In the last week or so, Vdare.com posted Paul Craig Robert's ridiculous collapse scenario that comes out of a bad b movie horror flick.
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/100726_dissolved.htm
The first sentence starts, ominously, "It was 2017. Clans were governing America." At that point, you can close the article because you know the man has gone insane. 2017 is seven years from now. Nothing changes that fast. How do people get away with publishing this level of insanity?
I have no interest in refuting Vdare's predictions. I'll just wait seven years and let reality refute them instead.
Unfortunately, this is the consensus belief of the right. Here is the Brussels Journal engaging in the same hyperbolic millenarianism .
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4488
The long-winded 'From Meccania to Atlantis' has been one long doomsday pitch. It has never admitted any chance that the West might survive or avert the coming collapse. All new events, for the last few years, have been incorporated into this doomsday pitch as more evidence of his belief's correctness. Any evidence that contradicts the coming doomsday, naturally, never enters into the equation. The most recent article, not really different from any of the other installments, except for the updated 'reasons' why we're doomed, doomed, doomed, cherry picks everything bad in the world and ignores anything good. But when you look closely at the problems he's saying are so bad, they all look immaterial and relatively harmless. This is going to end the world?
"To paper-over gaping craters in the founding concepts and subsequent applications of the global economy and financial capitalism, they blow up sovereign debts to levels that will cause either sovereign defaults or currency cave-ins in the future."
Currencies have caved in before. Sovereigns have defaulted before. Argentina has a hobby of doing both all the time, but they're still a modern country with a decent per capita GDP, length of life, standard of living, etc. Who the hell cares if we did both? If the whole world did both? Some old people would lose their savings and be unable to afford life extending health care. Everyone would breathe a sigh of relief because the benefits of life extension never merited the costs anyway, and the rest of the healthy, young, living people could get on with their lives, free of government debts contracted by previous generations they were never morally responsible for in the first place. If anything, the world would be a better place if everyone defaulted tomorrow. The first thing that would happen is the lenders would start begging people to borrow money again, and in a few days new trillions of dollars in debt would have been contracted, oftentimes by the exact same people who had just defaulted, because lenders need their money to be invested somewhere before it rots away from the normal course of inflation. Lenders need borrowers and debt, therefore sovereign defaults do not hurt debtors -- so long as the default is large enough, there is no way to punish the defaulters and commerce proceeds as normal.
"Instead of allowing crooked, incompetent and bankrupt TBTF (“too-big-to-fail”) enterprises to fail, elected oligarchs have socialized the Crooks’ losses by buying their garbage book assets with the people’s money at fictitious face values."
This is his hyperbolic version of our 36 billion dollar bailout, which was a dramatic success and cost far less than the Savings and Loans bailout of the 1990's. Instead of talking about how wise and benevolent our government was to help out its banks when they were in a pinch, he creates some lurid tale about how this will mean our approaching doom. Apparently we can't afford 36 billion dollars of bailouts, but can afford the trillions of dollars we spend on, say, medicare and social security. These 36 billion dollars are going to tip the scales and send us into worldwide 'Collapse'!'
"Instead of properly controlling the criminally violent and insane, the Masters-of-Destiny have disarmed – everywhere but in America (and not for lack of trying) – the law-abiding, peaceful and sane."
Except that there is less crime and less war than ever before. Except that Japan doesn't allow guns and has one of the lowest crime rates on Earth, as well as high personal liberty, thus proving the complete lack of causal connection between gun rights and all of the purported advantages gun spokesman claim they are protecting.
"Instead of allowing the best to rise to the top, they push to the top the possessors of magic skin tones and preferred orificial parameters. This cuts down the future of the West at the knees."Except that Vdare.com did a study on affirmative action in America and reported that it essentially represented a 3% economic drag on our GDP. Oh noz, we went from 48,000 per year to 46,000, it's the end of the world.
"Instead of disowning their Wilsonian madness after the Vietnam fiasco, America’s rulers (at times with NATO’s help) have waged a succession of foolish wars on distant, backward peoples, prosecuted with their unhappy subjects’ blood and money. The wars, the lost lives and limbs, the incinerated trillions in taxpayers’ money are all a monstrous stupidity, for it all unfolds with an eye on CNN, and not on Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. The strategic objective is inherently lunatic too, for you cannot change alien peoples that do not want and cannot change."Except that Obama is pulling us out of both wars, and Europe is also quitting these fruitless efforts. Furthermore, compared to the losses suffered during Vietnam, Korea, or the World Wars, these wars were meaningless squabbles. It's almost shameful to talk about the world collapsing due to the Iraq War when we survived World War I. The nightmare of charging an enemy trench line with the hope that the human wave behind you, or the one behind that one, might actually reach the opponent before dying is a tad worse than bombing some helpless terrorists via remote from an anonymous safe location.
"People have had enough. But to return a Western democracy to its rightful owners requires a majority of votes. Such a majority can no longer obtain for any political platform that would tackle even the top three major problems that bedevil the West: bankrupting socialism, nonwhite immigration, and implanted Islam. Not to mention the next dozen grave problems: irredeemable debt, the tyranny of the metastized State, the Looters’ coalition’s chokehold, sham global economy, fraudulent financial capitalism, minoritarian tyranny, shattered social capital, barbaric mass culture, nihilism, democracy turned idiocracy, breakdown of sexual norms and results (i.e. no babies), and falsehoods and self-hate careening through the land like a band of headless horsemen."
Our problems are too luxurious! Long ago, we solved the problem of production. We cured all childhood illnesses. We doubled our length of life. We freed women and gave them education, reproductive control, choice in marriage, and the freedom to pursue rewarding careers. We toppled all the totalitarian, genocidal evil empires on Earth and replaced them with forward-looking, free and peaceful governments. We freed hundreds of millions of people from the grip of Communism, an evil far worse than Islam could ever imagine. We ended famine all across the Earth. Our world is so blessed, so good, so happy, that the per capita GDP of everyone combined is above $10,000 in purchasing power parity. IE, everyone on Earth now could, reasonably, have a house, electricity, air conditioning, internet, a car, clean water, sewage, TV, a cell phone, a microwave, a refrigerator, meat, cheese, two kids, an education and vaccines/antibiotics against all normal illnesses. We ended war and now practically no one has to come home with missing limbs, die before they ever properly lived, or lose their loved ones. And yet here Seiyo is whining about, get this, "bankrupting socialism," "barbaric mass culture," and "democracy turned idiocracy."
Seiyo, and the Brussels Journal, have never been deprived of anything important. That is the only explanation for their cup of tears over meaningless things. 99% of human history you lost most of your children, women died in childbirth, men died in war, and no one loved anyone. Life was brutal, nasty, and short. It was unbelievably bad. But now apparently we have to worry about a "Looter's Coalition," which, even if you consider every cent of government spending to be waste, only accounts for 20% of the USA's total GDP. When America loses 20% of its GDP, that's the same as going from $45,000 per capita a year to $36,000. It has no visible impact on our quality of life. It's still richer than the majority of the 1st World. Stop complaining about meaningless things and have a little reverence for the world our ancestors have sacrificed and built for us.
Moving on to the next doomsdayer in our Collapse Chorus, we have Alternative Right:
http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/the-myth-of-technological-progress/
Here, we learn that technology can't save us and we are all doomed, doomed, doomed to the same standard of living we have today. At least Alternative Right is making a subtly important point -- Far-Right politics can only exist, or have any meaning, if technology doesn't improve in the next fifty years. Otherwise, all our problems will be solved without political intervention. No 'collapse' will occur, nor can any 'renaissance' with the far right now suddenly in control. If technology improves, the status quo can be maintained and no one will grow rebellious. The world won't listen to messiahs when they've all got cows in the barn mooing just fine as is.
More pointedly, to destroy the far right, all philosophy need do is predict technological growth. There could never be a more sure prediction. The author takes on the futile task, however, of somehow discounting all the progress we've made in the last fifty years, citing that poisonous Charles Murray theory in Human Accomplishment that modern culture has produced nothing of worth in any field, which seems to be the genesis of this doomsday cult:
"The world of 1959 is pretty much the same world we live in today technologically speaking."
Okay, let's stop right here. In 1959, countries like South Korea were as wealthy as Zimbabwe. China was in the middle of the Great Leap Forward. Maybe it feels the same for Americans, but most of the world was still in the dark ages circa 1959. The difference, for them, is a matter of life and death. The diffusion of technology has given billions of people a new life. Even if the first world has stood still for the past fifty years, the population of the world would still have charted the greatest rate of technological progress ever. But even this case can't be made, as I'll show in the coming quotes:
"I’d go so far as to say that the main technological innovation since 1959 has been space flight -- a technology we’ve mostly abandoned, and it’s daughter technology -- microelectronics. Computer networks came a year or two after 1959 and didn’t change very much, other than how we waste time in the office, and whom advertisers pay."
First off, space flight is continuing to advance. Japan deployed the first successful solar sail earlier this year. Space X launched the falcon 9 rocket for half the price of world competitors. The international space station is nearly complete, and the Kepler telescope has recently discovered that the milky way galaxy is full of potentially habitable, earth-like planets. This is an incredibly exciting era for space exploration. Just because we aren't sending astronauts on useless 'propaganda' missions doesn't mean we aren't making progress. How many more times need we visit the moon to satisfy these people? How many more golf games need to be played on the moon to get us back to our 'peak' of scientific progress?
It's ridiculous to say computers haven't changed our way of life. Computers have given us social networking, automated mass manufacturing, foreign language translation, internet shopping, video games, movies, remote warfare. . .no, this is just stupid, why do I have to explain how great computers are on a BLOG of all things, responding to another BLOG?
"Remember the kind of “artificial intelligence” which was supposed to give us artificial brains we could talk to by now?"
Patience. Computing power is doubling every few years. Since we're obviously on the right track, does it matter when exactly the threshold is crossed? Is the author seriously saying that the goal is impossible, just because we haven't reached it yet, despite the fact that computers have continued to improve every year in every way? Is he trying to say that the next fifty years won't be able to achieve any results, because even a computer 2^13 times smarter than the computers of today just won't hack it? Somehow I doubt this.
"I suppose some of the genetically engineered crops are impressive, though the birds-and-bunnies people tell me they are a bad idea."You mean the genetically engineered crops that have already helped solve world hunger and are continuing to increase food production every year? What exactly more do you want from a technology beyond 'save one billion lives from painful death?'
"Some wise acre is likely to pipe up and sing the glories of “Nanotech,”"You mean like the constant reports of progress we've made in silicon lithography, solar panels, graphene, and other technologies already being used all around us today?
"The SR-71 was designed in 1959. It took about two years to get the thing deployed, and it remains a faster jet than the F-22, which cost a lot more and took a lot longer to develope—first design was in 1986, first deployment in 1997."
You mean the F-22 which single-handedly in a mock dogfight beat 30 F-15's? The F-22 which is so far beyond all previous planes as to invalidate, like the ironclads did the entire wooden fleet of Britain, all other fighters on Earth?
http://www.warisboring.com/?p=387
"During their first major exercise in Alaska last year, Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor fighters from the 27th Fighter Squadron shot down 144 “enemy” F-15s and F/A-18s in mock dogfights."
"Medicine? Surgical techniques are unarguably better now than 50 years ago, but they’re not terribly different either. And compared to what was developed 50 years prior, not so impressive."
You mean how average length of life has risen from the 60's to the 70's worldwide? Or maybe it's how fatal heart attacks have been halved in the past decade alone? What exactly do you want from our progress in medicine, miracles? We've cured nearly all childhood illnesses and have nearly finished licking AIDS. Old age diseases are tougher and less pressing, because quality of life for old people is already dramatically reduced and nature intended for them to die anyway, to make space for newer, better people. Even so, we've dramatically reduced deaths from breast cancers, cured various skin cancers, and developed an HPV vaccine. Maybe this isn't dramatic or flashy enough for the author, but aside from immortality, I'm not sure what more medicine can provide.
"Telephones are better than they were in 1959, but the use of cell phones hasn’t really changed much. If you’re far from civilization, you will have no dial tone."
Except of course for Satellite phones that people can use from anywhere. Furthermore, exactly how many people find themselves 'far from civilization'? What are we, nomadic hunter gatherers? Practically everyone lives in cities where all sorts of facilities are available, of course it's senseless to provide facilities to non-existent people who don't need them elsewhere. Using this logic you could criticize anything. "Sure our submarines can dive 1600 feet underwater, but I don't see any flying submarines handling air travel, so submarines clearly don't amount to much."
Then he wraps it all up by claiming that technological growth is impossible without a Faustian, Promethean spirit, best inspired by far-rigthest politics, and that we'll never get anywhere without him. Oh really? I'll take that bet. I'd rather endorse a politics that isn't publishing disaster porn and monomaniacal pessimism as its weekly fare and take my chances with the sane remainder of the world. Somehow I have a higher confidence in people who love life and look forward to it than those who hate and dread it.
This isn't limited to the three websites, or articles, cited. It extends throughout Stormfront, DavidDuke.com, anywhere you want to look. The entire far right is infested with it, you could say it is a necessary precondition to even be a rightest. Which is why all sane, happy, well-adjusted people necessarily aren't part of the far right.
While they sing of our impending doom, I'll continue surfing the web, watching HD TV/3D Movies, reading books on my Kindle, and playing my PS3 -- all of which didn't exist in 1960, but apparently don't 'count' as 'real' technological progress and also indicate our 'barbaric culture' while foretelling our '2017 famines.' Ugh. And these are the far-right's leading lights and greatest spokesmen. They can't offer up anyone else.
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