Dalibor Perković's Blog

There are dozens of hard-core scientific papers proving that liberals are more intelligent than conservatives. Many aspects are measured: adapting to changed circumstances, vocabulary, various types of cognition, and the conclusion is inevitable.

This makes somewhat clearer the phenomenon that a lot of time in elections the population turns out divided very close to the middle. Politicians gravitate toward the average and if you take an average person, by definition, half the people will be more stupid and half will be more smart than him. And let the revels begin.

The left vs. right conflict is just one branch, a battle specific for a particular area in historic space-time. But the real war, since the dawn of time, has always been smart vs. stupid.



One of the two newest incarnations? Brexit.

Taken fresh off Twitter, personal testimonies:

Brexit…well interesting conversation today. Colleague “I voted leave, we should get out now!” Then said ”I’ll be alright I’m going to retire to Greece”. What will you do for health care, pension etc I said. Stunned silence.

Twitter exchange yesterday. Brexiter: I voted leave to stop FoM. Me: But that means you’re taking away my right to FOM. Br: You’re not stupid enough to think you won’t be free to travel in Europe are you?

Me: Why do you think it will still be easy for us to live/work/study in the EU, if your intention is to make it harder for other EU citizens to do the same here?

Brexiter: Blame the EU for not allowing you to do that.

Had a similar discussion with older couple. Refused to accept that Brexit removed that right; convinced that *they* will still have full FoM, because a) they’re British, b) the government will “negotiate a deal”.

Met a few of those. 25 year old voted leave then in next breath was going to live in Paris next year.

I asked a proud leave voter what the impact would be on her daughter who’s just bought a house in Denmark. She replied ‘oh I am sure they checked it out beforehand’ yup in August 2016 it was all so clearly defined.

I have had this conversation with 2 dif brexiteers but neither could see that it would alter things for them, both heading for France

My father and mother-in-law live in Spain and voted Brexit. They were very indignant when his pension dropped in value by €200.

It’s painful isn’t it? Arch Leaver Bill Cash has apparently realised his grandkids live in Spain and needs to make sure their EU rights are protected. Hypocrisy or plain stupidity?

Said the exact same thing to a Leave voting friend. He wants to spend the Winters in Spain on retirement. He hadn’t considered that for an elderly person private healthcare is pretty expensive.

My son was in year 6 at the time of the vote, and one of the lads in his class told him, “My dad is voting to leave coz it means we get all the fkin pakis out!”

This was an 11 year old boy.

It’s also worth pointing out, that his Father has not only never worked a day in his life (he does cash in hand house clearances) and has fathered 14 children, the first 10 are with various women,the last four with his current partner, who also hasn’t done a days work. I’d hazard a guess the “pakis” he wants out, pay his dole with their taxes.

Probably everybody can find an example from his own surroundings, but the one I will describe here is the one most appalling that I’ve encountered.

A few days ago a Facebook page Croatian History Portal (“Hrvatski povijesni portal”) – connected to the homonymous web page – went down. The reason for this was that the Facebook algorithm found that the published images of Hitler, Mussolinni, Ante Pavelić (the local variety of the former) and some others do not conform to the Facebook policy of “non-promoting hate-speech” or whatever they called it.



Give it a moment to let this sink in. A history page was taken down because it showed images of nazis and dictators.

I probably don’t have to explain that the purpose and the additional content of those entries was not uncritical praise, but quite the opposite: an objective overview of events and characters so that we can, oh, correct me if I’m wrong, but… learn something from history?

For the record, the decision was appealed and the appeal was rejected so as of today the Croatian History Portal Facebook page is gone, deleted from Facebook. (There will probably be a new one, but one has to wonder how much it makes sense, really.)

So, it seems the worst fears of doomsayers will not be fulfilled. The overall centralisation and informatisation of our media lives will not end up with full Thought Police and dictatorship aimed to control the flow of information. Rather, it will end with mindless algorithm supported by a intellectually deficient clerks who can’t see the difference between different contents. It’s ilke a version of Hanlon’s razor that says “Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity”. In this example, it is not the totalitarianism and conservative counter-evolution that we have to fear. Those you can fight, resist, hide from, evade and counterattack. However, the blunt force of stupidity is a natural force akin to entropy and when it gets supported by large systems things are bound to go down.

The only hope is that what is going to go down will actually be Facebook, in order to make room for something less solid and more adaptable to something as esoteric as human mind.

This looks like an eye opener and a game changer. I’m inclined to shout “Game over, man, game over!”, but I’ll leave that for some other post (the title “Relocation, Separation, Isolation, Amputation” has been crying to be used for far too long anyway). And it does have the properties of a Manifesto so maybe spreading it around isn’t such a bad idea.

A tiny bit of background: even though Alex Steffen is a prolific writer, this particular thing came from his Twitter account. Relatively brief, considering the topic, and painfully to the point.

I care deeply about rolling back this tide of fascism, racism & corruption, and building far more just, honest & fair democracies for everyone. This is the time for that fight.

That said, I have never been more worried about another, larger threat.

Our planet is in crisis.

This crisis is inarguably the largest present threat to human well-being around the world, right now, and it’s getting worse fast. It ought to be the main focus of human attention, everywhere. Huge numbers of scientists who study the Earth’s climate, oceans and ecosystems — and experts who study food, water, public health, migration and international security — are warning us that these systems are plunging into crisis, with each crisis impacting the other crises. I call this interwoven set of crises “the planetary crisis” precisely because even problems as big as climate change are not anything like the totality of the emergency we face.

The planet is one enormous, interconnected set of systems, and they’re all in upheaval now.

I’ve been working on the planetary crisis—and exploring the solutions we use to respond to it—for more than 25 years now. That’s a long time to live with catastrophic threats, and to keep doing work this traumatic, you have to grow a thick skin. So, if I say that things have me worried, please understand that I’m not new to these problems, nor easily flustered by them. Indeed, when I say I’m worried, I say it as someone who believes that it is our duty keeping our courage and calm in times like these.

That said, I’m worried to a degree I haven’t been before. I’m worried for a few reasons:

a) the science is coming back with more dire findings than many people seem to realize;

b) opponents of change are mobilized as never before;

c) time is of the essence.

That last part, time, is the most important. Time is short. Time is way shorter than most people understand. Time is even shorter than most advocates for climate action understand.

Time is short for two reasons. The first is that every day we delay action on the planetary crisis is a tragedy. Every day we lose, we draw closer to tipping points and breakdowns. We lose opportunities forever; we make the problems we have to face more dangerous ones.

The second reason time is short is that our solutions need time to spread. There has never been more reason for optimism about our capacity to build a carbon-zero world. Our clean technologies, designs, policy ideas and business models get more powerful by the day. Part of what gives them their growing power is that as we build more of the clean economy, we learn and improve. The faster we build, the faster we learn, the better our solutions get and the more able to out-compete the dirty economy they become. In addition, even many of our solutions that are on slower technical learning curves return much greater benefits the earlier they’re implemented. The sooner, for instance, that girls everywhere have the opportunity for quality education, the better off humanity will be. Almost everything we know how to do to tackle our planetary crisis works better the the faster we scale. Speed is everything. But at this moment when we need to go fast, we are surrounded by predatory delay. Predatory delay is the blocking of change to squeeze profits from unsustainable practices, regardless of the cost to others.

And here’s what worries me the most: I fear that far too many people are blind to the degree to which waiting to solve our planetary problems until we win our political aims inevitably means waiting for too long to solve them at all. We are out of time. If the order of our actions is

a) defeat facism, b) tackle the planetary crisis

or

a) anything, b) tackle the planetary crisis

it will be too late.

On climate, sustainable development, ecosystems and a host of interconnected issues, failure to act boldly in the next few years means a massive failure for all humanity. The 2020s will be the last decade in which we can choose a bright future for humanity. That means—especially on climate change—our next steps are the most important of all. And the kind of action we need has to be not only smart and good, but actively disruptive to the forces of predatory delay.

Given that in the U.S. this action cannot happen in the time we have available through the normal politics of national policy, we need a new kind of politics, using different levers and new strategies. Because we have to win fast, we have to fight different. I worry that way too many of us see addressing the planetary crisis as an “issue”—something to care about on our list of things to care about. And so when we hear about the need for climate and sustainability action, they add that need to a list of other priorities. All to often, this means thinking of planetary action as something that has to be done in balance with—or even subject to the prior demands of—other economic, social and political priorities. This is understandable. It’s also the most certain route to planetary catastrophe. Why? Because all of the pathways open to us in this crisis demand disruptive changes, deployed immediately, accelerated fast. There are no pathways that are slow, measured, balanced and non-catastrophic. Here’s the hard truth: Delay is the enemy of humanity’s future, but some delay comes in the form that demands other problems be solved BEFORE we can move forward with disruptive solutions. Some of that delay is even predatory, done to protect older advocacy establishments.

The problem: the speed of action needed demands discontinuous, sudden changes. These will certainly alter the shape of the economy, our cities and our societies. Yet we simply do not have time to wait until we’re certain of those impacts before we act. Demanding we wait until we’re certain of the outcomes of these changes is a demand for catastrophic failure. Recklessness is the only responsible course. That’s really screwed up. We should never have found ourselves in this position. Yet here we are.

At the same time, we know that societies in the grips of rapid transformation need to become MORE progressive to succeed. We need more education, better social safety nets, more democratic governance, stronger protection for human rights—more real solidarity. Here’s the hardest part, to me. If we choose to delay disruptive sustainability action to meet other present needs, we likely lose massively on both fronts. An unfortunately plausible outcome here is lurching, desperate last-minute schemes taken as a profound ecological catastrophe unfolds, which then combine to cause serious declines in human prosperity, widespread erosion of human rights, and spreading civil conflict.

A more likely outcome involves taking just enough action to stave off the worst of the catastrophes, but acting too slowly and too timidly to avoid increasingly dire problems… and *still* winding up with the profound economic dislocation some say they wish to avoid, today. I don’t think there’s any future where we avoid wrenching changes. As far as I can see, every future in which we focus on trying to avoid those changes leads to worse outcomes for almost everyone. We don’t talk about this nearly as much as we should.

As far as I can see, this means that all our best choices involve not resisting those changes or even mitigating the impacts of changes, but leveraging as much change as we can get to accelerate into a new economy with more forceful commitments to human progress.

In other words, as far as I can see, there’s no way out but through.

Our best shot is changes whose speed and impact are outside the current window of acceptable political debate. (That they are un-discussable does not, of course, make them impractical.) To win, we need to shift our focus from gradualism to speed, yes, but also from the idea we’re protecting people from change to the reality that we need to protect folks from delay. What worries me most of all is that I don’t see a movement for progress based on overcoming delay, a movement that understands that speed is justice.

The storm is coming. Every day it draws closer. And I worry more than I ever have that when it hits, we’ll still be arguing.

The world is filled with stories about how short-sightendess and short-term self-interest can cause disaster and decay of once functioning systems. However, the one published by BBC – and, to make matters worse, describing things happening on a continental level – is amazingly blunt and straightforward, showing how collapse out of sheer neglect and high-level stupidity can have drastic and widespread consequences.

This is one of those texts that cause a deep and overwhelming feeling of sadness over the condition of human mind and the depths human spirit can fall to. It couldn’t have been simpler. It couldn’t have been clearer. And yet, it happened. On a scale that can’t be called anything else but epic.

And the worst thing of all is that not many will learn from it, even those further to the west.

Will Central Asia fight over water? by Rustam Qobil

A tidbit I wrote on a small bacwater forum, then realised it makes sense and why not put it here, copy/paste is cheap these days anyway.

I’m inclined to go with Jim: “There is a little bit of me that says, let’s do it, let’s see how crazy shit can get!” Trump is not a presidential candidate nor a person. He is a symptom of a diseased system that has entered a new phase of swallowing its own tail. If he loses, there will be another after him because the causes that created The Trump did not stop existing. It will be the same as with Bernie Sanders: instead of learning from their mistakes and understanding Sanders’ popularity as a consequence of their failures, looking at them and trying to repair them, the Democrats took Sanders’ defeat as a proof that they were right all along and will continue on their old track.

Until a new Sanders and Trump come in and get even more support. The only issue will be which one of them will be victorious. But either way, the system ends there and then.

And no, I’m not inclined to believe that Trump is going to start a WWIII. He is Putin’s buddy, they will drink vodka and sing together and Putin is going to bring in some nice Russian ladies to the party and make Donny feel good. Yeah, CIA will collapse because Vlad will get all the confidential data he needs and American operations all over the world will collapse or fall into Russian hands, but somehow I don’t see that as a necessarily bad thing. As for USA, it may turn into a hellhole, but what many don’t realise is that USA is already a hellhole for many of its citizens. What I find funny is that many humanitarian organizations feel the need to go to Africa to help hungry black people, while they don’t realise that, if they want to help solve Third World problems, they can also start with their own suburbs.

But yeah, I don’t think Trump is going to win. This time or in this body anyway.

In a continuing effort to turn this blog into a dumpyard for texts I want to keep for posterity, here are some more contributions to my 21st century Textbook



The truth about Brexit didn’t stand a chance in the online bubble – about way more than Brexit

Forget the politics – Brexit may be unlawful – an especially insightful comments section uncovers some very interesting remarks and asks important questions about the relation between the ideal of democracy and the practicality of the rule of the law

What is actually happening (Facebook) – the comedy section

I stumbled upon a piece by Francis Fukuyama recently that basically confirmed something I’ve been nagging about for some time: democracy is not a cause, but instead, a consequence of a well-arranged and developed society.

There is strikingly little evidence that current donor and NGO efforts to promote good governance through increasing transparency and accountability have had a measurable impact on state performance. The theory that there should be a correlation between the increased availability of information about government performance and the quality of final government outputs rests on a number of heroic assumptions—that citizens will care about poor government performance (as opposed to being content to benefit from practices like ethnic-based patronage); that they are capable of organizing politically to put pressure on the government; that the country’s political institutions are ones that accurately transmit grassroots sentiment to politicians in ways that make the latter accountable; and finally, that the government actually has the capacity to perform as citizens demand.

The actual history of the relationship between state modernity and democracy is far more complicated than the contemporary theory suggests. (…) The sequence by which democracy and state modernity were established has determined the long-term quality of government. Where a modern state has been consolidated before the extension of the franchise, it has often succeeded in surviving into modern times; where the democratic opening preceded state reform, the result has often been widespread clientelism.

Francis Fukuyama: Why is Democracy Performing so Poorly?, Journal of Democracy, January 2015

To try to extrapolate and extend this theory into practical examples, what it basically says is that not only you can’t push a community into a modern era by “inoculating” it with democracy and expect that everything else will sort itself out, but, even worse, deterioration of other aspects of an already advanced society – education, economy, social consciousness – should, by definition, also cause a decline in the level of democracy.

Approaching this from another angle, it also leads to conclusion that democracy is not really a crucial point in civilizational development, removing it from the pedestal of a Holy Cow, something that is Not To Be Doubted Nor Questioned. Instead, it turns out to be only a symptom, an added touch for show of an advanced community, but not something that, in itself, is the source of this community’s superiority.

To put it bluntly, if you live in a society where people are stupid, poor and don’t care about anything, turning this society into a democratic one isn’t really going to make things better. Also, when living in a society whose democracy is threatened, maybe you don’t defend it it by defending the democracy, but instead, by defending the foundations that support it.

A must-read and another proof that reality is only for those who wish to postpone science-fiction. After reading this text, a few things come to mind: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Star Fraction and a few more.

Read’em and weep.

How a TV Sitcom Triggered the Downfall of Western Civilization by David Hopkins

I’ll just put this here for future reference, more as a bookmark than anything else, because Despair Fatigue by David Graeber is one of those epic, monumental texts that should be collected into a universal and permanent textbook for understanding economy and politics of the current era in general.



Just a few key quotes. Yes, that’s a lot of words. It’s a long text.

There’s been virtually no public debate on austerity itself. At no point, for example, did a major TV news outlet host a panel of economists discussing whether public debt was really the cause of the economic crisis, or debating whether European-style austerity or Obama-style fiscal stimulus would be a more appropriate response. The only questions were how much budget cutting was required and where the cuts should fall. This confident Tory narrative reigned unchallenged from the rudest hack in the Daily Mail to the most chiseled eminence of the (supposedly socialist) BBC, and all figures of public authority held to it even after the immediate effects of the cuts proved spectacularly ineffective.

(…)

This consensus, oddly, has next to nothing to do with the opinions of professional economists. Almost all British economists understood that the gaping deficits of 2008 and 2009 had been caused by the banking crisis, not the other way around. Likewise, anyone paying attention knew that cutbacks of public services to “save money” reduced economic activity, and hence government tax revenues, and so really had the effect of raising, not lowering deficits. Most also understood that deficits weren’t really much of a problem to begin with. But even the opinion of mainstream economists was, suddenly, excluded from public debate. By 2012, even the IMF was issuing statements urging the Tories to lay off. But you’d never learn any of this from the Times, the Observer, or the BBC.

How could such total, lock-step defiance of reality be maintained in a country with a formally free press and highly educated population? To some degree, you find the familiar bubble effect. Politicians, journalists, lobbyists, CEOs, and corporate bureaucrats rarely talk to anyone except each other. They constitute a distinct intellectual universe. Within this universe, economic policies are designed primarily for political marketability; economic science exists largely to provide impressive diagrams and equations to sell them with. Phrases designed in think tanks and focus groups (“free markets,” “wealth creators,” “personal responsibility,” “shared sacrifice”) are repeated like incantations until it all seems like such unthinking common sense that no one even asks what the resulting picture has to do with social reality. True, the bubble logic can be maintained only by a certain studied ignorance of how the economy really works. One 2014 poll discovered, for instance, that 90 percent of sitting MPs, for all their endless debates on the need to save money, didn’t know where money comes from. (They thought it was created by the Royal Mint.)

The bubble effect is not unique to Britain, of course. Political debate in the United States, Japan, or Germany works much the same way. But in Britain, things have gone so far that we are beginning to see a classic Big Lie reinforcer effect. When the consensus reality gets this completely divorced from actually existing reality, when so many innocent people have suffered as a result, and when anyone pointing this out has been so consistently and aggressively denounced as a tinfoil-hat-wearing flat-earther or Trotskyite, to break ranks would mean admitting that the lunatics were right. There is nothing the established media is more loath to do.

The divorce between consensus and reality has grown so extreme and unworkable that even the technocrats charged with running the system have started to cry foul. In 2014 the Bank of England—its economists apparently exhausted by having to carry out economic policy in a made-up, topsy-turvy world designed only to benefit the rich—issued a statement on “Money Creation in the Modern Economy” that effectively destroyed the entire theoretical basis for austerity. Money, they noted, is not created by governments, or even central bankers, who must be careful not to make too much of it lest they spark inflation; it’s actually created by private banks making loans. Without debt there would be no money. The post-Keynesian heterodox economists, regularly denounced as a lunatic fringe by those commentators willing to acknowledge their existence, were right.

No major news outlet considered this a story; politicians continued preaching their morality tales of the evils of debt exactly as they had before.

(…)

Tony Blair’s New Labour policies, which, despite the Labour Party’s working-class funding base, basically represented the sensibilities of the professional classes, did attempt to forge an alternative vision. For the Blairites, the United Kingdom’s future lay in what they called the “creative industries.” Had not the United Kingdom, regularly since the sixties, produced waves of popular music and youth culture that had swept the world, bringing in billions in direct and indirect revenue? It must have seemed a plausible gambit in the nineties, but it failed because the Blairites were operating with a completely false understanding of where cultural creativity comes from.

They naively assumed creativity was basically a middle-class phenomenon, the product of people like themselves. In fact, almost everything worthwhile that has come out of British culture for the last century, from music hall, to street kebabs, to standup comedy, rock ‘n’ roll, and the rave scene, has been primarily a working-class phenomenon. Essentially, these were the things the working class created when they weren’t actually working. The sprouting of British popular culture in the sixties was entirely a product of the United Kingdom’s then very generous welfare state. There is a reason that in Cockney rhyming slang, the word for “dole” is “rock ‘n’ roll”(“he got the sack, he’s on the rock ‘n’ roll again”): a surprising proportion of major bands later to sweep the world spent at least some of their formative years on unemployment relief. Blairites were stupid enough to combine their promotion of “Cool Britannia” with massive welfare reforms, which effectively guaranteed the entire project would crash and burn, since they ensured that pretty much everyone with the potential to become the next John Lennon would instead spend the rest of their lives stacking boxes in their local Tesco as part of the new welfare conditionality.

In the end, all that the Blairites managed to produce was a world-class marketing sector (since that’s what middle-class people are actually good at); otherwise, they had nothing to show for themselves at all.

(…)

This is where the notion of despair fatigue comes in.

One might argue that its beginnings were already visible in popular culture. Witness the emergence of the Scottish socialist school of science fiction, which, after the relentless dystopianism of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, led the way to a broader trend by toying with redemptive futures once again. Then there was Steampunk, surely the most peculiar of countercultural trends, a kind of ungainly Victorian futurism full of steam-powered computers and airships, top-hatted cyborgs, floating cities powered by Tesla coils, and an endless variety of technologies that had never actually emerged. I remember attending some academic conference on the subject and asking myself, “Okay, I get the steam part, that’s obvious, but . . . what exactly does this have to do with punk?” And then it dawned on me. No Future! The Victorian era was the last time when most people in this country genuinely believed in a technologically-driven future that was going to lead to a world not only more prosperous and equal, but actually more fun and exciting than their own. Then, of course, came the Great War, and we discovered what the twentieth century was really going to be like, with its monotonous alternation of terror and boredom in the trenches. Was not Steampunk a way of saying, can’t we just go back, write off the entire last century as a bad dream, and start over?

And is this not a necessary moment of reset before trying to imagine what a genuinely revolutionary twenty-first century might actually be like?

One of the most renown “small” observatories in the world with the education centre attached – the one in Višnjan in Istria – is going to keep existing, although it was a close call. After a few years of shutting programmes one after another due to lack of funding, local counties came to their senses and realised the tourist potential of the whole educational centre. More information should be published soon; in the meantime, the Croatian version of the text is here, but what is sticking out of the whole case are a few sentences spoken by the observatory and educational centre’s founder and manager, Korado Korlević, where he addressed a wider issue: EU funds being handed out to scientific, cultural and other NGO projects.

“We have seen that this is a very cruel money, that, in the end, it boils down to violence of administratively stronger inflicted upon the weaker. We have also witnessed that the government services in Croatia, instead of helping out, just wait for you to make a mistake and then issue a fine and ask of you to return the money you received. You write projects, you struggle, you wait for the funds for two years, and then someone demands that you return 10 percent because you didn’t do everything according to the 600-page manual. We decided it was best if Europe and the state keep their money. I can’t ask of the girls who work here to go through this administrative violence, to be on edge and unable to sleep throughout the week when they are writing projects and reports. No country should do this to their citizens.”