Colonization and All That: All Over, And Not the Worst!

The first indication that people are evil-minded is when they too readily, and too frantically, diabolize others… And diabolizing colonists, and their descendants, falls in that category. And that fall, as we will see, is particularly deep, and not self-conscious: indeed, most of the world population descends from colonists. And most the greatest successes of humanity, of its greatest civilizations, derived from colonizations. (When some scatterbrains encountered these remarks of mine, they rushed to call me a colonialist; that, of course, is one more error! Seeing the good side and the ubiquitousness of many colonizations doesn’t mean all colonizations were good: some were horrific abominations… Agricultural Europe itself was the bloom of a colonization from the Fertile Crescent…)

The human species is a colonizing species. Colonization has many potential dimensions. For example, it can be ideological: Indonesia was colonized that way from India (Buddhism), later from Arabia (Islam), and then from the Dutch. (Arguably since, by the CIA and its ilk.)

Yet, French president Macron, anxious to please North African dictatorships, recently called “colonization” a crime against humanity… a real barbarity“. Problem: over last 3,000 years most of Earth got mostly occupied by colonizers: all the Americas, Oceania, most of Africa, nearly of Europe, Japan, Indonesia, arguably most of China, etc.

Afghanistan was colonized by Achaemenid Persians, Greeks, Buddhists, Hindus, Mongols, Islamists, Moghols, Persians again, etc. Can we say Brits, Soviets and US/UN colonized Afghanistan? Not really the correct semantics! A return to correct human ethology is no colonization!

***

Politics Is Practical Philosophy, Yet, Philosophy:

Long ago, the tyrant of Syracuse got the top literary prize in Athens. It is traditional for philosophers to despise politics. Yet, most worthy philosophers were deeply entangled with politics, when not with politicians themselves: I know of no exceptions. But I want to generalize that: I would claim that, shockingly enough, most worthy politicians were philosophers. Whether they claimed to be so or not, is besides the point. Most influential politicians implemented new philosophies, not to say religions (Muhammad). Sometimes the new philosophy was implemented most spectacularly: think of Czar Peter the Great not just torturing to death “Old Believers”, and forcefully modernizing Russia into the West European model… under the penalty of death.

Some have objected there is no philosophy in, say, Julius Caesar’s writings. Well, there was enough for him to be the leader of the “Populares”. Caesar, a “populist“! And so on. Out of the top 30 leaders of Rome, all of them led philosophically. Even when Agrippina, the mother of Nero, imposed herself as Rome’s leader, to a macho Senate, she was doing a philosophical work, and opening the way to Augusta Galla Placidia, and several Frankish queens, the most important of who would outlaw slavery in 658 CE.

Eliminating slavery was also an eminent philosophical work. Interestingly, Saint Bathilde’s order was not preceded by the establishment of an entire anti-slavery philosophy by some eminent philosopher. Christianism pretty much ignored slavery as a problem, and the then just established Islam, took it for granted. The first eminent philosopher to condemn slavery was Bathilde herself… Yes, Bathilde, herself the top politician, the top ruler of her time in Europe, the Merovingian queen and ex-slave herself!

All the Americas Are Colonial. So Is Europe, Invaded by the Celto-Germans (among others). So is China, which has been pretty much colonized by the Han…

Although the West of China was colonized by Indo-Europeans who brought a lot of technology, (and killed the men, keeping the women for breeding, as modern genetics reveal).

***

All Politicians, Including Macron, Trump, Are Philosophers, Whether They Know It, or Not:

It’s not just Voltaire, Adam Smith, Rousseau, De Sade, Goethe, Herder, Hegel, Ricardo, Marx, Proudhon, Nietzsche who can be viewed as having forged much of today’s contemporary debate. When Earl Grey delivered a let’s-declare-war-to-Germany discourse in Parliament, August 2, 1914, a certain idea of what civilization was and entailed was loudly defended. Philosopher Bertrand Russell disagreed so deeply he was thrown in prison for his pro-Kaiser, pro-German plutocracy stance. Earl Grey was philosophically right, Russell was wrong.

And of course, Kant, Hitler were “philosophers”, in the sense that hundreds of millions Europeans thought they would “guide” them towards better worlds. Thanks to idiotic, self-contradictory, most inferior, extremely lethal ideologies. But philosophy is relative, like time itself.

Indeed, both wisdom (sophia) and love (philo) are relative. The wisdom of a slug is not that of a sea otter (their time perceptions are not the same, to start with). Hitler’s idea of wisdom was mostly demented (it could only hurt what he claimed to defend), and his idea of love was akin to the self-love of a suicidal maniac (Hitler engaged in a war he was sure to lose, in spite of a miraculous victory in a battle against France… a victory which made it all the more certain that he would lose the war).

China is a linguistic patchwork which reveals a tormented colonial past. The imperialism of Mandarin is quickly burying all this.

Much of Africa was colonized, by Peuls, Arabs, Bantus. All of North Africa was invaded by the Arabs, and the Arabic language was imposed to the Latin, Berber and Coptic speaking populations. When the French invaded Algeria in 1830s (in part to fight piracy and Ottomans alike), they used as an argument that they, as heirs of Rome, were coming back, with a modern version of Latin, the old language of civilization there… It’s a fact that Arabic was imposed on non-genetically Arabic population: a successful colonization, linguistically, religiously, and socially…   

African colonization by Europeans in the late Nineteenth Century was driven by the subtle argument that, to stop slavery in Africa, Europe had to take control. That may sound outrageous, but it is a fact that European powers were successful in stopping slavery in Africa (with some exceptions, like Mauretania). Also the argument is so good, it has been reused by the European Union and the United Nations themselves since: the idea was that some parts of Africa needed to be put under tutelage. A few decades ago, it meant the full power of UN embargoes was used to destroy racist regime (in Rhodesia, South Africa). More recently aid to say the Republic of Congo was given, but only protected by accounting from UN, and, or EU. The chief of Sudan was accused of crimes against Humanity by the International Court of Justice (a UN agency based in La Hague). The lightning military interventions of France in CAR, Ivory Coast, and Mali were all approved by the UN.

My own dad, a senior geologist, was employed by the UN in Cameroon, and Kenya to check that UN financed geological prospecting was done correctly.

Much of this doesn’t have to do with “colonization”, but with correct administration, and what has long been called the “mission civilisatrice”… which Caesar himself indulged in Gaul, when, among other things, he forcefully replaced the Helvetii where they came from (Helvetia).

***

Horrendous Colonizations:

There are plenty of abominable “colonizations”. Except they are not really “colonizations”. Some are outright exterminations which the Mongols instrumentalized, to encourage awe and obedience, all over. Real colonizations should involve colonists, Roman style (the Romans gave both the word and the semantics). For example, the exploitation of Congo by king Leopold of Belgium hardly deserves the label of “colonization”. The invasion of Mesoamerica by the Spaniards was a colonization, and it incorporated abominable ways, and outright aggressions the aim of which was to destroy civilizational diversity.

An example is the colonization of the Tarascan state (west, and enemy of the Aztecs). This was gratuitous, and highly controversial in Spain. The main Spanish perpetrator lived a long life, and always refused to recognize his crime, which was deliberate (conquistador in chief Cortez had agreed with a modus vivendi with Tarascan). Basically he held that Christian/Spanish civilization couldn’t allow a competing model to survive.

Roman colonizations involved instead retired legionaries invited to exploit agriculturally some land distributed by the Roman state (such land was aplenty after war). That was somewhat more civilizing and pacific. There were bloody revolts against Roman colonists, but rarely (the most famous being that led by Boudicca in Britain).

***

Semantics Can Make No Prisoners:

The foremost reason to write against the wholesale condemnation of “colonialism” is that it’s deeply unintelligent, as it makes no distinction, and choses the easy way out of condemning all of humanity (as Buddha initially did, before he realized the gross errors of his early fanaticism). Condemning “colonialism” is also deeply hypocritical: it implicitly pretends that those who do the condemning aren’t at all like those they condemn. But of course they are: tribal chief at 39 years of age of armed forces capable of killing 50 million people in half an hour, Macron exists, but shouldn’t… While they pretend to be better than what they condemn, “colonialism”, Macron and his ilk are actually worse than anything humanity conceived before.

Right, it’s not exactly the fault of the top politicians: somebody needs to tell them, that their Politically Correct spewing is now viewed for what it is: not very smart. Somebody they will hear. More sophisticated ideologies need to spread (but they won’t come from official philosophers, salaried where they are, because they support the establishment). It’s not enough to go cackle around against “colonialism”.  It’s actually counter-indicated…

There is as much colonialism as they are colonialism, and colonies. An example is that the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, English and Russian colonies in the Americas differed deeply, in the philosophies which guided them. It is a fact that the English colonialism was the most exterminationist.

Patrice Ayme

 

NOTHING IS MORE INHUMAN THAN IDIOCY

NOTHING TO FEAR MORE THAN IDIOCY

What characterizes the human species above all others? More intelligence! To be more intelligent is to be more human. Thus, to be more stupid is to be more inhuman. This basic observation about human nature ought to be the foundation of any worthy humanism. Humanization? More intelligence! Dehumanization? More stupidity!

Ah, “dehumanization”. The buzz word of August 2018. Internet monopolies have recently enacted policies to reduce what they call “dehumanization” (whereas, in truth, they were its main enablers, for many years). In practice, Internet monopolies eradicated some posts and, or, posters who engaged in blatant, outrageous, hurtful lies. Boldly, the New York Times wandered “Inside Twitter’s Struggle Over What Gets Banned”: The enormity of what some Twitter executives consider “dehumanizing” is striking. Twitter executives ponder ”whether tweets that disparaged immigrants could be considered dehumanizing. One executive insisted that it was important for Twitter to enable debate about immigration policy.” Thanks Twitter to enable debate about concepts!

Dehumanization is a great problem over the Internet, indeed… And it starts with having oligarchs in charge of deciding what allowable debate, or even presentation, consists of. Facebook censors some most famous paintings of the Renaissance: they hurt its dearth of culture, basic indecency, and overwhelming stupidity.

Once one realizes that stupidity is most dehumanizing, priorities should change. Of course immigration should be debated, and of course *some*, yes, some, immigrants should be disparaged (for example those who immigrate just to kill people of their host countries: there were several cases in France alone, in the last five years, totalling hundreds of victims. For example the Paris November attacks, or the Nice truck driver massacrer, a Tunisian on a residency permit, who killed more than 80 on July 14th…).

***

If intelligence is what characterizes our species most, why has it been so neglected by leading ideologies? Because of whom they were meant to serve!  

Leading ideologies promote stupidity, not just because the dim witted, and those who have mental pretense (like professional intellectuals) without the brainpower, are afraid of the notion of relative intelligence (which, one must admit, is fraught with the greatest subtleties and difficulties).

The fundamental reason why intelligence was not viewed as the foundation of humanism has been that, ever since the Macedonian tyrant Antipater, executor of the will of Aristotle (!) destroyed Athenian democracy, dictators, naturally enough, have prefered to reward and promote stupid philosophies and religions justifying their evil ways (Kant, Herder, Rousseau, Marx were examples; modern examples are all the philosophers absurdly claiming the Absurd to be the foundation).

One of the royal roads to stupidity, thus inhumanism, is to claim that there is no evil. Indeed evil is smart: evil hides in the details, or in plain obscurity (the proverbial “Dark Side”, 4,000 years old. So one needs smarts to detect evil, and, furthermore, smarts fight evil. (See Note 1 On Internet Companies)

A little, yet tragic tale will illustrate this very well.

***

Nothing To Fear More Than Overwhelming Politically Correct Idiocy

Sob story in the New York Times about the delicious US cyclists who went all around the world, constantly posting their adventures, and their faces, on “social networks”. And they advertized how great, handsome, and PC they were, because they extolled how everybody is good, and the only bad ones were those insinuating that not everybody is good, not everybody is beautiful (by the same token all US corporations and “foundations” are good, beautiful, and not evil whatsoever, as evil doesn’t exist).

The “cyclists” of doom, beaming with positivity. We are the world, we are the success, we are the good, look at us, world, just like the world, that world we rule, we gentle and beautiful. Plus or minus a few dozens of millions of determined killers out there… And the evil empire we work for. Mr. Austin was working for the Department of Housing and Urban Development when he decided to make the trip. The country where this picture is taken from crawls with millions of fanatical Muslim Fundamentalists determined to kill “disbelievers”. Obama says that’s beautiful (but then droned them in Yemen, Pakistan). I say it’s not smart to say this is all about goodness…

A mutual admiration society, throughout “social networks”… which can be very profitable for those who partake in them professionally: brainless, ignorant, thus splendid and familiar “Youtubers” can make fortunes, spilling all over the world their inanities. All for the best in the best of possible worlds, led by the best humanity which ever was (some of the major Internet monopolies are now taking affirmative action against authors who claim this is not the best of possible worlds, and censoring loud and clear; yours truly was censored and banned from many Internet places and search engines, more than a decade ago; when I said so, even leftists told me I was hallucinating). How wonderful, great, kind, awesome, well-meaning humanity is. Let’s quote the New York Times about that self-admiration society in “A Dream Ended on a Mountain Road: The Cyclists and the ISIS Militants”:

“Still, by the time they reached that bend in the road in Tajikistan just over a week ago, they had embraced the notion that the world was overwhelmingly good, the dozens of annotated photographs and the thousands of words they left behind show.

“You read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,” Mr. Austin wrote. “People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil.

“I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own … By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind… No greater revelation has come from our journey than this,” [Mr. Austin] wrote.” .

The (relatively) wealthy cyclists from the disant imperial superpower joined with other cyclists.

“Days turned to weeks, and then into months. Their bodies began to break. An ear infection landed Ms. Geoghegan in the emergency room in France. They both contracted pinkeye. They shouldered on through upset stomachs and sore throats.

It was winter by the time they reached Europe last December. Torrential rain soaked through their waterproof gloves. “Utterly hopeless, wet and cold,” they posted from Spain.”

At that point, they were saved by generous French and, or Spanish inhabitants, who dried them, sheltered them, and let them live with them until recovered. The amazing thing is that Mr. Austin was exposed to wanton acts of cruelty on the part of other human beings. Still, he persisted in broadcasting his “no evil” theory of humanity… Was he so deeply inculcated by Google, which pretended, for a decade, that its credo was “Don’t be evil”? (At least Google admitted the possibility of evil…)

The will to claim there is no evil, even after having been exposed to plenty of it, means that one is not authentic. Authenticity enables to reach deeper truth more easily. Truth is not just pretty, and a higher calling. Truth saves. And for those who refuse the truth, in the worst cases, death awaits, which could have been otherwise avoided. New York Times:

“But in the course of their travels, their blog posts also noted flashes of cruelty.

On one mountain pass, a group of men blocked their path and tried to shove the couple off their bikes.

And just 50 yards from the Spanish border in bumper-to-bumper traffic, Mr. Austin signaled to a driver that he wanted to cut into his lane. The driver let him enter and then — slowly and deliberately — began to run him over, trapping Mr. Austin’s bike between the advancing car and the vehicle ahead of them.

Still, by the time they reached that bend in the road in Tajikistan just over a week ago, they had embraced the notion that the world was overwhelmingly good, the dozens of annotated photographs and the thousands of words they left behind show.”

***

What happened in that bend of road is that those who self-promote through naivety to the point of hypocrisy met those who apply the lethal, vengeful, deliberately anti-Western ideology of Islam literally. Deliberately anti-Western? Muhammad himself said so. His followers followed the irate “men in black” Christian monks of the Fourth and Fifth century. Let’s not forget that, when Imperial Rome was at its peak, women bathed in what would be called 2,000 years later, bikinis.

***

…What your “friends” call goodness, your enemies call evil:

New York Times:

…”over a week ago,came Day 369, when the couple was biking in formation with a group of other tourists on a panoramic stretch of road in southwestern Tajikistan. It was there, on July 29, that a carload of men who are believed to have recorded a video pledging allegiance to the Islamic State spotted them.

A grainy cellphone clip recorded by a driver shows what happened next: The men’s Daewoo sedan passes the cyclists and then makes a sharp U-turn. It doubles back, and aims directly for the bikers, ramming into them and lurching over their fallen forms. In all, four people were killed: Mr. Austin, Ms. Geoghegan and cyclists from Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Two days later, the Islamic State released a video showing five men it identified as the attackers, sitting before the ISIS flag. They face the camera and make a vow: to kill “disbelievers.”

It was a worldview as diametrically opposed as imaginable to the one Mr. Austin and Ms. Geoghegan were trying to live by. Throughout their travels, the couple wrote a blog together and shared Instagram postsabout the openheartedness they wanted to embody and the acts of kindness reciprocated by strangers.”

Mr. Austin and his pseudo-benevolent, pseudo-benign ilk, those holier-than thou types who insist that there is no evil, except in our presumably evil and obdurately perverse, all too critical minds, have human nature between blindfolds.

The world is a big, scary place, indeed. Some people are not to be trusted. Some people are bad. Some people are evil.

“I don’t buy it.” said the one who got assassinated, in a revealing semantic slip: the assassinated victim speaks as if he believed everything was for sale, even ideas… Maybe he believed indeed all was a question of buying and selling. That is exactly the sort of mercantile mentality, the mentality that everything is for sale, that everything can be bought, many of those who are angry against the established order want to destroy (thus the appeal of Islamism). (Some will pontificate that “I buy it”is just a way of expressing oneself, that it means nothing, that it does nothing. Yes it does: it infeodates, emotionally speaking, the realm of ideas to the realm of buy and sell, Wall Street.)

Evil is not a make-believe concept we’ve invented to “deal” with the “complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own”…

Evil is not a question of making “deals”, as the naive smashed victim believed, in another semantic slip into emotional mercantilism. There are values and perspectives that are incompatible: an example is literal Islam, as found in Qur’an and Hadith… which is deeply incompatible with human ethology! Human ethology makes female and male humans quite similar. Islam says females are a fraction of men, at least judicially. The most common, wealthiest, most powerful versions of Islam says females are to be covered up. So it’s Islam against humanity, and only extreme violence can hope to succeed in this hopeless struggle. Hopeless: because how could humanity defeat itself?

Any ideology incompatible with humanity as deeply as Islam is, can be depicted as evil, as it generates a war with humanity: Nazism is another example. So are nearly all existing superstitious religions, for example Islam’s forerunner, Christianity… simply because they are war or slave religions which view women as warrior producing machines…

***

Evil is not just hidden in ideologies, more or less. Evil also has a neurological side, with its own rewards and its own inertia:

Hormones and neurohormones leading to destruction, cruelty, sadism, viciousness, fighting, do exist. Some will scoff, because, in their colossal ignorance and lack of the most basic imagination, they don’t realize humanity stand on the corpses of hundreds of millions of lions. Among other beasts vanquished, and prime among them, other human beings. Beasts and men alike learned their lesson: they were deliberately hunted.

Indeed after all these lions had been disposed of, it remained to dispose of those who disposed of the lions (and the tigers, and the panthers, and the saber tooth cats, and all sorts of man eating bears, etc.). War hormones are made to take command, and kill. War hormones can take command of an individual, or, much more dangerously, a crowd (some forms of lethal viciousness such as anti-Judaism have persisted for 17 centuries). By and large, humans are kind, deep down inside. However, not all the time, and not everybody. How many lunatics with a finger on a nuclear holocaust does it take to ruin the planet? Answer: just one. So the question of the evil of the one is paramount.

***

Stupidity is the main enabler of oppression, subjugation, thus evil (ideological, or physical):

Consider for example the banking system: money (for “everybody”) is created by lending to the wealthiest. Unacceptable in democracy, but accepted, because most people don’t know! Stupidity rules! (How the banking system works is not something taught as very important to MBAs…)

With the power we have today, a few self-interested plutocrats can own most of everything, and thus can have most of the power. And how many myopic leaders can we take? Even if the majority is kind, generous, and wonderful, it takes just one, or a few myopic ones, to kill us all.

No greater revelation came out of the naive victims’ sacrifices  than this: one gets killed only once, and, nowadays, thanks to cars, SUVs, rockets, the atom, one lunatic can kill a village, a city, even a country.

Human beings can be all the kindness they want to project. I am sure the five Islamist murderers can be kind, generous, wonderful… in particular circumstances which suits them. But they also believed in a murderous ideology. Murderous ideologies have to be killed, and were always killed. This is generosity, kindness, and wonderfulness at their best. By killing murderous ideologies humanity progresses and civilization reconciles itself with necessary technological advances, reconciling our new found powers and what our ethos needs to be to enable the genus homo to survive.

That intelligence is central to humanity has long been obvious: after all, the name of the species is Homo SAPIENS (Swede Carl von Linné in 1758). Sapere comes in part from to taste, to perceive, being wise, all things pretty much synonymous with intelligence.

We live in strangely mentally degenerating times (take the notion that fearing Islam is racist, as if fearing Christianity, something most intellectuals were affected by, for 17 centuries, was racist… Or, more basically consider the (“snowflake“) notion that debate itself is something one should fear). Actually it’s not so strange: the degeneracy is symbiotic with plutocracy itself: it originates with it, and also makes it possible.

Small superficial thinkers play the same role in the army of plutocracy as light skirmishers played in ancient armies. They are also the junction between the most common masses and the sophisticated intellectuals from the top universities, experts of the collaboration with the established order.

Nietzsche attacked Christianity as a “slave religion”. Most superstitious religions are slave religions: that’s why they have been invented. They all rest on the sentiment that the common person is culprit, a sinner, because that person didn’t believe in the goodness of the powers that be, which, lo and behold, pretty much identify with the oppressors.

The world cyclists, everybody-is-good, everybody-is-beautiful reflected this, as they denied that there were bad ideologies, or bad people. Instead, they brandished as culprit the attitude of suspicion, and what underlays it, simple objectivity.

They paid the price. A sad story. Let’s make it a worthy lesson.

So would we, as individuals, or as humanity, if we didn’t stay sharp and suspicious. Critique, intelligence, a propensity to detect evil, are no way to sell one’s products, but they are the way to stay alive. And they are also the foundations of morality. Anything short of that is effective nihilism.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

Note 1: Don’t be evil, we have the monopoly of that. Internet companies ask their subscribers and victims to sign long contracts in subtle legalese; that’s intrinsically evil: next thing you know all and any of your activities will be transmitted to various centers of powers, including para-governmental banks.

***

Note 2: New philosophers and philosophies coming out of them have to be smarter, logically or emotionally, than what came before. For example, Kant could be very smart. However, on most important subjects, racism and slavery, he was most dumb. His position would have necessitated to prove that enslaved races were inferior, objectively. Worse among towering German philosophers: Marx was an outright racist against Africans (and Jews, although he was one of them… one feels tempted to say: because he was one of them…)

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2018/05/06/marx-as-vituperating-racist-proto-nazi/

One see here that the followers of Kant and Marx, among them the Nazis (who said so themselves! Even Hitler!), have been self-selecting for dumbness (because they believe strongly, on a most important subjects, and all the “proofs” they have, are insults…)

***

Note 3: The rise of anti-PC psycho-philosophers such as Jordan Peterson (“12 rules”…) exploit the dumbness of the pseudo-left, by pointing out, implicitly, that it is more human to be smart.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/why-the-left-is-so-afraid-of-jordan-peterson/567110/

***

Note 4: I was banned from sites in the past, for unknown reason, including the NYT, which has recently reinstated me… The only site which banned me, around a decade ago, the “European Tribune”, for an explicit cause, explained to me that some of its members viewed me as a crazy conspiracy theorist, as I pretended that there were relationships between US plutocrats and Nazism, or between some well-known bankers and Nazism. The proof of my madness was that, according to them, Internet searches seem to show only me had such weird ideas… 

 

 

 

 

Cool: Species Nearly Destroyed All Life Before

Earth. The Dark Side. Homo. It has become standard to point out that the genus Homo may destroy life, or, our species, or, at least, civilization itself. This is related to the “Fermi Paradox” (“Where is everybody?” asked Enrico Fermi around 1950…) The idea was that civilizations self-destruct, hence no civilization is visible in the galaxy. To which I retorted that we overestimate the likelihood of advanced life in the galaxy, for a galactic sized number of reasons:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/40-billion-earths-yes-no/

One argument I rolled out is that life was nearly extinguished on Earth by life itself: consider “Snowball Earth”. This weapon of mass life extinction was generated by the advancement of life itself. Let me quote myself:

“Primitive bacterial life is probably frequent. However advanced life (animals) is probably very rare, as many are the potential catastrophes. And one needs billions of years to go from primitive life to animals.

After life forms making oxygen on Earth appeared, the atmosphere went from reducing (full of strong greenhouse methane) to oxidizing (full of oxygen). As methane mostly disappeared, so did the greenhouse. Earth froze, all the way down to the equator:

When Snowball Earth Nearly Killed Life

Yet volcanoes kept on belching CO2 through the ice. That CO2 built up above the ice, caused a strong greenhouse, and the ice melted. Life had survived. Mighty volcanism has saved the Earth, just in time.

That “snowball Earth” catastrophe repeated a few times before the Earth oxygen based system became stable. Catastrophe had been engaged, several times, but the disappearance of oxygen creating life forms had been avoided, just barely.”

Intense chemical weathering by massive acid rain is the likely cause of the end of a period known as the Marinoan glaciation, which happened form 650 to 635 million years ago, according to a paper published in the journal PNAS. This was the last occurence when nearly all of the Earth’s land and seas were frozen over, known as snowball Earth, with glaciers as thick as 2km. Other times, on the right, Earth had no ice at the poles… Present day civilization can survive a warm Earth (right)… Not a Snowball. However, to get from what we have now to no ice, in a geological blink, means ultimate war…

What does this mean philosophically?

Most philosophical systems in the traditional sense don’t consider the truism that, to get creation, one needs destruction, and the more creation, the more destruction. Why? That sounds childish, thus unwise. But children encounter the primeval. Philosophy extended to religion revels in destruction. Actually the Deus/God/Allah destroys the entire universe to establish Heavens.

The universe is a brutal place: not only do planets get flung into space, stars explode, but even entire galaxies get destroyed. The universe is also a happening.

In the greater scheme of things, a war where, say, seven billion people got killed would be nothing special: that was the world population in 1803, when the imbecile Napoleon, having mightily endeavored to reestablish slavery, losing an army in the process, sold a third of the present day US to the USA for 11 million dollars.

In the movie Terminator, Artificial Intelligence takes over, causes a nuclear holocaust, and tries to extinguish humanity. It is more likely though that more and more formidable wars would accompany a Hot Earth scenario… which is what we are going towards, quickly. As I have argued in the past, 2C Is Too Much! Under 2C of global warming, a chain reaction of tipping point would unleash itself, and self-accelerate:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/2-c-is-too-much/

Now the idea is hitting the mainstream, nine years later. See: “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. There, scientists argue that there is a threshold temperature above which natural feedback systems that currently keep the Earth at a nice temperature (around 15 C, global) will unravel. At that point, a chain reaction of climate events will thrust the planet into a “hothouse” state. Though the scientists don’t know exactly what this threshold is, they said it could be as little as 2 degrees C (4 degrees F) of warming above preindustrial levels. We are above that half-way point…

As they put it in scientese: “We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a “Hothouse Earth” pathway even as human emissions are reduced. Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene. We examine the evidence that such a threshold might exist and where it might be. If the threshold is crossed, the resulting trajectory would likely cause serious disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies. Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System—biosphere, climate, and societies—and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.”

People are deeply unaware, they believe that the planet’s climate is more stable than it really is. The episodes of Snowball Earth show that this is not the case. This erroneous feeling of ecological stability is the main source of the indifference which brings the destruction of the planetary climate.

The apocalypse, in the greater scheme of things, is not apocalyptic. After all, an apocalypse, etymologically speaking, is just an uncovering… And this is precisely this normalcy of the abnormal, which will make go so smooth…

Patrice Ayme

 

France Won WW2, Yet Lost It On The Internet, Thus Insanity Progresses

The market capitalization of an US company, Apple Inc., reached one trillion dollars today (August 3, 2018). It’s the first company in the world to reach such high valuation. In part, because Apple pays taxes not commensurate with its profits (Ireland, a state, which bemoaned Hitler death, officially, has a lot to do with that). Once I talked to a Silicon Valley executive who told me that Apple, Facebook, Google, etc. should pay no taxes in a country like France, because France was Hitler’s ally. How did we get there? This essay, one of many, wants to throw a light on those devious ways. Far from being innocuous, they are at the psychological-socio-economic root of what made evil such as Nazism possible.

***

Civilizational Madness Lurks On The Internet:

How we behave is related to how we think, manage our emotions, and so on. Somebody with impulse eating and drinking, has what one should call a deficiency in frontal lobes development… and it can apparently be imaged. It does matter: we don’t want impulsive legislators around the world enabling their impulsive leaders to impulsively extinguish humanity… as. Potentially already happened. It happened because insanity has not been studied as it deserves. Watch “stoic” philosophers admiring Seneca, tutor of Nero, an ultra racist plutocrat. Right, Seneca talked seductively… But so did Hitler. One has to learn to look beyond appearances, and detect the madness.

The Internet enables the most ludicrous minds to broadly advertise their insane logic. Some are thrill seekers, some want not to feel alone anymore, and share the madness, some are Messiahs… And many are paid (as when I state we need a hydrogen economy to go hand in hand with photovoltaics, and get 100 scathing remarks in ten minutes on Twitter).

Insanity itself seduces: after all, it’s different, and perhaps the deepest, specifically more developed  instinct in humans is curiosity. What triggers curiosity is what is unusual. There are many ways to seduce with insanity. One of them is ask insane question, as if one were motivated by curiosity, when in truth the question itself is a lie. Here is an example for sheer lunacy found on Quora:

Could France have defeated Germany in WW 2? How?

The author of the question concluded that France had it all, all it needed to win, including mightiest army, weapons, courageous soldiers… All except the will to fight another war (this is disproven by the fact the French army suffered 9,000 casualties a day during the 46 days after May 9, 1940). My answer to this completely insane, fake news, “leading” question, “Could France have defeated…” (leading into delirium that is):

Another alternate reality question: the French Republic declared war to Germany September 3, 1939. Germany capitulated, without conditions, on May 7 1945 in Reims, France, and again May 8, 1945, in Berlin. Hostilities stopped May 9, 1945.

Four victors in Berlin, May 1945, from left to right: generals Montgomery (UK), Eisenhower (US), Joukov (USSR), De Lattre de Tassigny (France)

Thus, France actually defeated Germany in WW2. It is curious that people can be so ignorant, that they don’t know this fact, the grossest outline of history. Some will say:’Oh but France got defeated in a battle’… Well, it was not the first time France lost a battle and went on to win a war.

France and Britain scored a many victories in 1939 and 1940, notably a major win after their second landing in Nazi invaded Norway. That offensive in Norway, had it proceeded as intended after said victory, was to cut Hitler’s crucial ally Sweden in two, cutting Hitler’s iron road, with catastrophic consequences for Hitler.

Indeed, France and Britain suffered a huge defeat during the Battle of France which lasted from May 10 1940 until a ceasefire, June 23 1940. This “Battle of France” was the deadliest battle on the Western front: more than 200,000 died (Belgian and French civilians and soldiers of all sides, all together). The dead included more than 50,000 Nazi (“German”) troops. Some will smirk and say:’Oh, the French killed 50,000 Germans in May-June 1940, so what?’ So this: those dead “Germans” were actually elite troops, the most trained, dedicated, ultra-fanaticized. They were sorely missed a year later, when Hitler attacked Stalin.

US fanatics, and quite often liars in (mental) absentia, further smirk that the US freed France in 1944. The exact notion is: the US helped to free France in 1944. So did others. More than half of the troops on D Day were NOT US. OK, there were only 400 French elite commandos… because the French hating plutocrat FD Roosevelt refused to let the French command know about D Day. But the French resistance was told, and played a crucial role (mobilizing 17 German divisions in south central France… Plus four elite Nazi divisions occupied at reconquering the liberated Vercors… killing 5,000 French civilians in the process.

D Day was a close run thing, for the first four weeks. Had the Nazis been able to bring to bear a few elite divisions in, the Allies would have been thrown back in the sea. Disinformation played a crucial role: Hitler was made to believe Patton would cross over the Pas De Calais. Allied air superiority was fundamental. But so was the French resistance, by sabotaging all trains, and endangering all German night moves.

So the French Republic was definitively at war in 1944. It had been at war earlier, in 1943, when general Juin broke decisively the Hitler Line (renamed before it got broken), in the mountains, south of Rome (which had stalled the Allies for many months). Juin told the high command he could be in Austria in a matter of weeks, if given more divisions. The Americans, instead, removed divisions from him, preferring the stalemate of Anzio.

In 1942, the French army of general Koenig blocked the Afrika Korps and the Italian armor, preventing them to encircle the British (“8th”) army, the only British army between England and India. So the French were also at war with Nazi Germany in 1942. And crucially: the Bir Hakeim battle was the best opportunity the Nazis and Italian fascists had to defeat the Brits, kill the Jews, get the oil. The result was, indirectly, the desperate Nazi attempt on Stalingrad…

So when were the French not at war in WW2? Say, in 1941 (when actually French forces were at war: attacked in Dakar by the British, the French army defended itself successfully, and De Gaulle contemplated suicide…). Guess what? The US plutocrats were fully allied with Hitler in 1941.

The French Republic won WW1, and WW2. Now Germany, mimicking France, is trying to be a republic (and would be a better one if it stopped exploiting southern Europe and holding hypocritical discourse on the European Union, refugees, ecology and Russia…)

The victory of French civilization was total: military, diplomatic, philosophical, even emotional… The erroneous, fatal, abysmal deviation of German ideology into a spirit following the tribalist Herder, and strictly opposed to Goethe, was totally smashed. American plutocratic propaganda to the contrary is not futile, though. In truth, it works, and it is extremely dangerous: civilization is at stake when US propagandists claim that Nazism actually won… They are claiming they won. Maybe they did, but they shouldn’t, and we can still make it so.

Take the four generals above. In other pictures, they all stand at attention and give a military salute together. However I couldn’t publish those pictures: they have been all stolen by entities called Alamy and Getty (Getty was a famous plutocrat). As far as I can tell, this is just Anglo-Saxon thievery, an opinion shared by Wikipedia (Anglo-Saxon media has gone in overdrive accusing “Russia” of malfeasance; it may be time, for balance, to use the same severity on the other side). Thieves grab public domain pictures, and, with the complicity of US search engines, make it so that they capture the Internet for profit… Just as Anglo-Saxon corporations, by launching and supporting Hitler (sometimes to the bitter end, see IBM), made it possible to steal the world, and now own it…

So of course the US won World War Two, and everybody else lost, to a more or less greater extent. In France, the wealthy CIA put 50 of the top French influencers on its payroll (so things have not really changed, they just got worse). I also view “French Theory” as a tool for plutocracy, something which has led us to the likes of Merkel ruling Europe into oblivion. Merkel: no logic there, as long as she can export cars using her bankrupt banks, and burn lignite in the guise of condemning nuclear power. Guess what? Today Fukushima beach was open to children: initially it was supposed to be closed for all humans 40 years (after several nuclear reactors riddled with grotesque safety violations exploded, consecutive to having been hit by a 30 meter wave…). What does that mean: Merkel’s overreaction is the result of a cognitive-ethical failure: she doesn’t mind cooking the planet, because that’s not “cool” to worry about that… But getting in one million improperly vetted Muslims, that’s “cool” (even if they threaten to go use their English in the UK, and thus help cause Brexit…)

Nowadays, we need the spirit of France on September 3, 1939: if you see evil, you attack. The US never attacked Hitler: it’s Hitler who declared war to the USA, December 11, 1941, 4 days after its ally Japan attacked at Pearl Harbor (which had attacked France in September 1940, as part of its war against China…). The US didn’t intend to go to war in 1942:  the many US businessmen making a fortune in Germany (as they had 25 years earlier) didn’t want war.

All these moral failures are never commented upon. Yet they are rife in today’s global world order. Why do they increase? Because of the increasing self-promoting ignorance of Internet fiends. The more outrageous there, the more “interesting” one is found to be, and the more one can get a nice income and position. How low can civilization go? How many lies does it take to sink all rationality?

Patrice Ayme

Oh, by the way, war games were conducted on what happened for five days after May 10, 1940, and the Battle of France of 1940, have been run many times. They always end the same way: with a French victory. In reality the Brits and France were defeated, because of a succession, and combination of very unlikely events. War games show that France and Britain should have won. If just one Spitfire pilot had been taken seriously, or the French had not sent their fast deployment armored reserve of seven divisions into the Netherlands, or a Nazi plane with plans has not crashed, etc…

http://www.lefigaro.fr/histoire/archives/2015/05/07/26010-20150507ARTFIG00304-rene-bondoux-raconte-la-signature-de-capitulation-allemande-le-8-mai-1945.php