Tag Archives: history

2021: Year in Review

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As per usual, I’ll list out and link to the stories I chose as the most frightening, most hopeful, and most interesting each month in 2021. Then I’ll see if I have anything smart to say about how it all fits together.

Survey of the Year’s Stories and Themes

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: A China-Taiwan military conflict is a potential start-of-World-War-III scenario. This could happen today, or this year, or never. Let’s hope for the latter. This is a near-term existential risk, but I have to break my own “rule of one” and give honorable mention to two longer-term scary things: crashing sperm counts and the climate change/fascism/genocide nexus.
  • FEBRUARY: For people who just don’t care that much about plants and animals, the elevator pitch on climate change is it is coming for our houses and it is coming for our food and water.
  • MARCH: In the U.S. upper Midwest (I don’t know if this region is better or worse than the country as a whole, or why they picked it), electric blackouts average 92 minutes per year, versus 4 minutes per year in Japan.
  • APRIL: One of the National Intelligence Council’s scenarios for 2040 involves “far-reaching changes designed to address climate change, resource depletion, and poverty following a global food catastrophe caused by climate events and environmental degradation”.
  • MAY: The Colorado River basin is drying out.
  • JUNE: For every 2 people who died of Covid-19 in the U.S. about 1 additional person died of indirect effects, such as our lack of a functioning health care system and safe streets compared to virtually all our peer countries.
  • JULY: The western-U.S. megadrought looks like it is settling in for the long haul.
  • AUGUST: The U.S. is not prepared for megadisasters. Pandemics, just to cite one example. War and climate change tipping points, just to cite two others. Solutions or at least risk mitigation measures exist, such as getting a health care system, joining the worldwide effort to deal with carbon emissions, and as for war, how about just try to avoid it?
  • SEPTEMBER: The most frightening climate change tipping points may not be the ones we hear the most about in the media (at least in my case, I was most aware of melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, collapse of ocean circulation patterns). The most damaging may be melting permafrost on land and methane hydrates underwater, both of which contain enormous amounts of methane which could set off a catastrophic and unstoppable feedback loop if released in large quantities.
  • OCTOBER: The technology (sometimes called “gain of function“) to make something like Covid-19 or something much worse in a laboratory clearly exists right now, and barriers to doing that are much lower than other types of weapons. Also, because I just couldn’t choose this month, asteroids can sneak up on us.
  • NOVEMBER: Freakonomics podcast explained that there is a strong connection between cars and violence in the United States. Because cars kill and injure people on a massive scale, they led to an expansion of police power. Police and ordinary citizens started coming into contact much more often than they had. We have no national ID system so the poor and disadvantaged often have no ID when they get stopped. Everyone has guns and everyone is jumpy. Known solutions (safe street design) and near term solutions (computer-controlled vehicles?) exist, but are we going to pursue them as a society? I guess I am feeling frightened and/or depressed today, hence my choice of category here.
  • DECEMBER: Mass migration driven by climate change-triggered disasters could be the emerging big issue for 2022 and beyond. Geopolitical instability is a likely result, not to mention enormous human suffering.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: Computer modeling, done well, can inform decisions better than data analysis alone. An obvious statement? Well, maybe to some but it is disputed every day by others, especially staff at some government regulatory agencies I interact with.
  • FEBRUARY: It is possible that mRNA technology could cure or prevent herpes, malaria, flu, sickle cell anemia, cancer, HIV, Zika and Ebola (and obviously coronavirus). With flu and coronavirus, it may become possible to design a single shot that would protect against thousands of strains. It could also be used for nefarious purposes, and to protect against that are ideas about what a biological threat surveillance system could look like.
  • MARCH: I officially released my infrastructure plan for America, a few weeks before Joe Biden released his. None of the Sunday morning talk shows has called me to discuss so far. Unfortunately, I do not have the resources of the U.S. Treasury or Federal Reserve available to me. Of course, neither does he unless he can convince Congress to go along with at least some portion of his plans. Looking at his proposal, I think he is proposing to direct the fire hoses at the right fires (children, education, research, water, the electric grid and electric vehicles, maintenance of highways and roads, housing, and ecosystems. There is still no real planning involved, because planning needs to be done in between crises and it never is. Still, I think it is a good proposal that will pay off economically while helping real people, and I hope a substantial portion of it survives.
  • APRIL: Giant tortoises reach a state of “negligible senescense” where they simply don’t age for a long time. Humans are distant relatives of giant tortoises, so maybe we can aspire to this some day. They are not invulnerable to injury and disease.
  • MAY: An effective vaccine for malaria may be on the way. Malaria kills more children in Africa every year than Covid-19 killed people of all ages in Africa during the worst year of the pandemic. And malaria has been killing children every year for centuries and will continue long after Covid-19 is gone unless something is done.
  • JUNE: Masks, ventilation, and filtration work pretty well to prevent Covid transmission in schools. We should learn something from this and start designing much healthier schools and offices going forward. Design good ventilation and filtration into all buildings with lots of people in them. We will be healthier all the time and readier for the next pandemic. Then masks can be slapped on as a last layer of defense. Enough with the plexiglass, it’s just stupid and it’s time for it to go.
  • JULY: A new Lyme disease vaccine may be on the horizon (if you’re a human – if you are a dog, talk to your owner about getting the approved vaccine today.) I admit, I had to stretch a bit to find a positive story this month.
  • AUGUST: The Nordic welfare model works by providing excellent benefits to the middle class, which builds the public and political support to collect sufficient taxes to provide the benefits, and so on in a virtuous cycle. This is not a hopeful story for the U.S., where wealthy and powerful interests easily break the cycle with anti-tax propaganda, which ensure benefits are underfunded, inadequate, available only to the poor, and resented by middle class tax payers.
  • SEPTEMBER: Space-based solar power could finally be in our realistic near-term future. I would probably put this in the “interesting” rather than “hopeful” category most months, but I really struggled to come up with a hopeful story this month. I am at least a tiny bit hopeful this could be the “killer app” that gets humanity over the “dirty and scarce” energy hump once and for all, and lets us move on to the next layer of problems.
  • OCTOBER: The situation with fish and overfishing is actually much better than I thought.
  • NOVEMBER: Urban areas may have some ecological value after all.
  • DECEMBER: Covid-19 seems to be “disappearing” in Japan, or at least was before the Omicron wave. Maybe lessons could be learned. It seems possible that East Asian people have at least some genetic defenses over what other ethnic groups have, but I would put my money on tight border screening and an excellent public health care system. Okay, now I’m starting to feel a bit depressed again, sitting here in the U.S. where we can’t have these nice things thanks to our ignorant politicians.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • JANUARY: There have been fabulous advances in note taking techniques! Well, not really, but there are some time honored techniques out there that could be new and beneficial for many people to learn, and I think this is an underappreciated productivity and innovation skill that could benefit people in a lot of areas, not just students.
  • FEBRUARY: At least one serious scientist is arguing that Oumuamua was only the tip of an iceberg of extraterrestrial objects we should expect to see going forward.
  • MARCH: One study says 1-2 days per week is a sweet spot for working from home in terms of a positive economic contribution at the national scale. I think it is about right psychologically for many people too. However, this was a very theoretical simulation, and other studies attempting to measure this at the individual or firm scale have come up with a 20-50% loss in productivity. I think the jury is still out on this one, but I know from personal experience that people need to interact and communicate regularly for teams to be productive, and some people require more supervision than others, and I don’t think technology is a perfect substitute for doing these things in person so far.
  • APRIL: Hydrogen fuel cells may finally be arriving. Not so much in the U.S., where we can’t have nice things.
  • MAY: I learned about Lawrence Kohlberg, who had some ideas on the use of moral dilemmas in education.
  • JUNE: The big U.S. government UFO report was a dud. But what’s interesting about it is that we have all quietly seemed to have accepted that something is going on, even if we have no idea what it is, and this is new.
  • JULY: “Cliodynamics” is an attempt at a structured, evidence-based way to test hypotheses about history.
  • AUGUST: Ectogenesis is an idea for colonizing other planets that involves freezing embryos and putting them on a spaceship along with robots to thaw them out and raise them. Fungi could also be very useful in space, providing food, medicine, and building materials.
  • SEPTEMBER: Philip K. Dick was not only a prolific science fiction author, he also developed a comprehensive theory of religion which could possibly even be the right one. Also, possibly related but not really, if there are aliens out there they might live in creepy colonies or super-organisms like ants or termites.
  • OCTOBER: I thought about how to accelerate scientific progress: “[F]irst a round of automated numerical/computational experiments on a huge number of permutations, then a round of automated physical experiments on a subset of promising alternatives, then rounds of human-guided and/or human-performed experiments on additional subsets until you hone in on a new solution… [C]ommit resources and brains to making additional passes through the dustbin of rejected results periodically…” and finally “educating the next generation of brains now so they are online 20 years from now when you need them to take over.” Easy, right?
  • NOVEMBER: Peter Turchin continues his project to empirically test history. In this article, he says the evidence points to innovation in military technologies being driven by “world population size, connectivity between geographical areas of innovation and adoption, and critical enabling technological advances, such as iron metallurgy and horse riding“. What does not drive innovation? “state-level factors such as polity population, territorial size, or governance sophistication“. As far as the technologies coming down the pike in 2022, one “horizon scan” has identified “satellite megaconstellations, deep sea mining, floating photovoltaics, long-distance wireless energy, and ammonia as a fuel source”.
  • DECEMBER: Time reminded us of all the industries Elon Musk has disrupted so far: human-controlled, internal-combustion-fueled automobiles; spaceflight; infrastructure construction (I don’t know that he has really achieved any paradigm shifts here, but not for lack of trying), “artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, payment systems and cryptocurrency.” I’m not sure I follow a couple of these, but I think they missed satellites.

Continuing Signs of U.S. Relative Decline

Signs of U.S. decline relative to our peer group of advanced nations are all around us. I don’t know that we are in absolute decline, but I think we are now below average among the most advanced countries in the world. We are not investing in the infrastructure needed in a modern economy just to reduce friction and let the economy function. The annual length of electric blackouts in the U.S. (hours) compared to leading peers like Japan (minutes) is just one telling indicator. In March, I looked at the Build Back Better proposal and concluded that it was more like directing a firehose of money at a range of problems than an actual plan, but I hoped at least some of it would happen. My rather low but not zero expectations were met, as some limited funding was provided for “hard infrastructure” and energy/emissions projects, but little or nothing (so far, as I write this) to address our systemic failures in health care, child care, or education. The crazy violence on our streets, both gun-related and motor vehicle-related, is another indicator. Known solutions to all these problems exist and are being implemented to various extents by peer countries. Meanwhile our toxic politics and general ignorance continue to hold us back. Biden really gave it his best shot – but if this is our “once in a generation” attempt, we are headed down a road where we will no longer qualify as a member of the pack of elite countries, let alone its leader.

The Climate Change, Drought, Food, Natural Disaster, Migration and Geopolitical Instability Nexus

2021 was a pretty bad year for storms, fires, floods, and droughts. All these things affect our homes, our infrastructure, our food supply, and our water supply. Drought in particular can trigger mass migration. Mass migration can be a disaster for human rights and human dignity in and of itself, and managing it effectively is difficult even for well-intentioned governments. But an insidious related problem is that migration pressure can tend to fuel right wing populist and racist political movements. We see this happening all over the world, and the situation seems likely to get worse.

Tipping Points and other Really Bad Things We Aren’t Prepared For

We can be thankful that nothing really big and new and bad happened in 2021. My apologies to anyone reading this who lost someone or had a tough year. Of course, plenty of bad things happened to good people, and plenty of bad things happened on a regional or local scale. But while Covid-19 ground on and plenty of local and regional-scale natural disasters and conflicts occurred, there were no new planetary-scale disasters. This is good because humanity has had enough trouble dealing with Covid-19, and another major disaster hitting at the same time could be the one that brings our civilization to the breaking point.

So we have a trend of food insecurity and migration pressure creeping up on us over time, and we are not handling it well even given time to do so. Maybe we can hope that some adjustments will be made there to get the world on a sustainable track. Even if we do that, there are some really bad things that could happen suddenly. Catastrophic war is an obvious one. A truly catastrophic pandemic is another (as opposed to the moderately disastrous pandemic we have just gone through.) Creeping loss of human fertility is one that is not getting much attention, but this seems like an existential risk if it were to cross some threshold where suddenly the global population starts to drop quickly and we can’t do anything about it. Asteroids were one thing I really thought we didn’t have to worry much about on the time scale of any human alive today, but I may have been wrong about that. And finally, the most horrifying risk to me in the list above is the idea of an accelerating, runaway feedback loop of methane release from thawing permafrost or underwater methane hydrates.

We are almost certainly not managing these risks. These risks are probably not 100% avoidable, but since they are existential we should be actively working to minimize the chance of them happening, preparing to respond in real time, and preparing to recover afterward if they happen. Covid-19 was a dress rehearsal for dealing with a big global risk event, and humanity mostly failed to prepare or respond effectively. We are lucky it was one we should be able to recover from as long as we get some time before the next body blow. We not only need to prepare for much, much worse events that could happen, we need to match our preparations to the likelihood of more than one of them happening at the same time or in quick succession.

Technological Progress

Enough doom and gloom. We humans are here, alive, and many of us are physically comfortable and have much more leisure time than our ancestors. Our social, economic, and technological systems seem to be muddling through from day to day for the time being. We have intelligence, science, creativity, and problem solving abilities available to us if we choose to make use of them. Let’s see what’s going on with technology.

Biotechnology: The new mRNA technology accelerated by the pandemic opens up potential cures for a range of diseases. We need an effective biological surveillance system akin to nuclear weapons inspections (which we also need) to make sure it is not misused (oops, doom and gloom trying to creep in, but there are some ideas for this.) We have vaccines on the horizon for diseases that have been plaguing us for decades or longer, like malaria and Lyme disease. Malaria kills more children worldwide, year in and year out, than coronavirus has killed per year at its peak.

Promising energy technologies: Space based solar power may finally be getting closer to reality. Ditto for hydrogen fuel cells in vehicles, although not particularly in the U.S. (I’m not sure this is preferable to electric vehicles for everyday transportation, but it seems like a cleaner alternative to diesel and jet fuel when large amounts of power are needed in trucking, construction, and aviation, for example.)

Other technologies: We are actually using technology to catch fish in more sustainable ways, and to grow fish on farms in more sustainable ways. We are getting better at looking for extraterrestrial objects, and the more we look, the more of them we expect to see (this one is exciting and scary at the same time). We are putting satellites in orbit on an unprecedented scale. We have computers, robots, artificial intelligence of a sort, and approaches to use them to potentially accelerate scientific advancements going forward.

The State of Earth’s Ecosystems

The state and trends of the Earth’s ecosystems continue to be concerning. Climate change continues to churn through the public consciousness and our political systems, and painful as the process is I think our civilization is slowly coming to a consensus that something is happening and something needs to be done about it (decades after we should have been able to do this based on the evidence and knowledge available.) When it comes to our ecosystems, however, I think we are in the very early stages of this process. This is something I would like to focus on in this blog in the coming year. My work and family life are busy, and I have decided to take on an additional challenge of becoming a student again for the first time in the 21st century, but somehow I will persevere. If you are reading this shortly after I write it in January 2022, here’s to good luck and prosperity in the new year!

Big History

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I hadn’t heard of Big History, and this article in Aeon is actually critical of it, but it sounds interesting as an attempt to fuse natural and social science into a curriculum.

The Big History narrative itself is given shape by the interplay between the forces of entropy and complexity that are represented, respectively, by the second law of thermodynamics and evolution. The second law of thermodynamics postulates that there is a finite amount of energy in the Universe that is slowly dissipating, but evolution shows that there are moments when a particular threshold is reached and overcomes entropy by the creation of new forms of complexity. Big History proposes there are eight ‘threshold moments’, when profoundly new forms of complexity appear in the past: (1) the Big Bang; (2) stars and galaxies; (3) new chemical elements; (4) the Earth and solar system; (5) life on Earth; (6) the human species; (7) agriculture; and, our currently proposed geological epoch, (8) the Anthropocene.

Aeon

A lot of thinkers I admire, among them Howard T. Odum (not mentioned in this article), have focused on entropy as a sort of defining principle to understand the universe we find ourselves embedded in. Our universe is spirally toward disorder and randomness, but that process is very slow and somehow we find ourselves in a tiny pocket of increasing order within that universe. It starts with the Earth somehow orbiting the sun, and continues with life, the purpose of which seems to be to continue creating order out of chaos where mere physics and chemistry leave off, and then it seemingly culminates in intelligent life and the things intelligent life is able to create.

That’s my quick take from a skim of the article, but this article references a number of articles and books by the Australian developer of the Big History idea (the somewhat ironically named David Christian, because this is a system of belief at least somewhat intended as an alternative to traditional religion.) There is also a TED talk out there for people who like that sort of thing (give me a book, please), and apparently a middle- to high-school curriculum developed by the Gates Foundation.

On revolution

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Today’s topic is random thoughts on revolution. Seems fitting somehow as I write on Thanksgiving Eve 2021. Thanksgiving is a uniquely American (i.e. U.S.) holiday, although it has nothing to do with the American Revolution per se.

First, for Thanksgiving I have purchased a 12-pack of the Yard’s breweries “beers of the revolution”. Yards claims to have based these recipes on ones found in the actual papers of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. However literally or loosely they have interpreted whatever is in those papers, these beers are all yummy! I plan to drink “George Washington’s Porter” on Thanksgiving itself.

Second, I have purchased the novel Invisible Sun by Charles Stross, which is next in the Merchant Princes series and came out just recently. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the idea of revolution plays a role in this series. In fact, there is a book that serves as a sort of cheat sheet for how to avoid the mistakes of revolutions past and successfully mix politically revolution with catch-up technological progress. They seem to manage just this, although they do not avoid the ravages of global warming. A slight spoiler is that the American Revolution is not the primary model for their revolution, and neither is the British Revolution, the French Revolution, or any other European revolution a mostly ignorant American might have heard of. Nor is it based on communism, although they do seem to have decent public transportation, which we here in the U.S. know is a Commie plot!

Partly inspired by Charles Stross, I read a book called The Shortest History of Europe and another called Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition in the West: 1560-1991. I learned that there was something called a Dutch revolution, which I had no idea of. My knowledge of the British and French revolutions was mostly based on being forced to read A Tale of Two Cities in high school, which is mostly about the French revolution. The other fictional account I thought was about the French Revolution was Les Miserables, which I looked up and it is not about the (1789) French Revolution, but takes place around the 1830s. Like I said, I’m ignorant. But it’s not really my fault – in the course of my grade school studies, I had no less than three full years of American history, plus a full year of Virginia history around fourth or fifth grade. Wouldn’t it make sense if we had at least a year of European history at some point, maybe around the same time we are forced to read A Tale of Two Cities? The history of classical Greece and Rome, followed by Europe, used to be called “western civilization”. That might not be politically correct these days – well, maybe a two-year course covering those topics in a larger context of world history would make equal sense.

Continuing my historical theme this fall, I also read (listed to) S.P.Q.R. by Mary Beard, a historian of ancient Rome. I enjoyed this much more than the European history. It all ties together in a few ways. First, the fall of the Roman Republic in the first century B.C. (we are supposed to say B.C.E. now), along with the instability in many European countries around the 1700s right through the 1900s, convinces me that long-term stable governments are definitely the exception and not the rule in human affairs. Stable forms of government, democratic or not, seem to often be measured in years to decades. Centuries definitely seem to be the except to the rule, and I am not aware of any form of government that persisted for a millennium or more. So you could say the U.S. is doing pretty well as it approaches to 250-year mark, but getting pretty long in the tooth. Changes in government are not always sudden or violent. The Roman emperors maintained many of the nominal institutions of the Republic on paper, such as the Senate, while gradually usurping their functions. In the end, the Roman empire did “fall” so much as fade away into regional enclaves mixed in with the quasi-international Catholic and Orthodox churches. The breakup of the British, French, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires mirror this in many ways, and there may be some parallels to U.S. retrenchment in parts of the world, although that history is far from settled. There are probably good examples in the Eastern and Southern Hemispheres too, but I will have to chip away on my ignorance of those another time!

One final thought – something that surprised me is that episodes of inflation are a common theme that often coincide with or trigger political instability in history. Maybe I will give this some more thought and attempt to say intelligent things about it another time.

who goes Nazi?

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This is a 1941 article in Harpers, and be warned parts of it don’t read as politically correct today.

Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.

Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.

Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.

Harpers, 1941

What’s interesting to me is the idea that members of the American upper class having garden parties at the time seemed to contemplate the possibility of America itself “going Nazi”. And it is the whims of a very small group of upper class people who seem to get to decide whether the rest of us in the vast masses “go Nazi” or not.

July 2021 in Review

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July 2021 is in the books. In current events (I’m writing on Sunday, August 1), the Delta variant of Covid is now ripping through the unvaccinated population in the U.S. and predictably leaking out into the vaccinated population. I wasn’t too focused on Covid in July though, looking at the posts I have chosen below.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The western-U.S. megadrought looks like it is settling in for the long haul.

Most hopeful story: A new Lyme disease vaccine may be on the horizon (if you’re a human – if you are a dog, talk to your owner about getting the approved vaccine today.) I admit, I had to stretch a bit to find a positive story this month.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: “Cliodynamics” is an attempt at a structured, evidence-based way to test hypotheses about history.

What’s new with “cliodynamics”?

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Cliodynamics is an attempt to collect and organize data on human history in a structured way that can be subjected to scientific testing. The link I just posted is to Peter Turchin’s blog, and the actual data set(s?) are available here.

There’s also a recently published book on comparative history called Figuring out the Past, which sounds interesting. My formal education in history, which did not extend past grade school, often focused on the history of individual countries (most obviously, the U.S.). Other offerings, which I didn’t have time to take in the course of my oh-so-practical engineering education, often seemed to focus on specific topics. I often wonder if it would be possible to teach kids world history more or less chronologically over the course of several years, and really delve into what was happening simultaneously in different parts of the world at various times. The other way I learn about history informally as an adult is to read or hear about a current event, then dig deeper into the history of a particular geographic area or human group to try to understand the context for the current event. I’m almost always surprised at how little context I actually had to understand the current event before I started digging, and I never have time to do as much digging as I might like.

Data is another way to look at/teach/learn about history. I’m often interested in how many people were alive at a given time, how much energy they used and what their energy sources were, and (somewhat morbidly) what they died of. But I don’t really know where to begin to look for most of that data.

Cahokia

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Cahokia, according to BBC, was a Native American city near present day St. Louis. It reached its peak of about 30,000 people around 1,000 A.D., which may not sound impressive but was a larger city than Paris at the time. One interesting thing the article mentions is that there is no evidence of a market economy found, but instead the city appears to have been a “cultural center” renowned for feasts, parties, and…graveyards.

the Antikythera mechanism

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The Antikythera mechanism is a 2,000-year-old mechanical model of the solar system found in a sunken ship in the Mediterranean in 1901. It looks like a clock mechanism, but the strange thing is that there were no clocks yet at the time, so a puzzle is why, if the ancient Greeks or whoever built this had this technology, why didn’t they also have clocks? It is also a puzzle because scientists haven’t been able to recreate it using any known manufacturing technology available at the time. I’m not saying it was aliens, because the model shows the sun and other known planets (no telescopes until about 1600) revolving around the Earth, and spacefaring aliens would presumably know better, unless they were trying to trick us.

Is a modern U.S. civil war possible, and if so what could it look like?

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This article in The Week argues that civil wars can take a variety of forms, so we shouldn’t be overconfident that one is impossible just because we don’t have an obvious geographic basis for one.

  • The original U.S. civil war is a somewhat obvious example of a geography-based conflict. Although, I see it as less of a territorial dispute and more of an economic and class conflict, rationalized and manipulated by racial and religious ideology.
  • Yugoslavia in the 1990s was an ugly conflict between ethnic and religious groups who were interspersed geographically. Rwanda isn’t mentioned but I understand it to be similar, although I don’t fully understand either of these conflicts.
  • The English Civil War “that raged from 1642-1651, pitting the crown against parliament, cities and towns dominated by a rising commercial middle class against the aristocratic countryside, and the staid religious convictions of the ruling class against the theologically driven radicalism of more demotic religious sects.” Okay, I’m almost completely ignorant of this one, because I was only taught U.S. history in school and haven’t gone back to study this one on my own. Perhaps the Crown whipped up a crowd of supporters and said something like, “Hey, why don’t you guys go over there and storm Parliament and have a portrait painted (no cameras yet) of yourselves naked except for a pair of Viking horns”?
  • I did read A Tale of Two Cities in high school, but I always thought that book was false advertising because it was 99% about the French side. I’m not an expert on the French Revolution (not mentioned in the article) by any means, but I understand it to be mostly a class conflict – a revolt of the poor and working class against an exploitative aristocracy. The conditions that could spark something like this would seem to be ripening in the U.S. as wealth and income inequality get objectively worse, but watching Bernie Sanders (who to be clear, advocates peaceful income redistribution to avoid the heads rolling) lose last year convinced me the propaganda here has been so successful for so long among the working and middle classes that this is unlikely. Put another way, our working and middle classes misunderstand the cause of our suffering and have been convinced to support the people causing it, or at least enough of us do that we are hopelessly divided for now. Bernie tried and failed twice (and before that, Ralph Nader tried and not only failed but set the cause back by 20 years), but maybe a more charismatic or more skilled Bernie/Nader will come along in the future, and conditions will have worsened in the meantime.
  • The Troubles in Northern Ireland. I understand this as a group with an ethnic and religious identity wanting regional autonomy, and a central government fighting that, leading to a long, low-intensity insurgency and counter-insurgency conflict. This is happening all over the world (the south of Thailand is just one example I am familiar with), but I don’t see obvious parallels in the United States. The repression of the war on drugs and mass incarceration have some echoes of this perhaps, with the Black Lives Matter movement emerging as a somewhat organized, nonviolent form of resistance. Perhaps it could turn violent if something like the Black Panther movement of the 1960s were to re-emerge.
  • Not mentioned in this article is the increase in right-wing militia groups. Their rhetoric is violent, anti-government, sometimes racist although I don’t believe all these groups identify as racist or white supremacist. It’s not exactly clear to me what they want other than disorder.
  • The Spanish Civil War “that shattered the Iberian Peninsula into a multitude of factions — from anarchists, Stalinists, and anti-clerical absolutists on the left to fascists and Catholic authoritarians on the right — between 1936 and 1939.” Again, my formal education was a complete failure and I am ignorant of this one. Maybe Biden has been fooling us and he will now reveal his true colors as the new Franco/Mussolini/Catholic authoritarian/Emperor Palpatine/Voldemort clone. After all, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Now, continuing this line of thought, who could Joe Biden appoint as Grand Inquisitor? My first thought is Mike Pence. However, an Inquisition will need to be good at things like contact tracing, isolation of victims, and disposal of bodies, and Pence failed his audition as head of the coronavirus virus task force. So I’ll go with Rick Santorum, former Senator from Pennsylvania, who just might have the right combination of political skills, religious fervor and psychopathy to get the job done.

a best of best of 2020 roundup

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The “best of” articles are starting to roll in now! Here are a handful.

  • Best of Frontline. They have a 2-minute Rocky training montage of all their episodes in 2020. As you might excpect, they covered the pandemic, the protests, the Supreme Court, and the election. They don’t seem to have covered international events much other than the pandemic to some extent. Frontline is a great documentary series, probably the best. If I had nothing else to do and really wanted to understand the year, I might take a weekend and binge watch Frontline. Perhaps there are some childless, retired or independently wealthy people out there who can do this, but alas…
  • 25 most popular Longreads exclusives. A few interesting ones look at “Britishness”, the “MasterClass” series, ancient canals in modern-day Phoenix, and the possibility that the Olympics may not be back. I like Longreads in principle but sorry, TLDR!
  • Top 25 Censored Stories from Project Censored. A couple interesting ones look at education/incarceration links and a comprehensive proposal for criminal justice reform.
  • Jeff Masters at Yale Climate Connections reviews the 2020 hurricane season, which broke many long-standing records and would seem to bode ill for the near future.