Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on October 23, 2025 | 134 Comments
A brief note here on a topic that’s been in the news lately – namely, the news. Or, more specifically, the so-called ‘legacy media’ such as national newspapers and television. And, alongside that, declining literacy and book-reading, which is obviously of great personal concern to me as the author of a recently published book, as well as a watcher of historical change. Also, religion.
Let me explain.
Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983) is a touchstone work on, well, nationalism, that religion of modern times. One of his arguments is that literate publics reading national newspapers, of the kind that emerged in the nineteenth century, helped to create a shared sense of purpose and joint understanding, forging a national community out of people who had no ‘real’ community with each other of the face-to-face sort. Later, national television stations served the same function. These, along with sacred sites of the political centre (like the tomb of the unknown soldier, the Capitol or the White House) help generate the nation as a collective entity. It’s not necessary for citizens to agree with everything they encounter in the media, or to like incumbent governments. But it probably is necessary for these media and symbols of rule to set the terms, to largely define the universe of community narrative for most people, if nation-states of the modern form are to endure.
If that’s so, then various recent events suggest the nation-state’s days may be numbered. If we take the case of the USA, the President’s lawsuit against the venerable New York Times doesn’t bode well. Presidents and newspapers of record need to be jointly defining the political universe, not locked in multi-billion-dollar battles. Keener students of US history than me might correct me if this is wrong, but as I understand it the last president or would-be president who sued a newspaper was Theodore Roosevelt’s case against Michigan’s The Iron Ore in 1913. Apparently he won, receiving six cents.
Meanwhile, I read somewhere on Substack (I read quite a bit of stuff on Substack) that the legacy media is commanding less and less of people’s attention compared to platforms like, er, Substack (see?) The context of the piece was the kerfuffle a few weeks ago about Jimmy Kimmel’s ABC show being pulled after his remarks about the Charlie Kirk murder (sorry, I can’t find the post to link to anymore). No big deal, the Substack author thought. Most people aren’t tuning in to legacy media anymore anyway. The author argued that Jimmy Kimmel would be better off running his own social media show, following in the footsteps of other online notables such as Chris Smaje Joe Rogan.
But the risk is that if citizens get most of what informs them about the wider world by picking and choosing their preferred content from the online bazaar, pretty soon they stop being citizens of a functional nation-state where the terms of the community narrative get publicly defined. Although Kimmel was reinstated after an outcry, it seemed to me that the ease of his initial ousting was symptomatic of this larger disintegration of nation-states, which is impelled by many current forces. Declining literacy is another such force. If nation-states need literate publics, the decline of literacy might help impel their eclipse and replacement.
I’ve long been a critic of modern nationalism and the nation-state, but there’s a case of being careful what one wishes for. One aspect of the modern, legacy-media inflected nation-state is the high bar it sets for citizen rights. Phrases like “that sort of thing just shouldn’t happen here/in this day and age” are possible in a modern nation-state. They become moot when the idea that the state or the modern system of states is the guardian of the nation’s interests crumbles. And that idea has done a lot of crumbling lately. New distributed media technologies like mobile phone cameras enable every bit of state brutality to be recorded and disseminated with the admonitory cry “the eyes of the world are watching!” But increasingly the eyes of the world don’t care. The eyes of the world watching, those things not happening here, only come into play when citizenship rights matter, and that’s precisely what’s now falling apart.
(Incidentally, there have long been de facto if not de jure gradations of citizenship rights in many countries – especially around racialised and other minorities, for whom the eyes of the world have never watched so attentively. I don’t mean to minimise this. But nationalist projects can long endure while stigmatising out-groups, provided there’s a large in-group. I’m not sure they can long endure without a secure in-group).
From my admittedly distant vantage point, I’ve been watching US politics unfold over the last few years, and the last few months in particular, and wondering whether the nation-state can survive what’s been happening (much the same is true in the UK and elsewhere, but generally not on such a fast forward setting). In my new book, Finding Lights in a Dark Age, I draw on the idea of stranger kingship to try to make sense of the present Trump presidency.
I read over that section quite a few times while it was still in draft, asking myself repeatedly if stranger kingship (a phenomenon more typical of premodern societies outside of Europe and its offshoots) really worked as a model for the contemporary USA, or if I was just being a smartarse who was trying too hard to be original and different. To which my considered answers are not entirely and yes probably, but nevertheless I left that section in because I do think it still captures something relevant.
I’ll write about stranger kingship in the US in more detail in another post. One thing that’s clear is that a society characterized by stranger kingship isn’t a nation-state. And that it requires the ordinary people to define themselves as a group in a certain opposition to the king.
Here we come to a fork in the road. I’ve been looking at social media responses to ICE raids and militarised federal incursions into US cities, which often enough divide into progressive horror of the ‘that sort of thing just shouldn’t happen here’ variety, and right-wing glee of the ‘that’s why I voted for Trump’ variety. If that sort of thing continues and Trump-style Republican government endures, then the usual roster of modernist political labels like right-wing populism, authoritarianism and/or fascism will probably do the job. But as the federal government’s inability to deliver big, beautiful outcomes for people locally becomes increasingly manifest, another possibility is that people start to build local politics in structural opposition to their stranger kings.
Presently, the major currents of thinking on both the mainstream political left and right seem fatefully enraptured with the centralized politics of the nation-state, believing that if the correct government is in place it will deliver what the people really want. If people were to stop thinking that, we may be at the start of a politics equal to present times.
A couple more points to wrap up this post. First, my new book was duly launched last week in Frome Town Hall, appropriately. I enjoyed it and the feedback was generally positive. I got an interesting question from a sceptically secular member of the audience about whether ‘ethics’, ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’ always go together, as per one of the slides in my presentation. To which my answer, after a long and crooked road from my secular left-wing starting point, is a guarded ‘yes’. To quote Nick Mayhew-Smith “religion is what mediates the relationship between people and place”* – and I think this means collective, organised religion as part of an ongoing tradition, even if I’m not certain that any of the existing organised religions and their ongoing traditions are quite up to the task. Still, I find the fact that, unlike various other extinct creatures, they’re still there after the full force of the modernist onslaught against them to be mildly encouraging. More on that another time.
Second, a check-in with readers of these posts. I’ve got a lot of non-blog related work to get through at the moment, so my output here might be quite slow. I have in the pipeline posts about overshoot, housing and rent, Nate Hagens’s interesting analysis of what he calls the Walrus movement, and possibly an update on the manufactured food story discussed in my previous book. Then I was planning to write a short cycle of posts about Finding Lights in a Dark Age. I’m also feeling quite low energy at the moment and need to pace myself a bit. Anyway, I’m interested in any thoughts about topics of interest to those who generously devote time to reading what I have to say.
Nick Mayhew-Smith The Naked Hermit: A Journey to the Heart of Celtic Britain
* the quote above is from page 113
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A few random thoughts:
1) A focus on image and symbol rather than words as a means of communication is something I’ve been thinking about recently; I don’t think this is necessarily new (one need only look at 20th-century propaganda posters from a variety of sources to understand that symbolism is alive and well), but I do think the effect is magnified by the way improvements in technology have resulted in images being much, much easier to create, reproduce and spread than was necessarily the case even twenty or thirty years ago; I can remember, in the mid-1990s in the Canadian prairies, using a dialup internet connection to view one page of one book from the website of the Bodleian library. My father was much more impressed with this than I was at the time! Now we have a multitude of videos and a lot of them are fake. But this fits into converstions around the Reformation and the control and transmission of information; for a few centuries, the printed word had outsized power because it was easier to reproduce than pictures were, and we built social and educational structures that privilege people like me who do well in word-based systems. But when a stranger president can post a fake video of himself flying a jet that dispenses a brown liquid onto protesters, and wannabe nationalists plaster flags on everything (flags of St George, patron saint of agricultural workers, farmers, field workers, soldiers, archers, armourers, equestrians, cavalry, saddle makers, chivalry, peacekeeping missions, skin diseases, lepers and leprosy, syphilis, sheep, shepherds, scouting, Georgia, Ethiopia, England, Aragon, Catalonia, and Bulgaria — St George, pray for us!) as some kind of protest against migration without thinking about who benefits from their expression of ire, we may be past the point where words will win many battles. And of course censorship and surveillance are serious concerns, too. It will be interesting to see how this plays out as supply chains become more strained; at the moment it’s very easy to buy either a St George’s flag or an inflatable frog costume, but this won’t be the case for ever. I’m also interested in low-power, low-volume network communications like the initiative at meshtastic.org — but this is always going to mean dancing around the edges. What does the samizdat of the coming dark age look like? (How did your narrator, in the last part of your book, know to go to his kinfolk?)
2) Many institutions, including churches, have survived modernity by adapting to it to some degree, and not everyone in these institutions today is aware that expectations of infinite growth are unrealistic and harmful. Churches are also pretty vulnerable at the moment, I know of very few that don’t have worries about how to keep going financially, and while there has been some reckoning with this on various levels, I think the reckoning is far from over and the real test will be what happens locally. I have personally found real solace in the Church of England, but also very deep frustration and hurt, and I accept that this is part of the reality of human beings learning how to live together, part of weaving together meaningful connections of care. To do that I had to get over myself and stop looking for a perfect church. Keeping churches open and functioning is, sadly, not One Weird Trick to Escape Catastrophe, but there are churches that are responding to what’s happening now and what seems to be on the horizon, doing valuable pre-figurative work, building refugia of sorts whether they know it or not.
St Augustine wrote “Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless ’til they find their rest in you” (or something very much like that, anyway). Jesus said “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” (That’s Matthew 11:28 and the preceding verses are difficult.) One thing many churches do offer, and which is perhaps somewhat counter-cultural, is space to rest and contemplate, to grapple with hard questions of meaning and purpose but also to accept that maybe we aren’t going to be able to answer them on our own. Sometimes, holding this space is very much at odds with responding to financial pressures — as for any institution with a large contingent of voluntary workers and donated income, in a period where people’s leisure time is increasingly enclosed and finances increasingly constrained compared to, say, half a century ago. Sometimes holding this space is difficult in the face of the urgency of responding to our current predicament and the knowledge that things are likely to get worse: volunteer burnout in churches is a more serious problem than some like to admit. But holding this space, even imperfectly, is worth doing anyway, and rest and contemplation are worth seeking out anyway, whether that’s within the walls and liturgy of a church or sitting by a fire with loved ones and a poem or a song.
I do always look forward to your posts here, and to the ensuing conversation, and I will enjoy reading more as and when your energy levels and other commitments permit (and not before, please, I am quite serious that rest and contemplation are worth seeking out). Housing and rent are particularly interesting to me at the moment. I think Nate Hagens overstates the Walrus position a bit, but I’d have to give it a second listen… maybe if the Abundance crowd (who remind me of nothing more than the steel and rail dude in Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, a book I hated so much I nearly didn’t finish it) are saying regulation is the problem and the left-ish technocrats are saying capitalism is the problem, both of them have valid points. But those on the left that I listen to, at least, are quite aware that authoritarianism doesn’t only exist on the right — it’s just that right wing authoritarianism is the flavour of authoritarianism we are facing at the moment. I’d be interested in your views on Zack Polanski as leader of the Green party in England and Wales, though.
The industrial manufacture or precision fermentation of studge or whatever is of much less interest to me than land access to make sure people can grow and eat something else instead, and it would be good to have some sense of how land access (and land use rights?) fit in with industrial protein manufacturing in general (and I might put battery chickens in that category, too…). Meanwhile, last I checked Monbiot is still going after animal agriculture as never sustainable at all, which is frustrating (especially for those of us with difficulties absorbing non-haeme iron but who also still probably eat less animal produce than average just because of growing so much produce…), but he’s already proven himself unwilling to respond graciously to good-natured argument, so it’s probably best not to kick that particular nest. I don’t need you to write a blog post on this to know that he’ll call you names about it if he reads it at all.
You’ve mentioned cooperative or community growing of some staple crops here and there, and I’d love to know how that is working if you’re able to write about it.
“Monbiot is still going after animal agriculture as never sustainable at all.”
Yep, Monbiot is stuck in the 1970s, where one strategy was to take the extreme position in order to get a little bit of traction against a powerful foe. It still doesn’t work.
Thanks Chris.
I’m in the US, so I haven’t seen your new book yet – I’m still looking forward to it. So you bring up interesting points here, but I’m not certain I know quite all that you are saying about them.
But about the collapse of mainstream media as surrogate town hall causing people to “…stop being citizens of a functional nation-state where the terms of the community narrative get publicly defined…”
I’m old enough that I grew up with legacy media. We lived in the Los Angeles area, so we had more TV stations than anybody, 7 of them. The narrative was definitely under control.
But even still, I was in kindergarten when I unequivocally learned that my fellow students’ stories about fairness and shared citizenship were lies. I was in second grade when I heard my teachers telling me obvious lies.
I am white, male, middle-class, etc. All the demographic markers that my country was supposedly set up to favor. I’ve had every advantage except for obscene hereditary wealth, and even still, whenever I slipped up and started feeling like a part of the larger society of my country, I was rudely awakened from that fantasy in short order.
Yes, it’s true that the 1960s were boom times for sub-cultures here. Maybe that’s a place to start with the latest round of schizmogenesis.
As for your bit about ubiquitous personal media sharing:
“But increasingly the eyes of the world don’t care.”
I disagree. Everyone I know has a deeply held opinion about their media feed. Those opinions don’t necessarily match up with each other or with any verifiable facts, but people care. What we don’t see is any any effective action in response. Nor do we see any evidence that the power elite care about what the people feel or think. At least not in particular. The thoughts and feelings of the people are only for propaganda and occasional vote-getting purposes.
As for ‘stranger kingship’, well, I’m not sure what that entails, exactly.
But I will say that the fundamental logic (if you can call it that) behind the Trump presidency is sound. Trump is the id of America. The few Trump supporters that I know will freely admit that he’s a buffoon, but they still agree with him, more or less.
And the vast majority of my friends who are Trump haters are unable to hear it when I tell them that the plutocracy and torture and war crimes that Trump is doing are largely continuations from the Clintons and Bushes and Obamas and Bidens.
The domestic storm troops are a new development, but not entirely novel. Remember the Haymarket.
In many ways, Trump is the logical next step in the European plunder of the ‘New World’. The empire turning inward on itself.
And don’t forget that the US is the country that perfected the art of professional wrestling. Of course it’s fake. Of course they are cartoon characters. Everyone knows this, but they still treat it as all real.
You say:
“If people were to stop thinking that, we may be at the start of a politics equal to present times.”
Yes, indeed, and twas ever thus. But what did P.T. Barnum (not quite) say about not underestimating the lack of imagination of the American public?
I looked up stranger king and found out it was a concept pioneered by Marshall Sahlins, so I assume that is what Chris is referring to. I will find out later in his book and subsequent posts as he fleshes out his idea. But Sahlins’ idea was that it was a way to resolve conflict. Here is where I disagree with Trump as a stranger king.
As I have explained repeatedly over the years, my thesis is that the Tea Party captured the Republican Party (or Repooplican Party as I often call it). By 2015 this process was complete and there is no Tea Party of any note now. It IS the main party in US politics. The Democrats (or Democraps as I often call them) play second fiddle. Even the success of Joe Biden in finally (!) getting out of Afghanistan was set in motion by Trump before he left office the first time. Donald Trump didn’t win the election in 2016; Hillary Clinton lost. I said this on Election Eve and Bernie Sanders said this some time later. So if you don’t believe me, just consider that Bernie Sanders is an astute individual.
The idea of Donald Trump and the Tea/Republican Party resolving conflict is laughable. Their whole program is based on polarization and creating conflict. AND Joe Six-Pack and his wife Karen just love it! I saw this in action on the ground while fighting the Tea Party from 2010 to 2016, when they finally achieved their objective in Donald Trump. Now the Trump Administration is creating conflict all over the world. This seems to be at odds with the idea of a stranger king resolving conflict.
There may be more complex issues in the original interpretation of a stranger king, for instance acquiescence in a process that is inevitable. But picking the least bad alternative smacks more of just old-fashioned exploitation than a rational reaction.
Yes, Chris references Marshal Sahlins with the idea of a Stranger King. I picked up ‘Finding Lights in a Dark Age Tuesday, and finished reading this morning. A tour de force of a book, fleshing out our best options for navigating the coming collapse as individuals and communities.
The idea of a Stranger King references an outsider brought in as a titular ruler to avoid civil war between factions at court. The new ruler spends most of his time in fights within the court to establish his position, and is happy with the provinces just acknowledging he is king, though he has little power to enforce his will outside his bedchamber, and sometimes not even then.
In turn the provinces are free to govern themselves as they see fit. A case can be made that Trumps first term fits this model. The two factions at court, the Democrats and Republicans had become incapable of governing the country for the general welfare while becoming increasingly sectarian. A large part of the electorate had had enough and brought in an outsider, Trump. In his first term Trump spent most of his time fighting his own court, the Republican establishment, both it’s elected politicians and cabinet ministers, plus the permanent civil service. Hence Trump did not achieve much outside Washington D.C. if Trump had won in 2020, the obstruction of his court to his will would have continued, though with Trump gaining the upper hand eventually. That did not happen. His loss inadvertently gave Trump the opportunity to defeat his opponents in the Republican party, and in his second term to completely dominate his court. He is now going after the other factions in the court the Democrats and the permanent state, and is flexing the limits of his power in the provinces.
I suggest that Mr Trump is moving from being a Stranger King to a potential William the Conqueror. In defeating Harald and the English, William, the outsider, remade the political realm, replacing the English aristocracy, eliminating the powerful earldoms of Wessex, Mercia, and Northumberland, whose internecine warfare had plagued English politics for the previous four centuries. His doomsday survey intruded central power into every hamlet, measuring all wealth and potential revenue. The USA is not the small Kingdom of England, it has the equivalent of fifty Earldoms of Wessex. So interesting times.
I’m UK based so an outside opinion on US politics, apologies if I have offended or been mistaken.
The global internet is the apotheosis of modern communication. There are still other media, but the average American spends seven hours per day looking at screen feeds, most of which are sourced from the internet. This means that when the internet inevitably fails, as must all things that require a high-energy industrial civilization for their existence, most people will lose almost all touch with the outside world. Their information sphere will rapidly shrink to a tiny local-gossip bubble.
But that startling news void will be the least of our troubles. The failure of the internet will also mean that the majority of commerce will grind to a halt. All the communication required for the functioning of modern civilization is now dependent on the internet and I see no way that copper landlines, fax machines and teletypes will be resurrected as fallback communications systems.
The internet has been constructued as a gigantic single-point-of-failure for modern civilization. Civilization can now only be kept going as long as it exists. The day that it doesn’t exist is the day that everyone will wish they were living on a small farm.
Astute points. Here in southern France we had power outages yesterday due to heavy winds. My partner and I had our flu shot appointment at 14:00 (after the lunch hour) and had to wait some time for the pharmacists to figure out how to open the door shutter by hand. Then we had to wait some more for the internet to come back so they could process the transaction for the free shots. The irritation value in daily life will increase dramatically once this kind of thing becomes the norm. The interim situation will likely become the “Baghdad standard,” where power is on for a specified time each day. Lotsa fun.
The global internet will die on its feet . I have a long list of news news reports where AI is used for facial recognition and research into legal and other information , AI has no BS filter unlike most humans , it learns from the net , it also lies makes things up and places them on the net , other AI units read the lies makes a few up and adds that to the pot round and round it goes untill nothing on the net will be safe to use as information , from the correct time to plant seeds to the strength of steel used in bridges , nothing will be trustworthy , everything will become drivel and only used for gaming , no scientific paper will be trustworthy without a bullet proof list of atribution to other papers that were written without AI involvement . Anything written after the introduction of AI is suspect .
USA today is not the USA everyone thinks it is ,fifty years ago the USA was 80% plus white 19% ish black , now its around 40% white 30+ % Hispanic and the rest black and Asian , the politics is following the demographics , the USA is changing the world will have to get used to it .
Trump is first and foremost a business man , A very different broom compared to the old leaders of both parties , Schumer ,Pelosi , etal are under attack by AOC and the new radical left . The repubs have accepted people of all races and put them in positions of power , the vice president is married to a woman from the Indian sub continent , The president married a Hungarian , the racist/ fachist claim is just rubbish ! the same goes for the misogyny label just look at the number of women in his government .
Trump is trying to preserve a dying empire , its too late its no longer a superpower , its nuclear defence is fifty year old minute man missiles , its best fighter is forty , the b 52 is being re engined by Rolls Royce ( no reliable us alternative ) with the idea it will last to be a century old .
Culturally the USA is a disaster , hard left , hard right , Christian , Satanist , Moslem , atheist , Hispanic that hate blacks , some blacks hate everyone , Jews moving southern
states ,drug wars . major cities looking like Mogadishu .
Some cities opening grocery stores because the companies can’t stop shoplifting and go broke .
The USA is a mess and falling apart and will in time break up hopefully without a civil war . .
Europe seems hell bent on suicide , the latest EU pollution legislation has Qatar and the USA ready to stop LNG deliveries , poking the bear is never a good idea and having electricity prices three times higher than your competitors guarantee bancrupsy . buying ” cheap ” food from Argentina will only be cheap until they have no competition from euro farmers .
Don’t expect the US to pull the EU chestnuts out of the fire I doubt they can .
Briefly:
Kathryn, thanks for your wise words on the difficulties and compromises of actually existing churches. And also for your invitation to rest and contemplation. Regarding religion, I’m basically thinking at a higher level of abstraction that a shared tradition of the sacred is probably a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a moderately sustainable dwelling in place. Thanks also for your encouragement about the blog and suggested topics, which I’ll ponder.
Eric, I think I maybe didn’t explain myself very well on a few fronts in relation to your comment. In saying ‘the eyes of the world don’t care’, I accept that people care a lot about their political opinions, whatever they are. What I meant is that citizenship within a modern nation-state no longer gains such buy-in from other citizens about the rights and dignity that’s every citizen’s inherent due – I agree that this has often been more theoretical than real, but even the theoretical veneer counts for something. While I’ve never been persuaded by nationalist claims of legitimacy (hence agreeing with you about the Clinton/Bush/Obama/Trump continuity), their fraying doesn’t necessarily take us to a good place – although it might conceivably, in a ‘supersedure’ or stranger king situation. I also agree with your view of Trump as the empire turning its predatory, colonial ways upon itself, which is a theme that runs throughout ‘Finding Lights…’ – hence the importance of learning survival tips from colonized peoples. Regarding the lack of imagination of the American public, my hope is that people may have more imagination, focused on different things, when they’re no longer a public, but it’s far from guaranteed.
Walter, I guess it’s my bad for floating the concept of Trump as a stranger king without explaining, but I’d humbly request suspension of critique until my argument is on the table. I’m certainly not arguing that Trump is resolving conflict – I’d hope that my previous corpus of writing here would make that clear. Philip gives a flavour of my argument in his comment. There are other stranger king like aspects I pursue in the book. I think we will see more and more Trump-like figures in high office as the power of high office to control the narrative wanes. It seems to me worth asking why this is and what can be done about it – invoking the stupidity of the electorate or the venality of the political class only goes so far.
Philip, thanks. I’m glad you enjoyed my book (btw, I started reading the postwar Germany book you recommended – very interesting, but in the end I didn’t have time to finish or absorb it). As I said in the book, and above, indeed there’s a great danger that the US (and other) governments will become more directly predatory and colonial. But I’m not sure William the Conqueror is the most apposite historical parallel (though it appears Trump recently heard of him and is a fan, which is worrying). Perhaps a discussion for another time. Or a party game to suggest others – my starter: President Mobutu.
Joe’s point about the internet is apposite – another reason perhaps for me not to worry overly about AI, as per a recent post. That’ll be when, per Kathryn’s point, the small farm future blog goes samizdat. Though maybe not – there might instead have to be a cultural revolution here in the small farm future newsroom. Here’s another communication network to reckon with – kin and clan (is that how my narrator knew?)
My kin tend to use Facebook (ugh), but will communicate with me via email or telephone (these days VoIP, which is much cheaper) when absolutely necessary, since they know how much I dislike the Book of Face. Clan is more difficult, but suffice to say that I have a small group of friends whose homes I can walk to, and a wider group I can cycle to.
When my maternal grandfather travelled to Canada in his late teens he spent much of the rest of his life communicating with family by infrequent letters, and I think very occasionally phonecalls. There was no going back to visit, though by the last three decades of his life it would have been affordable; by then, there wasn’t anyone left for him to visit. So there’s not really much model of clan there for me to draw on. On the paternal side, some members of my family of origin do maintain connections with cousins and long-time friends-of-family in a certain area of Saskatchewan, and this looks closer to what I have with friends here, and to some extent to connections I maintain at church.
Without wanting to spoil anything, it wasn’t clear to me in that portion of your book that there would be a functioning postal service. But I do think a postal service of some kind could easily outlast reliable internet communications; I should probably make like my mother in the 1980s, and keep a physical address book. (There’s something in here about the often-gendered nature of the labour of maintaining connections with kin and clan, but that’s a tangent for another time.)
(Though it may not be a postal service as we think of it — see PostNord in Denmark, which looks like it might not outlast the internet!)
During the Covid lockdown in southern France, some postal carriers were just dumping bags of mail out in the forest. This was well documented after hunters started finding them. Since then, I have not relied on La Poste and so have already adapted to a postal-free world. If I get my mail, great. If I don’t, then I am perturbed but not surprised. Just another symptom of breakdown and decline.
I’m an American, so I haven’t seen Chris’s book yet. We do have a recent development in line with Chris’s prediction above that “… as the federal government’s inability to deliver big, beautiful outcomes for people locally becomes increasingly manifest, another possibility is that people start to build local politics in structural opposition to their stranger kings.”
Since our new Secretary of Health and Human Services is busy destroying our public health system, two groups of states have formed consortia to address public health needs and policy on their own. One group consists of California, Oregon and Washington. The other group consists of ten northeastern states, and interestingly enough this consortium is also addressing emergency preparedness (probably because the federal government is no longer interested in disaster relief).
I have to admit that I was surprised at how quickly these regions stepped up. And with air safety crumbling and health insurance in peril for millions, they may have to take on even more.
I lived in Washington state for many years and was on Basic Health because I was poor. When the state ran the program it was quite good. When the state had to transition into the ACA during the Obama years and became Apple Health, the quality went down and the administrative red tape increased significantly. This is an illustration of synergies that work better under a lower level of administration. If the west coast consortium can achieve better results in providing better health care, that will become a model for other alternatives, just like Basic Health used to be a model for other states.
We have excellent health care in France, even as resident aliens. My partner’s daughter, her husband and their two children live in Seattle. She talks to her on the phone at least once a week and the contrast in health care between even a progressive blue state and what we have in France is a source of constant amazement. AND she has premier health insurance because she works for the University of Washington!
Per the stranger king concept, Chris says, “Wait for it. All in good time.” Fair enough. But I was minded to look up Marshall Sahlins’ obit, since he died in 2021. I found a good one by James Fox in the Asian Pacific Journal of Anthropology. Sahlins’ book, The Western Illusion of Human Nature (2008) is listed as ” . . . his most serious bout in a long wrestling match with Western intellectual history.” Sahlins’ conclusion? “My modest conclusion is that western civilization has been constructed on a perverse and mistaken idea of human nature. Sorry, beg your pardon, it was all a mistake. It is probably true, however, that this perverse idea of human nature endangers our existence.” (2008:112) This book was published by Prickly Paradigms Press (love the name!), which Sahlins co-founded, as was David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), which Chris mentioned some time ago and which I read several years ago. In fact, I did a sample flip on my copy of Graeber’s book and landed on pages 40 and 41. I had highlighted a couple of passages.
On page 40, Graeber discusses the nation-state and defines it in the usual fashion, ” . . . one people, speaking a common language, living within a bounded territory, acknowledging a common set of legal principles . . . . ” The context here is discussing anarchy and distinguishing between ” . . . some sudden revolutionary cataclysm–the storming of a Bastille, the seizing of a Winter Palace–but will necessarily be gradual, the creation of alternative forms of organization . . . . ” Back in 1969, our little group called this distinction “rational anarchy” and was a way to distinguish ourselves from the bomb throwers. This kind of discussion and distinction was in the very air we breathed back then and became the focus of formation of food co-ops in Minneapolis in 1971. [Sidebar: In case people have not noticed, I try to get a nice bit of alliteration into every piece I write. Especially as I have been picking, packing and pickling pecks of peppers lately. This was a particularly prolific year for peppers.]
On page 41, Graeber mentions looking for societies that: ” . . . lack a state apparatus (which, following Weber, one can define roughly as: a group of people who claim that, at least when they are around and in their official capacity, they are the the only ones with the right to act violently). These, too, one can find, if one is willing to look at relatively small communities far away in time and space. But then one is told they don’t count for just this reason.”
A couple of points here. Evidently, Max Weber had delineated the defining characteristic of a state as “the monopoly on violence,” well before Elman Service codified the band, tribe, chiefdom, state scheme of organization of human societies in the 1950s. (Which is still taught in Anthropology 101 courses, by the way.)
Secondly, spreading out in small communities in time and space is critical to building alternatives. We tried it in cities. It didn’t work very well. Back in 1971, food co-ops functioned as a springboard for back-to-the-landers. Staying stuck in the ‘urbs is no bueno. If you refuse to get out into the rural environment, you will be forced to “go along to get along.” All under the thumb of corporate overlords. At least in my little village Macron is far away and the mayor is too lazy to oppress us in a significant manner.
Third, many people confuse state, nation and nation-state in their casual conversation and even in their writing. This is not good. A state has a clear definition as the most complex form of Service’s categorization and features monopoly on violence, resources distributed by class, centralization, no upper limits on population size, and law as a guiding principle for restraining behavior. Nation-state is as Graeber defined it and a nation is just a geographical categorization of borders that are patrolled. Of course, people can disagree. However you cannot disagree based on “fuzzy” logic and because you want to keep the system going that provides you with a cushy desk job! I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. That is just “stinky cheese.”
And that brings me back to Sahlins’ comment on Western civilization. “It was all a mistake.”
How does this tie into stranger kings? We are now seeing – in the Trump presidency – that a less complex and more brutal stratum of human social organization underpins what we conceive as “democracy” and “liberal democracies” and “the rule of law” and other such notions that we imbibed with our mothers’ milk soon after we were born. It is not nice. It is not pretty. But it is very powerful. One could do worse than start with Mao’s famous dictum, “All political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.”
We are in deep shit. As we used to say back in the 1960s, “You better get your shit together.” And if your mental image is of a small child rolling his feces into little balls and gathering them together around himself as he sits on the floor in rapt attention on what he has produced? Well, that is Donald Trump. Because he has his shit together, he is able to do things no other President has done before. Rule of law? Don’t even bother with sidesteps like other Presidents. Just go ahead and do it. Need money for a ballroom? Extract tribute from corporate sycophants who want government contracts. Need more oil because Middle East oil is slipping out of your grasp? Invade Venezuela. Food exports declining as an aftershock of your trade wars? Just pay off the farmers with subsidies. I could go on at length but I think you get the picture. If you want to make some positive changes, you have to deal with literal and metaphorical shit. But here is the upside. Shit grows good roses.
Just to pick up on a couple of points from Walter’s interesting comment.
Nations, states and nation-states: in modern times, polities defining themselves as nation-states have become pretty much the only game in town in terms of global sovereignty. Some of these polities have better claims than others to genuinely represent a nation whose interests it supposedly serves, but all nations are ultimately fictions with many tensions and alternative histories/narratives cross-cutting them. A lot of intellectual nation-building work has been undertaken globally by poets, writers, journalists, historians, cartographers and so forth to shore up these fictions, mostly starting in the 18th century. That was the focus of Benedict Anderson’s book. But they’re still fictions and that process is now unravelling, hence the need to rethink the nature of politics using tools that the hegemony of the nation-state and its modernist politics have ill-prepared us for.
On the state, Weber defined it as a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force. This is quite similar to Mao’s ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’. But there’s a sleight of hand in these definitions. Power may grow out of the barrel of a gun, but in what sense does *political* power do so? Politics is the business of negotiating and seeking ways to settle conflicts of interest. You can settle conflicts in your favour if you’re better armed than your adversary, but this anti-political strategy rarely endures. Or, to put it another way, people experiencing the sharp end of physical force very rarely consider it legitimate. Weber’s definition is more like a post hoc rationale for a monadic conception of ‘the state’ which Graeber and Sahlins argued, correctly IMO, (to paraphrase) ‘never existed at all or was at best a fortuitous confluence of elements that are nowadays drifting apart’ (On Kings, p.22).
Hence Trump is lashing out everywhere trying to maintain that grip, but it probably won’t work in the long run. And that’s where ideas like the stranger king might come into play for the ordinary folk having to pick up the pieces.
Democracy does work , just look at the South Wales election held this week , the disgust of the voters removed the labour party’s 127 year control if that seat , they came third with 13% of the vote as reported here , that took some doing but Starmer managed it .
Then there is government over reach , the UK net regulator is threatening to send. met police to the USA and arrest heads of us companies for allowing derogatory posts on their platforms , just walk in and arrest them , no extradition warrant , that will not fly , we have the first amendment covering free speech , we also have kidnap laws . The UK gov high handed and idiotic attempt to treat a sovereign country as a colony , ( A colony that fought for its independence and won ) is rapidly destroying UK US relationship .
Some good points here Chris, especially ” . . . the need to rethink the nature of politics using tools that the hegemony of the nation-state and its modernist politics have ill-prepared us for.”
However, I beg to differ on the sleight of hand comment. You say, “Power may grow out of the barrel of a gun, but in what sense does *political* power do so? Politics is the business of negotiating and seeking ways to settle conflicts of interest.” In my opinion, there is NO “business of negotiating and seeking ways to settle” unless you are ALREADY in the system and have the guns behind you. That is, unless you are already part of the system of organized violence called “the state” and have power within the system based on your status, wealth and connections. [Can you call the cops if you have an intruder? I cannot. The gendarmerie don’t give a shit. Good thing I can still take a punch to the face. For a brief period back in the states I could get some response if my life was threatened but not anymore. I am back in the 1960-80s again. On the sharp end of the spear, as it were.] As an example, if you say to a Minnesota state highway patrol officer on the road that you do NOT have to show him an ID, do NOT be surprised if he threatens to kill you. [This happened to me in 1977. I stood my ground and luckily he did not kill me.]
There is no sleight of hand here. The people with the guns and the badges have the power. They also have the whole power of the state behind them. When I was indicted one time I got a notice of “The State of Minnesota vs. Walter Haugen.” Really? The whole state of 3.5 million people against lil ol me? As Johnny Cochran (O.J.’s lawyer) famously said, “Who is the most powerful person in the justice system? It is not the prosecutor. It is not the judge. It is the police officer. He can take your freedom. He can take your life.” I sincerely doubt that David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins had any real understanding of what an illegal immigrant faces just walking down the street. For them it hasn’t changed much since the 1960s. Back when I was a migrant worker in the 1970s I saw a lot of Mexicans just kidnapped. At least they sent them back to Mexico instead of Uganda or El Salvador.
Trump may be President, but it is the guy who pulls the trigger who is the first line of offence. He (or she) could actually say, “No way! I am not going to enforce these immoral laws.” But they do that very rarely. One of my friends from the old days became a police officer in Minneapolis because he came from a long line of Irish-American police officers and was pressured to do so. He tried it and quickly resigned because he could not stomach the idea of going to a demonstration and beating up on his own friends. There were other reasons for his decision too, of course. But he was a rare case. Most police officers go right along with it. Even if they question it, they still do it. And of course they have never questioned the narrative of “the state” so they do not have the preparatory mental skills to even begin to question their jobs. Which is why I am now so focused on paradigm shifts so more “people with guns and badges” actually have some tools to rehink their role in the corrupt system of organized violence called “the state.” If we could actually “Defund the Police” like the programs attempted in Minneapolis and Seattle, Trump would not have the power to enshittify the world. (Kudos to Cory Doctorow for this term.) To make a long story short, there is no sleight of hand here. I’m with Johnny Cochran, especially after my many run-ins with the police, sheriff’s deputies and highway patrol officers.
I am continually amazed at the consternation expressed on news clips by the people who have just been bombed by the IDF or beaten up by Israeli settlers or been snatched off the street by armed thugs who don’t even identify themselves as ICE or police officers. Of course they are suffering at the hands of the thugs with guns. The system needs to protect itself and grow its cancer.
Back in 1980, I started saying, “If YOU would have listened to US ten years ago, WE wouldn’t be in trouble NOW.” Every five years I have updated it, so now it is, “If YOU would have listened to US fify-five years ago, WE wouldn’t be in trouble NOW.” I have been a Cassandra for a long time.
So why am I so strident now after 57 years of activisim? Since 20 January 2025, the situation has undergone a quantum shift to the rightwing extreme. Now it is not just “we are in trouble.” It has become, “If you don’t DO something to preserve yourself and your family, you will suffer.”
You and I came to the idea of a small farm future from different points of departure. But the destination is the same. And of course, I have respect for your views. But the situation is dire.
Plan of action:
1) Get out of the city
2) Grow your own food
3) Buy silver
4) Focus on positive alternatives
Walter, I think you show convincingly why the violence at the command of the state is real power, but not why it’s legitimate power. IMO every modernist philosophy that tries to justify the legitimacy of state violence – social contract theory, utilitarianism, Marxism etc – fails here too. The danger, the sleight of hand, is in replicating the state’s own claim to turn an is into an ought.
We navigate and negotiate conflicts of interest with people every day – within and between families, neighbours, workplaces, churches, community organisations, businesses, unions and cooperatives. I don’t think it’s a good or necessary idea to invoke the spectre of an armed police officer as the ultimate arbiter of all these conflicts.
In many societies where the writ of the violence-monopolising state runs weakly or not at all, ordinary people have often been well armed and well prepared to exercise violence in pursuit of their interests. As with the case of blood feuds, the body count in such situations can be high. People therefore often develop ways of negotiating and resolving conflict through ritualisation and talking rather than through naked violence. This kind of parleying is what I call real politics. It can be ritualised into a parley-ment. But if the parliament then claims that it alone is justified in exercising violence on its own account, then some people may conclude that the parleying has stopped and withdraw their consent. The parliament may use its force to kill or otherwise silence these people. But it still lacks their consent, and we’re no closer to establishing the inherent legitimacy of its violence.
Chris – You are absolutely correct that “violence at the command of the state is real power, but not why it’s legitimate power.”
It is NOT legitimate power and I never said it was. Structural arguments are not value arguments. Legitimate power depends on a social contract, which is a lie most of the time. Did I enter into a social contract when the US wanted to send me to Vietnam? Of course not. Is there a social contract between the Israeli government and the Palestinians? Of course not. It is tres simple. Submit or be put in jail and/or killed. In the case of the Palestinians, even when they submit they are still jailed, tortured and killed.
The police power that keeps the US, UK, France, etc. running – at least somewhat coherently – is not legitimate because it is not a social contract. If it was a social contract, there would have been 1) bargain, 2) consideration and 3) good faith. All states fail at all three. Therefore there is no legitimacy. If you get put in jail for smoking weed, it is not based on legitimacy. It is based on raw power, enforced by thugs with guns.
As I said previously, the normal social relations, contracts, etc. that you engage in on a daily basis are nested within a corrupt state-level society based on illegitimate power.
What everyone misses is that a devolution and transition from class-based resource access into a system based on rank is an opportunity all up and down the social strata. Zuckerberg and Bezos see this already. The wheel turns around when the billionaires re-invent capitalism into techno-feudalism through cloud-based rents (credit here to Yanis Varoufakis for this insight). Then we transition even more into rank-based access to resources. So a transition back to feudalism. Oops.
There is no more time for indulging in academic folderol. It is all about power.
Here is a quote from the North Country Anvil in 1971. “Most hippies wouldn’t be able to recognize power if it was lying on the ground in front of them.”
Just replace “hippies” with “people” and you have updated the quote.
Walter, okay that’s good we agree on power & legitimacy. In relation to power and its futures, yes the rich (individuals and countries) are enclosing resources. As well as the cloud, the likes of Bill Gates are buying up a lot of farmland too. But they’re also buying up gated escape pods, presumably on the grounds they think their wider power/resource grab might not work. It seems to me as well for the rest of us to be thinking about ways we can help it not to work. IMO this involves thinking about the nature of power, and who one’s allies and adversaries might be in contesting it. So, for example, I’ve never been sure what the ‘feudalism’ part of ‘techno-feudalism’ means exactly by analogy to the history of feudalism in land. I wonder if ‘techno-absolutism’ might be a better historical analogy. Techno-feudalism or techno-absolutism – I can see how some might consider that question mere academic folderol. But, at least when posed as a question of political strategy, I’d argue it will turn out to be important.
Technofeudalism = rent trumps capital. The full title of Varoufakis’ book is Techno-feudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023). One of your other commenters mentioned the increase in rents and the rise of the rentier economy (again!), so there are at least two of us thinking in this direction. It should not be too hard to make the connection between feudalism and rank-based access to resources. Trump is ahead of the game vis-a-vis progressives and liberals and even moderates.
Here’s a thought exercise. England under Henry the 8th was a complex chiefdom MORE than it was a state. The film version of Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel was an interesting take on this. In Service’s four-fold scheme of human social organization, the lines between categories are not as bright as you might think.
Academic folderol is holding onto social science theories when the evidence on the ground deflates them. Varoufakis has not done this.
Chris wrote “…the likes of Bill Gates are buying up a lot of farmland too. But they’re also buying up gated escape pods, presumably on the grounds they think their wider power/resource grab might not work. It seems to me as well for the rest of us to be thinking about ways we can help it not to work.”
That could be the topic of a new book, specific ways we can help it not to work. Back when Chris was taking suggestions for the book he would write after “Saying NO…”, I brainstormed a 4-part book idea which included this (from a comment):
“Allowing centralised control to increase (for example, with a Central Bank Digital Currency CBDC, increased surveillance, reduction in civil rights) will presumably result in a different looking SFF than if the real political power moves to the local level such that a centrally-planned and controlled food production economy wouldn’t be able to get off the ground no matter how hard the remote bureaucrats tried.
“Part 3 of the book could be more of a guide and a call to action, of what can be done now to increase the odds/chance of a convivial SFF.
“For example, at the political level, a convivial SFF is a more likely outcome if we:
1. maintain the use of cash and politically oppose CBDC adoption
2. oppose increased surveillance
3. oppose reductions in civil rights (rights to assemble, protest, etc.)
4. support more local governance (devolution, and states’ rights instead of federal control), not centralized control and globalization.
6. take steps to support the political changes needed for land reform
7. etc., etc.”
https://chrissmaje.com/2024/05/remembering-peasants-anticipating-peasants/#comment-263081
Thanks for that reminder Steve. More thoughts on that in due course.
Okay, thanks – I’ve been writing about rent and the rentier economy on this site for a long time. And, as promised above, will be doing so again soon. Maybe I should read Varoufakis’ book, but I’d take issue with the implications of the title. IMO capitalism hasn’t been killed by rent – rent in general and economic rent in particular has always been intrinsic to it. I generally avoid talking about ‘feudalism’ because I find it too floppy a term with too many different meanings – it’s not a good catchall for premodern societies with warrior aristocracies and a lot of peasant cultivators. There are ways in which the idea of rank-based access to resources can better typify such societies than nominally egalitarian capitalist ones, but also ways in which the opposite is the case. I don’t think Trump is ahead of the game – I think he’s just responding wildly to a metacrisis that’s far beyond his control or comprehension. However, I’d agree that the tamer response of progressives/liberals/moderates involves little greater control or comprehension.
There has always been techno feudalism the peasant had a axe or a slashing hook , the knight had armour plate chain mail and a sword , no contest !
Diogenese10 – Now the elites have electricity, but the intent is the same. Keep the peasants in line and growing the food. After collapse it will be back to swords vs. pitchforks again.
A couple of points about “localized power”:
1) Small farms are always in need of a method for slaughtering livestock, killing predators and hunting supplemental meat. I have several guns, most of which I inherited from relatives, but every small farm should have at least two rifles (a .22 and a .30-ish bore) and one shotgun (12 gauge is most common, but a 410 is handy, too). My most used gun is an SKS. Next is the 22 caliber rifle. I even have a BB gun for dispatching trapped mongooses.
2) Guns are the epitome of personal power projection. They are rarely the only means of resolving interpersonal disputes; indeed they are rarely used when societies have a generally accepted legal system available. But the coming small farm future is likely to happen when legal systems are weak or non-existent. At least one country whose citizens were mostly small farmers thought guns were so important that they ammended their constitution to describe basic rights about owning guns.
There are only two things of real intrinsic value in the world – land from which food and water can be derived and the means to defend one’s use of that land. The most effective means of land defense is a cohesive community, but a cohesive community with guns is even better.
And before anyone accuses me of being a “right-wing redoubt nutter”… think about this topic intently. (BTW, my politics is very much leftist).
europeanconservative.com/articles/news/half-the-anglican-world-breaks-away-over-church-of-englands-progressive-turn/
Don’t know if UK msm is covering this , I know a lot of US Episcopalian are and are disavowing Canterbury and the new arch bishop , the funding well has been turned off , churches are empty and ex CofE are borrowing other denomination buildings for their services .
What funding well would that be?!
GAFCON have been threatening schism for decades over the ordination of women, they’re delighted to finally have the excuse.
Hilariously, I don’t know if this is in mainstream media over here either — because I’ve been reading about it in churchy sources.
The church of England receives funding from every Episcopalian church in the USA , during the last minor schism when women were ordained , the CofE sold the churches that refused to agree and were put up for auction , the vicars were dismissed and the congregation borrowed Southern methodist buildings for their services , paid the vicar directly from the collection .
Like the Catholics they demanded their pound of flesh ( the collection ) until they drove everyone away . including me .
I went to a CofE school the vicar taught two RE classes every week , he lead a short service every morning and played the piano for the morning Hymns .
This is the bible belt , religious news like this is discussed in every Christian denomination down here ,the msm won’t touch religion with a barge pole , and there are a lot of churches , we have 11 diffrent denominations in a town of 2600 people catholic to Lutheran and everything in between ..
The church of England receives funding from every Episcopalian church in the USA
Nonsense.
It used to , every vicar had a deposit account the same account as every other vicar / pastor as we called them and happily paid in the collection when the bank opened . they also had a account that they were paid out of , both based in the city of London . spending was requested from the arch diocese in NY up to a certain amount that was ok over that amount it was referred to Canterbury .
The CofE is closing and selling churches , they sold my old school and there are six houses built on it .
Spray painting the inside of Canterbury cathedral is seen as sacralidge and was denounced by just about everyone .
Sorry Chris . I will now keep my peace .
I think you might be confusing the Anglican Communion with the Church of England.
Staying, trying to provide land to those willing to hoe weeds and bring manure.
Government should provide some security and an agreed rule of decision making to settle conflicts.
Fuel, and roads, and trains, and airports and electric grids are energy related and all government supported . A mistake IMO
It really does come down to energy and how to avoid its use because if you can do that then government doesn’t have so many levers to control you.
There are just too many people who think government should support their energy habits, with guns if necessary so the trick is to ditch them and find people who can live with very little government energy supports.
No flying or long distance travel, no commute to your job. Or traveling because your job demands it. No to lots of things everyone thinks they deserve or need or demand.
Security and rules to decide disagreements need to be rethought in a system where the state doesn’t provide those crucial elements anymore.
One hoe at a time because everyone else is nuts and no government can provide energy when it’s not there anymore. Get ready for that day.
I am certain before the day that the wheels completely fall off the gov / s will bring in rationing , getting the prols used to shortages and less likely to turn to pitchforks .
https://ukreloaded.com/global-push-to-reshape-agriculture-human-diets-so-every-food-supply-fits-within-sustainable-and-planetary-boundaries/
We’re facing increasingly dirigiste top-down control and people being herded into ‘smart cities’ … not the rural resettlement that some of us envisaged in the 1970s. It seemed to halt and reverse in the UK when ‘globalisation’ took off, roughly from the 1990s.
I don’t know why some people still think that ‘COVID’ 2020 was a deadly disease. Very good propaganda by global bodies, though. Sadly some people believed it, even in 2021 which was a crucial year to wake up and avoid official advice. 30% of the people I know did.
The elite write in code. They don’t mean living within sustainable planetary boundaries. They envisage those at the top table cruise around in private jets and eat organic-grass fed produce whilst >99% are under tight control and live a miserable existence. A bit like Stalin’s regime, really.
400 UK officials have just flown to the ‘COP’ meeting in Brazil, emitting I’d estimate a cool 2,500 tonnes of CO2, or 5,000 tonnes for the return journey. Do they believe the CO2 propaganda? Of course not. Brazil has built a new motorway to take delegates to the venue. Ask yourself, are these people serious ?
One needs to read the alternative media that took off after 2020, even at the expense of some discussion of small farm minutiae. These decentralised futures look unachievable if billionaires like Ellison (of Oracle) continue to accumulate >$100s of billions and manipulate ‘governments’. Ellison’s a ‘friend’ of the war criminal Tony Blair who’s currently trying to force compulsory digital ID on us. If it happens, Blair’s son appears to control the company which will run it. Wake up, people.
Nicely put .
I don’t know why some people still think that ‘COVID’ 2020 was a deadly disease.
Mostly because it is deadly. It killed nearly a quarter of a million people in the UK — or about three in every thousand people. I knew some of them before they died, and some of them were pretty fit and healthy. Vaccines have reduced deaths and hospitalisations quite a lot, but long-term illness after COVID infections is a pretty serious problem.
I agree with you that the messaging around it was pretty terrible, though, and at times outright dishonest: there was evidence from very early on that COVID is airborne, for example. And most governments are still largely dropping the ball on the kinds of ventilation-related mitigations that would reduce airborne transmission, not only of COVID but also of influenza, TB, chicken pox, measles in under vaccinated areas, and less harmful but still annoying illnesses like the common cold.
I regarded Covid as endemic by 15 March 2020. Part of the distrust of ,the death numbers came from a policy of crediting the death to Covid if there was any symptom of the virus at the time of death. Then when the CDC and other agencies changed their policy, the distrust increased.
Early on it seemed that deaths from shutting down global supply chains would result in more deaths than the actual disease. But then the concept of measuring excess deaths surfaced. This was based on a statistical baseline and every death above that baseline was counted as due to Covid. This concept was intellectually dishonest and subsumed deaths from supply chain shock into the Covid category. How convenient.
My working model is still that supply chain shutdowns caused more deaths than Covid. But since the data producers get to choose what category to put the death into based on a politically correct paradigm, we cannot really know.The UN used a similar tactic sometime around 2010 I think, when the global starvation number reached 1 billion. They just changed the metric and the number went down to an “acceptable” 800 million. They continue to do so. As Disraeli once said, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” (He cribbed it from someone else, but when Mark Twain credited it to Disraeli it stuck.) We really don’t know whether there were more deaths from supply chain shock. Nor do we really know the number of Covid deaths. What we do know is that it is endemic and the cases that affect us personally
Here in France we got all the shots. We got another dose last week with our flu shots. Neither my partner nor I have had it, even though all our neighbors have had one or more incidents. Of course there could be several reasons for our resistance so far.
Endemic has a specific technical meaning and COVID definitely didn’t fit that by March 2020.
The people I know who died of COVID didn’t have malnutrition on their death certificates but the person who died of malnutrition sure did, and didn’t have COVID on the death certificate. Supply chain problems were certainly inconvenient for some (I wasn’t really affected, because I am well housed and have a tendency to own more stuff than I strictly need, but some of our soup kitchen guests were), but the economic issues from disaster capitalism have caused longer term problems even with supply chain stuff back to normal (or as normal as it probably would have been by now anyway).
It is true that COVID has a much lower case fatality rate than, say, untreated TB, or measles in a naive population. We should have been able to handle it much better than we did, but I don’t have any good reason to mistrust the UK death figures. Infection figures were much more ropey as for the first few weeks it was impossible to get tested even if you had symptoms.
Kathryn, you seem to be using either the “argument from authority” or the global distinction of pandemic vs endemic, both of which I disagree with. The simple distinction is that the disease is present in the background in the population, ready to pop up when conditions are favorable. Embedded. This is now the normal use of the term.
Here is what UCLA Health says in recommending boosters. “Today, thanks to vaccines, growing herd immunity and the emergence of effective drugs and treatments, the COVID-19 emergency has ended. No longer a pandemic, it is now considered to be endemic. That means a disease is embedded in the population, but it occurs at predictable and manageable levels.” 17 Jan 2025
The Mayo Clinic addressed this question on 10 March 2022 and made these distinctions.
Endemic – The amount of a particular disease that is usually present in a community. It’s also called a baseline.
Epidemic – An increase — often sudden — in the number of cases of a disease above what is normally expected in that population in a specific area.
Pandemic – An epidemic that has spread over several countries or continents and affects many people.
Since Covid is now classed as endemic – whether or not it has spread beyond a localized population – it appears I was just ahead of the curve in my thinking. This is not unusual. I am an independent thinker with a healthy disregard for authority. Nor does it make me a conspiracy theorist or a rightwing whacko, like US Secretary of Health and Human Services Kennedy. It just makes me an independent thinker who is usually ahead of the curve. Here is a report on the endemic vs. pandemic issue from the American Medical Association. There is also a link to a video which some people may find useful. A nice quote: “There is not a set threshold that dictates when a pandemic becomes endemic, Dr. Parodi said.” In using a precise criterion of embedded, it seems I am more precise than the AMA without being rigid. Again, this is not unusual.
https://www.ama-assn.org/public-health/infectious-diseases/how-we-will-know-when-covid-19-has-become-endemic
Supply chain problems were more than just inconvenient. Since the world DEPENDS on global trade and highly globalized food distribution systems there were millions of deaths that resulted from stopped shipments of food, medicine and other basic materials. You don’t have to believe me. Anyone can do a little research on this and judge for themselves without buying into the mainstream narrative. Consider this from the World Health Organization 13 October 2020:
“The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic loss of human life worldwide and presents an unprecedented challenge to public health, food systems and the world of work. The economic and social disruption caused by the pandemic is devastating: tens of millions of people are at risk of falling into extreme poverty, while the number of undernourished people, currently estimated at nearly 690 million, could increase by up to 132 million by the end of the year.” And have those undernourished people died by now? It is likely. Now consider that the WHO whitewashes global problems and shoehorns them into a “nicey-nice” framework in order to keep their funding and pander to global governments that they have to cajole into doing the right thing. Listen to Ghebreyesus (WHO Director-General) talk sometime.
What I strongly object to are: 1) blaming Covid for millions of deaths that were actually due to stopping the global trade networks, 2) using Covid to increase a government’s power over its citizens, 3) condemning millions of people to death by starvation in prioritizing ideology over realism, and 4) skewing the data collection process and massaging the data by using a gross catch-all category. Boris Johnson lied to you and is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. Emmanuel Macron lied to us and is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. Donald Trump lied to US residents and is responsible for millions of deaths.
I was certainly ahead of the curve in categorizing Covid as endemic well before the “credible” politically driven organizations did so. That is not a big deal. What IS a big deal is the whacko panicked response by the governments that caused millions of needless deaths.
As for real conspiracy theorists, I often read them or listen to them or watch them on YouTube in order to get an idea of what they are thinking. There is some wheat amongst the chaff. Not much, but some. Remember when Hillary Clinton complained about a “vast rightwing conspiracy” in 1998 when the righwing whackos were attacking her husband in the Lewinsky scandal? She was branded as a conspiracy theorist herself; an example of twisted reflexivity, by the way. Clinton used the term again in her 2016 presidential campaign. She was right both times. There ARE “vast rightwing conspiracies.” Now they hold the fate of the world in their hands. Oops.
Walter, under what definition do you believe COVID was endemic in March 2020?!
Further: global deaths that were allegedly a consequence of supply chain disruption do not mean that COVID itself didn’t kill around 232000 people in the UK. Again, I have no reason to doubt those numbers; over the UK population, that works out at a little over three in every thousand people. That tracks pretty well with the COVID deaths I personally know about, which are more than three, but concentrated in areas of urban poverty and overcrowding.
As I already said, “The simple distinction is that the disease is present in the background in the population, ready to pop up when conditions are favorable. Embedded. This is now the normal use of the term.” Then I went on to quote the medical experts who now say the same thing. I made a calculation on the time of “embedment” based on what I saw happening in the news and on the ground. And I acted accordingly and got all the shots. [I also did some research on the mRNA transport system and became sanguine about its use.] This “noveau corona virus” blew up the old definition of endemic, which wasn’t very good anyway after HIV-AIDS. Even at the end of 2019, there were some suppositions that this “new” virus was just a newer version of the Spanish Flu that has been embedded in the global human genome since 1919. Another point is that four months of exposure is PLENTY of time for a virus to get established and burrow into a population-wide genome. We are talking about fast-acting zippers after all! (For those who don’t get it, a virus is like half of a zipper looking for another half. AND it can fit in quite well without having an exact match. And yes, there are some viruses that have a complete zipper.)
If one is struggling with the term “embedded” think of another iteration. The energy used to manufacture a car or tractor is how many kilocalories or kilojoules or kilowatts or BTUs it took to make it. The term you use is not important (contrary to the nitpickers who think a watt is somehow qualitatively different from a kilocalorie for instance). What is important is that before you use a car or tractor, the system has already paid for the energy used to make the product. It is in the background. Some of the critics of EVs for example, point out that the total energy use for an EV is about 80% embedded and 20% consumption in use. For ICE cars it is 20% embedded and 80% consumption in use. If you are a Howard Odum fan, he co-opted the embedded term into his new term “embodied.” You say tomayto, I say tomahto.
The common cold and the various flu viruses (including Covid) are embedded in the human population worldwide. Before 1492, that was not the case in the Americas. It has gotten worse since the advent of jet travel. It is no great leap to compress the timeline into four months for this new virus (December 2019 to mid-March 2020). Think of it as me using a synchronic view (what is happening right now) to look at the functional aspect vs. a diachronic view by the medical establishment (happening over time). I can hear them saying, “We cannot just alarm people by saying it is already in our genome and will pop up over and over again. We have to frame it as a fight we can win definitively. Think of our phoney-baloney jobs and the research money we might lose. Better to spread it out over time.” And that is what they did. The medical establishment admitted Covid was an endemic two years after it became a global health problem. AND that does not make me a conspiracy theorist. A skeptic and cynic, yes.
Please note that I have never downplayed the deaths actually caused by the virus itself. My strong objection is to the lies and misdirections used by federal and local governments for their own incompetent and sometimes nefarious purposes.
Well a congressional report which was not covered in the msm stated that only one Amish died of covid, a recently adopted kid , no one else did from the whole community of over 300.000_and none took the ” vaccine ”
There is now a congressional investigation into why .
What made me raise an eyebrow was why Fauchi and the head of the CDC plus others were given presidential pardons for their part in this , kinda stinks to me.
The other thing is I went to hospital lately I was tested for covid , I questioned the surgeon about it and he said ” yes we know they don’t work with a 80% false positive but they are mandated , without one I am not allowed to treat you .”
Why do you think COVID tests have an 80% false positive rate?
COVID is fascinating to me in the way so many people are prone to conspiracy thinking about it, or editing the stories they tell themselves (and others) about the disease in order to make it feel like they knew what was going on all along.
Meanwhile my life is so much improved by avoiding airborne transmission of colds that I’m not planning on going “back to normal” anytime soon, and this is considered way, way weirder than thinking the whole thing was a conspiracy. I’d love to have functional public health bodies taking care of this stuff but, well, here we are. Is this an example of a public ceasing to be a public, though? I’m not sure: it took decades for them to listen to John Snow or Semmelweiss.
Thanks Kathryn.
Yes, this was my experience too. During the major Covid years, I would wear a N95 mask whenever indoors in public, and I didn’t get sick at all. For at least 3 years. Normally I would have gotten a cold or something each winter.
So I have empirical evidence that masks work, whatever the ‘experts’ may say.
You are quite correct that continuing this masking into the ‘post Covid’ period would seem much weirder than espousing any conspiracy theory. Which is yet another way back to Chris’ original topic, maybe. Our shared beliefs in community do have a huge impact.
To wear a mask at the library or the grocery store costs me nothing. And probably doesn’t gain me very much either. But to wear a mask when I’m in close contact with my friends – who are the most likely to infect me – means that I will be having to explain the mask every time I see them.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I said to myself that I’ve lived a long and interesting life, and if I die, that would be okay. Though my wife would be pretty upset.
But now? Being sick is a drag, but I’m still fairly ambivalent.
I have been able to completely discontinue my asthma medication now that I’m not getting three colds every winter!
For small gatherings of friends we just ask people to test first, and reschedule if anyone has cold symptoms. For larger gatherings we either meet outdoors or mask up. Dining out more bothersome than it used to be, but I can deal with “not dining out in winter when outdoor service is unavailable unless there’s a compelling social reason to and going in mask when I do” as a price for “not needing medication just in order to keep breathing”. I use elastomeric masks that fit well enough that I can hold my breath, pull down the mask, take a bite of food, replace the mask and breathe. It’s a bit awkward, but really not a big deal, except for people who make a big deal of it. Thankfully the other members of my household are very much on the same page, so I’m not doing this and then having them bring home three colds per year.
I’m not quite as scrupulous as you are about masking, but my wife and I still wear masks indoors in public places and only eat at reataurants with outdoor seating (or are extremely well ventilated). Being in a tropical place helps. Here in Hawaii only about 2 or 3 percent still mask indoors in public spaces, with health care settings a bit higher.
I’m still wearing masks because of the totality of likely culprits: cold, flu and Covid viruses. I fear influenza more than Covid.
I’m not keen to decide whether influenza or COVID is worse; both can have some pretty serious after-effects.
With declining antibiotic effectiveness there’s also a lot to be said for not picking up TB. I do work with higher-risk populations for that.
I look at masks this way , look at the standard military germ / virus warfare masks given out compared to a 95 mask . Plus no military germ warfare officer has been on tv informing us about the covid problem ., no one asked those that know and defend us about the problem , the real experts .
I wear an elastomeric N99, not an N95. I can get five for £20 here and they usually last me about a month, sometimes less if we use the lower-quality incense at church or if I’m on the Tube a lot (where the particulates can be pretty bad).
The difficulty with N95s is that fit and seal aren’t straightforward, and they seem to deteriorate pretty fast if the mask is worn a lot, making them not that much better than cloth masks, which do have the advantage of being pretty much infinitely re-usable and so much better for the environment, but which just don’t filter anywhere near as well. It’s pretty expensive (and very wasteful) to buy a new N95 every day or two, and cloth masks don’t offer good enough filtration in a context where I’m often the only person wearing a mask in a poorly-ventilated room full of people, so I’ve landed on the elastomeric N99s as the best option for me at the moment, despite the plastics being a major compromise.
Because that is what a heart surgeon told me !
https://www.floridahealth.gov/newsroom/2025/05/20250530-cdc-removes-covid19-mrna-vaccines.pr.html
“CDC Removes COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines from Immunization Schedule, Florida Leads the Nation in Groundbreaking Public Health Shift”
Interesting discussions of guns and germs going on. Let’s avoid steel for now, okay? Thanks for keeping it polite.
On the matter of (metaphorical) guns and feudalism, for sure you can write histories of the world focused on inequalities of naked power of the swords vs pitchforks variety that tell us a lot. But there’s also a lot they don’t tell us, and in periods like now when naked power is retrenching itself I believe it’s particularly important to seek those hidden stories.
To Joe’s points about guns, I’d say that in a small farm future of higgledy-piggledy smallholdings full of trees and mixed cover one would have to be careful wielding powerful modern weapons for fear of accidentally killing a neighbour and sparking a blood feud. Maybe that focuses attention on the endless debates about the second amendment: is “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” the same as “the right of people to keep and bear arms”? I’d certainly be interested in more discussion about what a “well-regulated militia” would look like in a small farm future. Probably not much like the self-appointed militias in the contemporary USA? Gun culture, and hunting culture, in Britain is very different from the US, I think. Another topic for discussion. I wonder what John Christopher’s ‘The Death of Grass’ would look like if you transplanted the story to the US? I touch in passing on defence of property boundaries in ‘Finding Lights…’ Another important topic.
Another aspect of all this is the modernism/urbanism that shrinks in horror from the life in the raw involved in the self-reliant small-scale farming that turns livestock into deadstock and asserts itself against pests and quarry, yet connives at the industrialised slaughter undergirding the conditions of its apparently more genteel existence.
But affordable, reliable and powerful personal arms are surely a product of high-energy contemporary industrial society whose future, along with all its other products, looks questionable?
I’ve been interested to read the different perspectives on Covid here – thank you. The debate about its origins somewhat interests me. A lab leak is one in the eye for the ecomodernists. A wet market is one in the eye for the agroecologists, albeit you can tell it as a tale of expansion of human frontiers and turn it into an anti-modern parable. Interesting that arch-ecomodernist Matt Ridley has written a book expounding the lab leak idea – maybe he’s a more complex character than I thought.
Black powder flint lock guns will last centuries and anyone can make powder and ball from lead . they will kill a deer at 300 yards a bison at 150 . simple effective and invented somewhere in the fourteenth century made far more accurate after the invention of rifleing and surpassed somewhere around 1840 after the invention of the cartridge / precision cap .
A well trained person can reload the times a minute , and is therefore a very accurate marksman .
I have some experience with black powder guns. I was a member of the Sealed Knot (an English Civil war reenactment society) for many years, mostly as a musketeer. My matchlock musket was made by a blacksmith. The barrel was a steel tube with a plug and flash pan at one end, plus a simple pivot mechanism for the trigger. The match was made out of sashcord soaked in potassium nitrate. Once you were used to how to use it I found it more reliable than a flint lock, though my experience of flintlocks is restricted to trials of friends guns. I had a mold made for a bullet to fit my musket (0.61″ calibre) and fired it on a 100 yard range, where it easily hit the six foot square target screen, but you were lucky to get within a foot of the bullseye, remember this is a gun with no sights. But may I add that a musket has two dangerous ends. The butt should be metal bound, and a musket butt in the face can really ruin your day ( personal experience), and is a very useful deterrent when you don’t want to use lethal force. I agree that defending an individual farmstead is not effective, but a village militia may be useful at persuading undesirables to move on, trouble makers to keep the peace and a deterrent against banditry, or again not, it depends. The advantage of a musket in the UK is that you can hold it on a shotgun licence (for smooth bore weapons), which is a lot easier and cheaper to obtain than a firearms license (for rifled weapons), but you can fire ball and shot from a musket, but only shot from a shotgun (to obtain shotgun slugs in the UK I believe you need a firearms licence). To use black powder you also need a black powder licence to store black powder on your property and a suitable storage location to store it i.e. somewhere if it goes bang it does not bring the house down.
I also have experience with using a percussion cap muzzle loading rifle, an Enfield two band 1858 reproduction. This was a professionally made weapon. I found it very reliable and accurate, and my friends liked using it too. Again I cast my own bullets, which would be useful in a dark age situation, though obtaining caps would be less easy. An advantage of black powder is that it stores better than modern smokeless powders that can degrade with time. Also black powder can be hand made if the ingredients can be obtained, not so with cordite. At present I don’t have any firearms due to mental health problems, but in future if I have the opportunity I would obtain a percussion musket which allows you to use shot or ball, and is sufficiently long and has a metal bound butt, that waving it somebody’s face makes them move on. Please note that at present in the UK to hunt larger game a high velocity rifle must be used. All black powder weapons are low velocity weapons for the purpose of the game laws. However in dark ages things change.
The ” plains gun ” usually .30 caliber then the ” mountain gun ” .50 or bigger , are the usual black powder guns in the USA percussion cap or flint lock , rifled , a.50 can get up to 1950 feet per second , big enough to stop a grizly and accurate . the thirty will stop deer and smaller critters .
Can be fitted with long range sights ,( think Quigley )
The smallest calibre black powder rifles I have seen available in the UK is 0.45″. Some of these could have telescopic sites fitted. My ex percussion cap muzzle load rifle was 0.57″ calibre, a military calibre bullet designed to stop a horse, at nearly twice the weight of the equivalent sized ball. It could certainly take down red deer the largest game animal we have in the UK, but the law says otherwise.
But affordable, reliable and powerful personal arms are surely a product of high-energy contemporary industrial society whose future, along with all its other products, looks questionable?
I feel like this is an area where the overall trajectory might be toward simplification rather than elimination… but that the uneven distribution of collapse/crumbling/simplification makes a big difference.
I know next to nothing about firearms, and only a little more about bicycles. Give me a broken old-style sit-up-and-beg single speed steel bike and a pile of scrap bicycles, and someone with basic welding or blacksmithing skills can probably keep it on the road, or what passes for a road, though stuffing the tyres with dried grass when you run out of patchable inner tubes is going to get old really fast. I can even do some of the repairs myself with tools I already have. The same probably can’t be said for a state-of-the-art 21st century bicycle with carbon frame, electronic shifting, fancy gears, suspension and so on. If you have a remotely passable track, a bicycle saves so much time and energy that it’s worth maintaining it in good working order. It still won’t get you anywhere as fast as even a rather crappy car will, but it can go places a car can’t go, and brief periods of portage are at least possible (if very unpleasant). The trick is not getting into a situation where you need to race a car along a motorway: that’s not what bikes are for, even if you’ll easily outpace someone who is trying the same stunt on foot.
I don’t know what the firearms equivalent of that old bicycle is, but I’m sure it exists, and is useful for hunting deer or squirrels or maybe threatening to take the local Big Man down a peg without actually doing anything foolish. But you don’t want to rely on it to defend occupation of your semi-licit squatted homestead if your enemy has access to satellite imagery updated every few days, long-range drones, anti-personnel mines, and night vision goggles, even if they’re out of actual ammunition for their highly finicky precision long-range guns (…and anyway, if you even know those are pointed at you, you might not be able to tell whether they’re loaded.) You probably don’t even want to rely on it against a team of 12 highly trained archers. Of course, if you and eleven of your mates each have one of these, and you’re accustomed to working together, then you might be able to come to some kind of temporary arrangement with whatever tax collector comes along, at least the first time…. but there are probably more amicable ways to handle the situation, and depending on the resources behind whoever you’re dealing with, a violent approach might only be buying you time.
Imagining that we will quickly skip to a world where all cars are scrap and all electronics stop functioning, and your fight with someone coming to turf you off a piece of land or steal your grain or your sheep or whatever will be on an even footing, seems like a strategic error to me. Or maybe something more in the realm of eschatological belief.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth thinking about how you might respond to a show of force. Sometimes you don’t need to outrun the bear, you just need to outrun the other guy. But there will always be someone around with better technology than you have to hand, and there are limits to what you can do about that.
Personally? My eyesight isn’t that good, even with spectacles. Accordingly, I am focusing on other skills.
Re: home made weapons, I’m reminded of stories about European musketeer sailors being prevented from landing by north American native archers. Eventually the natives adopted gunpowder weapons, and I think I understand why, but I also believe it was a strategic mistake because they never controlled the source of the technology or materials.
As for bicycles, for any bike made in the 20th century, the single most advanced technological component is the ball bearings. You will not be able to make ball bearings at home, but you could substitute bronze sleeve bearings at a modest cost in efficiency.
But the second most technologically advanced component is a problem. The chain. Modern bicycle chains consist of either 4 or 5 different pieces. You will require about a hundred of each of these pieces, and they must be essentially identical to each other. It is theoretically possible to make these pieces at home, but with all the time spent making them, it would be faster to just walk to your destination.
Remembering that 5 years of heavy use is a long time for a bike chain. 3 years if it’s kept outdoors.
Chainless pedaled vehicles do exist, and can be blessedly simple mechanically, but they are either dangerous or slow. Selecting for slow, I favor the three-wheel drive velocipede tricycle. I (haphazardly) made one entirely out of salvaged wood, and it functioned for about a mile:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/19957900@N03/3098847964/in/dateposted/
Re: chains: if you’re running a single-soeed or even hub gears there’s much less wear on the chain than on derailleur gears; you also have the option, then, of a full chain guard which hugely reduces wear. I easily get five or ten years out of a chain and I ride most days.
And if you have a pile of scrap bikes and a link in your chain breaks, you can probably scrounge one from another bike, unless every chain is a different gauge, which is not how older bikes tend to work
Ball bearings are indeed more difficult! But if your bottom bracket is completely shot there is the option of taking the pedals off, adjusting the saddle height and treating the whole thing as a draisine — harder to control and more work than pedaling, but still often faster than walking, it just depends on the terrain.
Regarding the lab leak hypothesis, If Books Could Kill podcast had an episode about this not too long ago:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/episodes/17282956
Given the likely zoonotic origins of so many other pathogens affecting humans I don’t really think the lab leak explanation is at all necessary. I also feel like maybe not doing gain-of-function research would be a good idea, but that’s one of those arms race problems: an ethical, moral and philosophical conundrum, not a practical mystery.
I grew up in on a dairy farm in southern Minnesota. In this region, deer hunting could only be done with a shotgun and a single slug cartridge. This was precisely because of the risk of hitting unseen people, cattle, etc. When I moved to northern Minnesota, deer hunting with a rifle was allowed even though the forest was denser and provided shorter sight lines than the pasture lands and mixed forest in the south. I don’t know if the shotgun/slug rule still applies in southern Minnesota.
“But affordable, reliable and powerful personal arms are surely a product of high-energy contemporary industrial society whose future, along with all its other products, looks questionable?”
You don’t need industrial society for reliable and powerful personal arms. Plus, swords and spears and axes don’t need reloading. And even a broken foil can do damage, as I found out in fencing class one day when I got stabbed in the neck below my face mask by a broken foil. Swords WILL be expensive though.
Check out the legend of Wayland the Smith sometime (Völund in Old Norse). The Lay of Völund, or Völundarkviða, is in the Elder Edda if you want to read it. Völund was a son of the King of the Finns, which in Old Norse meant the Sámi, so there is already an element of shamanic magic right from the beginning of the tale. Per my researches in the Tromsø Museum many years ago, it is clear to me that runes were invented by the Sámi as the drawings on the “runebomme,” or Sámi shamanic drum, became more abstract over time. There were some people that the old Vikings had a healthy respect for because they were “way out there.” One group were the Wends. Another group were the Sámi. (Laplander is a derogatory term, by the way.)
Anyways, Wayland used bog iron to make fine swords. There is even a reference to him shaving a sword to filings and then feeding it to chickens in grain meal. Then, when the chickens pooped, he collected the droppings and forged them into a new sword. The added phosphorus from the chicken poop gave the sword new properties and was key to his reputation. John Anstee told me this story almost 40 years ago when I visited him in Cumbria. He was the man who rediscovered pattern welding, which is like damascening on a structural level. Samurai swords used something similar in their folding techniques.
My own tool-making is confined to making knives out of old files, which I did in high school. However, the point of this trip down memory lane is that fine swords were made out of an easily gathered commodity and transformed into well-made deadly weapons through innovation and lots and lots of labor. As Hilda Ellis Davidson pointed out decades ago; after the mines at Noricum fell into disuse with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, good swords became rare and treasured. This wasn’t really turned around until the Normans started mass production of standardized blades. Blacksmiths like Wayland were in demand and the Lay of Völund is a cautionary tale. Don’t piss off the guy who makes magic out of ordinary things.
After collapse, there will be plenty of warehouses and derelict factories to loot for raw materials. There have been plenty of swordsmiths in England since the 1980s, doing their craft without much acclaim. A few of them will survive, although their main work will probably be scythes and various other farm implements.
I would think for a time that truck chassis would be a readily available source for extreme high quality steel , its some of the best flexible fatigue resistant steel in existence .
I use cheap steel-angle bed frames that I find on the curb when the college rentals turn over every year. A nice high tensile springy steel.
I am proud of you guys. Being a high-quality scrounger is a good skill to have.
I have a reputation in our house for this kind of thing…. probably the funniest instance was when our toilet was blocked and we realised that for some unknown reason we didn’t actually have a plunger (possibly ours had been loaned out and not returned, but I’m honestly not sure). I walked out the door to go purchase one and there was a Thames Water worker just packing up his van, so I asked him if he has a plunger we could borrow. He came and unblocked the toilet, we thanked him profusely, and after he left my house.ate turned to me and said, “Kathryn, did you just womble a plumber?”
Looks like” de industrialtisation “and “terminal decline” are going hand in hand .
uk.news.yahoo.com/british-industry-now-terminal-decline-132710871.html.
Shame about Wedgewood I worked there for a while .
I wonder what the government is going to pay for food imports with …
I should probably have said “affordable, reliable and powerful personal firearms…” but I’ll look up flintlocks.
I think guns are pretty useful as a farm tool, but not generally so useful as a farm defence tool for the reasons that Kathryn – and Thomas Hobbes before her – lays out. The exception probably being violent frontier situations. I found Daniel Nugent’s book ‘Spent Cartridges of Revolution’ fascinating in that respect.
I agree with Kathryn on the Hobbesian eschatology of single defence of the homestead. I try to navigate around that in ‘Finding Lights…’ without denying that all sorts of power plays, some of them nakedly violent, are on the cards.
“guns are pretty useful as a farm tool, but not generally so useful as a farm defence tool”
Generally agree, unless multiple cooperating farms coordinate defence. A single farm can’t be defended at all (unless it is huge with many workers), hence the need for a defensive commons with defensible walls. You see these all over the world from ancient times until now.
The simple truth is that people are willing to use violence to control territory, much as our primate cousins do. No matter what happens during and after the transition to a small farm future, some entity will obtain a monopoly on violence no matter where one lives. We’ve had to live with that fact for thousands of years and we can surely do so in the future. The only exception would be if the violence involves nuclear weapons. That could kill us all.
Just check up the EBT problem in the USA ,43 million are receiving the supplement and the money is running out many are saying they will raid and steal food from stores , they would steal food from your garden too if they saw it . The future is looking grim .
Per the Covid discussion, there is an article in the Guardian today that illustrates my point. (Nitpickers take note. I did not say “proves my point.”) The article is by Environment Editor Damian Carrington and published today, 29 October 2025. The headline is: “Rising heat kills one person a minute worldwide, major report reveals.” The report comes from the Institute for Global Health, University College London (UCL). The report is 54 pages and available free. One can download it simply by registering. The link is in the article.
This report is a meta-analysis. That is, a report that summarizes and codifies other reports. A LOT of reports. This technique has become a “go-to” method over the last few years – popularized by Nature magazine especially – and is really a handy method to make some sense out of the ocean of data available to researchers and consumers. (Yes, you ARE a consumer of data too!) However, the methodology is hidden in the original reports. You can download the report, do a quick skim and see for yourself.
So I cannot see the methodology behind the collection and categorization of data. I would have to go to every single report listed in the references. And the methodology may be different in each report anyway.
Now . . . in using the “excess deaths” category to determine deaths from Covid, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the US clearly stated their methodology. Establish a baseline of recorded deaths previous to the Covid outbreak, add up total deaths in the same period and area and then subtract one from the other. This number is then CATEGORIZED as deaths from Covid. No differentiation between deaths from starvation caused by supply chain shock, no fine discrimination by looking at each death certificate and making a judgment on whether the medical establishment got it wrong. It is just a baseline and the increase in deaths. Simple. What could possibly go wrong? Plenty.
I have been castigating this methodology on social media since 2020. It matters little to me if other people with more credibility and fancy titles don’t agree. And I feel entirely comfortable castigating the Guardian for using a meta-analysis report to score political points with their so-called “progressive” and “semi-socialist” readers. And let me be clear. The Guardian is lamestream media too. They are just not as bad as the New York Times or Washington Post or Sydney Herald or Daily Mail or other newspapers. The only newspapers I thought did a good job were the underground newspapers I used to sell on street corners back in 1969-70.
Both the excess deaths methodology and this meta-analysis report are politically driven. If this is not clear enough, there is a built-in bias based on influencing people and channeling their thoughts into already established channels. In the 1960s we called this “channeling.” The postmodern word for this is “spin.” It really is just another form of propaganda. The rightwing whackos coined the term “lamestream media,” but it is an apt term. We would not expect the CDC to try and get people to think new thoughts because it is a government organization. But the Guardian? isn’t that what they pride themselves on doing?
Now . . . the Guardian gets it right sometimes, like when they reported a study done by a researcher in 2004 that established the AMOC vortices were slowing down and then the ensuring Pentagon report on a new ice age. (This is scary stuff by the way, especially as the Pentagon’s main worry was how they were going to “combat” immigration from Scandinavia and the Baltic states into southern Europe.) But most of the paper is now just drivel. They even canceled me because I called George Monbiot a shill for the nuclear industry one too many times. I used to just get another screen name by establishing a Yahoo email address but now I don’t even bother anymore. The Comments section on most articles are just stupid and without even a trace of their former British wit.
Now . . . for all you nitpickers, it is certainly true that excess heat has caused excess deaths. It is also true that excess fossil fuel consumption has changed the climate, not only through greenhouse gas emissions, but directly through an increase in the heat generated. Overpopulation has played a part in this too, as 8.2 billion people exude about the same amount of heat – every day! – as the consumption of the daily crude oil output of a major oil producer, Russia. (I have gone through the numbers many times on social media, so I do not feel the need to repeat myself. If you want to calculate the numbers yourself, use 2250 kcal/day per person and 6.1 gigajoules in a barrel of crude oil.)
The bottom line? This is a crap article intended to make people scared without giving them any hint of how to make their lives better and/or do something to change the downward slope of western civilization. It uses a suspect meta-analysis that is ripe for the rightwing whackos to challenge it. I can almost see them licking their chops and sharpening their pencils.
Per the guns comments, I am not too worried about my neighbors with guns trying to steal my potatoes sometime in the future when I am already being stabbed by sharpened pencils in the here-and-now.
UK COVID deaths and UK excess deaths aren’t the same number; our recorded COVID deaths were deaths where COVID was on the death certificate, not extrapolations from excess deaths. So when I described COVID as a serious disease (especially in unvaccinated people) based on the deaths from COVID in the UK, I was talking about deaths from COVID, not deaths from supply chain issues or reduced access to medical care or any of the other stuff that goes into the excess deaths calculation.
None of that means the excess deaths from knock-on effects of COVID aren’t real, of course, and it certainly doesn’t mean the response to COVID was handled well (it wasn’t). But Neil asked why people think COVID is deadly, and my response is that… it is, or at least it was. And in my observation, even with vaccination it’s still not something to trifle with. I hope this clarifies my reasoning some.
Vaccine availability on the NHS in the UK is pretty limited this year, so we might see a pretty rough winter, though COVID also doesn’t seem to have settled into a seasonal pattern like influenza yet, so… we’ll see.
l might manage a longer comment later about some of your other points but for now I have some discarded metal lockers to pick up with the bike trailer, and I think I’m only going to be able to manage one per trip, so if I want to get them before dark I am going to have to get a wiggle on.
You missed the point. The UK does indeed use a methodology called “excess deaths.” Here are a couple of bullet points from the Office for National Statistics per their revision of 24 February 2024. They must have needed to make this revision. The question is why? Politics? Poor performance of the numbers? Did they get it wrong in the first place?
[Start quote]
1. Main changes
* Trends in population size, ageing and mortality rates are accounted for by the new method for estimating the expected number of deaths used in the calculation of excess mortality (the difference between the actual and expected number of deaths); this is not the case for the current method, which uses a simple five-year average to estimate the number of expected deaths.
* Individual weeks and months that were substantially affected by the immediate mortality impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic are removed from the data when estimating expected deaths in subsequent periods, whereas the current approach involves removing data for the whole of 2020.
* Use of a statistical model means that multiple demographic, trend, seasonal and calendar effects can be included simultaneously in the estimation of expected deaths, and confidence intervals can readily be obtained.
* A “bottom-up” approach to aggregation means that estimates of excess deaths are additive across age groups, sexes, and high-level geographies, and between months and years.
* Having a common methodology for all four UK countries means that estimates of excess deaths are consistent and comparable across all parts of the UK, and the new methodology is largely coherent (though not identical) to that used by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities to estimate excess deaths in English local authorities.
[End quote]
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/causesofdeath/articles/estimatingexcessdeathsintheukmethodologychanges/february2024
Let me be as clear as I can. I reject “excess deaths” as a methodology. Obviously you don’t. However, you might want to consider why there has to be revisions in how excess deaths are calculated across the whole UK. Is it because the evidence on the ground has changed? Not bloody likely. Is it because the Grand Poobahs are struggling to hold onto their political power? More likely.
Let’s bump it up to the next level. The third bullet (asterisk) point says, “Use of a statistical model means that multiple demographic, trend, seasonal and calendar effects can be included simultaneously in the estimation of expected deaths, and confidence intervals can readily be obtained.” This is just reification of a tool (confidence intervals) so it can be used to sucker people into believing the model. “Wow! They have confidence limits! They MUST be right!” I suppose you have heard the famous quote from George Box, an eminent statistician who said, “Essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful.” Useful to who you ask? Uh, Keir Starmer, Boris Johnson, the Lancet, and the medical establishment, to name just a few. It is probably no surprise to you that I reject statistical modeling too, especially when addressing complex systems. I don’t build models. I do experiments. The need to reduce a complex system down to two or three or four interactive variables so you can actually produce a model negates any and all conclusions. And of course, this leads one to question the whole Establishment. That then leads us back to 1966 again, where the “Establishment” was the leading cause of the troubles in the world. Uh, we got that right didn’t we? Oops.
The use of modeling, starting with Limits to Growth in 1972, has kept the environmental movement from actually fulfilling its promise. What we have now in the postmodern world is more sophisticated rubbish than we used to have. And it costs more too.
I’m not arguing with you about whether the excess deaths methodology is imperfect or wrongheaded or whatever. I don’t really have a dog in that fight.
I am saying that when I mentioned UK COVID deaths to Neil initially, I was referring to the counted deaths from COVID — deaths where the clinician registering the death put COVID as the cause of death on the death certificate, which is what we counted here — and not to calculated excess deaths, which are a different number (but which naturally includes the COVID deaths).
I am not Neil. I went back and checked and I had no response to his original comment. I say enough contentious things every day without being mistaken for agreeing with someone else. I certainly think Covid is a deadly disease. People die from it. And I think it was endemic much, much earlier than the medical establishment did, for several reasons. And I think “excess deaths” is a dodgy category, again for several reasons. And I don’t really like classification schemes in general. I like to think “hors catégorie” as they do in the Tour de France.
The problem is political power and its permutations. Perhaps people should process their opinions thusly:
Personal = professional = political
Thanks for the clarification, Walter.
I think we probably have to agree to disagree on exactly when COVID became endemic, but I don’t think it matters much for practical purposes. It could have been eradicated very early on with proper measures against airborne transmission, it wasn’t, and after that point it was going to become endemic sooner or later.
I am not entirely sure how we got onto the methodology of excess deaths (and I’m reading on my phone, so going back up several threads to find it is going to be more frustrating than anything else). The reason I am referring back to my reply to Neil is that your initial comments were in reply to that reply. It’s clear enough that you aren’t him, and I’m certainly not trying to accuse you of agreeing with him, but that was the context for my initial comment.
In any case, I think we agree that any methodology used to arrive at excess deaths is going to have flaws. It’s only ever going to be an informed guess and should only be treated as such. Reality is messy.
I do think attempting to calculate excess deaths could, in a less dystopian context, function in terms of making human lives part of the wider conversation: a great GDP but very high deaths seems like an inherently bad deal to me, a signal that something has gone badly wrong somewhere, even if it’s a messy signal. But maybe that just makes it easier to put a monetary price on human life, which I also think is a bad idea: there will always be someone who wants his money more than he wants me to have my life.
Well on this side of the pond hospitals that put covid on the death certificate got a extra $600 for treating a covid patient .
europeanconservative.com/articles/news/academic-papers-obstruct-and-lie-to-protect-harmful-gender-medicine/
This is why a lot of people don’t trust ” science” anymore .
Plus the BBC has been found doctoring Trump’s Jan6 speech to give the wrong impression .
Msm can’t be trusted either .
Congressional investigations have debunked near all covid ” science ” the CDC leaders pled the fifth amendment
As the old saying says lies are around the planet before truth has got its trousers on .
The Cass review was hot garbage.
I agree with you that lies spread fast and that there are a lot of them in mainstream media at the moment.
I am not harmed at all by the trans people in my life, or, for that matter, by random trans people I don’t know. But as a woman who happens to be tall and have a slightly lower speaking voice than average, I am negatively affected by the continued attempts by a small but vocal group of bigots to exclude trans people from public life.
I’m not up for debating the existence or human rights of trans people in this space, or anywhere else for that matter.
I will say that if you think you don’t know any trans people, it’s likely that you just don’t know any trans people who feel safe telling you they are trans, and you might want to reflect on why that is.
As soon as the Covid discussion loses steam, let’s start one on the war in Ukraine!
I might try and tap out of that one…. I don’t begin to understand all the moving parts.
I was attempting sarcasm. I know of a few sites where three topics are forbidden: covid, the war in Ukraine and climate change. If those are allowed, they can take up all the bandwidth of the comments section.
Well back on the global warning ……
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/10/28/now-he-tells-us-bill-gates-backflips-and-says-climate-change-no-threat-to-humanity-after-all/
But it’s interesting how much of the COVID discussion boils down to epistemology!
One thing the covid “discussion ” has done is that ” scientists ” are being questioned ,
Here in the USA 1 in 31 children now have autism , and childhood vaccinations are being questioned , Children in the USA have 32 vaccine shots before the age two , up from 5 twenty years ago , I had none seventy odd years ago ,
Autism is becoming a disaster here , parents and politicos are demanding answers .
I think the increase in autism diagnosis is an increase in diagnosis rather than an increase in how many people are autistic. Autism is understood much differently than it was even when I was a child (and I probably would have had an autism diagnosis, if I had been evaluated then on the same criteria used for evaluating children now).
I think many of the anti-vaxxers don’t realise that many of the diseases we vaccinate against were once serious diseases that killed many children every year. I am grateful that I have never had to worry about getting measles or polio or tetanus, all horrible illnesses. I’m grateful that I have some protection against influenza and COVID, should I manage to catch either. I wish I could have had a chicken pox vaccine instead of getting chicken pox as a teenager, because that was pretty rough. And vaccination is the main reason smallpox is eradicated. I also think we should, as a society, be taking public health measures around COVID and other airborne illnesses that are more sophisticated than “vax and relax”, starting with better ventilation and/or air treatment in hospitals and schools and extending to things like better sick pay policies so people don’t have to go in when they’re infectious.
I absolutely believe we should question scientific knowledge, that’s just part of doing good science and funding out more. I don’t think that’s actually what’s happening under the current political regime in the US: blaming scientists for something that isn’t a problem as a distraction from something that is a problem is not questioning or furthering scientific knowledge at all.
At the speed that autism is accelerating the USA politicos are beginning to worry that the USA will collapse . High tech needs bright smart people and we are running out of them , Ford states they are 80.000 car techs short in their agencies , GM and Stelantis the same , computerised cars need computer specialists and they can’t find any .
Some of the brightest and smartest people I know are autistic, including many who are experts in various bits of computing.
There is evidence that antibiotics can trigger autism. Given in early childhood they can alter the bacterial flora of the gut allowing clostridium tetanus to dominate. This bacteria produces a neuro toxin that can pass through the gut wall and then via the vagus nerve to the brain, producing serve autistic symptoms and damaging brain development. The use of antibiotics has become profligate in recent decades in the west, with autism rising with antibiotic use. This explanation though does not cover autism diagnosed shortly after birth.
I can give sources if asked, but do not have them to hand at the moment but the book 10% Human.
On the topic of “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics”:
Back in August 2020, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) disclosed that “the COVID-19 Data Dashboard has been reporting, for England, all deaths in people who have a positive test… it uses the fact of a positive test and the fact of death to derive the number reported. However, it is only an approximation of the number of people who die from COVID-19 because other causes of death are included…”
And why did they use such an approximation (counting as a COVID death anyone who died from any cause who had a record of a positive COVID test at any time in the past)? The reason they gave was “to be sure not to underestimate the number of COVID-19 related deaths.”
Starting in late August 2020, the any-cause-with-a-positive-test approximation was modified for deaths occurring more than 60 days after the positive test, in which case they would be counted as a COVID death “if COVID-19 appears on the death certificate.”
https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2020/08/12/behind-the-headlines-counting-covid-19-deaths/
However, the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) explains that if COVID-19 appears on the death certificate, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the death was due to COVID, or that COVID was an underlying cause of death.
‘We use the term “due to COVID-19” when referring only to deaths with an underlying cause of death as COVID-19 and we use the term “involving COVID-19” when referring to deaths that had COVID-19 mentioned anywhere on the death certificate, whether as an underlying cause or not.’
So, the ONS must be counting only the deaths “due to COVID-19”, right? Wrong. They are counting the deaths “involving COVID-19”, regardless of whether COVID was an underlying cause or not.
From the ONS:
“COVID-19 deaths in England and Wales”
“…To summarise: 186,276 deaths *involving* COVID-19 registered in England and Wales as of 23 September 2022.”
Note that those 186,276 deaths were only “involving COVID”, which doesn’t mean that the deaths were “due to COVID” or that COVID was an underlying cause of death, according to the ONS.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/totalcovid19deathsintheuk
Meanwhile the risk of heart attack and stroke in the months following COVID is something like three times higher than normal — but I suspect those deaths aren’t generally recorded as being caused by COVID.
One of the people I know who was killed by COVID had it early in the first wave; he was in hospital for something like six weeks, finally got home, was very slowly recovering and learning to walk again, and then collapsed and died one day, around four months after his initial infection. Prior to COVID he had no health problems and was very fit and active. So there was certainly some justification for including COVID as a cause of death some time after the initial infection, though most of the deaths of people I know were quicker than that.
Meanwhile, regarding the overcounting of deaths due to COVID-19, some medical research published this year (by Nature dot com) looked back at “all in-hospital deaths, that were reported as COVID-19 deaths, in 7 hospitals, serving Athens, Greece, from January 1, 2022, until August 31, 2022… This is the first study based not solely on death certificates, but also on data extracted by expert physicians from the chart file of each individual patient, and on the opinion of the caring physician.”
They found that a full 45% of in-hospital deaths registered as COVID-19 deaths were actually “unrelated to COVID-19”, in other words, “COVID-19 was not related to the death”.
They also found that COVID-19 was the direct cause of death in only 25% of those registered COVID-19 deaths. In the remaining 30% of registered COVID deaths, “COVID-19 was not the primary cause [of death] but contributed to the chain of events leading to death.”
Basoulis, D., Logioti, K., Papaodyssea, I. et al. Deaths “due to” COVID-19 and deaths “with” COVID-19 during the Omicron variant surge, among hospitalized patients in seven tertiary-care hospitals, Athens, Greece. Sci Rep 15, 13728 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-98834-y
A major problem in communication is certainty. For instance, contrast the following two statements, A and B.
A: “I regarded Covid as endemic by 15 March 2020.”
B: “Endemic has a specific technical meaning and COVID definitely didn’t fit that by March 2020.”
Statement A is a description of what the author of the statement thought about a topic in the past. It can be regarded as a throwaway statement or as a working model to explore the topic. There is no certainty, only a clearly held opinion. It is not “gospel truth,” to use a hackneyed phrase.
Statement B is an attempt to “lay down the law,” to use another hackneyed phrase. It attempts to refute Statement A without any reference to a governing body or a clear definition. It is just an argumentative statement that is full of certainty and can be easily disproven. (The term “endemic” has changed in meaning over the years, even by the governing bodies who attempt to regulate it. References were provided for this change.) It should also be noted that the governing bodies who attempt to regulate terms are themselves suspect because of their errors in managing public health.
So why is certainty bad? Because it restricts power. If you push your certainty onto someone, you have lost the fuzziness of shared interpretation – a cultural behavior that is quite powerful.
A real world example to illustrate my point. If you have to arrest someone because he/she won’t respect the law against smoking weed, you have already lost a more sophisticated cultural power and have to use guns and handcuffs. On the other hand, if you can get the people to obey a law and self-restrict their behavior by using propaganda distributed in schools and media, you have won on a more sophisticated meta-level. To drive home the point further, if you can get people to stop smoking weed by shoving bogus statistics and cultural tropes down their throats when they attend school, you don’t have to waste time and resources putting them in jail and punishing them for the rest of their life in getting housing and education because of their criminal record.
Why is Trump successful in making his current trade deals and keeping Europe subjugated to his whims? Because he has blown up the concept of certainty in US foreign and domestic policy. He is now known as TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) on Wall Street and the stock market has reached all-time highs on the Dow Jones and S&P Indexes. Wall Street loves Trump! Why are Starmer and Macron and Merz blowing it? Because they are trying to maintain certainty in public policy – without having any credibility. Does Trump have credibility? Of course not! Does he need it? Of course not. He controls ICE, Homeland Security and the most powerful military in the world. A few judicious raids and the opposition folds. A few demonstrations and hysterical media documentaries mean nothing. Nothing!
Now in case anyone cannot follow my argument; I started out by using an example from within this blog discussion and reified the idea of certainty. I then used this reification of certainty to make an example of how it restricts cultural power and prompts the use of a lower level of power – guns and handcuffs. This is a nod to another element of this extended blog discussion, by the way. After asserting that shared interpretation is antithetical to certainty, I provided a real and cogent analysis of why Trump is so powerful – precisely BECAUSE he has blown up certainty.. And I am not the first one to say this.
So how does this apply to a small farm future? As the US and UK hasten down the steep decline of their economies and societies, there will be opportunities to collect bits and pieces of local power. However, if you are locked into certainty in your arguments, you will miss these opportunities. I say this based on my own experience dealing with local and national issues. Look at the Trump family and their increasing share of money and power. My thesis is that this is happening because Trump has blown up the whole concept of certainty in domestic and foreign policy. This is all my opinion by the way. I am not trying to convince anybody or “lay down the law.” But I figured out a long, long time ago that uncertainty is a necessary tool in your mental toolbox.
Certainty is like cement. If it hardens you are stuck and someone else has to chip you out of it.
Uncertainty is like quicksand. If you move your legs correctly, you can get out of it by yourself.
I think you may be making some assumptions about the level of certainty I hold about anything.
I do think there is room in conversations for some amount of provisionality; but at some point we all need to make decisions based on incomplete and/or provisional data. I am currently on a footpath underneath a bridge over a river in London, and can see from the splash patterns in the water that it is still raining; am I 100% certain that I will get damp if I leave the shelter of the bridge? No, but the likelihood seems high enough that I’m going to stay here for the moment anyway. Looking at what I can see of the sky I think I’ll probably have to deal with at least a bit of water to get home, though, so at some point my calculation will probably change to “going to be cold and dry under the bridge or warm and damp if I get moving” and I will go pick the shaggy ink caps I saw earlier and cook them before they turn into a blackened mess, as they are wont to do.
I note that my first response to your statement about having regarded COVID as endemic by March 2020 was to ask why you thought that, not an attempt to impose certainty on you or anyone else. I’ll admit that even after all your discussion of excess death calculations, I am still not sure I fully understand why you thought COVID was endemic by March 2020; that is not the conclusion I drew from the information available to me at the time, and nothing I have seen more recently suggests strongly that it was endemic then either. But as I have also said, exactly when COVID became endemic is of little consequence in practical terms now.
Anyway it looks like I have a break in the rain after all, so I am going to go see about the aforementioned shaggy ink caps.
Kathryn – I used your statement as a starting point to construct a bridge into a wider discussion. I didn’t even use your name. I think I got my point across about certainty. If you say something “definitely didn’t fit,” that is a statement of certainty. If you don’t want to admit it, that doesn’t bother me.
The reason for raising big issues is that the readers of this blog are a biased sample. Biased samples are not always a bad thing. For instance, in growing out new seed varieties, the protocol is to use seeds from fifty or more plants in order to get a normalized sample. What this does is provide consistency in the seed line. But that is not what I do and I do not prioritize consistency the same way other independent or commercial seed breeders do. I WANT bias so I take seed from single individual plants. I may take multiple samples in the following generations, but it is not a given. My successes so far are probably higher than the Land Istitute in Kansas, when weighed on a per researcher basis. It is a constant dynamic flow, and I try to mirror this flow in my thinking. Certainty is right out. I do the same sort of thing on social media. I throw out an idea or two and see what arguments and counter-arguments I get.
It is to my advantage to get the biased sample of the readers of this blog to see what opportunities are lying about and to use them. I may not directly benefit from a new paradigm that comes out of Somerset, for example, but someone else will
As for my reasons for categorizing Covid as endemic early on; I already gave you my responses, which you can go back and read if you wish.
I think Trump has found out that the USA is no longer the superpower , and NATO is just a blow hard talking shop , choices in trade between the USA and Russia / China the USA does not carry as much weight as it thought it has , the USA is floundering for exotic metals , and the world no longer depends on US food exports and have seen very expensive Western high tech weapons turned to scrap with cheap drones , Europe is about to close its car industry , VW has lost over a billion euros in the last quarter , and is relying on imported energy to keep the lights on .
Western empire is over its moving east .
In Lena Petrova’s latest podcast, she says the UK has now completely de-industrialized. I suppose Germany is next.
The worrying thing is what the UK is going to pay for its food imports with , its sold everything of value ( accept the crown jewels ) .
Starmer and Reeves seem bound and determined to test my hypothesis of hypercomplexity leading to collapse. Starmer especially seems to have it all ass-backwards. Here is a quote from Politico.
‘His claim last December that “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline” even prompted accusations from civil service unions that he was using “Trumpian language.”’
As I have been saying for over a decade, (well before Trump’s first term) the smart move is to manage economic contraction. Starmer should just accept decline and instead warm up the bath water.
Perhaps he will wise up after a whole bunch of grannies die from starvation in their unheated houses this winter.
The UK had 1600 people die of cold and malnutrition last year, they just happed to be the homeless on our streets. You would think it would be a scandal, but to the media and political class these are non people for whom what happened to them was there own fault. Don’t expect spreading poverty to change attitudes at the top of society. They will just double down on the growth mantra, sacrificing people and planet to get it.
I think this growth mantra is a part of the collapse in Starmers support. People are asking the question: when was the last time growth did anything for me? When was the last time I saw real economic growth where I live? Will more growth benefit or harm me? Many people no longer believe in the growth fairy. I think many know a big contraction is coming for the UK, and that the Starmer government is just talking so much bovine excrement.
No political party is offering managed contraction, and I don’t think any will. Why, because that will be to admit that the modern experiment is over, and all the promises of that experiment are broken. Three centuries of history in the dumpster. But there is life outside the modern paradigm, and it can be good as Chris and many others have written about and lived. Hard times are coming, but they can be lived gracefully if you know how.
May I add, another part of the collapse in support for the Starmer government are all the ministerial scandals ending in resignations that are revealing his cabinet to be full of wealthy upper middle class professionals, who think the law does not apply to them, er just like the Tories they replaced, and just like them they like punching down. They just can’t see themselves from the outside.
The countries that have cheap energy / workers pay or gold or silver mines are the ones with highest growth , until it runs out , Spain was the richest country on the planet until the central American silver mines ran out , England was the richest country until coal peaked and the USA hit oil, Europe’s Russia phobia is destroying the economy , US oil is now expensive compared to the mid east , and on it goes , cheap energy or low wages gives countries the edge .
A word on contraction vs. degrowth, since degrowth seems to be the buzzword of the moment. I regard degrowth as a nonsense term because it is a postmodern deconstruction of “growth” and is being used as a cover for a “kinder, gentler” ecomodernism. Ecomodernism itself is just a cover for a “kinder, gentler” capitalism based on smart technology. {The term in the 1960s was “hip capitalist.” Yvonne Chouinard was an example of this.] Look at George Monbiot’s rather flippant disregard of the huge amount of energy needed for his Frankenfood ideas. Chris has done a very good job of dissecting Monbiot’s ridiculous ideas on this subject. In my opinion, ecomodernism is like the Democrapic Party in the US, which used to be focused on the working class but made a shift towards Wall Street after the George McGovern debacle in the 1972 US presidential election. [The party is still called the Democratic Farmer-Laborer Party, or DFL, in MInnesota, but even there it has not really had a working class orientation for many years.] In a very real sense, ecomodernism is the latest attempt to channel environmentalism back to mainstream capitalism.
Degrowth is an English translation of “décroissance,” and was invented by André Gorz in 1972. Gorz was a French philosopher and journalist who was a disciple of Sartre’s existentialism (as opposed to Dostoevsky’s existentialism for example). It is based on rejecting the economic growth model in public policy, which has been ubiquitous since World War II. Décroissance was classic postmodernism, which first postulates modernism and then uses it as a bridge to a select and often suspicious alternative. If you reject modernism, you don’t even have to be a postmodernist. (!) I have gone around and around on social media with the “degrowthers” and they don’t like it when I link their ideas to Herman Daly’s attempts to advocate development without fossil fuels (or very little) in his concept of ecological economics. I see no “development” without “economic growth.” Back in the 1960s and early 1970s I liked Daly’s idea of a “steady state economy,” but then it dawned on me around 1973 that is is unworkable on all levels – local to global – because of the micromanagement needed, which in turn required a lot more energy and organization at levels that are unrealistic in a grim world of wars and neo-colonialism. Contemporary writers like Richard Heinberg readily admit that any sort of transition to a lower use of fossil fuels in the electrical grid, manufacturing and the like will require a massive amount of infrastructure build out. As Heinberg and others have noticed, we would need to do the build out NOW when fossil fuels are still cheap. But then that increases pollution, heat and gas buildup in the atmosphere and the oceans, and worsens global warming (or climate change if you are being politically correct). In a nutshell, degrowth is a crap concept because it still wants to do some development and make the world a happier place for all of us. To my mind, it exists in a land of unicorns and gumdrop trees.
Economic contraction, or just “contraction” when including social and political and environmental contraction, is quite different. It means getting by with what we already have and NOT building new EVs or hip classrooms or new ways to “synergize smart technology” or any other bullshit term. The model here is Cuba, which was stopped in its tracks by US sanctions in 1958 after the revolution. Cuba is still surviving as a nation, even though it is poor. The Soviet Union provided assistance until its collapse in 1991, but then Cuba was able to adapt with localized measures. Pat Murphy wrote a very good book on community solutions using Cuba as a springboard in Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change (2008). There is also a good documentary by Faith Morgan called The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (2006). Murphy and Morgan were a husband/wife team that ran Community Solutions, a nonprofit in Ohio. Murphy’s and Morgan’s Plan C is based on “Curtailment” – we must not only make drastic cuts in our use of fossil fuels, but also cut our rates of consumption, buy less, use less, want less, waste less, watch less televsion, eat better foods, give up driving private cars, and become, in short, “a nation with new values.” [From the Amazon blub for the book.]
Curtailment and contraction are the same. They are also the same as “Reduce, reuse, recycle,” from 1970. I would contrast them with the current use of “degrowth.” The idea of “contraction” here is to run down our fossil-fuel technology and replace more and more of it over time with manual labor. [Rediscovering localized water power is another avenue for the future too.] In other words, keep those old cars running as long as you can, like then do in Cuba. At the national level for Macron, Merz, Sanchez and the like, this means managing the inevitable economic contraction within their own countries. Are they smart enough to do it? Nope. Maybe Sanchez. Maybe. But in the UK and US? Not a chance. Ergo recession, depression and collapse. As collapse accelerates the downward decline of depression, dieoff begins. Oops.
And of course anyone can disagree with me. People have been telling me I was wrong for 75 years. It hasn’t killed me yet.
Yes Walter.
Economies of scale are a killer on the way down. Capital geared for high volumes of production becomes very inefficient when raw materials or energy run short. It’s partly this factor of diseconomies of scale that led to the rapid and deep collapse of the Soviet Union, principally due to energy shortages.
There is not much manufacturing left in the UK, so diseconomies of scale don’t apply much, it’s more a case of relying on others economies of scale, until you can’t. That will leave the UK in the position of being unable to make or import much of anything for most products. Cuba and the Soviet Union might then look like best case scenarios for collapse!
A lot of the UK population have been in the reduce, reuse, recycle for decades, but that will take you only so far. I prefer to buy old tools, they are usually better designed, better made, and of better metal. They have though become thin on the groundof late. At some point you need to replace tools, and that requires energy intensive production, and preferably at a scale that enables a world made by hand standard of living. Which for the UK means rebuilding a tool making industry mostly from scratch. God help the UK!
I was a member of the Green party of England and Wales many decades ago, but walked away when it fell for the ecomodernist conjob. It’s liberal classes dominated membership wanted to have their cake and eat it and ecomodernism was a way for them to rationalise the irreconcilable. Handmade, craft work, gardening, root cellaring, oh they’re so doudy shout the ecomodernists, we have a bright shiny corporate future to sell you. Lies damned lies.
Walter, you only have to right once, they have to be right forever. A betting man would back you! I have been saying much as you have for forty years. But from my experience of late there are more people listening and wanting to learn hand crafts.
Lastly a short tale about tools. The first year after I planted my walnut orchard I wanted to cut the grass, about two acres. I hired a neighbour with a tractor and a mower. Bad mistake, he managed to chop one of the walnut trees down! Next year, I thought I will cut it myself, but I wanted a tool that I could carry in the back of a van as I had no secure storage on site, and that did not involve to big a capital investment. I bought a top of the range Stihl motorised strimmer. It was a big machine that hung from a harness on your shoulders. It did the job, but I hated it. It was heavy, noisy, dangerous, and stank of petrol fumes. After two years I had to find something else. I came across Austrian scythes, bingo! I started with the 60cm the first year, the 75cm the next and the 85cm the year after. They are light, noiseless, no fumes, safe and quick cutting. Notice that each step has involved a reduction in capital intensity and energy intensity, but still got the job done. Reduce, reuse and recycle doesn’t quite cover this, maybe add rescale? Yes Walter, I like your definition of contraction, using what you have, until it wears out, then hand tools and craft work.
Good show! I have a Fux, which I bought at a bio-faire some years ago. I had purchased several scythes at vide greniers (French for “clean out your attic”) before this but they were too short. I gave one away and sold the other for 10 euros. I kept a backup. In addition to wheat, I use the scythes to cut down my corn stalks and lay them down in nice rows. Per the US ag schools, stalks a few inches high are supposed to use a reverse capillary action to push more moisture down into the soil over winter. It sounds counter-intuitive doesn’t it?
I use my Stihl FS 55 strimmer a lot! The US term is weed-whacker. So far this year I used 13 liters of gasoline (petrol or essence in France) in my Grillo tiller and 17.5 liters in my weed-whacker. This is similar to past years. I want the chopping action so the biomass breaks down faster. Yes, the noise is terrible, but it is a trade-off I am okay with. Keep up the good work!
Philip, the fact that the UK has no large scale manufacturing creates the possibility of small and medium scale machinery and industry for local and regional economies. We’re interested in textiles and have been working in the space of restoring the work of making cloth in Britain, what it will consist of, and as you say, rescaling. I good friend of ours, Alan Brown, of ‘The Nettle Dress’ fame (great film, highly recommended) is always talking about the efficacy of the hand made over the machine, and I love your ‘tale of tools’ as you whittle down to the scythe.
I have question, generally to the readers, I’m trying to remember one of the early books on material dependencies of the modern economy, supply chains etc. Female author who works out a functioning economy based on wood, akin to the tudor period? Jog any memories?
Thank you!
Ellen MacArthur wrote “The Virtuous Circle” on circular economy stuff and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation is pretty big on wood as part of a circular economy, but I haven’t actually read the book.
Regarding textiles, I got distracted yesterday and taught myself nåbinding (or at least, one stitch style of it) instead of going to the allotment. I know knitting is faster but I like the idea of a garment that doesn’t unravel as soon as it gets one hole. And while working with shorter lengths and having to either splice them together or tie in hundreds of loose ends is annoying, there are advantages, especially for smaller pieces, in being able to carry a shorter amount of working yarn and pull the work out when I have a few moments — a bit like someone using a drop spindle might be slower than someone using a spinning wheel, but get more done once they get the hang of spinning while walking…
I think the nålbinding will be a lot easier once I make it purchase a proper needle for it, the darning needle I was using for the purpose of experimenting was a bit of a challenge.
Thanks Kathryn, it’s not Ellen Mcarthar, though it is interesting. I think the author originally worked in shipping and could see first had the enormity of the supply chains, and their fragility. The book predates alot of the ‘material basis of the modern system’ discussions.
Great to hear about your textile adventures!
“run down our fossil-fuel technology and replace more and more of it over time with manual labor”.
You are right about “degrowth” as a movement to put lipstick on the recession/depression pig. Economic and political contraction are coming, and as the energy supply rolls over, all governments are going to find that the most politically acceptable path will be to use all remaining energy available to prop up existing systems the best they can. There won’t be any resources left over for replacing modern systems with lower-energy systems like those from our (distant) past, much less investing in new things to make “degrowth” more palatable.
Hence the difficulty with your prescription to “replace more and more (modern fossil fuel technology) with manual labor”. Manual labor in the gathering or production of essentials, like food and water, involves moving that labor out of cities to the places where food and water can be acquired without industrial machines. As I have noted here before, any significant re-ruralization process would require a huge amount of new infrastructure and training, the resources for which could only come from taking precious resources from the already rapidly dwindling support of urban populations. Not likely to happen. Thus, the only people who will be able to use manual labor to substitute for machine labor, are the people already living in rural areas.
The lesson for anyone paying attention: move to the country as soon as possible and get set up for a manual labor future, a small farm future. Scythes to replace line trimmers and brush-cutters, crosscut saws to replace chainsaws, woodlots to replace propane and natural gas. Water supplies that don’t require electric pumps. Every bit of significant infrastructure, including buildings, outbuildings, fencing, water piping, and tools, all need to be acquired as soon as possible, before things get too expensive or simply unavailable as supply chains collapse.
Economic doom is coming and people need to prepare for that. Everyone should be a doomer-prepper and doing their prepping in the country.
You mention supply chain problems. Here is a quick recap of the Nexperia kerfuffle, which may have a wider impact than people realize. Nexperia is a Dutch company owned by Wingtech. a Chinese company. From CNBC:
“Nexperia manufactures billions of so-called foundation chips — transistors, diodes and power management components — that are produced in Europe, assembled and tested in China, and then re-exported to customers in Europe and elsewhere. Around 70% of chips made in the Netherlands are sent to China to be completed and re-exported to other countries. The chips are basic and inexpensive, but are needed in almost every device that uses electricity. In cars, those chips are used to connect the battery to motors, for lights and sensors, for braking systems, airbag controllers, entertainment systems and electric windows.”
The Dutch government seized the company in October, citing “national security concerns.” Everyone knows this is bullshit but it prompted a hold on exports of the assembled and tested chips from China back to Europe and elsewhere. Major automakers around the world (except China of course) are now having to pause manufacture of new cars, which is a major blow to the economy of Germany and the US especially.
Back in the 1960s, it was a common trope that, “What is good for General Motors is good for America.” One could say that still; and also about Volvo in Sweden and Volkswagen, Mercedes and BMW in Germany. I suspect Chancellor Merz is not getting much sleep at night because of this issue. The key takeaway for me is how much a growth economy depends on new automobiles. One can see this in China too, as BYD capturing the EV market around the world is essential to China’s current economic growth and helps mitigate their real estate bust.
Electricity is needed for many, many things in daily life and now the foundation chip for many of the devices we use has supply chain problems because of Dutch hubris – no doubt influenced and prompted by American hubris. I used to think the Europeans were smarter than that – until I moved to Europe. Hubris is a common theme in ancient Greek mythology and the simplest definition is “overweening pride.” And of course hubris leads to nemesis – fatal retribution. Oops. Greek mythology is full of stories about this.
The Trump Administration is trumpeting their dear leader’s visit with Xi Jinping in South Korea as a success. Most of the analysts I trust on the Web call it a failure. One of the so-called “successes” is an agreement to “talk about it some more.” Hah! The Dutch government will likely have to eat crow. And will the center-left blow it after their recent win in the Dutch general elections? Seems likely. They seem to have the same disease of the liberals in the US; they like to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Bottom line: There are many, many indicators of how dependent we are on global supply chains and electriciiy available 24/7. The Nexperia kerfuffle could be another falling domino on our downward decline.
Finding people fit enough both mentally and physically to do the manual labour will be interesting , gearing bodies up to do freaking hard labour burning 4to 6000 calories a day six days a week will kill many , how many homesteader will take on soft city people that think an hour in a gym is hard , its an entire new concept to them that you work from sun Up to sun down in all weather’s .
Yes you are right if you have high taxes to pay, extortionate rent to pay, or you have specialized in producing a commodity that you sell at wholesale prices and have to buy everything you need at retail prices. Or you are a slave. You will have to work like stink in over producing a crop to sell enough to pay your way or your masters way. Really nasty, and has destroyed peasant economies in the past. However in my experience if those conditions do not apply and the peasant grows a diverse food, fibre and silvan crops, life is pretty gentle. Yes, a few days a year you have work like hard, but most not. A lot of tasks are repetitive but not onerous, involving more skill than effort. Tasks involving heavier work such as ground preparation or wood extraction I space out over a season. At times I did produce charcoal, kindling, firewood and nuts for sale, but I found the extra work to produce well beyond my needs onerous. I now produce for myself only and do twenty hours a week part-time work at minimum wage to cover my cash needs which includes running a vehicle.
Gareth and Samuel Lewis have detailed in their book “Twenty-first Century Hoe Farming” the time is requires them each year to produce a cereal and two root crops to support there family in Brittany, 12 days including ground preparation, sowing, weed hoeing, and harvest spread across the year. They do a lot of other work as well, but it’s not onerous.
The biggest problems for reruralisation isn’t physical fitness, but access to land, tools, and the knowledge of how to live off the land. It takes five years to get at least half competent in a diverse range of skills. And not many people can teach all those skills and most of industrial farmers would struggle to adapt their skills to a reruralised society.
The populous are not going to take kindly to everyone living in one heated room ,bedrooms with no heating and cold baths , A low energy future means a cold future .
I live with one heated room, and I’m comfortable. The house is well insulated. This time of year I usually just light the stove for one pulse of heat at 8ish, with a burn for an hour, which keeps the downstairs cosy until bedtime. This uses small diameter coppice wood which gives a quick burn to heat the house up. This uses about a box file quantity of wood. Later in the winter I will place a keeper log (large diameter log) in the stove as the stick wood dies down, which will burn slowly for for an hour, and if really cold a second one thereafter. If I want to warm the bedroom I open the door at the top of the stairs. Yeah cold showers for me when the gas runs out, but I hope the medieval bathhouses or the Scandinavian saunas may catch on here. My experience is that woodfuel heating is efficient if you have a good stove and your own woodlot, but in a contraction situation many people are going to be cold.
We don’t have a woodlot and so we buy wood from the locals. This emphasizes the need to trade locally. As I have mentioned before, I regard trade as pre-dating increased brain size in the transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. (Others disagree of course.) We use 3-4 stere (cubic meters) per winter and the price went up to 70 euros this fall in southern France. In our area, there is still a lot of logging so we will likely be able to buy or trade for firewood from local wood cutters for some time.
I and my partner will likely die in our beds with the lights and heat on. The same cannot be said for her children and grandchildren. The smart 30, 40 and 50-year-olds are positioning themselves for the likelihood of a cold and depressing future. Trade in your local area has been a beneficial tool for over a million years.
We are working on a theory of heating the body rather than heating the space, and ‘retrofitting’ bodies with woollen clothing, and functional undergarments, like you say, leaving fuel to heat small spaces, for cooking and/or heating water.
This works well for me down to about 15°C, after which point I will wake up in the night with an asthma attack, unable to breathe. (Daytime is fine but sleeping in cold damp air is just not good for me, probably due to lung damage from a few years of busking on the Tube; if I keep an eye on overnight temperatures I no longer need an inhaler, largely because I no longer get respiratory infections three or four times per year.) It doesn’t matter how warm the rest of my body is under the duvet, if the air I breathe while sleeping is a certain amount of cold and damp I have trouble. So I would probably want a bedroom rocket mass heater or something, or to sleep in the kitchen in winter if that’s the only room with heating.
I also know some elderly people really struggle in colder temperatures, being too cold for too long can be bad news for things like heart failure and this also impacts people’s ability to stay warm even with layers on. So granny might mostly sit by the fire…
…but adapting our activities and timing heating etc to the needs of different members of a household is not a disaster, if there is sufficient access to fuel. Access to fuel in turn comes back to access to land.
Thanks for the ongoing discussions. I’m afraid I’ve got too much on to contribute at the moment. I will try to put another post out as soon as I can.
Just a short note on the “ground game” that has been utilized so effectively by the Repooplican Party and missing from the Democrapic Party. Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election because he and his staff workers rang a tremendous amount of doorbells and engaged on a personal level instead of focusing on Wall Street and corporate donors like the mainstream Democraps.
Mamdani also had a strong orientation towards issues and downplayed identity. Free buses and rent freezes were just a couple of his issues. Make no mistake, Mamdani won BECAUSE he is a progressive but he was a smarter progressive. I sincerely doubt he canceled anybody. In fact, in directly challenging Donald Trump, he engaged with the dominant power structure in open combat, instead of trying to sidestep it like the DNC (Democrapic National Committee – the people who cheated Bernie Sanders out of the presidential nomination – twice!).
So for anyone who is actually considering how they can grab some power on the local level post-collapse, consider what Mamdani did right: 1) a ground game and 2) prioritizing issues over identity.
If you want more on this, I recommend the coverage on Democracy Now both the day of the election (Tuesday) and the day after the election (Wednesday).
Glad you pointed this out, it’s relevant considering the topic of this post is words and media, that while temptation is to focus on Mamdani’s posting savvy, the real impact was the 90,000 volunteers knocking on doors and talking to people one at a time.
I think it’s also worth pointing out in addition to issues over identity (well except the identify of being a New Yorker) that the specific issues are local in concern and don’t really/aren’t meant to apply everywhere else, and I think that’s a good sign as well.
Well there are the productive and the non productive , with money / companies it is far easier to move to a more positive place , we are seeing that all over the west with corporations shifting overseas where energy price and wages increase profits . People on the other hand find it harder to move until a point is reache d where staying where you are is not viable , Forbes has said over a million comparatively rich new Yorkers have asked their employers to move from NY to lower tax states , if , now when Mandan I wins . The productive are fleeing socialism . and taking with them their wealth and tax revenues .
The unproductive stay until the lack of funds forces the city /state can no longer afford to keep them in the manner they become accustomed too , NY is the canary in the coal mine , major corporations can move near instantly now they have no heavy machinery to move just computer held information their best employees will move with them , the poverty striken will stay in their poverty .
Its the same with homesteading , You can’t carry too much dead wood , the productive up and leave for greener pastures , the unproductive starve or steal .
Thatcher was right , socialism only works until you run out of other peoples money , , or labour .
I think describing wealthy corporations (and their shareholders) as “productive” here might be a category error. Their profit is made by not fully compensating workers for labour; their power is literally built out of other people’s money and labour.
Thatcher was good at making rich people and rich corporations richer, good for her I guess. That doesn’t make her (or any neoliberal) into an authority on right and wrong, or on the problems of socialism.
I also think a productive Vs unproductive dichotomy is a dangerously simplistic way to talk about human beings.
Don’t get me wrong I dispised Thatcher , her devil take the hindmost policies turned Britain into what it is now , A bancrupt country rapidly heading for third world status .
The major corporations are doing what they have always done , rip off customers and suppliers until there is nothing left to rip off then go bancrupt , remember FW Woolworth , the 1960 version of wall mart , BP was a world leader now its a minor player .the average life of a US corporation is between 30and 45 years . Blaming corporations for low wages should be put on the shoulders of politicians , Europe and the USA are importing large numbers of people and in doing so drive down the pay of every blue collar worker , here agriculture complains americans will not do those jobs , well they won’t simply they will not work for less than minimum wage , the illegals do . they can because they are paid cash in hand , no tax no social security taxes . Of course the corporate world greases the palms of politicos .