health policy and practice who helped author the report. “It comes up anytime there’s a shooting that makes the news, when it should be something we’re paying attention to.”

In another example, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and New Mexico all have higher firearm mortality rates than Mexico, where decades of violence between state forces and rival drug cartels has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and left more than 115,000 people missing.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/30/states-firearm-death-rates

…way to suit yourself, cheryl…love it when a plan comes together…& the plan is you not having to feel bad…which you don’t…so…it must be working…right?

…those marxist fuckers must be sobbing into their cornflakes…that’ll warm cheryl’s cockles…let’s have a look at

And he’s clear on why they’re so effective. “You can’t shoot climate change, you can’t take it to court, the same thing with capitalism. These are big, abstract forces, and you feel kind of hopeless against them,” he says. It’s far more attractive, exciting even, to “attack a personalised enemy”. All of us are susceptible to this, Seymour maintains – “There’s jackboots for all of us”, he reminds me at the end of our interview – albeit not equally.

I ask him about the left’s attempts to try a similar tactic and personify capitalism – for example, Bernie Sanders’ crusade against billionaires. He says they’ve had some success but it’s not so easy to play the far right at their own game. The ultra-rich live on another planet – you might see Jeff Bezos on TV, but you’re never going to meet him. Whereas people feel they know immigrants or Muslims and, if you read the news, you’ll be offered up these people as deviants every single day, Seymour points out.

…did I catch you nodding along to that part about the “deviants”, cheryl?

Seymour set about reading all he could, from oceanography to evolutionary theory. Now he is, arguably, one of the UK’s foremost thinkers on the politics of climate breakdown and nature loss. In his regular Patreon and podcast appearances, Seymour – who is clearly something of a polymath – effortlessly joins the dots between environmental collapse, the rise of the far right and the role our desires play in a crumbling world, all while retaining his Marxist roots. As the Swedish scholar Andreas Malm asks on the front cover of Seymour’s new book, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization, “What thinker would you bring to an Earth on fire? You would not want to leave Richard Seymour at home.”

Our emotional responses to the world around us is one of the things that interests Seymour most. When we meet in the British Library to talk about his latest work, it’s this theme we keep circling back to.

Comparing the success of the far right in India, Brazil and the US (among other places), Seymour argues that most explanations for their rise are insufficient. What we’re seeing is “too consistent over time and too global, to be explained by local factors such as the backlash of a fading white supremacy, or Russian troll farms, or ‘bad actors’ spreading disinformation,” he writes. These movements also don’t have the hallmarks of historical fascism. “Their immediate objective is not the overthrow of electoral democracy,” Seymour observes, but “a constitutional rupture breaking with all humane and ‘woke’ constraints on the exercise of power.” While the old establishment decomposes, the far right conjures up apocalyptic images – “the great replacement”, “Islamisation”, “Chinese-style communism” – to animate potential supporters. This is not yet a distinct form of fascism; instead, it is what Seymour calls “disaster nationalism”.

An examination of the far right globally, Disaster Nationalism isn’t strictly about the climate crisis. But they are clearly connected. While disaster-laden fantasies capture imaginations, the environmental crisis lurks in the background. Seymour wants to interrogate this: why is fictional collapse so appealing, so exhilarating, when we live in a world of already existing, real disasters?

If people are miserable, insecure and humiliated, the far right offers a specific remedy in disaster nationalism, Seymour argues. “It offers the balm, not just of vengeance, but of a sort of violent reset which restores the traditional consolations of family, race, religion and nationhood, including the chance to humiliate others.”

Applying a psychoanalytic lens, as the American writer Tad DeLay does too, Seymour avoids commonplace and often sympathy-tinged characterisations of the far right as a cry of the working class (the “left behind”). The economy matters somewhat – he says a trajectory of decline fuels many middle-class people’s radicalisation to the right – but the roots of these movements often aren’t proletarian.

“All of these formations start off with a fairly middle-class voter base,” he tells me. “That’s certainly true of Bolsonaro, Duterte and Modi, and after a term in office, they have begun to build a real cross-class coalition, which is incredible.”

Anyone familiar with Seymour’s writing will know that he takes racism, sexism and transphobia seriously. When we talk, he speaks about these forms of bigotry with the same sophistication he brings to his writing and manages to do so while forgoing one of the other mainstream explanations of the far right’s rise, where voters are dismissed as gullible idiots who need to be shown the error of their ways – and of their information sources.

“If I agree to fantasise about gruesome, erotically charged scenarios for whose reality I’ve been given no good evidence, I am not simply lacking ‘critical skills’ or ‘media literacy’: the fantasy is doing something for me. It is staging something that I want, even if I don’t want to want it. And if that fantasy is then adopted by numerous others, for no good reason, then the wish obviously isn’t reducible to personal psychopathology but is rooted in a shared social condition,” he writes in Disaster Nationalism.

And that shared social condition is crucially affected and shaped by climate breakdown. The 2020 Oregon wildfires are illustrative, sweeping through the western US state after a series of chronic disasters: the credit crunch, skyrocketing rural poverty, alcoholism, suicide above the norm and a breakdown of local news, leaving Facebook and Nextdoor to fill the void. But when mostly white, rural, conservative Christians see the fires, it’s not climate change or capitalism they blame.

Spontaneously – not orchestrated by any one person or politician – it is the conspiracies they’ve heard that make the most sense of something so large and so destructive: Antifa, doing the bidding of the Democrats whose aim is to usher in communism, are to blame, wanting to kill people like them to remake America. Ideas like these spread like a contagion and the threshold for their uptake isn’t necessarily that high. As the fires rage, people refuse to leave, Seymour notes, so they can physically protect where they live from the arsonists they believe are behind all of this.

Ecological disaster transforms into disaster created by human evil; the climate crisis turns into a crisis of interpersonal rivalry, aggression and victimhood. The destruction of the planet creates the structural conditions for these ideas but it wouldn’t be possible if they weren’t already circulating, Seymour argues.

…it’s a topsy-turvy world, cheryl

Hope-scolds, as he calls them, miss the point when they caution that greens who doom-monger about the state of the world will demotivate people; recognising the end may be imminent can have the opposite impact, he argues. “People can be affected by climate disasters and draw wildly varying conclusions from it. But when they find other people who have the same response and who want to do something about it, they bond over it,” he explains.

“Too often, leftist talk about ‘organisation’ is abstract, making it sound like the issue is one of correct ideas and procedures,” he says. Instead, it should mean creating a form of life where people need each other. We already see this in unions, where people might join for better wages but end up striking to defend their comrades, even if they lose pay.

…& someone has to take out your garbage, cheryl…not that your garbage is all the slack you pay out for someone else to pick up while you get on with not upsetting yourself like god intended

This might all sound a bit too “universal peace and brotherhood”, he acknowledges, while still retaining his sardonic edge. But “if you imagine that you live in a planet where everything alive around you is purposive and has an intentional relationship to you and the rest of the world … I think that motivates better behaviour.”

For Seymour, then, comradeship isn’t just between humans, but between species and the living world. This is surely the bedrock of not just socialism, but eco socialism.

To better understand this and what we’re losing, it makes more sense to talk about mass extinction than just climate change, he tells me. “It pertains to the destruction and decay and etiolation of life across the board and all the evidence suggests we’re in what some call the end – Holocene mass extinction.” And extinctions reveal all our unacknowledged dependencies; we need plants and other animals. We, human beings, do not sit at the top of a grand hierarchy. Continuing as we are, exploiting other animals and the rest of nature, is unsustainable.

…I hear you…but…cheryl says that’s an unacceptable imposition on her happy place…so…I dunno?

“If you want a less fancy way of putting it: love,” says Seymour. This isn’t necessarily where all Marxists might end up but he adds, “if we’re talking about socialism, what else are we talking about?”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/30/richard-seymour-on-far-right-environmental-crisis-disaster-nationalism

…good question…slightly begs a few of its own, though…like…how are we doing on the overlap between people-interested-in-what-we’re-talking-about & people-doing-something-constructive-about-it-because-they-strangely-give-a-flying-fuck?

…or do I got to pull a cheryl on that for the sake of my precarious mental health…because I hear that passes for a long-term strategy if you get your spine removed so you’re flexible enough to crawl up your own ass into your own unique pocket reality

…speaking of taking flights of fancy…for a little bit of what you fancy…because it does you good…remember when we used to pack books for a trip?

…now…gimme a minute…I’ll see what tunes I can haul in with this net after I cast about a bit?