How Bad Is Biden’s Slump? - Political consultants vary in their views of what caused it, and how the President can recover. - link
Instagram for Kids and What Facebook Knows About the Effects of Social Media - A Senate committee hearing will address whether Facebook is following the example of Big Tobacco. - link
Trump Still Faces a Reckoning in New York - Court documents and interviews indicate that the Manhattan District Attorney is accumulating evidence of pervasive tax fraud. - link
What Is Going On with the German Election? - As negotiations continue, it helps that Germans have experience building coalitions and that the largest parties aren’t extreme. - link
Jason Isbell, Friend to the Vaccinated - The singer-songwriter has been very public about his pro-vaccine stance. - link
</figure>Horror is a natural refuge for atheists and sinners. But Netflix’s Midnight Mass made me feel erased.
I’ve been trying to put my finger on why Midnight Mass, Netflix’s new seven-part series from the creator of The Haunting of Hill House, feels so pernicious — and not in the way its creator intended.
Critics frequently describe Mike Flanagan, the feted writer-director of The Haunting of Hill House and its follow-up The Haunting of Bly Manor, who also directed Doctor Sleep, Hush, and a bevy of other admired horror movies, as a “horror auteur.” His lofty reputation seems to be tied to his tendency to sidestep the darker elements of horror; as the New York Times noted in a recent profile, “Flanagan has earned a reputation for what might be called humanistic horror … while never skimping on the nightmare fuel, [he] believes that horror can offer something deeper.”
The typical Flanagan fare wraps poignant stories of family, community, and unremitting optimism around horror-filled centers. This combo has made him a perfect collaborator with Netflix, the home of most of Flanagan’s recent work. In all of the films and series he’s written for the network so far, Flanagan has created tales whose horror plots draw broad audiences and whose rosy themes appeal directly to middle America. Flanagan’s Netflix partnership has also given him an enormous audience; The Haunting of Hill House, arguably his most successful project, was one of the most-binged series of 2018.
Yet despite their aesthetic loveliness, tonal tenderness, and popularity, Flanagan’s stories often seem to trade narrative precision and craft for emotionality. There are glaring unanswered questions, incoherent finales, and plots that frequently become muddled by what appears to be Flanagan’s determination to make horror that feels literary and optimistic rather than tropey and dark. His focus on the brighter parts of humanity often creates a sharp, sometimes confusing dissonance between the genuinely scary stories he weaves and the worldview underpinning them.
In the case of allegorical explorations of love and grief, like Hill House, this dissonance can pay off wonderfully, because the sharper the horror, the stronger the healing catharsis can be. But in Midnight Mass, the precarious balance between horror and hope that characterizes all of Flanagan’s work finally tilted in the wrong direction, at least for me.
Flanagan told the New York Times that Midnight Mass is his most personal story yet, based on his own years of religious exploration and “a healthy Catholic upbringing” that was challenged by his personal study of the darker aspects of the Bible, until he ultimately found more affinity with atheism and science. Despite these self-professed doubts, however, there’s very little doubt in Midnight Mass. The show’s overtures toward critiquing America’s Christian majority fall by the wayside. Instead, Flanagan and his Midnight Mass co-writer, his sibling Jamie Flanagan, wrap a tale of religious zeal around a barely veiled allegory for the Covid-19 pandemic that’s bolstered by an emphasis on individualized faith. There’s so much effusive Christianity here, so many rapt displays of faith, sermons, monologuing through Bible verses, and preaching to the lost, that the horror elements almost feel like window-dressing.
Even though Midnight Mass does still contain plenty of overt horror elements, I think the series actually pushes Flanagan quite far outside the horror genre. If anything, I felt baited by this story, which plays within the modern horror sandbox while undercutting much of the ethos of modern horror via its embrace of Christianity as a source of hope and nourishment for lost souls facing an incomprehensible crisis. Many critics have found that to be a good thing, praising the series’ emphasis on the less sordid aspects of horror. Yet while Flanagan has every right to keep writing relentlessly hopeful stories, for horror fans like me, the effect of his optimism is frustration over feeling shunned as a non-believer — by the very genre that usually protects non-believers from feeling shunned.
As a queer, genderqueer atheist who was raised as an evangelical, I’m drawn to horror in part because horror stories fundamentally offer a counter-narrative to mainstream Christianity’s most toxic ideas. Through tropes that tend to celebrate villainy, sinfulness, deviance, queerness, and defiance, horror embraces and empowers all that conservative religion rejects as immoral and unholy. Think, for example, of the many queer horror icons that have helped shape queer identity into a reclamation of villainy. Or of The Witch’s Black Phillip famously inviting Anya Taylor-Joy’s colonial Final Girl to “live deliciously.”
Horror at its best teaches us how to live within, and how to find ourselves within, society’s morally gray areas. In a post-9/11 world, horror as a genre has grown blacker, bleaker, sharper, but also perhaps more comforting in its bleakness. Horror validates our fears of climate crisis, social meltdown, existential collapse. It reminds us we’re not alone in being afraid — and crucially, it doesn’t bother with false comfort. This is why the combination of horror and religion has so often made for such terrifically powerful drama throughout the history of cinema, from Haxan to The Exorcist to The Witch: Religion is all about offering people comfort, and horror is all about stripping it away.
Flanagan tries to favor the horror counter-narrative in Midnight Mass. His heroes are a gang of misfits, including frequent Flanagan collaborator Kate Siegel and Friday Night Lights’ always soulful Zach Gilford. They’re both playing rebel runaways, Erin and Riley, who each returned to their remote fishing village, Crockett Island, after their lives were derailed — hers by an unplanned pregnancy and his by a drunk driving incident that left an innocent girl dead. Along with Hassan (Rahul Kohli), the local town sheriff who most people call “Sharif” — one of the many Islamophobic microaggressions he endures — they form a trio of outcasts struggling to assimilate in the conservative small town.
Their primary nemesis is local zealot Bev Keane (Samantha Sloyan), who never met a wandering soul she couldn’t belittle through a mix of passive-aggressive insults and straightforward superiority. Though she comes off like a walking Karen meme, she’s primed and ready to sign up as God’s commander when apocalyptic events start to befall the island. First, the local priest goes missing, only to be replaced by a younger model, Father Paul (Hamish Linklater) — who starts healing the sick and raising the dead, quickly amassing a cult following of believers.
Paul’s evangelical energy gives Bev renewed purpose and justification for her lifelong superiority complex, along with an excuse to act out her revulsion for anyone she deems unworthy of God’s love. She’s not fazed at all when she learns the dark supernatural reason for his strange ability to perform miracles; instead, she’s eager to bring on the apocalypse. She and the priest begin organizing their band of believers to make it happen.
Bev’s complete readiness to usher in the book of Revelations might sound over the top, but it really isn’t. As I watched Midnight Madness, I was frequently reminded of Mississippi governor Tate Reeves, who recently defended his leadership of the state with the worst pandemic death toll in the US by claiming that people who believe in the afterlife “don’t have to be so scared of things.” Even relatively mainstream Christian voices have questioned whether the pandemic is God’s judgment.
Flanagan uses the plot of Midnight Mass as an allegorical stand-in for a broad range of extreme conservative reactions to the pandemic. On that theme, the series’ scathing reproach of Christianity’s enablement of hysteria, apocalypse mania, and survivalist extremism couldn’t be clearer. But if Flanagan wanted to condemn religious zeal more generally, he failed.
Midnight Mass makes several attempts to critique organized religion, yet the impression it leaves is that faith in God, and explicitly Christian faith in particular, is the ultimate pandemic comfort. The series almost entirely erases atheists, agnostics, and people of other religions by emphasizing its Christian worldview. “I choose God,” Hassan’s rebellious teen son, Ali, declares when he joins Paul and Bev’s new cult, as if Allah, the god he grew up worshiping, was never real. The narrative wants to portray his choice as entirely wrong-headed, and he is quickly shown to regret his decision, but when most of the series’ other “good” characters are also making choices based on their proud faith in the Christian version of God, the implied falseness of Ali’s choice doesn’t sink in.
There’s plenty of room here for homages to movies about religious doubt such as Winter Light and First Reformed, but apart from Riley being a lapsed Catholic, dragged back to church at his parents’ insistence, Flanagan barely touches on religious doubt at all. Instead, he repeatedly places such an excruciating emphasis on faith in the divine as a form of ultimate reassurance — explicitly a Christian faith above all else — that Midnight Mass becomes a homily. Multiple long sequences where the whole town gets together to sing Christian hymns seem to serve no narrative purpose except to remind us how comforting God’s presence is and that worship is beautiful. While there’s a climactic effort to enfold atheism and agnosticism into a revised definition of “god,” similar in spirit to Angels in America’s famous ozone monologue, it comes far too late to shake the series’ Christian-centered worldview.
Is all this really horror? Midnight Mass was certainly marketed as horror. And Flanagan loves to slowly weave tonal qualities like atmospheric dread into a soft cocoon of meditations on life, love, and the human experience. He typically seems more concerned with the latter than the former, however, and his work nearly always rejects the fundamental core of most modern horror: the paradoxically comforting assertion that all hope is lost.
My personal imagined backstory of Mike Flanagan (my headcanon Flanagan, as it were) is that, like many indie filmmakers, he found that horror offered him a low-budget route to a career. His debut film, 2011’s Absentia, was a modest Kickstarter hit that received lots of critical love, in large part because it was so atypically philosophical for a horror film — an ongoing characteristic of Flanagan’s work. That success allowed him to keep building out his portfolio, drawing in audiences with the lure of horror, and then serving them a broad range of stories whose primary appeal lay in their sense of hope, family, love, and now faith.
Ultimately, this approach is what has made Flanagan such a popular director and writer. I’m not sure I’d call it horror, though. I believe that whatever continues to call Flanagan back to the genre is powerful and real, entangled with his personal perspective on philosophy and human connection. Yet I also think Flanagan would rather rely on long silences and jump scares — and, to give him credit, no one is better at a well-timed jump scare — to stand in for a deeper exploration of what horror is.
Midnight Mass is a piece of gorgeous filmmaking; Flanagan has a thing for backlighting and shadowy nighttime sequences that contrast beautifully with the scenic coastal setting. But the best horror should ideally confront its audience. Midnight Mass instead offers up a convenient villain while sidestepping most of the difficult questions about the consequences of religion unchecked by rationality, or the way organized religion can become a system of abuse or a tool of control.
Horror is the genre that many look to when they want to see society stripped of its false narratives. The myth that technology is only benevolent. The myth that civilization can protect us. The myth that any long-term earthly consequences for humanity’s short-term greed don’t matter because God has a mysterious plan and will reward us in the afterlife.
Flanagan does express skepticism over the human-created idea of “God’s plan” early on in Midnight Mass. If he’d leaned harder into that skepticism, perhaps the series’ premise would have more heft. But it seems he would rather pay less attention to what scares and disillusions us (even though in 2021 there’s so much to scare and disillusion us) and spend more time on what connects and unites us. I can see where others might find comfort in that.
In Midnight Mass, though, what connects and unites the community is the false hope that God is working miracles on Crockett Island. Rather than allow that horror to fully sink in, however, Midnight Mass avoids the question of long-term consequences. In an insulting twist, it presents the priest whose murderous deception jump-started its entire plot — and who’s been intentionally secretly poisoning his congregation for weeks! — as a well-meaning man motivated purely by faith and love, a good guy in the end.
And Flanagan, despite indicating to the Times that he leaned toward rationalism and humanism rather than belief in the divine, apparently needs hopeful endings so much that he even chooses to sidestep revealing whether there will be long-term consequences to Paul and Bev’s botched plot to bring on the apocalypse. Rather than allow the perpetrators, or any of the townspeople who’ve joined in the hysteria, to face earthly justice for their crimes, the show ends, instead, with a sweet montage in which they all sing hymns and comfort each other. The sheer horror of this moment — that the townspeople are so consumed with religion that it has destroyed them — gets subsumed in a wash of rosy cinematography and the moving strains of “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”
Is that a beautiful, moving ending for most of the series’ viewers? Most likely. It’s just that to so many horror fans, a belief in God isn’t a comfort: It’s the ultimate false hope. For me, Midnight Mass’s conclusion feels less like a soothing balm in a moment of crisis, and more like an outright lie.
Inside the upside-down world where Covid-19 vaccines are dangerous and ivermectin is saving lives.
Some Americans who are reluctant to get vaccinated believe they are living through a very different pandemic — one where the approved Covid-19 vaccines are ineffective and dangerous, and where a long list of “miracle cures,” ivermectin among them, are critical to patients’ health and safety.
From the outside, these positions can seem not just dangerous but incoherent. What would lead a person to say they won’t take a vaccine approved by federal regulators, then take an off-label medication because they read about it online?
Of course, not all Americans who are reluctant to get vaccinated have embraced supposed miracle cures: The reasons that people give for not getting a Covid-19 vaccine are varied and complex. But over the past year, among some refusers, a community of intense vaccine denialism has developed and created a sort of psychological scaffolding to support their views. As a group, the most fervent vaccine deniers construct and perpetuate an alternative narrative of the pandemic. And when inconvenient facts — from a news report to a friend’s or relative’s decision to get vaccinated — challenge that narrative, they give them a place to take refuge.
This phenomenon has its origins in America’s political polarization. One of the best predictors of whether someone is resistant to getting the Covid-19 vaccine is whether they identify as a Republican, and we know those partisan bonds are powerful. But they are not sufficient to explain the intransigence. Most Republicans have gotten the vaccine by now, but about 12 percent of Americans say they will never get vaccinated under any circumstances. (Roughly six in 10 of those people are Republicans, but a small minority of Democrats also say they won’t get the vaccine..)
It’s this community of hardcore refusers that have closed ranks and created an insular world meant to perpetuate their beliefs.
“On the face of it, it doesn’t make sense that you don’t trust doctors and science, but then the next moment, you’re sharing news about some other medical cure and taking that and putting it in your body,” Jay Van Bavel, director of the Social Identity and Morality Lab at New York University, told me. “These are not trivial beliefs. These are some of the most significant decisions you can make in a once-in-a-century pandemic.”
In communities of hardened vaccine skeptics, new information isn’t necessarily treated as an opportunity to reassess their beliefs. Instead, new facts are seen either as affirmation of what this community already believes or as a distraction that should be dismissed because it doesn’t neatly sort into their anti-vaccine narrative.
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“People listen to people ‘from their group’ and whom they think they can trust,” David Dunning, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, told me. “People really don’t know what science is, and so do you feel you can trust the person giving you advice, rather than appraising their expertise, becomes the thing.”
Ivermectin is the latest fad among hardened vaccine skeptics. But it is only one unproven treatment in a much longer line of alternative cures and “science” that has driven opposition to the mainstream consensus on masks, social distancing measures, and now the vaccines.
Early in the pandemic, this worldview held that Covid-19 wasn’t that serious of a threat to begin with, little more than the flu. Then it moved to existing drugs — hydroxychloroquine took an outsize place in this narrative — that meant the virus could be easily contained. At the same time, some Covid deniers came to believe that masks and social distancing restrictions were not only unnecessary but a power grab by the establishment, leading to protests at state capitols last spring.
But as the pandemic dragged on, the human toll became more difficult to ignore. People were getting sick and dying. So the anti-mainstream narrative glommed onto any new cures that surfaced in the fringe scientific literature.
“When you really want to believe something — like ‘you can’t trust the vaccines’ — you’ll come up with any number of rationalizations,” Van Bavel said. “It’s like whack-a-mole. You falsify one premise and they just create a new one.”
This is a well-documented social phenomenon. In a new book by Van Bavel and Lehigh psychology professor Dominic Packer, The Power of Us, the authors recount one controversial work of social science in the 1950s. Social psychologists infiltrated a doomsday cult to find out how the members would react when their promised date of salvation — the day that a UFO would come to Earth and take them away — came and went without the prophecy coming true.
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The researchers found that when the prophecy failed, most people didn’t quit the cult. They didn’t discard their old beliefs, protest that they had been lied to, and desert the cult’s leader. Instead, the leader offered his followers a brand new narrative, which many of them accepted: Their fervent faith had been so powerful that the apocalypse had been averted.
It wasn’t that the prophecy was wrong. Instead, the followers believed they had been so right that the cult had actually saved the world. Such contortions are a survival mechanism when living inside a worldview that runs up against reality.
“At that moment of cognitive dissonance, they want to resolve that dissonance and make sense of it all,” Van Bavel said. “They’re looking for anything.”
This internal pressure can be immense. Van Bavel and Packer scrutinized some of the social science research that followed the 1950s study and reached similar conclusions, including the cult-like properties they identify in the corporate culture at Enron.
Today, being pro- or anti-vaccine has become essential to many people’s social identity during the pandemic. William Bernstein, a neurologist and author of The Delusions of Crowds, pointed me to the “moral foundations” theory, which attempts to understand what motivates the decision-making of people on the right and left ends of the political spectrum.
That theory holds that, within the American right, the concepts of loyalty and betrayal are more influential to their worldview than on the American left. Staying true to your group is a powerful pull for conservatives.
“For these folks, facts mean nothing; membership and identity, everything,” Bernstein said over email. “Groupishness, in-/out-group differentiation … is much stronger on the right.”
Republican vaccine skeptics have also been able to lean on messaging from their political movement’s leaders. Though most national GOP leaders are not explicitly anti-vaccine, many of them — particularly Donald Trump — have sown doubts about the seriousness of Covid-19 and distrust of medical science from the start of the pandemic.
Perhaps it is no surprise then that, according to August Gallup polling, unvaccinated Republicans see Covid-19 as less threatening, compared to how Democrats, independents, and vaccinated Republicans view the disease.
“When the vaccines showed up, it made sense to see them as unnecessary and untrustworthy,” Robb Willer, director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University, told me. “Once this situation crystallized, Republican leaders and media … started to follow and play to anti-vaccine sentiment in the Trumpist base of the Republican Party, which helped to further crystallize anti-vaccine sentiment.”
This anti-mainstream narrative — skeptical of vaccines, hopeful about supposed miracle cures like ivermectin — can be found fully formed on patriots.win, the successor of the now-banned subreddit r/The_Donald, which once claimed nearly 800,000 members. I took a look to see how the president’s most fervent and most online followers, who were forced to build this new online home in the middle of the pandemic, construct their worldview and maintain it among themselves.
The Covid-19 pandemic has tested the anti-vaccine narrative’s ability to evolve to keep up with the facts on the ground. Hundreds of thousands of people have died. Most of the population has gotten one of the vaccines at this point. The people dying today are largely unvaccinated.
But people have still proven quite capable of shaping and reshaping a narrative that doesn’t require them to admit they might have been wrong.
In fact, some think it’s their side saving the world.
“IVERMECTIN PRESCRIPTIONS SURGE,” reads one recently trending post on patriots.win, “Democrat media is failing. The truth is getting out. People are getting well. Lives are being saved.”
It doesn’t matter that, as Vox’s Kelsey Piper recently covered, the most methodologically sound studies find no net benefit in using ivermectin to treat Covid-19. The studies that do purport to show a benefit either are flawed (the drug may have been used in tandem with another drug, like dexamethasone, that is shown to work against the coronavirus) or maybe outright fraudulent.
Nor does it appear to matter to certain portions of the anti-vax community that the United States has been averaging more than 2,000 Covid-19 deaths every day, the highest numbers since the winter, and deaths have been concentrated among unvaccinated people. (One in four Americans over age 12 still has not received a dose of the vaccine.)
“If we’ve learned anything in the past five years,” Bernstein said, “it’s that tribal identity trumps everything else, including … self-interest.”
People will not surrender the skepticism of vaccines easily, because, as the moral foundations theory would hold, conservatives are especially resistant to betraying their in- group’s core beliefs.
One poster on patriots.win took that mentality to its logical conclusion, saying they would die before they let their children receive the Covid-19 vaccine. Another poster said, proudly, that they had pulled their child out of a school over a mask mandate. They were greeted with congratulations and praise.
This online community has become a source of solidarity and serves, from a psychological perspective, to deepen the person’s commitment to their worldview.
“Ostracism is so threatening to people. They create an insular community, relying on them for information and relying on them for belonging,” Van Bavel said. “They get social support. If they hear the news come out and defend the vaccine, other people rally around them.”
People can follow their chosen leaders and believe their chosen experts, but sometimes reality still breaks through. In some of those cases, they can seek support online when they are confronted with something in their lives that contradicts their anti-vaccine narrative.
One recent post on patriots.win begins, “Last night, a friend told me both him and his wife got the ‘jab’ …” The poster recounts how a friend broke the news that the friend had gotten vaccinated in order to take a cruise that required it.
“The weakness of people is so disappointing,” says the top-rated comment.
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The discussion can stray into conspiratorial territory. In one recent post asking in all caps “IS THE VAX MAKING PEOPLE CRAZY?”, one commenter claimed to have seen two people in a car pull up to a green light “and just stare off into space confused.”
The person asked: “Did the vax do this?”
“See it every day … It’s everyone,” another poster responded in a since-deleted comment. Added a third: “I’ve noticed that too.”
This kind of thinking is not new to humankind, of course. We have always relied on the people closest to us, whom we trust most, and been distrustful of outsiders and others. It is not uncommon, as cultural cognition theory would suggest, for people to flock to news and information sources that support what they already believe.
But these online communities — and the patriots.win forum is just one of many — have made it easier than ever for people to find affirmation in their fringe beliefs.
“Social media is not the cause of this, but it’s more like an accelerant,” Van Bavel said. “People have built reputations and communities online that matter to them a great deal.”
You can sometimes see the struggle to maintain a coherent worldview, to adapt, in some of these online threads. The oppositional narrative started with the idea that Covid-19 wasn’t all that dangerous to begin with — no more dangerous than the flu, a notion propagated by Trump, among others, early on.
The intensity of the pandemic has made it hard to maintain that belief. Covid-19 was always deadlier than the flu. The delta variant is more contagious than its predecessors and could be more virulent. One in 500 Americans has died at this point.
So the anti-vaccine narrative gravitated toward alternative cures in the face of the virus, hydroxychloroquine being the best-known example and ivermectin being the most recent to gain widespread attention.
Monoclonal antibodies, a treatment pushed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for people infected with Covid-19, are also a focus for posters on patriots.win. That treatment does have scientific evidence to support it — but it is supposed to be reserved for people who end up hospitalized with the virus, an outcome people would be much more likely to avoid if they got vaccinated. But some Americans are clinging to any reason they can find to avoid the vaccine, and the availability of such a treatment gives them one.
There always seems to be something new: Rolling Stone reported recently on people gargling iodine as a coronavirus prophylactic.
“They’re trying to find some cure, because we are living in a pandemic,” Van Bavel said. “They’re looking for anything to rationalize their belief that the vaccines are wrong.”
Author Andreas Malm on the failures of climate activism and the need for escalation.
Has the climate movement failed?
It’s hard to look at the world at this moment and not conclude that the answer is yes. Despite all the activism, despite all the protests, despite all the warnings, the world is still in many ways hostage to the fossil fuel industry.
A new book by Andreas Malm, a professor of human ecology at Sweden’s Lund University, asks a simple but perplexing question: Given the stakes, why hasn’t the global climate movement become far more radical than it is?
It’s a fair question. If we as a species were serious, if we really believed what we already know about climate change, we would be doing everything humanly possible to shift course. And yet we’re not. Even the most ambitious policy proposals on the table, with little chance of passing, are scarcely sufficient. This is the starting point of Malm’s book, and if you follow his logic it leads to some conclusions you may find uncomfortable.
He says it bluntly: We should “[d]amage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed.” For Malm, we have a choice: Destroy the property that’s destroying the planet, or sacrifice the Earth on the altar of that property.
Malm’s book — it’s titled How to Blow Up a Pipeline — is obviously meant to provoke. But embedded in the provocation is a morally serious challenge to how we think about, and act on, the crisis humanity faces. And to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure how I feel about it. For instance, I think his summons to violence vastly overstates our ability to “control” such violence once it’s unleashed. I’m also less confident in the strategic utility of violence (even if it’s limited to the destruction of property, as Malm recommends) considering the enormous blowback that might result from it.
I reached out to him for this week’s episode of Vox Conversations to talk about how we got here, why he says it’s time to escalate, and the problems — both obvious and subtle — with such a radical approach.
Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation and some additional material from a follow-up exchange over email. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
In some ways I feel like I’m part of the problem. I know the situation we’re in, and I continue to live my life as though I don’t.
Or maybe, to be more fair to myself and people like me, I live as though I am powerless, as though a begrudging acceptance is the only option. I put my bottles in the recycling bin and I roll it out to the street every Friday, but it all feels so pointless. But maybe that’s just the story I’m telling myself because it’s better to be impotent than morally culpable.
Yeah. But this is part of the cognitive or psychological or fundamentally political problem here, that people see themselves as responsible for the situation and feel that “the level of action that I need to be on is recycling bottles” and things like that. I don’t know you as a person, but I suspect you’re not a CEO of an oil or gas or coal company. You’re not one of those people who profit from the continued destruction of this planet. I suspect you’re not one of the hyper-rich, either, who engage in extreme luxury emissions in the consumption sphere.
We shouldn’t imagine ourselves being all of us responsible for this mess. The responsibility is heavily concentrated in a particular segment of people, namely those who make the actual investment decisions about what energy sources to exploit or not. The level of action that we as individuals need to engage in is in collective action, together with others, against the interests sustaining the production of fossil fuels.
Well, you do something that strikes me as very important in this book. You frame the climate crisis as fundamentally a political economy problem. It’s not a science problem. It’s not a knowledge problem. We know everything we need to know to do what we know we need to do, but we’re stuck where we’re stuck because certain interests are invested in keeping us there.
Is it too simple to say that what you think we really have is a capitalism problem?
No, that’s not too simple. It’s what it is. That’s exactly what it is.
I’ll just quote you here and let you expound on it. You say, “The historical victory of capital and the ruination of the planet are one and the same thing.” Is that an indictment of capitalism as such, or is it an indictment of this manifestation of capitalism? Or do you think the internal logic of capitalism was destined to lead us to this place in any case?
I would lean toward the latter. Let me just take one example. A country that’s not so often discussed in this context is France. The single largest company in France is Total [TotalEnergies SE], which is one of the major oil and gas companies in the world, currently constructing what will be the world’s longest heated oil pipeline in Tanzania and Uganda. They just signed a contract with Iraq for a massive expansion of the oil and gas infrastructure there. They want to go into the Arctic to get even more fossil gas.
Now, this company cannot continue to exist as such. It cannot continue in this fashion, if we’re going to have a planet where we can live without going up in flames. I think that company should be taken over by the state in France. It should be socialized, nationalized, and forced to quit fossil fuel production and do something else, such as cleaning up the atmosphere instead of polluting it even more.
Is that compatible with the continued capitalist status quo in France, or would that challenge to such an important part of the capitalist class in France set in motion a process that leads beyond the capitalists present in that country? I don’t know. It’s certainly not on the table, because [French President Emmanuel] Macron is backing this company on all fronts; so will [far-right leader Marine] Le Pen if she were to become president. That’s the kind of change we need, but it’s not in the cards anywhere, really.
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I want to be as clear as possible about what you’re asking climate activists and citizens in general to consider. You argue that the ruling classes simply will not do what’s necessary. You argue the movement should, and I’ll quote now, “Damage and destroy new CO2 emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed.”
Now, I think that’s about as clear as any statement could possibly be. So let me just ask: Why do you think going in this direction will succeed where other nonviolent approaches have failed?
Well, to begin with, I don’t know that it would succeed. It’s not like I have a crystal ball where I’ve seen that we’ll win if we start doing this. But I think that the situation is so dire, so extreme, that we have to experiment, have to try. What we tried so far has only taken us so far. It’s given us limited success, but we still haven’t managed to dent the curves and bring emissions down and start the transition.
I mean, after a summer like this, and after all the disasters that keep raining down on us, it strikes me as paradoxical that people let these machines, these properties that are destroying the planet, continue to operate without going into the facilities and shutting them down and wrecking them.
I do think that the past experiences of social struggles suggests that if you’re fighting a very powerful enemy, you need to engage in tactics that can impose costs on that enemy. This usually includes forms of property destruction and confrontation with the ruling order that goes beyond absolutely peaceful civil disobedience. I don’t know of any relevant analogy or a parallel struggle in the past that has succeeded without an element of more militant methods. I don’t see how we can imagine that we will win this fight while staying as gentle and kind and polite as we have in the climate movement so far.
Are you advocating terrorism?
Some people would call it that, but that’s not a definition of terrorism that I find justifiable. If the word “terrorism” is going to have any kind of meaning, it’s the indiscriminate killing of civilians for the purpose of instilling fear. That’s very far from what I advocate.
Certainly the indiscriminate killing of civilians is terrorism, but I would tweak that definition a bit to say that the ultimate point of terrorism isn’t to instill fear but to provoke a political response, and that’s definitely what we’re talking about here.
If you advocate the destruction of property, and in this case property that is at the very core of the problem, property that contributes to people’s death from climate catastrophes, if you advocate putting these machines out of business, I don’t see how that can fall under a reasonable definition of what terrorism is. Some people will call it terrorism, just like some people would call the BLM protesters terrorists last year, but that’s another problem.
So you do seem to draw a moral distinction between property sabotage and violence [against humans].
Some people say that, including the Catholic workers that I write about in the book, Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, who systematically destroyed property along the Dakota Access pipeline when it was being constructed. They come from a particular radical Catholic tradition where they see this as falling under the definition of nonviolence. So they would destroy a lot of equipment, burn it, blow it up, and classify that as nonviolence.
I myself have no problem with that logic. But most philosophers, as far as I can tell, would say that this is a form of violence because the owners of these things perceive themselves to be harmed, their interests being harmed, even though their own bodies are not being harmed. Therefore, the argument would be that this is a kind of violence. But all philosophers that I’m aware of see this as a form of violence qualitatively different from actually targeting the bodies of the people in question.
There is a difference, for example, between slashing a tire and slashing the lungs of the owner of the car. These are two completely different types of violence, and the distinction between them is clear. But I also think it’s hard to dispute the general perception that if people go marching down a street and smash all the windows in the shops, what they’re doing is nonviolent. That’s not how people see it. A riot is generally perceived as a violent thing even if it doesn’t harm a human being.
In my book, I accept that philosophical definition and the commonsense use of the term here that property destruction is a form of violence. But it’s a lesser form of violence, qualitatively different from harming human beings.
I wonder if you think there’s a point at which the crisis is so immense, and the threat to human lives in the future is so great, that we’d have to reevaluate the limits of violence in the present. Personally, I don’t think that logic is morally justifiable and I’m not even sure there’s reason to think more violence would be effective in the first place, but I wanted to at least ask.
The struggle against fossil fuel production would not need killings, nor would such acts benefit the cause — no matter how catastrophic the future risks might be. So I do think respect for this line is essential. That said, I am not a pacifist in the sense that I rule out the taking of lives in all contexts, on moral or strategic grounds; in retrospect, I fully support the Northern side in the US Civil War and the struggle of anti-fascist partisans in Europe, to take only two obvious examples.
But I don’t see the moral calculus changing in this fashion, partly because I don’t see how hurting people — as human bodies — in the present could even hypothetically save future lives.
It’s more or less a truism in the literature on civil disobedience and nonviolence that protest movements succeed or fail on the basis of mass participation, and that the easiest way to deter mass participation is to turn to violence. You have a lot of issues with that argument. What do you think that misses? What do you think is wrong about that?
Virtually all the historical cases that are advanced in favor of this argument show the opposite. But we don’t need to get bogged down in the distant past; we can just look at what happened in the US in 2020.
After the murder of George Floyd, people rioted in Minneapolis, and three days after the murder they stormed the police station in the Third Precinct and burned it and completely gutted it. That, as far as I can tell, at least, served as a catalyst for people to engage in BLM protests on a scale never seen before. Of course, the overwhelming majority of demonstrations were peaceful, but the element of property destruction cannot be discounted as counterproductive.
I think that, to the contrary, what the storming of that police station signaled to people is that the systematic violence perpetrated by police forces against African Americans is not our fate. It’s not a law of nature, something that we just have to resign ourselves to. It’s something that we can physically disrupt and put an end to. That inspired people to engage in activism on a scale never seen before in US history. It was, as far as I know, the largest social movement in American history, if you count by the number of people on the streets.
The climate movement needs something similar, because people tend to perceive fossil fuel infrastructure as a fact of nature, something beyond our control, something that we cannot put a stop to. Therefore, those disasters that are destroying our lives are something that we can just try to live with, to adapt to as best as we can.
What people tend to forget also is that the disasters that we saw this summer all over the globe, that’s not what global heating is going to look like. I mean, people experience these things and say, “Aha, this is the new normal.” But there is no baseline in global warming. It gets worse all the time. The longer you continue with CO2 emissions, the more you add to what’s already accumulated in the atmosphere, the worse it will be. Every taste of global warming is always a foretaste, which means that 10 years down the road, what happened this summer might look extremely benevolent.
Even in the case of the BLM protests last summer, I don’t think burning down police precincts helped the movement. The movement would have accomplished what it accomplished without that. I think that risked turning public opinion against it. But I don’t think it succeeded because of that. I think it was unhelpful, to put it mildly.
I wonder how concerned you are about unleashing these sorts of forces. I mean, in the book you call it the “fine art of controlled political violence.” But I don’t think political violence can be controlled, at least not reliably — especially when the ends, in this case our actual survival, are so extreme.
How much does that worry you?
No, of course, of course. There are all sorts of pitfalls and dangers and risks, and we’re so late in the day that no path forward is risk-free. If you just continue with business as usual, that entails an enormous amount of risk.
Peaceful civil disobedience as an exclusive tactic for the climate movement has the risk of inefficacy. Escalation of the kind that I advocate has the risk of unleashing political forces and violence that cannot be controlled. Yes, that risk exists. I do think that political violence can be controlled. I find it hard to endorse the idea that as soon as you engage in any kind of violence, it will automatically spiral beyond control into some kind of, I don’t know, vendetta or violence orgy or something like that.
Again, the George Floyd uprising last year is a case in point, because I think that there was collective discipline about the level of violence that the radical edge of that movement engaged in.
There was a general realization that if the movement oversteps that boundary, that very important limit, and starts killing people, the backlash will be tremendous. There are many other cases where you have militant movements deciding that, “We’re engaging in this specific kind of violence. We’re not going to harm individuals, we’re not going to kill people, but we’re going to harm property,” and have successfully maintained that limit and that boundary. I don’t think that’s impossible.
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Indian Premier League 2021 | Chance for Delhi to bounce back against struggling Mumbai - Lying second with 16 points from 11 games, the target for Delhi Capitals would be to finish in top-two
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Smriti Mandhana falls after slamming a magnificent maiden ton; India 276/5 as bad light interrupts play - 25-year-old Smriti Mandhana became the first Indian woman to hit a century in day-night Tests and also the first from the country to reach three figures in Test cricket
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Society needs to be sensitised towards challenges faced by the elderly: Vice-President - The Vice-President conferred the ‘Vayosheshtra Samman’ awards to the elderly and NGOs for their contributions.
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(some things don’t translate super well, I’ll try my best)
He asks: “Dad, I heard some strange words at school today, and I don’t know what they mean.”
His dad responds, “Hmm… Tell me what they are. I’ll try to explain them as best I can.”
The boy asks the following: “What’s ‘angry?’ What’s ‘furious?’ What’s ‘crazy?’ What’s ‘ku xiao bu de (Taiwanese expression meaning “not knowing whether to laugh or to cry”)?’”
His father thinks for a moment–how will he explain this? Then he comes up with an idea. He picks up the phone and dials a random number. The conversation goes like this:
Person on the other end: “Hello, this is the Lin residence, how may I help you?”
Dad: “Hello. I’m looking for Chow Yun-fat.” (famous Hong Kong actor, well-known from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)
Mr. Lin: “Excuse me, what?”
Dad: “I’m looking for Chow Yun-fat.”
Mr. Lin: “I think you’re mistaken–this is the Lin residence.”
Dad: “Please, I beg you, may I speak to Chow Yun-fat?”
Mr. Lin: “Oh, this is ridiculous! I’ve had enough.” He hangs up the phone.
The father explains to his son: “There, you see? That person is angry.”
The young boy nods, understanding. Then his dad picks up the phone again and dials the same number. Mr Lin responds, politely:
“Hello, this is the Lin residence, how may I help you”
“I’d like to please speak to Chow Yun-fat.”
“Did you just escape from the mental institute or something? This is the Lin residence, did you not hear me already?”
“I’m sorry about that. Could you help me find Chow Yun-fat, please?”
“Find your mother’s ass!” Mr. Lin hangs up again, and the boy’s father explains: “Now that person is not just angry, he is furious. Now for ‘crazy.’ What does crazy mean? I’ll show you.”
He picks up the phone again and dials the number a third time. Mr. Lin is still furious, saying, “This is harassment, you hear me? Keep this up and I’lll call the police and get you arrested!”
The dad responds, “Hello, is this the Lin residence?”
Mr. Lin is taken aback. He responds, much more gently: “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I’ve just been getting a bunch of prank calls lately and I’m a little on edge. Who is it you’re looking for?”
“I’m looking for Chow Yun-fat.”
The dad hangs up and explains, “Now that’s what you call crazy.”
For his final act, the boy’s father picks up the phone and dials the same number one more time.
By this point, Mr. Lin is absolutely frothing at the mouth, sputtering, “This is enough, you hear me? ENOUGH! I’m calling the police! I’ll have no more of this. I’m DONE!”
The dad says, “Hello, this is Chow Yun-fat. Has anyone been asking for me?”
And that, my friends, is someone who doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
submitted by /u/foldbetweenthelines
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The mother was trying to hail a cab when her daughter noticed several wildly dressed women who were loitering on a nearby street corner.
The mother finally hailed her cab and they both climbed in, at which point the young daughter asked “Mommy, what are all those ladies waiting for by that corner?”
The mother replies “Those ladies are waiting for their husbands to come by and pick them up on the way home from work.”
The cabby, upon hearing this exchange, turns to the mother and says “Ah, c’mon lady! Tell your daughter the truth! For crying out loud! They’re hookers!”
A brief period of silence follows, and the daughter then asks “Mommy, do the hooker ladies have any children?”
The mother replies “Of course, Dear. Where do you think cabbies come from?”
submitted by /u/nothinlefttochoose
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I’ll return
submitted by /u/yomommafool
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Both end up lying in bed deep-throating a plastic tube.
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A few weeks after her second husband died, Maria also passed away.
At Maria’s funeral, the priest looked skyward and said, “At last, they’re finally together.”
Her sister sitting in the front row said, “Excuse me, Father, but do you mean she and her first husband, or she and her second husband?”
The priest replied, “I mean her legs.”
submitted by /u/ksp1234
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