https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/13/scott-morrisons-net-zero-modelling-reveals-a-slow-lazy-and-shockingly-irresponsible-approach-to-climate-action

We're going to need a thread for Australia news soon, either that or a thread for funny consultancy firm papers. This bit in particular killed me

Here’s what I didn’t predict: of the various pathways modelled in this document, Australia’s government picked the one that doesn’t even reach net zero by 2050. Their preferred scenario, “The Plan”, hits 2050 with a whopping 94 megatonnes of emissions remaining, or 215 if you exclude questionable offsets. They reached the point of 85% reduction in emissions, and very simply gave up. This ignored 15% is breezily labelled “further technology breakthroughs” in the document. It’s both amusingly honest and stunningly irresponsible.

Imagine cashing a cool 6m for writing "the plan for 2050 is to come up with something until 2050" 😆

😆 There's been countless memes about Morrison's plan.

The opposition here is useless, but right now it still looks possible Morrison will be voted out by the middle of next year. He's an utter swindler. After that you'd probably see improved policy and rhetoric, but the country would remain in the grip of the energy and resources lobbies.

Another £16bn offshore gas project has just been green-lit (Scarborough). Heading for that Fury Road future currently.

I read a lot of criticism of Germany on here and obviously don't follow German politics much, but from what reaches me it seems that a lot of good is happening there? A lot of the most left-leaning politicians who missed out on being a part of the government use examples from Germany for how things could be here. I keep reading stuff about how the new government wants liberalization of citizen laws, self-identification for transgender people, cut emissions drastically compared to the last government and legalize cannabis. Is it all smoke and mirrors?

Yeah it's just spin on a thoroughly depressing coalition agreement. Legalising weed is fine and making it easier/cheaper for transgender people to get their paperwork done is too, the biggest positive for most people is raising minimum wage by €1.50 to a whopping 12 Euros.

Virtually everything else is demoralising to outright catastrophic. Labour laws are being relaxed meaning employers have it even easier to stick workers into "atypical" working contracts where the employer doesn't have to pay normal tax and contributions, you don't make enough to make a living and the unemployment office adds just enough for you to pay your rent. Pensions will be put into a privately run fund that will invest them in the stock market just to add insult to injury.

A lot more sabre rattling and agitation in direction of China, Russia and the Middle East should be expected with a Green hawk foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, but at least she's a woman and will bring a mother's touch with her when she decides on the next rounds of crippling sanctions on whoever. The designated defence minister said in the past she wants to raise military spending to not just the NATO target of 2% but 3%. Cutting on emissions "drastically" has been said by every government of the last 25 years and literally nothing ever happened, and there's nobody who does greenwashing and climate virtue signalling as well as the German Greens. Everything that's been announced so far just corroborates that further.

All of the above however pales compared to the fact the coalition has put an market radical in Christian Lindner in the position of finance minister. Even moderate or slightly conservative economists, mostly abroad, have expressed concern about this appointment, he's genuinely stuck in the 70s or 90s or whenever the last time was where deregulation, cutting back on government expenditures (ie on social services, subsidies for corporations are ok) and privatisations were the rage. Literally every single thing in the coalition agreement is under funding reservation which means he basically gets to green light everything before it happens.

To summarise - a couple of minor good points, a whole lot of hot air, a couple of catastrophic developments on the horizon and a massive black cloud above all of it is what's happening here.

Would it be fair to call it a re-run of the 00s neoliberalism project?

Absolutely. There are six established parties in Germany, and the four that have contributed to every coalition since the inception of the federal republic vary from neoliberal with a green or red tarnish to vanilla 100% neoliberalism. The party system/political representation here is well and truly broken, not to say it's any different anywhere else. Germany's is only special in that it's housing the second biggest parliament in the world behind only China (German efficiency my dick), you have a wide range of parties in it and yet regardless of which colour box you open left right or centre inside you'll find the same load of steaming garbage.

24 days later

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-un-disarmament-idAFKBN2IW1UJ

https://asiatimes.com/2021/12/no-un-agreement-on-killer-robot-ban/?mc_cid=a7424d778b&mc_eid=f072d9574c

Deploying AI to murder people is really the fate and end that humanity (or the part that dabbles in stuff like that) deserves. Can't trust it to drive our cars in traffic but sure, why not let it decide whether to end human lives or not

Unlike existing semi-autonomous weapons such as drones, fully-autonomous weapons have no human-operated “kill switch” and instead leave decisions over life and death to sensors, software and machine processes.

The Geneva talks, ongoing for eight years, have taken on new urgency since a U.N. panel report in March that said the first autonomous drone attack may have already occurred in Libya.

For example, a neural net designed for use in Pittsburgh hospitals identified asthma as a risk-reducer in pneumonia cases; image recognition software used by Google identified Black people as gorillas; and a machine-learning tool used by Amazon to rank job candidates systematically assigned negative scores to women.

Sure, but what if a remorseless, adaptive and resilient system of control already permeated every aspect of existence, enslaving all people it touched without a scrap of conscience and threatening an overall crisis?

...

Sorry—I guess posts about Arteta's approach to tactics and man management should go in the football section.

😆

minor spelling correction

adaptive and resilient system of """control"""

By the way the story on fully autonomous killer drones is fucked, though I think the idea there's usually an engaged moral subjectivity in imperial acts of killing these days at any level is ... in question. Feels more like this stuff just makes it totally explicit to me.

Was just reading an FT article about the projected 30% contraction of the Afghanistan economy since the humiliation of the US and the overnight dissolution of the ADF and the Ghani government, which will come in significant part as a consequence of reserve bank funds being frozen. That in itself is using a technical instrument to kill with no directly adjacent culprit facing censure.

Burnwinter wrote:

By the way the story on fully autonomous killer drones is fucked, though I think the idea there's usually an engaged moral subjectivity in imperial acts of killing these days at any level is ... in question. Feels more like this stuff just makes it totally explicit to me.

Was just reading an FT article about the projected 30% contraction of the Afghanistan economy since the humiliation of the US and the overnight dissolution of the ADF and the Ghani government, which will come in significant part as a consequence of reserve bank funds being frozen. That in itself is using a technical instrument to kill with no directly adjacent culprit facing censure.

Of course there's no moral subjectivity in the acts of killing by your average human US soldier (let's be honest, not too many other passports carried by those doing the killing) or drone operator, that much becomes evident when you see that most countries where said killings happen aren't even formally at war ie most people getting killed aren't soldiers or combattants. AI operating drones in combination with loitering weapons are just the next level where it's easy to see it escalate to a level with it going "sadly, horribly" out of control. You can smell the headlines already.

Absolutely no argument on your second point. As deadly as "normal" warfare (and its deviant relatives like DU etc) is, economic warfare is far more deadly and has been for a good while now. That's why I never exclude or absolve Europe from its responsibility for the demise of Syria, EU sanctions of the Syrian economy are one of the biggest factors to lead to the current catastrophic situation there. Same for Saudi Arabia's all out war on Yemen and of course the grandmasters of that instrument, the US who use extra territorial sanctions to cover half the planet. This is just the official list the US Treasury bothers to put online itself:

https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/sanctions-programs-and-country-information

They're exactly as you describe, a weapon that kills - even worse than indiscriminately - the weakest first in efforts to achieve regime change or bully governments into their doing.

2 months later

Act of war/invasion seems imminent on Ukraine. My thoughts with Ukrainians caught in this bigger geopolitical game.

Putin claims Ukraine is attacking Russia 😆 Just an excuse to start the war.

the war has started.

i feel for all the ukranians out there. fucking hell

It is bloody tragic … the old men are back again. The United States, NATO, Ukraine, Russia all to blame, but none more so than Russia.

I am shocked nobody is backing Ukraine up. At this rate they will be eaten up alive by Russia in 2 weeks.

mdgoonah41 wrote:

the war has started.

i feel for all the ukranians out there. fucking hell

Ukraine has been at war since 2014. No one gave a fuck since it was pro Western Ukrainians shelling the Donbass which is fine, but let's not act like there haven't been more than 10,000 dead since then and Russia are the ones starting the killing now.

Clrnc wrote:

I am shocked nobody is backing Ukraine up. At this rate they will be eaten up alive by Russia in 2 weeks.

Kiev has only itself to blame. There have been plenty if opportunities to avoid this in the last years but when you reject them all and keep verbally pushing for conflict, promote literal Neonazis to important positions to negotiate you can barely act surprised that your civil war turns into a bigger one.

As usual the people are the only ones feeling the repercussions. Not on the same level of course but the sanctions and shutdown of Nord Stream 2 probably means Germans can look forward to buying American fracking gas for 30x the price next winter.

I'll refrain from reading too many "news" in the next days from any party, not good for your mental health to be exposed to propaganda from either side.

My cobbled-together understanding based on what I remember from the coup in Ukraine in 2014, and recent research …

The various versions of the Minsk agreements were supposed to allow for an orderly decentralisation of Luhansk and Donetsk via constitutional reform and referenda, the limit point of which from a Russian point of view was always supposed to be secession.

Instead there's been years of contra wars in those regions since 2014, funded by both Russia and other sources, and their "freely elected" leaders are so free they both got their United Russia party tickets last year.

The democratic question of "Ukraine or Russia?" in Donbas seems to be fully alive and undecided, and you can't see how it could be while conflict continues. This is an ongoing unprincipled territorial struggle between greater powers, aimed at the significant resource and strategic implications.

Putin's speech on the declaration of recognition of Luhansk and Donetsk was pretty interesting reading. Slammed Lenin for giving up too much to member states of the USSR other than Russia during its formation, and criticised Stalin for successfully integrating central power without ever adjusting official Soviet ideology to acknowledge it, instead maintaining a pretence of a democratic constellation. And also lots of bitter bean-counting about fiscal transfers during the collapse of the USSR. The overall thrust was that Russia must have a big, autocratic empire again, the public rationale is little more than blatant imperialism.

As Putin alludes to in his speech, there's been a dynamic where Ukraine has heightened the conflict and played both sides to extract concessions from the EU and NATO at different times, and NATO now seems very lukewarm on joining this conflict.

Today we're looking at a full-scale air and sea suppression by Russia of any Ukrainian military response, I'm guessing the future holds intensified guerrilla warfare in Donbas with civilians in the crossfire … and I suspect it's going to look a bit like "Syria lite" over there, probably right down to the US arming a "people's revolution" … it is brutally horrible for the people who live there.

That's a pretty good summary Burns. I disagree with the quip about the freely elected leaders in the East - no doubt there's plenty of nepotism or outright corruption at work there too but being native Russians to a large percentage and having been at war for close to ten years, not out of their own volition, I'd wager they have a lot more backing in the populace than the pilot operated comedians and oligarchs in Kiev.

Putin's speech is very long but makes for interesting reading. His stance is obviously presidential and one sided but the international chartas, contracts and historical facts he mentions are available online to read for anyone who cares enough to do so. Compare that to the ridiculous simplification and outright distortion of what's going on there, literally "Putin invades Kiev" in German news since last night.

You notice little things, like the fact there's tons of Twitter threads going viral by people in Kiev but none from the affected regions …

My understanding is both regions have majority "ethnic Ukrainian" populations and are majority Russian-speaking. By contrast Crimea's over 80% Russian …

The election results that have come about are skewed in favour of the separatists, but the whole situation's so disruptive and violent you have to wonder what's in play. Not even referring to direct interference, by the way, just to my thinking that an insecure population that's become the plaything of greater forces can't really self-determine.

One thing that's interesting is that Putin's manoeuvres allegedly have minority polled support in Russia, somewhere in the 40s. Annexing Crimea was a slam dunk with the Russian population, I remember a Russian migrant colleague saying something like "It seems only natural to me, we always took our holidays there" …

If anyone wants to check out a very long read on Putin's worldview a decade ago, this was a useful way to sort out his relationship with the Soviet era, the unprincipled but effective way he's controlled Russia, and what the threats to that control have been over time. A lot of the stuff mentioned seems to play out in his war speech.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii88/articles/gleb-pavlovsky-putin-s-world-outlook

Are Ukraine (and it's people) likely to put up a big fight? Do they have the means or the will?

good summation of everything going on since 2014. the talk is from 2015, but pretty much predicted how things would unfold in the years that followed

goon wrote:

Are Ukraine (and it's people) likely to put up a big fight? Do they have the means or the will?

No idea really. Apparently Russian control of Odessa via the reinforced Black Sea Fleet, if it were to happen and could be sustained, could be big longer term, since it's responsible for 70% of maritime trade. There were a pile of false reports of an "amphibious landing" there earlier today, but there is air and sea control for Russia there by the sound of things.

Ukraine has a relatively massive army and a huge number of reservists. I'm unsure if or how they might be used or resupplied in this conflict.

There is this term "frozen conflict" for situations like what's been going on in parts of Georgia and in Donbas. An op-ed I read today suggested expanding and continuing the problems of control in Ukraine is a goal for Russia, since it prevents Ukraine joining NATO. The whole situation seems a textbook case of "politics continued by other means" …

Burnwinter wrote:

My understanding is both regions have majority "ethnic Ukrainian" populations and are majority Russian-speaking. By contrast Crimea's over 80% Russian …

Probably misworded it, native Russians as in natively Russian speaking - not that it were that much of a clear difference, the languages are very similar. I have a couple of friends from the region and they consider themselves Russians in Ukraine, they also say that's what everyone they know call themselves. That Mearsheimer clip Gazza posted and the maps used in it shows that pretty well

Yeah, for sure. That's why the scare quotes. Even Polish and Russian are close to mutually intelligible, I used to tease my Polish ex about this. Most Slavic languages are pretty close. I understand more or less all Ukrainians speak Russian fluently.

I only mention it because I looked it up, and it seems in the whole of Donbas a majority of people describe themselves as having "Ukrainian" not "Russian" ethnicity, despite this closeness and the majority pro-Russian politics in those places.

Polish and Russian are for my understanding further apart. My Russian is very rusty but I still understand bits of Ukrainian because of it, Polish I barely understand except for kurwa mac

I still understand a fair bit of Polish these days, used to understand a bit less Russian before my ex made me switch to Polish, and the Polish sort of fuzzed it up.

I feel like they're very similar. Very similar (and fucking hard) grammar (with differences like the absence of the verb "to be" in the Russian present tense), lots of vocab crossover, different alphabet but the Cyrillic characters aren't hard to pick up.

It's true Czech, Slovak and Polish are even more similar. Could be that my relative lack of knowledge of these languages compared to say, French and Spanish makes me understate the differences between them.

I could genuinely write a 20 page essay about the situation in eastern Europe right now, about the historical failures of the West and Germany in particular and the developments in Russia that led to such an escalation and how if we, meaning the german people especially, had made an effort to understand what is going on there and looked to work together to truly create a united Europe, all this could have been avoided. I won't though, because even after Arsenal made me feel ecstatic yesterday, I still woke up feeling nauseous today and that is what sticks. There is something nightmarish about war in Europe for me, even knowing that it has been coming for 8 years and that war is being waged all around the world every day. Hearing the sirens, seeing the lightning of explosion, seeing civilians hide in metro stations and bunkers, imagining what terror they're going through. Not even 100 years after the unspeakable horrors of World War II, human lives are still seen as collateral in the power games of old white men by the likes of Putin and Biden. And that is just mortifying. I just hope the Ukrainian people can somehow get their lives back. The ones that still have lives to get back to that is.

Burnwinter wrote:

You notice little things, like the fact there's tons of Twitter threads going viral by people in Kiev but none from the affected regions …

My understanding is both regions have majority "ethnic Ukrainian" populations and are majority Russian-speaking. By contrast Crimea's over 80% Russian …

The election results that have come about are skewed in favour of the separatists, but the whole situation's so disruptive and violent you have to wonder what's in play. Not even referring to direct interference, by the way, just to my thinking that an insecure population that's become the plaything of greater forces can't really self-determine.

One thing that's interesting is that Putin's manoeuvres allegedly have minority polled support in Russia, somewhere in the 40s. Annexing Crimea was a slam dunk with the Russian population, I remember a Russian migrant colleague saying something like "It seems only natural to me, we always took our holidays there" …

If anyone wants to check out a very long read on Putin's worldview a decade ago, this was a useful way to sort out his relationship with the Soviet era, the unprincipled but effective way he's controlled Russia, and what the threats to that control have been over time. A lot of the stuff mentioned seems to play out in his war speech.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii88/articles/gleb-pavlovsky-putin-s-world-outlook

Also, thanks for posting that interview, it's a really interesting read.

This is all so depressing. Not the least bit surprising for us in Eastern Europe though. We've lived under this active threat for decades. Knowing that it's happening one day, just not sure if it's tomorrow or a few years down the road.

Doesn't look very good at the moment, but I really hope the Ukrainians can put up a proper fight, not collapse immediately and drag this on.

The Ukrainians did everything they could to prevent the situation in Georgia where Russian propaganda successfully made it look like they were the aggressor and the military invasion was justified. I don't think there are many who believe Putin's crap about peacekeeping against the Nazi Ukrainians that were committing genocide against Russians in eastern Ukraine. In doing so, they lost valuable time in putting together their reserve forces and setting up a proper defence. "We lost our country and independence, but at least a few less idiots on Twitter think we're nazis."

Fucking Belarus should not be considered an independent country any more either.

Economic sanctions alone won't do shit. Especially with China backing Russia up.

Kurt Eisner wrote:

Not even 100 years after the unspeakable horrors of World War II, human lives are still seen as collateral in the power games of old white men by the likes of Putin and Biden. And that is just mortifying. I just hope the Ukrainian people can somehow get their lives back. The ones that still have lives to get back to that is.

Well said. These conflicts, political, economic or military, are engineered by tiny, incumbent, parasitic minorities who protect the stakes to which they believe they're entitled by grinding up confused, ordinary people.

What if you could just do a day's work and get mad about the footy on the weekend while the tanks and missiles rusted away? Fuck war.

Burnwinter wrote:
Kurt Eisner wrote:

Not even 100 years after the unspeakable horrors of World War II, human lives are still seen as collateral in the power games of old white men by the likes of Putin and Biden. And that is just mortifying. I just hope the Ukrainian people can somehow get their lives back. The ones that still have lives to get back to that is.

Well said. These conflicts, political, economic or military, are engineered by tiny, incumbent, parasitic minorities who protect the stakes to which they believe they're entitled by grinding up confused, ordinary people.

What if you could just do a day's work and get mad about the footy on the weekend while the tanks and missiles rusted away? Fuck war.

It's a very nice thought Burnsy, but as well all know, "the footy" (epl, ecl, world cup etc) is all tied up with this geopolitical fuckery. It's no place of retreat.

Burnwinter wrote:
Kurt Eisner wrote:

Not even 100 years after the unspeakable horrors of World War II, human lives are still seen as collateral in the power games of old white men by the likes of Putin and Biden. And that is just mortifying. I just hope the Ukrainian people can somehow get their lives back. The ones that still have lives to get back to that is.

Well said. These conflicts, political, economic or military, are engineered by tiny, incumbent, parasitic minorities who protect the stakes to which they believe they're entitled by grinding up confused, ordinary people.

What if you could just do a day's work and get mad about the footy on the weekend while the tanks and missiles rusted away? Fuck war.

Imagine. You'd think humanity would make peace around the world its highest priority. Instead it's money and "growth", so that after work we can lie around wanking to porn from around the world and get everything we need delivered to us by horribly underpaid and overworked delivery guys and gals without even getting up, let alone stop to think. Opium for the world, power to the dealers and death to those that are exploited on the other end of the world to make it all possible. Sometimes I think humanity peaked with the neaderthal.

All it takes is just a complete mad power hungry man to destroy peace. Disgusted by what is happening to Ukraine and it's people.

Clrnc wrote:

All it takes is just a complete mad power hungry man to destroy peace. Disgusted by what is happening to Ukraine and it's people.

It takes a lot more, and peace has been a very fragile construct, in some regions not even that, for a long time now. Hitler would have been a nobody if not for the circumstances of the time, the powers that were in Germany and the disgruntled and disgraced general populace that enabled him to become the biggest monster in humanity's history. Heck, the communist revolution enabled Hitler's rise, because the likes of Hindernburg, von Papen, von Schleicher and the rest of the burgeoisie and remnants of aristocracy decided the likes of Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and Kurt Eisner were a bigger threat to Germany than Hitler and his free corps of fascists.

Similarly, the aftermath of the cold war, the messy breakup of the soviet union and the reckless westernization of Europe lead by the US and the Nato have enabled Putin to become a de facto dictator and the negotiations with Kiev to make them a bulwark of the West on Putin's doorstep have presented him with a reason to go to war.

So, no it doesn't just take one power hungry man to destroy peace. It takes a lot of them. He's just the most ruthless of the bunch. And, to be clear, that makes him the worst of them. But another like him will come somewhere, somewhen, unless we finally fucking learn and start to work together instead of against one another. But the world will burn before that happens. At least capital will continue growing. Maybe we can buy ourselves a fucking soul back at some point.

Yeah its a whole lot of circumstances, but that doesn't excuse Putin and his actions.

Anyway, Dynamo Kyiv players have been conscripted to fight the war.

They give soldiers seeds so sunflowers can grow from their bodies when they die. I can't stop thinking of Dovzhenko's Earth.

The world's back has been to Ukraine for a long while now. There's no glory in a violent death. I wish they would demilitarize and live, and that NATO would guarantee asylum to dissidents.

First night of good sleep for me since this all started was yesterday after my younger brother made it across the border from Uzhhorod into Slovakia. It’s been really stressful but thankful it’s almost over now - his flight leaves from Kosice tomorrow. Had been begging him for the past month to leave the country, but he kept insisting it was all calm. He only agreed to move out West from Kharkiv (where his university is) under immense pressure from the family, and now he understands what the hassle was about. None of his friends who waited till the bombs started landing have been able to leave Kharkiv. He is extremely fortunate. Got separated from his girlfriend, but she’s also luckily made it to Poland.

So many lives just thrown into chaos and disarray so suddenly. Over what?