SSBs, not as bad as they sound
Hmm – well, it’s a start
So I watched a video touching on solid state batteries (SSBs), and the difficulties involved in developing them and the promise they hold for the future of battery technology and electrification in general, in the battle for clean, renewable power generation. It was a bit nerdy, in other words way too technical for an arts-based ignoramus like me, but I do have a certain interest in learning and the future, so I want to get my head around the possibilities and the problems. So away we go.
Batteries are all about two electrodes, an anode and a cathode, with electrolytic material between them which enables charged ions to pass from one to the other. This material has generally been a liquid or a gel, but these materials have many efficiency (and flammability) problems, apparently.
So, to basics. How does a battery work? Why is it called a battery? AINL [Artificial Intelligence Never Lies] puts it this way:
A battery is a device that stores electrical energy in chemical form and converts it to electricity on demand through electrochemical cells. It consists of two terminals (anode and cathode) separated by an electrolyte, and when connected to a circuit, a chemical reaction causes electrons to flow from the negative terminal through the circuit to the positive terminal, creating an electric current.
Which raises more questions from the novice: what exactly is electrical energy, and how can it be stored in chemical form?
We have to get more basic. Energy is essentially stuff in motion, like a rock rolling down a hill, but also lightning, which is electrical. It ‘releases built-up electrical charges between a storm cloud and the ground, or between such clouds’ (AINL again). I’ve written about lightning before, quite a bit in fact, because it’s complicated. As to the term ‘battery’, it comes from Benjamin Franklin, whose early electrical experiments involved Leyden Jars, devices to store static electricity, linked together like a battery of cannons.
Anyway, no matter what I’ve written in the past, I have no idea what ‘electrical energy in chemical form’ means. Will I ever know? It has something to do with redox (oxidation-reduction) reactions, in which one chemical substance loses electrons (it’s oxidised) to another (which, counter-intuitively, is reduced, though I suppose that’s because electrons are negatively charged).
But I’m getting bogged down in the basics here – let’s accept as a given that batteries which use liquids or gels as the electrolytic material are never going to be as effective (energy-dense) or long-lasting, or safe, as those using solids (SSBs). The big issue is, why are SSBs so hard to create in a stable and effective form? Again according to AINL, it’s all about ‘high manufacturing costs, scalability, and performance issues, particularly in cold temperatures’.
Solid-state batteries being tried use lithium as the anode, from which lithium ions pass through a ceramic or solid polymer to a cathode of oxides or sulphides. Wikipedia briefly summarises the benefits and problems:
Solid-state batteries are potentially safer, with higher energy densities. Challenges to widespread adoption include energy and power density, durability, material costs, sensitivity, and stability.
These problems, or challenges, have been around for a long time, but apparently 2025 has been a year of real progress in the field, with lots of cashed-up, well-reputed manufacturers vying for SSB priority in making the crossing of ‘the valley of death’, as one expert puts it. One of these is the Chinese state-owned car manufacturer, Chery, and another is VW, in partnership with others, including Gotion, a Chinese company that has produced a battery called Jinshi. AINL again:
This advanced battery technology offers a high energy density of 350 Wh/kg [watt-hour per kilogram], which can extend the driving range of EVs to approx. 1,000 km. The Jinshi battery is also noted for its enhanced safety features, durability and ability to charge quickly.
This energy density is apparently well over that produced by Tesla so far. Gotion is claiming a 1,000 km range for its battery, with ‘stable performance between -20 degrees celsius and 85 degrees (!), and a projected lifespan of a million kilometres. They’re expecting effective mass production by end of decade. As a 69-year-old, I can hardly wait – just to see it never mind drive it.
Another organisation VW is working with is QuantumScape (how impressive is that name) in the US. They’re apparently a well known company ‘in this space’, They’re working on a lithium-metal/anode-free solid-state cell. Their lithium-metal anode is ‘formed in-situ’ during charging, it isn’t a permanent ‘built’ thing, apparently. According to ‘Just have a think”, there is no pre-existing anode:
The solid electrolyte is in fact a ceramic separator which plays a dual role: it provides a highly conductive pathway for lithium ions and it physically impedes the growth of the dreaded lithium dendrites (that we’ve looked at in previous videos).
I’ve seen images of the dreaded dendrites, which form like little tree roots on the anode of lithium batteries when charging.
Anyway, just to change the subject for a mo, what about sodium batteries? Not for vehicles though – for home. Subject for another post.
So QuantumScape are promising higher energy density – 300 watt-hours per kilogram at cell level – and improved safety and faster charging, and a longer cycle life. It might all be hype, but they have at least demonstrated one of their SSBs in a VW Ducati electric motorbike, so that’s something.
‘Just have a think’ tells me that the two largest battery companies in the world are CATL and BYD, so let’s just have a look. CATL is a Chinese company, Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited, which is ‘the world’s EV and energy storage battery manufacturer’. They’re into lithium-ion and other advanced battery technologies, for EVs and other commercial applications, including aviation. BYD (‘build your dreams’) is also Chinese but it has been focussing a lot on the Australian market, so I need to learn more about their operations here, where it’s been selling cars since 2022.
As for these companies’ development of commercially viable All-SSBs, they’re generally seeking to dampen expectations, as clearly they’re meeting with obstacles. Five years from now, more or less, seems to be their prediction. I can’t wait.
Obviously I’ve just started to scratch the surface of this technology, but it’s clearly stuff that’s got a lot of smart people and companies activated. I hope to educate myself further for future posts.
References
Nietzsche and Darwin and science and philosophy
When I was young, living in Elizabeth, a newly-built working-class town north of Adelaide in South Australia, I was able to avail myself of books of all kinds on our home shelves – novels, histories, encyclopaedias and the like. It was only much later that I had cause to wonder – where did all these books come from? I don’t think my father ever read a book in his life (he later, after my mother left him, told me I need only read one book – the Bible). My mother read very few. I had two older siblings – two and three years older – but surely all these books didn’t come from them.
Among them were a few works of philosophy which I skimmed my way through, puzzled and occasionally impressed, I think mostly by the author’s chutzpah. His name was Friedrich Nietzsche, and the titles were Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and The Antichrist. Much of the writing involved seemingly pithy little aphorisms – sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes confusing, and occasionally liberating for an anti-authoritarian adolescent, as I most definitely was at the time. In The Antichrist, for example, Nietzsche got stuck into ‘Saint Paul’, which tickled my fancy in spite of my not knowing much about Nietzsche’s target. The naughtiness of it all was quite a thrill to me.
So my none-too-reliable guess is that I was fifteen or sixteen when this skimming took place, but it certainly stuck in my mind. Meanwhile I continued my reading, particularly from the library close by, from which, often on the recommendations of my older brother’s university friends, I borrowed and read pretty well the whole oeuvre of Thomas Hardy, as well as other 19th century Brits – Dickens, the Brontes, Austen, George Eliot, and writers we’d studied at school – George Orwell, Albert Camus, and, from Camus, the Roads to Freedom trilogy of Jean-Paul Sartre. All this would’ve been in those mid-teen years, the couple of years after I’d left school due to being smacked in the face by the headmaster, for no good reason.
So all of this is preliminary. Years later, I happened to read something very scathing that Nietzsche had written about George Eliot, surely one of the best novelists of the Victorian era. On looking into the matter I learned that he had never read Eliot and was responding simply to a remark made about her by someone he knew. Oh dear. Whatever opinion I had of Nietzsche was definitely dented.
So, flash further forward, and after being apprised, over the years, of some misogynistic remarks by Nietzsche, my interest in him was pretty well dead. That is, until a recent conversation with an intelligent female friend caused me to try reappraising my reappraisal. I checked my admirably voluminous bookshelves (I’m not even sure where all those books came from either) and found I had two Nietzsche paperbacks with my name written on the inside cover over 40 years ago – Thus spake Zarathustra and a two-in-one volume, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner. I’m pretty sure I never read this second book all those years ago, but for my sins I’ve just read The birth of tragedy. I found it more or less completely incomprehensible, and somehow irrelevant.
So I’ll present a comparison, odorous though it might be. The birth of tragedy was Nietzsche’s first published book, in 1872, when he was in his twenties and a very youthful professor in Ancient Greek philology. As it happens I’m now reading another book, published in 1871, on a very different topic – Charles Darwin’s The descent of man. Darwin never obtained a professorship, but he did okay for himself, being a scion of the aristocracy, and, to be fair, an indefatigable researcher. Clearly, both authors felt strongly that they had an important message to impart to the world. So let me quote from both authors.
First, a more or less random passage from Nietzsche’s The birth of tragedy – and, to be fair, this is, by all accounts, far from his best work, and he himself dismissed it in his later years. Yet I feel its esoteric nature is fairly typical:
In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing. His very gestures express enchantment. Just as the animals now talk, and the earth yields milk and honey, supernatural sounds emanate from him, too: he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his dreams. He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: in these paroxysms of intoxication the artistic power of all nature reveals itself to the highest gratification of the primordial unity. The noblest clay, the most costly marble, man, is here kneaded out and cut, and to the sound of the chisel strokes of the Dionysian world-artist rings out the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries: “Do you prostrate yourselves, millions? Do you sense your Maker, world?” [the quote is from Schiller].
F Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner, translated by Walter Kaufmann, 1967, pp 37-38
So, the above passage was written, or published when Nietzsche was about 27 years old. The next passage was from a book published in 1871, when Darwin was 62, and very much an established ‘natural philosopher’, revered and reviled world-wide.
The feeling of religious devotion is a highly complex one, consisting of love, complete submission to an exalted and mysterious superior, a strong sense of dependence, fear, reverence, gratitude, hope for the future, and perhaps other elements. No being could experience so complex an emotion until advanced in his intellectual and moral faculties to at least a moderately high level. Nevertheless, we see some distant approach to this state of mind in the deep love of a dog for his master, associated with complete submission, some fear, and perhaps other feelings. The behaviour of a dog when returning to his master after an absence, and, as I may add, of a monkey to his beloved keeper, is widely different from that towards their fellows. In the latter case the transports of joy appear to be somewhat less and the sense of equality is shewn in every action. Professor Braubach goes so far as to maintain that a dog looks on his master as on a god. The same high mental faculties which first led man to believe in unseen spiritual agencies, then in fetishism, polytheism, and ultimately in monotheism, would infallibly lead him, as long as his reasoning powers remained poorly developed, to various superstitions and customs.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: in J D Watson, ed. Darwin, the indelible stamp: four essential volumes in one, 2005, pp 679-680
I’ve excluded the notes from the Darwin extract, but just about every page of his book is annotated with references to contemporary writers and analysts of various species, their behaviours, anatomies and so on. The extract from Nietzsche is of course a translation, so that carries problems, which I haven’t the nous to explore. It could be argued that Nietzsche’s extract is ‘philosophical’ while Darwin’s is ‘scientific’, which certainly tempts me to try to explain, or at least explore, the difference. I remember, from my philosophical readings of the eighties, one philosopher, it might’ve been Max Black, arguing that most analyses of ‘problems’, whether within ourselves or in the world, start as philosophy and end as science – to put it a bit crudely. In that respect I think of Kant’s phenomena/noumena distinction, which I’m sure seemed incredibly insightful at the time, and I recall being quite impressed with it as a young person. We experience everything through our senses, but how do we know they’re reliable? We can’t check with others, as they have the same sensory equipment as ourselves – equally unreliable – or reliable. The ‘noumenal’ world is supposedly inaccessible to us all, if it exists. What has happened since Kant’s time is a much greater access to the phenomenal world, from the 13 to 14 billion-year old universe, to quarks, neutrinos and such. And nobody’s talking much about noumena, if they ever were. Scientists now would surely say that Kant’s noumenal world is, and always, was, unprovable. Nice try, Manny. And yet it does raise interesting questions about individual perception and reality.
Another interesting point I would make about Darwin/Nietzsche is that, though their subject matter could hardly be more different, at the time they would both be considered philosophers – at a stretch. In 1867, William Thompson, aka Lord Kelvin, and Peter Tait, published Treatise on Natural Philosophy, essentially treating of what was known about physics at the time. The modern term ‘scientist’ was only just coming into general use towards the end of the 19th century. In the 1880s Nietzsche published a book bearing the English title The Gay Science (the German title was Die frohliche Wissenschaft), which is regarded (by Wikipedia) as one of his more positive books (nout to do with logical positivism), promoting science and skepticism, but I think it’s safe to say that there’s no science at all in The Birth of Tragedy. You might say that he was still weaning himself from Greek philology at this time, and expatiating on his personal response to ancient Greek drama.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make with these two extracts was that they have so little in common with each other. Their preoccupations were poles apart. Darwin’s work was rooted in the world of solid academic and upper-middle class connections, and the gathering of data, whereas Nietzsche is all flightiness and abstract conjecture. I must admit I found little of the bite and the dismissiveness in The Birth of Tragedy that haunt my memories of reading Nietzsche, probably because it was his first published work, but I also found nothing that inclines me to read more of his stuff. And yet, there’s The case of Wagner, which I’ve heard is a demolition job of the notorious anti-semite, though there’s a related work, Nietzsche contra Wagner, published shortly afterwards, that really does the job.
So I was planning to do a more close analysis of the above-quoted passages, but it all seems a bit much. Darwin’s material speaks for itself, I think. It took humans a long time to get to the stage of careful and objective analysis of their environment, in terms of time and space, structural complexity, wave-molecular interactions, life from non-life and so on, and we’re still learning, and discovering. Nietzsche’s work, though this may not be the best example, is more poetic and personal, and considering his fate, it’s hard not to sympathise. Nietzsche, I note, seems very quotable (you can find dozens of quotes from him online), as he was very fond of trying to capture something deep and meaningful in a sentence. Darwin is pretty well the exact opposite, yet surely his influence has been greater. However, in spite of The Birth of Tragedy, I’m prepared to give poor Friedrich another go, kind-hearted soul that I am.
The Gay Science perhaps…
References
Friedrich Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner, trans Walter Kaufman 1967.
Charles Darwin, The descent of man [sic], 1871
Conservative Christianity is strange
choose your messiah
I’m not a Christian and never have been, though I was sent to a Salvation Army Sunday School every week, from about the ages of six to ten, where I listened with bewilderment to very serious stories about our father in heaven, who made us and loves us and who we should be endlessly grateful to for our existence, and who knows our every thought, and who will punish us for our bad deeds, and who is everywhere though he lives in heaven, which is in the sky somewhere, and we should pray to him regularly, because then he’ll know that we love him, though he doesn’t really need our love because he is omnipotent and omniscient and words like that, and he had a son who lived for a while on earth, but that’a another story.
It all sounded pretty unlikely to me, but it was actually scary how seriously these Salvation Army people took it all. However the Jesus stuff seemed a bit more comprehensible, as mostly he seemed to be a real person who lived long ago preaching kindness and forgiveness and telling stories about good deeds and healing the sick and saying nice things about the meek and the weary and the heavy-laden. His being the son of this invisible all-seeing and all-knowing god bloke didn’t make much sense, except that he also performed miracles like his Dad, who miraculously created the whole world. But what seemed to make sense was that Jesus was like some model human being, a kind of example to us all as to how to live a good life.
Which brings me back to conservative Christianity, especially in the USA, where Christianity holds sway more than in any other putatively Christian nation. Interestingly, the two countries I’m most associated with, Scotland, where I was born, and Australia where I’ve long lived, are both leading the field in abandoning that religion, doubtless due to my enlightening, or baleful, influence.
The question being, was Jesus, as portrayed in the gospels, a conservative?
Some years ago, during Trump’s first term, I went to a meet-up, of sorts, called ‘deep thinkers’, which turned out to be a bit of a joke. At the bar I encountered a bloke who I deemed to be of Middle Eastern origin (I had a lot of Arabic-speaking students at the time, and he looked similar), and we talked briefly about his work in computing. Then I asked him where he was from. ‘Port Pirie’, he said – pointedly, it seemed to me. Oops, he didn’t want to be considered a ‘foreigner’, presumably. Then, more or less out of the blue, he announced that Donald Trump was the greatest President in US history. Well, I never. He also described himself as a conservative Christian – I can’t recall which announcement came first, but the combo immediately linked Jesus and Trump in quite a curious way.
Years ago in either this or a previous blog, I wrote, over a number of posts I think, an analysis, of sorts, of the gospels, influenced no doubt by the classical scholar Robin Lane Fox, especially his books The unauthorized version: truth and fiction in the Bible, and Pagans and Christians. There are many difficulties – different translations soften or ‘beautify’ the original language, the gospel of John differs markedly in its account from the synoptic gospels, some events, such as ‘the woman taken in adultery’ (John 7:53–8:11), are later interpolations, and the whole Christmas day as the birth of Jesus thing is of course spurious. Arguably, the Jesus character is full of contradictions – ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ on the one hand, and ‘I come not to bring peace but a sword …. to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother’, etc, on the other. But generally I’ve always preferred the ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’ version – I mean, who wouldn’t?
But again I ask myself, did he preach conservative values? Not consistently. If this means ‘family values’, I’ve just quoted his words against them. In another speech he says ‘Whoever reviles his father and mother must surely die’, which doesn’t leave much room for nuance – but then again, everyone must surely die, so it’s a bit meaningless. And what if the mother of X is an axe-murderer and the father of X is a whore?
Anyway, I was wanting to argue that conservative Christianity is self-contradictory but now I’m not so sure, since Jesus himself is not as coherent a character as might have been hoped. My vague image of him wandering around Judea barefoot, healing the sick, telling stories about good Samaritans, changing water into booze, and encouraging little children to come to him, for some reason, is one of a well-meaning, slightly eccentric Mr Nice Guy, a bit pompous at times, but, according to his many portraits, quite nice-looking in a pleasantly effeminate, and surprisingly non-Jewish, non-Levantine way.
So I like to take the view that Jesus was a nice guy who mostly promoted peace and love, so I wondered at this conservative Christian being a fan of Donald Trump. Surely no Christian, conservative or otherwise, could possibly see ‘Old Shitmouth’, as a like to call him, as bearing any resemblance to their religious hero. And yet, my Christian interlocutor did talk about ‘illegal people’ on the USA’s southern border – this at a time when the news was full of children being locked in cages in southern Texas. I have to say that I was so flabbergasted that someone who was so keen to announce to me that he was a Christian should talk about people being ‘illegal’ in any sense, that I was rendered speechless. Much later, the Yiddish term trepverter, picked up from a Saul Bellow novel, came to mind. It’s about thinking of a smart retort, or comeback line, after the moment has passed – though for me it was less a retort than a disquisition on the legality and legitimacy of all creatures great and small, because, after all, the Lord God made them all….
And that’s the point – many of the biggest US supporters of old Shitmouth label themselves as conservative Christians, which raises the question of what Christianity actually means to them. Love thy neighbour? Blessed are the peacemakers? It can’t mean these things. It must mean that sword stuff, the crucesignati, the fight to death against the infidels – with Old Shitmouth as their Dear Leader….
From this distance, in Australia, it’s tragicomedy on a grand scale. We shall see how it all ends…
dithyrambs and dead ends….
So how does the great, yet still prospective, Trumpian dynasty finally establish itself as the ne plus ultra of all dynasties Americanian? How does it rid itself of the pestilence of the other? There is surely much work to be done. The current, almost too-belated and yet still maligned Apollinian leadership must, in its height and depth, ensure that the Dionysian dithyrambs of the soi-disant ‘Democratic’ canaille be rendered down to their most lassitudinous level, a level to which they are all-too naturally inclined. These untermensch have stained the great Americanian nation and threatened its proper and all-too-deserving ubermensch place in the political and all-essential financial world for too long, and their grave must not be risen from.
Voting, I can assure you, does not occur in heaven. What purpose would it serve but to lower standards? And when heaven is created on Earth, there is nothing for it but to celebrate, and fill ourselves with the love of the eternal. But we must have keepers at the gate, and be ever-vigilant regarding the enemies within, for in this soiled world impurities lurk everywhere, even our heavenly corner is not entirely safe, and nothing is forever, though we must strive to maintain our dynasty as thoroughly enriched as it could possibly be, as a haven against the levelling forces of inferiority.
So let’s have no more polling, and no more useless, disruptive, and profoundly unvisionary dissent. We are better than this. The future is already here. We will never dismantle it.
Okay, enough of the bullshit. I’m thinking, if that’s what it’s called, of doing a course in economics, to try and understand how the super-rich get away with paying far far less than their fair share of taxes, and what can be done to change this, and how it is that the US can have a national debt of over $37 trillion and yet be described as the world’s richest nation or biggest economy or whatever. According to AI, which never lies, the US has a projected deficit for the 2025 fiscal year of about $1.9 trillion. A fiscal year is apparently a 12-month annual accounting period, with the dates varying from country to country. In Australia it’s from July 1 to June 30, and I always thought that dating was a global thing, so parochial and untravelled am I.
I recently watched, with some skepticism I must say, a video recounting the fall of empires – that of Rome, Spain, Britain, Russia and – just stay tuned – the USA. It argued, in a rather pat and I should say smug way, that they all followed precisely the same pattern and the USA would inevitably follow suit. Obviously, being a 20-minute video it was a wee bit short on detail, but of course it was broadly correct in that no empires, or dominant nations, last forever. One thing it didn’t mention of course was the USA’s nuclear arsenal – or that of Russia. Both of these countries will remain a massive global threat for as long as those arsenals are maintained, and there’s absolutely no sign of them being dismantled in the foreseeable.
I was told today by a woman in the conversation class I help to facilitate – all the attendees were Japanese, as it happened – that Japan now has its first female Prime Minister. How did I miss that? Does she wear high heels? Anyway, it’s a good sign, But Sanae Takaichi, the new PM, has only 2 women in her 19-member cabinet. Then again, Margaret Thatcher never had a single female in her cabinet in her eleven and a half years as PM. Australia’s current 23-member cabinet under Anthony Albanese features 12 women – the first-ever female dominant cabinet in our history, and likely a world record for Prime Ministerial governments. Can’t wait for it to be the first female-only one. Sigh. But it’s interesting that Japan has a Prime Ministerial system, which I tend to associate with English-speaking, Westminster-based political entities. Clearly the fact that it still has a monarch, or emperor, and feels a strong need to maintain that imperial link as fundamental to its history, would make a constitutional system like that of Australia, and of course Britain, very appealing.
So the emperor plays much the same ceremonial role as the monarch in Britain and the Governor-General in Australia, but I note that Japan hasn’t gotten on board with female succession, unsurprisingly, being one of the most patriarchal nations in the developed world. This could cause problems in the slightly distant future, as current Emperor Naruhito, in his mid-sixties, has no sons. He does have a daughter, Princess Aiko, but it’s claimed that his nephew, the young Prince Hisahito, is being groomed to take the throne when the time comes. Now, I’ve mentioned that Japan is quite patriarchal, but feminism is certainly raising its voice there, and I’m hearing it. A lot of women are not happy that the succession is not going to Princess Aiko, which would create the first Japanese Empress. Modernising to maintain an ancient tradition – sounds perfectly cromulent to me.
Continuing on the feminism theme, I wrote recently on wealth-is-power, wondering just how much wealth/power is in the hands of women. My vague guess was 1% female compared to 99% male. AI (never lies) tells me that 86.5% of billionaires are male, 16.5% are female. There are no trillionaires as yet (which is why autocorrect thinks I’ve made a mistake in writing the word), but they’re getting there. Anyway I’m guessing that the 1% figure is still correct, as it’s likely most of the females on the list are thoroughly impoverished compared to the top males. Female empowerment is all very well but let’s not get ridiculous.
Economics is a subject of some interest to me, and I’m wondering if I might do a thorough study of it my old age. Courses are available at the usual institutions, but unfortunately not for the impoverished. Funny that. Meanwhile there’s economics talks on youtube which might be worth commenting on, so that’s a start – but the news is, we don’t have to worry about trying to work out how to make money or regulate our economies, whether we be families, nations or planets, because never-lying AI will be doing it all for us, so effectively that we won’t be needing economists or indeed humans. The BBC World Service, no less, has kindly informed us that artificial intelligence will ‘go rogue’ by 2027, leading to human extinction about ten years later. I’ll be only about 81 or so by then – way too young to die… but then, I’ll be in great company. Maybe that’s what happened to all those dead exoplanets out there….
References
Friedrich Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c751z23n3n7o
https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-general/japanese-monarchy-0016250
AI2027: Is this how AI might destroy humanity? – BBC World Service
Just a few thoughts on climate change and the obstacles…
There are people in the world, in their millions or billions, who know, with as much certainty they can have about anything, that their god or gods exist. Yet, since they don’t all believe in the same gods, they cannot, as a matter of logic, all be correct, and there’s a strong possibility that none of them are. That’s my belief, but is it just a belief?
But my intention here is not to go on about religion, I’m thinking more about knowledge or what people claim as knowledge. For example, and this is my real topic here, some people claim that climate change, or anthropogenic global warming, is a myth, a mistaken belief, or a plot of some sort – a plot developed by certain people who somehow stand to gain by pedalling misinformation. And some people claim this without really believing it, while others presumably believe in it to the point of refusing to examine the science, which they strongly suspect is just indecipherable gobbledygook.
This seems to be the case for many people on ‘the extreme right’, but what exactly is the extreme right?
I tend to consider extremists as people who believe without thinking. Certainly without trying to think carefully or deeply. Another term often used is ideologue. An ideologue is someone who is, in a sense ‘previously convinced’ and ‘thinks’ from that previously convinced perspective, which is generally drawn from strong family and/or cultural influences. I don’t believe however, that they’re hopeless cases, or I don’t want to believe it.
An ideology is often something you will adhere to especially if you are treated well within and feel you’ve benefitted from that family and cultural background. For example, if your parents are both devout Christians and have treated you with kindness and devotion, and you feel strongly that you’ve benefitted from their parenting, you’re likely to feel a strong urge to continue in their tradition and to see the world through that lens.
Climate change ‘skepticism’, however is a non-belief, and it’s often, but not always, connected to a general skepticism of science (I’ve heard tell of Nobel Prize winning scientists who don’t believe in anthropogenic global warming). There are many people who are very ‘turned-off’ by science – not so much clueless as totally uninterested in looking for clues. Science just doesn’t matter to them, again due to background influences. And a lot of such people are in high-level political positions, especially in the USA. Again this is often because they are preoccupied with other things, such as power, wealth or fame – the phenomenon known as ‘getting ahead’, or ‘getting on top’. It would be interesting to ask Donald Trump, or say Nigel Farage, or Australia’s Jacinta Price, to expatiate on their favourite science. Or perhaps not.
These are three people who, I suspect, have never given any thought to finding out about climate change. I mean, doing some very basic research on the subject. And this is largely incomprehensible to people who, when they don’t know much, or enough for their sense of self-pride, about a subject, make some effort at learning more about it – like how the adaptive immune system works, or how we discovered exoplanets, or what’s this thing about birds being dinosaurs. They’ve been encouraged, perhaps even without realising it, to wonder about such things.
One of the problems of our political systems, whether democratic or otherwise, is that we generally find ourselves being led politically, not by people who want to know or learn stuff, but by people who want to control stuff. People who are ambitious for themselves. Examples of such people are too numerous and obvious to mention. And of course the opposite is generally also true – people who want to ‘find things out’ aren’t so much driven by the lure of wealth, power and control.
In the case of climate change, which is much about what we are doing with our wealth, politics and science often clash. It is a fact that our planet is warming faster than at any point in human history, and this is clearly due to greenhouse gas emissions. China is the largest emitter overall, and the USA, second in overall terms, is the largest emitter on a per capita basis, of the world’s highly populated nations (per capita emissions in some Middle Eastern countries, and in Palau, are quite a bit higher). However, China’s total emissions are between twice and three times that of the USA. Its government accepts the facts about global warming and is apparently committed to ‘achieve carbon neutrality by 2060’, though this will be extremely difficult, to put it mildly, given its plans for economic growth. As to the USA, its target will no doubt vary depending on which monarch is on the throne. And please believe me, that isn’t a joke.
We need, of course, to look to the big emitters overall – China, USA, India and Russia, in that order – because we in Australia are minnows in comparison – interestingly, we’re 16th in both overall and per capita emissions. Still, it would be great if we could set an example.
According to the Worldometer website, which I hope is reliable, and which unfortunately only has data to 2022, CO2 emissions are still rising worldwide, though in some major emitting countries, such as China and Russia, they’re reducing slightly, while in other mostly developing countries, such as Indonesia, they’re rising fast.
There are other sources which give more recent data, but the overall picture is complex. Many regions are quickly developing alternatives to fossil fuels to supply their energy needs, but global consensus on the problem, and especially from major emitters, is essential for success – success being measured by keeping global average temperatures to, if possible, 1.5 degrees, or at most 2 degrees, above a baseline (the average between 1861 and 1890). Many have given up on the 1.5 target, and a 2024 poll found that only 12% of US ‘Republicans and Republican leaners’ considered climate change to be a major government priority. This is serious considering that Republicans will probably be in power there for the next 50 years or so, given current trends.
Interesting times….
References
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/
the worst of the English-speaking democracies – 2
I’ve written briefly about Australian and New Zealand politics, now to Canada, which suffers from sharing a long border with the USA, and also some of its history with regard to Britain. However it couldn’t have been too much of a head-butting experience (with Britain) as it’s still a constitutional monarchy with King Chaz as ceremonial head of state (though a recent poll showed that only about a quarter of Canadians are actually aware of this), and they have a Governor-General, like we in Australia do. They even have a House of Commons, but thankfully not of Lords (the Brits should get rid of that thing, tradition be damned). Their Upper House is the Senate, as in Australia. The head of the elected government is the Prime Minister, primus inter pares, as in Australia and New Zealand. The two dominant parties are the Conservatives and the Liberals. So the Liberals are the left party in Canada, but the right party in Australia, and ‘liberalism’, especially neoliberalism, is a right-wing ideology in Britain and Australia, though it is seen as left-wing in the US. Other confusions include ‘blue’ states being left-wing in the US but right-wing in Australia, and vice versa for ‘red’ states. Canada also has its ‘minor’ parties like Australia.
According to Wikipedia, party discipline is much stronger in Canada than in either the USA or Britain, which is probably why their political dynamics aren’t internationally newsworthy. The country’s culture is also far more liberal (in the left-wing sense) than the US. I’ll quote this lengthy piece (references removed) from Wikipedia, which captures better than I could that vas deferens:
Canada’s egalitarian approach to governance has emphasised social welfare, economic freedom, and multiculturalism, which is based on selective economic migrants, social integration, and suppression of far-right politics, that has wide public and political support. Its broad range of constituent nationalities and policies that promote a “just society” are constitutionally protected. Individual rights, equality and inclusiveness (social equality) have risen to the forefront of political and legal importance for most Canadians, as demonstrated through support for the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a relatively free economy, and social liberal attitudes toward women’s rights (like pregnancy termination), divorce, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, birth control, euthanasia or cannabis use. There is also a sense of collective responsibility in Canadian political culture, as is demonstrated in general support for universal health care, multiculturalism, evolution, gun control, foreign aid, and other social programs.
Sounds almost too good to be true – is it propaganda? No wonder the USA avoids mentioning its goody two shoes neighbour – though of course Trump is intent on annexing the place, sort of (then, everything he says is ‘sort of’).
My source goes on to say it’s all pretty centrist in Canada – the Libs being centre-left and the Conservatives being centre-right, and often the twain shall meet. Members of the Cabinet, with various portfolios, are usually, but not always, members of the elected party. All very collaborative and humanistic. It almost seems as if they’ve learned from United Staters how not to run governments.
Canada has a Supreme Court, with 9 Justices, and a Constitution, initiated in 1867. Its decisions are presented bilingually – an important point to remember, Canada being effectively a bilingual nation, though its political system is largely based on that of Britain. Again, nothing controversial to see here.
In trying to comprehend the horror of the US political system in comparison to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, I’ve not yet mentioned one factor – Christianity. I’ve written elsewhere about how rapidly Christianity has been abandoned in Australia, especially over the past 60 years or so. There has been a similar abandonment in Canada, though it has been slower. In Canada’s 2021 census, 53.3% reported being Christian, and 34.6% claimed no religion. Australia’s last census was also in 2021, with Christianity at 43.9% and no religion at 38.9%, and it looks certain that the 2026 census will show ‘no religion’ getting the most ‘votes’. In the USA, where it seems they don’t conduct censuses, we have to rely on private companies such as Gallup Inc., whose polling over 2020-2024 has Christian belief at around 69% and ‘religiously unaffiliated’ at 21.4%. One might imagine that Christian religiosity might result in more ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’ loving-kindness, but, whodathunkit, the USA has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the democratic world, as well as the largest rich-poor divide, and the lowest per capita spending on public health, education and welfare. Jesus wept.
So how does the USA’s political system compare with the Westminster-based systems of Canada, New Zealand and Australia? In their 2018 book How democracies die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two Harvard-based political scientists, don’t make such comparisons – instead they compare the USA’s problems with those of Venezuela, Turkey, Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Hungary and other despotisms. This, I think, is a typically American bias and failure, especially when you consider how often that country’s CIA has deliberately destabilised other polities, mostly in favour of right-wing alternatives. Had they simply looked over the border in Canada, they would have found plenty of material to shame the USA by comparison.
There are so many problems with the USA’s political system that it’s hard to know where to start. But probably the best place to start is at the top. They need to scrap their Presidential system. None of the other democratic systems detailed here – in Australia, New Zealand and Canada – have ever, and will ever feel the need to have ‘no kings’ rallies (fingers crossed). They each have Prime Ministers, primus inter pares again, who can be dismissed by a no-confidence motion from their cabinet, or by a leadership ballot against a contestant, e.g when Paul Keating challenged Bob Hawke’s leadership and won in 1991 – and this has occurred from time to time, in Australia, Britain and elsewhere. There is no national vote for one person – the Prime Minister has to win her own electorate like everyone else. The USA has an impeachment process but it has proved grossly ineffective in recent times.
Prime ministers, unlike US Presidents, have no pardoning powers, no immunity from prosecution and no ‘running mate’, who can, completely unelected, become President if the incumbent dies, is incapacitated or forced to resign. They have no power to select unelected people to high office, in Treasury, Justice, Health, Foreign Affairs or any other capacity. They do not personally select members of the judiciary, and they must attend parliament to explain, along with other front-benchers, their legislative program and respond to criticism from the opposition. Governing Canada, and Australia, and New Zealand, is a collective responsibility, and hopefully always will be.
There are many other problems with the US system that are screamingly obvious to outsiders. The pardoning powers, the immunity, the gerrymandering (which happens elsewhere but to nowhere near the degree that it happens in the US), the voter suppression, the huge amounts of vote-buying money swirling around at election time, the ‘executive powers’, the politicisation of the judiciary, and so much more. The USA’s political system is, by any reasonable standards, the worst in the democratic world. But another problem which makes these major deficiencies so intractable is the myopic jingoism that has for so long been a part of the American psyche. Why do so many Americans believe, as if they’ve been hypnotised to believe, that they have the world’s greatest democracy? Is it perhaps because it has been pummelled into them from their first schooldays? I’ve heard from Americans that this is so.
So, who knows how this mess will end? I can’t see anything to hope for in the immediate future.
References
the worst of the English-speaking democracies – 1
five Australian PMs, from 2010 to 2019
I don’t like the USA very much. I suppose that’s putting it mildly.
I’m not a nationalist. I was for some years involved in the humanist movement, attended meetings and gave, I recall, three talks to humanist groups, one on the free will issue, one on the decline of Christianity here in Australia, and one on the rise of internationalist organisations over the past century or so.
Lately, like many, I’ve become – I don’t know what to call it, concerned, transfixed by the USA, not wanting to know, not wanting to miss anything, a mixture of horror and schadenfreude. But generally, I find it more valuable to listen to those outside looking in, than to US commentators, with their ‘how have the mighty fallen’ fantasies.
This is generally a sound approach. As I’ve written before, if you want to know what an individual is like, don’t take it from the horse’s mouth, because she’s understandably (and healthily) biased. So you ask the people around her, who’ve had dealings with her, some friendly, some not so. This is ‘solid science,’ as they say. And the same goes for countries, generally.
So the most appropriate countries to compare the USA with are, surely, the other English-speaking democracies. That’s to say, Britain, the ‘mother’ of them all, and Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It’s important to note that Australia and New Zealand became separated from Britain more or less amicably, while the USA did so via a war of independence. Canada’s history lies between these two extremes. These facts help explain the differences in their polities.
So, to start with Australia, and I’ll try to be brief. It started in 1788 when a British flag was hoisted in what is now known as Sydney Harbour, claiming, rather outrageously, on a ‘finders keepers’ basis, that all of the surrounding land, the extent of which was largely unknown, now belonged to that small densely populated island on the far side of the globe. It all seemed perfectly cromulent to the colonists, and to be fair they had no idea quite how massive the land area was. Later, in spite of the rather obvious presence of non-British humans in the region, the land was declared ‘terra nullius’. Whether this was a convenient fiction, or simply a joke, is anyone’s guess.
The colonists used this harbour region as a prison camp for some decades, adding other camps in the north and south. Crime and punishment was rather fetishised in this period, to the detriment of the so-called lower classes. But further into the 19th century, after the Australian continent became more fully surveyed and explored, free settlements, or separate colonies, developed along the eastern and southern coasts, and in Tasmania, each governed by officials tied to the motherland. The Aboriginal population, more sparse and scattered than the Maori population in New Zealand, and considerably less given to warfare, tended to be brushed aside in the early decades.
The important Sydney region began its transformation from a struggling and near-failing farming and rum-guzzling community into a more civil society under Lachlan Macquarie, governor from 1810 to 1821, yet this seemed to encourage the motherland to send out more of their unwanted. The colonial population rapidly increased, and farming, often conducted illegally (squatting) became quite lucrative for some. Settlements grew beyond Sydney, as well as in modern-day Melbourne, Hobart, Launceston and Adelaide.
So, jumping to the late 19th century, the colony was more or less thriving in spite of a serious shortage of women, especially in the early years. This actually led to supportive treatment such as assisted migration and favoured settlement and employment terms. A mid-century gold rush boosted the population while further contributing to the gender imbalance, as well as racism.
Voices for independence were being raised from the 1830s in Australia, and even in Britain by the 1850s. The self-government process developed in different regions, and was less a national than a colony-based development, since each region had already created governmental systems. Constitutions were created in NSW, Victoria, Queensland, Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania and South Australia and approved in Britain by the end of the 1850s. Western Australia was officially self-governing by 1890.
So with constitutions came legislative councils for each of the far-flung colonies. With variations they created lower and upper houses, with the upper houses being based on a very limited property-owning male franchise. My home state, South Australia, was the first to introduce universal male suffrage in the lower house in 1956. It was also the first electorate in the world to introduce female suffrage, and the right to stand for office, in 1895. Only for ‘white’ women, of course.
So Australia’s move towards complete independence from Britain was piecemeal and peaceful. 1901 was the year that it became a national federation of states, with a governor-general and state governors linking it to the motherland and its constitutional monarch, but with all legislative power in the hands of the federal and state governments. On the federal level it operates largely under a two-party system, with smaller parties on the left and right fringes, sometimes forming coalitions with their corresponding larger parties, and independent members of various types. The head of government, the Prime Minister, is not elected directly by the people, as is the case in the USA, but by the elected members of her or his party, and she can be removed from her position by a vote of no-confidence from those elected members. The opposition leader attains her position by the same process. New legislation is introduced by the incumbent government, debated and voted for in the lower house (the House of Representatives), after which it passes to the upper house (the Senate) for confirmation.
In all of this there’s, unsurprisingly, little difference between the Australian system and the British one. There’s a two-chamber parliament that meets regularly, all made up of locally elected members. Those members choose their leader – the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader, and they in turn choose their ministerial and shadow ministerial ‘teams’, e.g the Treasurer, the Foreign Minister, the Education Minister, the Attorney-General, the Deputy Prime Minister and so on. This collection of ministers is called the Cabinet. Australia also has a Constitution, like the USA, but unlike the USA, it virtually never gets mentioned. It basically explains how the government or parliament is constituted, and there seems to be general agreement about it.
The important difference between Australia’s Westminster-based system (and those of Canada, New Zealand, and of course Britain) and that of the USA is the absence of anything like a President, or immunity from prosecution for any member of government. Pardoning powers are in the hands of the Attorney-General, in consultation with the Cabinet, and are very seldom used. The seven-person High Court of Australia is the equivalent of the USA’s Supreme Court, but nowhere near as controversial (very few Australians would be able to name anyone who’s on it). Mandatory retirement age for its Justices is 70, and new members are selected by the Attorney-General in consultation with the Cabinet.
New Zealand’s democratic or political history (I suppose I’m trying to say ‘white’ history without sounding racist – of course its Maori history was full of politics in the broad sense, as was Australian aboriginal and native American history) can be dated to 1840, the year of the Treaty of Waitangi, and the declaration of British sovereignty over the islands by its first governor, William Hobson. The Maori people, Pacific Islanders who first settled on the North Island some 12,000 yers ago, were generally much more difficult to deal with in these early years of white colonisation than Australia’s Aboriginals. Given to tribal warfare before the whites arrived (much like the whites had been in Europe for millennia), they were well prepared to make life tough for the newcomers. This led to serious warfare from the 1850s to the 1870s when, for some odd reason, many Maori groups refused to accept that their 12,000-year island home now belonged to Britain – or possibly Australia. The British government, which by the mid-19th century had become somewhat overwhelmed by the burden of its own colonial enterprises, generally left developments in New Zealand, which mostly centred around the Bay of Islands at the very northern region of the North Island, to those ‘over there’ who thought they knew what they were doing.
This was generally a good thing. The New Zealand Constitution Act of 1852 led to the first elections in 1853. There was a property qualification, of course, but it was more liberal than that of Britain at the time, and a large number of Maori chiefs could vote. All Maori men over 21 could vote by 1867. This was way ahead of anything in Europe or North America. However, by the early 20th century, Maori had been stripped of almost all of their land. Unsurprisingly this led to uprisings and plenty of violence.
New Zealand adopted a Westminster-based system of course, with a ceremonial Governor-General representing the British monarch, a Prime Minister, and two major parties, Labour on the left and the Nationals on the right. There have been a number of minor parties and independents over the years and recently coalition governments have been more common than not. Here’s how Wikipedia recounts it:
In 1996, New Zealand inaugurated the new electoral system (mixed-member proportional representation, or MMP) to elect its Parliament. The MMP system was expected (among numerous other goals) to increase representation of smaller parties in Parliament and appears to have done so in the MMP elections to date.
New Zealand’s judicial system has been independent and largely uncontroversial, though there have been some important recent changes. A body called the Supreme Court of New Zealand came into being in January 2004, replacing the right of appeal to the London-based Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. There was a certain amount of opposition from monarchists about this change, of course.
Although religion played some part in the politics of Australia and New Zealand into the 60s, both countries have been ‘losing their religion’, i.e Christianity, quite rapidly since that time, in contrast to the US. This is one of many factors separating the US from the Westminster-based English-speaking nations, as we shall see.
In the next post I’ll take a look at the USA’s unfortunate neighbour, Canada, which also has a Westminster-based parliamentary democracy, as well as the USA itself, as briefly as possible.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Australia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Australia
Keith Sinclair, A history of New Zealand, 1969
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_New_Zealand
genetics for the faint-hearted
get it got it good
What’s a haplotype? It’s a bunch of alleles, so I have to be clear first about alleles. A haplotype, also known as a haploid genotype, is a set of alleles inherited (as a set) from a single parent.
Alleles are pretty complex, at least to me. I think of Mendel and his peas, but it’s vague. Looking up a definition hasn’t helped much. It might, or might not, be better to start with DNA and/or RNA, and of course I know something about these macromolecules and their structure. They’re made up of nucleotides, and an allele is described as ‘a variant of the sequence of nucleotides at a particular location, or locus, on a DNA molecule’. This doesn’t help much. Do I repeat myself?
I’ll keep trying. There are haploid cells and diploid cells. In humans they’re called gametes – the sperm and the eggs, and they each have 23 chromosomes. Fertilisation of eggs by sperm creates zygotes which are paired – 23 chromosomes from each gamete type. Twenty-three pairs of haplotype make a genotype.
Why am I bothering with this? I can’t remember now, but I think it was about alleles. There is a problem in my mind about a haplotype, say inherited from Mum, and this ‘bunch of alleles’ thing. I mean, what’s the difference between an allele and a gene?
So I plug this into the machine. It seems that genes are things that code for things. In the phenotype. Your phenotype is the expression of your genes. Hair colour, penis size, intelligence maybe. Also I suppose your species. Bonobos have 24 pairs, but so do chimps. So…
Whales, since I’ve been focussing on them a bit lately, have mostly 44 chromosomes (22 pairs), but some species have 42.
Anyway this all began with talk on social media about XY and XX chromosomes, male and female humans and longevity. XY is male (for humans and some other mammals, and some fish, snakes and even plants). These are the ‘sex chromosomes’, at least in these species. That’s to say, the sex-determining chromosomes.
So a karyotype is, for my information, ‘the general appearance of the complete set of chromosomes in the cells of a species or in an individual, mainly including their sizes, numbers and shapes’. The sex chromosomes, obviously, are part of that karyotype, and they’re not always named XY or XX. Bird sex chromosomes, very interestingly, are ZW for females and ZZ for males. And what researchers are finding, in this doubling up (ZZ for male birds, XX for female humans) has some effect on their longevity – male birds, on average, and somewhat dependent on species – live longer than females, while female humans, and other mammals with XX chromosomes, live longer, on average, than males. Correlation or causation?
But all of this stuff on haplotypes, and full genotypes, is intrinsically interesting, and I could do a complete free online course on it, maybe…?
So if you know the genotypes of both your parents, could you work out their particular contribution to your phenotype? ‘I got my braininess from mum and my good looks from dad’ type thing? I should listen to the Sapolsky videos online maybe…?
If only I was 40 years younger. Still my genotype, and some luck, has kept me alive thus far…
the what that I try to say…
A phrase in a novel – falling in love is like being haunted. It brings to mind youthful feelings, traces of which are occasionally felt in – late maturity?
It may not have been love, I was ever skeptical, but in youth you might encounter someone, without ever really meeting her, a friend of a friend of a friend, you see her, and then not, and you’re not thinking of her, you don’t think, and then, unexpectedly, she’s there, in a room you’ve entered, a room full of people, and your skin goes electric, so palpable you feel other people must notice, you want to escape the embarrassment.
Of course, of course, you have been haunted. Wonder and hope haunts. You need something, but how awful to impose that on others, especially on her. And so you’re caught in an orbit, a satellite, it feels fatal to get too close, or to drift away, into empty hopelessness. Can you simply remain like this? Is it bearable? Is it bearable not to?
Haunting, haunted. You imagine speaking but dare not. You imagine trying to speak but the words refuse to become sound. You imagine a disdainful look that you’ve never seen on her face. You wonder at all the barriers you insist on creating. You count all your failures. You detect a pattern that you feel is slowly reducing you to… what? Nothing substantial. A thing so insubstantial that nobody, let alone her, will even feel any need to avoid. How could such intensity produce such nullity?
——————–
Hell is other people? Heaven too? Thoughts are encased in bone and flesh. We think others are a mystery, as if we understand our own hopes and fears and anger and anguish. We think, why did we think that? Idle, hurtful thoughts, impossible to trace. Or we don’t want to get lost in that maze.
We’re drawn to what hurts us, for example, where there is pain there is life. But what is the equation? What are the respective quantities? Should we experiment with experience or stay safe or find a balance but what balance? To each her own?
Screens are safe, mostly safe, their unexpectedness rarely pains, threatens, upends our lives, which is why they never provide us with enough. Spontaneous interaction is the essential that we often strive to avoid. Why do I say we? Can I even speak for myself honestly?
Love is a terribly abused, essential word. It makes for us a pain which threatens our lives while we wonder about its reality. To not believe in it is killing, to believe too much kills with hope. But what matter, we must die.
Old people on the streets sit on mats. I mostly look at the women. She sat on a dusty blanket with a bowl, a big Buddha staring through the passing crowd. A small dog skipped by on a lead, my dog, pulling toward her, and her face lit like a lamp, warming and shaming me, indelibly.
Growing old, things still happen. Hope springs familiar, but so different, but not so different. No movement to action, or little, mostly just thought, internal, invisible to all but the self. When action occurs, however slight, it shocks and shames and excites, too much. No more, no return. But then…
I stand at the whiteboard waiting for my students to drift in. I wear a fixed, almost grim smile. A thin, wiry Arabic student enters and sidles between desks. His near-shaved head makes me think of skinheads of long ago. A contrast. He looks at me and stops, smiles.’Handsome’, he says. I smile back, thin. My skin prickles.
I walk streets and stop at bars, or not. I pass a pub, familiar, near my home. Near the door I stop to let others pass, leaving. A tall, scowling man, who seems surrounded by acolytes, is saying ‘he sits there every night, with his one bacardi, clogging up the place’. I feel a surge of violence, burning. I blink and blink. Moments or hours afterwards I wonder at myself. Is this a male thing?
I indulge myself with memories. As a child, but not so young, I sat beside a girl in class. I noticed with pride that I was the only boy who did so. I wanted to be unnoticeably exceptional. That year, the only year, we had inkwells and pens with nibs. It was hard for me, my left hand, my writing hand, trailed behind the nib and smudged the page. The girl, whose name I remember, looked at my work and smiled, a sad beautiful smile. And then, but perhaps not then, perhaps a day later, or a week, she rose, in the silent class, and approached the teacher’s desk, and I knew why, and the teacher, a young woman with huge intimidating spectacles and without a smile, came to me in all this silence and told me that I could write with a pencil from now on. And when she was gone, I looked at the girl, my friend, but she would not look at me.
And memories bring more memories, as if on a string lit by the first. She came in late, and held a handkerchief balled in her hand. Her face was wet and discoloured, pink, almost purple, a number of subtle shades, and she was trembling. Everything disappeared around this sight.
There is only one more memory, it was so long long ago. We were walking home together, like friends, chatting, and I was carrying her books. Yes, truly, I was carrying her books. I think I had come to realise that she was beautiful. And she told me, with a touch of sadness, the very slightest touch, that she and her family were moving to Melbourne soon.
______________________________________________________
Familiar silence encloses me, though the inner noise baffles and bores. Impotence is tedious, yet it grows and grows. Or perhaps it was always this way, memories are so unreliable. How we love to manipulate, while never quite believing in its effects. And hate to be manipulated, yet always somehow hoping.
References
Han Kang, Greek Lessons, 2011
patriarchal power, money, and endings
I’ve written before about how people make the category error of confusing patriarchy/matriarchy, which is a system, with men/women, which is about individuals. Of course we can think of woeful women and marvellous men, but that’s not at all the point.
And then there are others who say that the aim should be égalité, not oppression of one gender by another. Of course this is reasonable, but if we look at other primates we find a complexity that is hard to parse into neat categories. In a study of 121 primate species, published in PNAS, entitled ‘the evolution of male-female dominance in primate societies’, they start with this:
We show that societies where males win nearly all aggressive encounters against females are actually rare. Evolutionarily, females became more dominant when they gained more control over reproduction, as in monogamous, monomorphic, or arboreal species, as well as when they faced more competition, as in solitary or pair-living species. Contrarily, male-biased dominance prevails in terrestrial, sexually dimorphic, and polygynous species.
Human primates (and don’t we just hate being described that way) are, these days, mostly monogamous, very varied in terms of size, and generally terrestrial, so it’s hard to say how that works for gender dominance.
However, though it galls me to harp on human uniqueness, we have created or evolved these things we call civilisation, language, nations, technology, etc, which have complicated questions of gender dominance. For example, it’s clear that size would hardly be expected to matter so much in a technically-savvy society such as ours. Then again, male violence against women, as we all know, is far more prevalent than its opposite.
Male dominance is still very much the norm in human societies, and is often taken for granted in surprising ways. I remember as a mature-age student in the 90s befriending a young woman who was convinced that men had better, more complex brains than women, and that neural physiology would bear that out. What could make her think this? Did she also think that male cats and dogs had more complex brains than their female counterparts? It seems that our patriarchy, slightly declining though it is in recent times, is still doing its damage in terms of human ambitions and expectations.
One way that gender empowerment can be measured in human societies, and nowhere else in the living world, is wealth. Moulah. Wealth, they say, is power. And when we look at the USA, supposedly the richest country on Earth, with the greatest wealth disparity in the WEIRD world, it’s very clear that wealth is wielding its power there in rather disturbing ways. This has made me wonder – how much wealth, globally, is in the hands of men, compared to women? Would it be 90%? Surely more than that. Surely closer to 99%. In any case it makes a mockery of looking at gender dimorphism when determining the power imbalance between the sexes in humans. And it’s no good looking at the disparities of pay between Mr and Ms Average, I’m talking about the world’s controlling billionaires, all of whom are men. Here’s the opening paragraph of an essay from the Brennan Center for Justice, on money spent on the recent US election:
The 2024 federal election cycle was the most secretive since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010. Dark money groups, nonprofits and shell companies that spend on elections without revealing their donors, plowed more than $1.9 billion into last year’s election cycle, a dramatic increase from the prior record of $1 billion in 2020.
Though it occasionally happens, the super-rich, pretty well all male, don’t contribute money to the left side of politics. There is an Emoluments Clause in the US Constitution, but it’s a sick joke, and I’m very doubtful about that $1.9 billion figure – surely it’s far more than that. And although it hasn’t been so prominent lately, the ‘project 2025’ agenda includes an assault on women’s rights and freedoms in that beleaguered country, including a nationwide ban on abortion care, with the further threat of banning all forms of birth control and fertility treatment such as IVF. It also plans to prosecute health professionals who engage in abortion care, and to largely curtail the Affordable Care Act, which would disproportionately disadvantage women in a number of ways.
Of course Trump, who is now clearly the dictator of that country, is less concerned with project 2025 than with prosecuting anyone who has slighted him, and with cashing in on his dictatorship, but his fellow-travellers are mostly of the macho-fascist type, so the assault on women’s rights, freedoms and empowerment will continue, perhaps into Trump’s third term. All we seem to be able to cling to is the long arc bending towards justice that Martin Luther King evoked.
I suppose it will all end by our discovering how smart we are, as opposed to how smart we think we are….
And then maybe bonobos will survive us, and evolve…
References