📰The Guardian Facilitates Genocide
Let me show you why this newspaper has lost its credibility as independent journalism.
An article this month says:
The Environment Agency released a report last week that predicts a growing shortfall of water in coming years, leading to a deficit of almost 5bn litres of water a day by 2050.
- This implies that the "prediction" is a 5 billion shortfall (a third less than the present supply) meaning that is what is going to happen. But this is the average prediction - the top of the normal distribution curve. Obviously, there are the outlier long tail possibilities that it could be say 2 billion or say 12 billion. The average is not relevant - what is relevant is the catastrophic chance of a 12 billion shortfall - i.e. the total collapse of water for agriculture and supply to urban areas (i.e. evacuation from cities).
- The statement implies it will be 5 billion a day each year, but that just means an average year. Again, say 1 year in 4 there will be a 12 billion shortfall (see consequences above). And mathematically that means one year in 16 (.25x.25) this will happen 2 years in a row and will therefore be 100 or 1000 times more destructive - i.e. permanent migration from the UK and/or social collapse (think about the Gaza crowds wanting to get food).
- Last but not at all least - there is the old chestnut that this is a closed sub-system analysis. What else will be happening in the world by 2050 in a post-2C world? Well, according to other Guardian articles there is a 50% chance AMOC will collapse, leading to a 10-30C collapse in winter temperatures. Oh, and loss of control of wetland methane release, taking temperatures over 3C, runaway sea level rise (Greenland ice collapse), and then 1 billion people on the move because of wet bulb effect mass deaths in the subtropics.
So...
Independent journalism would insist that each article on the future would look at the whole system and add in the new elements of that day's news. Anything less is not worth the paper it is written on.
They would write, for instance:
"We have news today that the average collapse in water supplies will be 5 billion litres a day - a third of present supply, by 2050. We have to add that into the Guardian's running all-system analysis of the future - 10 million extra migrants coming into the country and a 50-50 chance of mass migration out of the country due to AMOC collapse. We need to add in the inevitable collapse of the world economy at some average point in the 2030s.
Needless to say, given the interlocking facts, the Guardian's independent position is further strengthened that revolutions are now inevitable, and they are justified and necessary for liberal civilisation's survival. Please sign up to join the Guardian's staff team's unlimited hunger strike to demand a citizen assembly-led government, happening on June 1st."
A final point - it's interesting isn't it that when the Guardian does an article on individual suicide there is always a link to support services and the end - all right and good. But when it comes to the mass killing of billions of black and brown people, followed by the mass suicide of our whole civilisation - well it is "just another day" as the slave-supporting Guardian of the nineteenth century would have put it.
Independent? - Nope - complicit in genocide? Yes
The Schizophrenia Machine
The annoying thing about liberals is that they hate unpleasantness when it happens to them but they spend their lives not thinking straight about the 10 million times more unpleasantness they create for other people.
The Guardian is a massive schizophrenia machine. Over in the “climate department” we are told on a daily basis that the human race is heading for extinction - or effective extinction if you want to be nerdy about it. While over in the politics department it’s liberal business as usual. This is not smart.
As columnist Marina Hyde says.
“I can see Ms Lunnon thinks that the only context for anything anyone says or does, ever, is that we are about to become extinct, and that trumps absolutely everything.”
Let's be polite and suggest this sentence is not very well thought through. Obviously, if we were about to become extinct then that would trump absolutely everything. In World War Two, 3% of humanity died and the war definitively did trump everything - so presumably if 100% of humanity is about to die then...well.
The point, however, is not about basic logic. It is that Marina, along with the rest of the liberal elite, simply does not want to believe what they do not like.
How does this denial happen? I offer the following reasons.
- Guardian writers think climate is an issue. It is not. By definition it is everything, in the sense that air and water are everything - no water you die - no climate you have no food, you die.
- Guardian writers think climate is an event: “When we get to 2c...” - implies we stop there. No. 2C locks in 3C and so on. It does not stop.
- Guardian writers think the climate is about the physical world, which they are dumb enough to think does not interact with the social world. If you, for instance, suggest that climate will create mass rape, all hell breaks loose. But to deny this is like saying a meteorite landing in New York will not kill people.
They think then that there is only one domino. There is in fact a series of them. When you knock down one, you will knock down the rest of the row. This is basic physics. The tipping points in the geophysical system trigger each other, which then re-amplify each other - it's ONE SYSTEM.
This is how you lock in human extinction. And everyone with minimal analytical skills knows that human extinction is now the main scenario.
Of course, saying this is not going to get Marina to understand what is going on, because people who are embedded in a self destroying elite system can only very rarely get their heads out of it.
This is why these people have a complete lack of understanding about why people think it's okay to hassle those who administer the greatest act of injustice in human history. They don't realise that the old liberal system is done - it's totally fucked. The future is fascism or some form of Citizen Assembly-led government. Either way politicians have no future. Sorry.
If you stand by and allow the world to experience something on the scale of 30 world wars, you really don't get to complain about a bit of vigorous “protest”.
(Note: The reaction to this will be all about the vigorous protest and nothing about 30 world wars - the joy of privileged delusion.)
I've got two focuses:
- Revolution - Building social formations to create revolution and guide moments of social disruption.
- A Balanced Society - Building the new civilisation, based on a new balance of deliberative democracy, compassion and limited consumption.
Want to join me? Sign up my monthly Zoom call. (More info here)
Sign up for nonviolent civil resistance with Just Stop Oil in the UK or via the A22 Network internationally. Alternatively, you can now join a new collaborative project I'm helping with called Humanity which is aiming to build the new world ahead based on deliberative democracy.
