UPDATED: "Anticipatory Obedience"

Anticipatory obedience is a term I was unfamiliar with until reading an article in The Guardian.

[I]n On Tyranny, Tim Snyder’s bestselling guide to authoritarianism. Snyder defines the term as “giving over your power to the aspiring authoritarian” before the authoritarian is in position to compel that handover.

It appears that is precisely what has happened at The Washington Post. The newspaper's editorial board had drafted its endorsement of Kamala Harris for U.S. president, but then its owner, Jeff Bezos, intervened and forbade it. It appears that Bezos, who also owns Amazon and Blue Origin, wants to make sure that if Don Trump wins the race, his businesseses, which compete for government contracts, will thrive.

Within hours of making that decision, 

high-ranking officials of [Blue Origin] briefly met with Trump after a campaign speech in Austin, Texas, as the Republican nominee seeks a second presidency.

Trump met with Blue Origin chief executive officer David Limp and vice-president of government relations Megan Mitchell, the Associated Press reported.

Meanwhile, CNN reported that the Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, had also recently reached out to speak with the former president by phone. 

Those reported overtures were eviscerated by Washington Post editor-at-large and longtime columnist Robert Kagan, who resigned on Friday. On Saturday, he argued that the meeting Blue Origin executives had with Trump would not have taken place if the Post had endorsed the Democratic vice-president as it planned.

The was additional fallout.

 In their criticism of the Post’s decision on Friday, former and current employees cite the dangers to democracy posed by Trump, who has openly expressed his admiration for authoritarian rule amid his appeals for voters to return him to office.

The former Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who broke the Watergate story, called the decision “disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process”.

The former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron said in a post on X, “This is cowardice with democracy as its casualty”.

The cartoon team at the paper published a dark formless image protesting against the non-endorsement decision, playing on the “democracy dies in darkness” slogan that the Post adopted in 2017, five years after its purchase by Bezos. 

The Post was actually the second major paper to veto a presidential endorsement. 

The Post’s non-endorsement came shortly after the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, refused to allow the editorial board publish an endorsement of Harris.

Unfettered and fearless journalism has always been crucial to stable, well-functioning democracies. With the craven, self-serving sycophancy of people like Bezos and Soon-Shiong, it is clear that America's drift toward authoritarianism is no longer limited to the unhinged MAGA  crowd. As a consequence, all are diminished and endangered.

UPDATE: In today's (Oct.29) Star, Andrew Phillips writes:

The point is that by ordering their papers to stop short of endorsing Trump’s opponent the owners are showing weakness in the face of a candidate who has made clear he’s prepared to violate every norm of democracy. Make no mistake: Trump will take advantage. “If Trump sees a sign of weakness,” former Post editor Martin Baron told the New Yorker over the weekend, “he’s going to pounce even harder in the future.” 

Bread And Circuses

 

No, I am not one of those who begrudge rich people their pleasures and pursuits. Content in my own life, I harbour no ill-will toward those who are better off than me.

I do become bothered, however, when those pursuits both distract us from, and add to, the existential crises our world faces. In that, the billionaires have much to answer for.

Take the recent 'groundbreaking' flights of Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos into near-space and the breathless reporting that followed it.

Start at the 9:40 mark of the following to catch Stephanie Ruhle's  breathless, (star struck?) interview with the Bezos boys:

Similar gushing interlocutions can be found online following Branson's Virgin Galactic foray, but I hope the above serves to illustrate that this kind of gushing, lionizing coverage serves merely as a bread-and-circuses diversion away from the many problems we face in our terrestrial sphere.

Now, were you to watch earlier in this broadcast, you would hear how Bezos also talks about seeing our planet from above and how fragile it really is. He opines we must do everything we can to protect our world, as if  his space trip offered a transcendent experience.

And Branson, after his trip, said he wants to spend the rest of his life helping to solve our many problems here.

Apparently, those problems do not include our biggest threat, climate change.

Despite these intrepid innovators' claim that the greenhouse gas emissions from their excursions are no different from those from a jet flight, the truth is otherwise. First of all, both of their business models call for more and more of these inner-space trips, and as they scale up, the price will come down, making them more accessible to more people. Hence, more trips, more greenhouse gas emissions.

Secondly, the nature of these emissions is different from jet trips. Katherine Gammon explains:

Eloise Marais, an associate professor of physical geography at University College London... studies the impact of fuels and industries on the atmosphere.

The carbon emissions from rockets are small compared with the aircraft industry, she says. But they are increasing at nearly 5.6% a year, and Marais has been running a simulation for a decade, to figure out at what point will they compete with traditional sources we are familiar with.

“For one long-haul plane flight it’s one to three tons of carbon dioxide [per passenger],” says Marais. For one rocket launch it’s 200-300 tonnes of carbon dioxide carrying 4 or so passengers – close on two orders of magnitude more, according to Marais. “So it doesn’t need to grow that much more to compete with other sources.”

But the problem is more than simply the amount of carbon spewed, because 

emissions from rockets are emitted right into the upper atmosphere, which means they stay there for a long time: two to three years. Even water injected into the upper atmosphere – where it can form clouds – can have warming impacts, says Marais. “Even something as seemingly innocuous as water can have an impact.”

Closer to the ground, all fuels emit huge amounts of heat, which can add ozone to the troposphere, where it acts like a greenhouse gas and retains heat. In addition to carbon dioxide, fuels like kerosene and methane also produce soot. And in the upper atmosphere, the ozone layer can be destroyed by the combination of elements from burning fuels.

When I was a boy, I imagined a future of endless possibilities. Each liftoff of the Mercury and Apollo missions served only to whet that imagination. But I grew up and saw an increasingly fractured world with no simple remedies. 

Perhaps it is now time for these 'boys of space' to do a bit of growing up as well.

 

 

Guest Post: A Response To Be Careful What You Wish For

As I indicated in my last post, I have been having problems with readers' comments. I have not been receiving them. I have found a workaround the situation; although I am still not being notified of them, I went into the dashboard and looked under Comments Awaiting Moderation, where I found several. The following is one of them, a response from BM to my post, Be Careful What You Wish For:

Walmart has been pulling off the same manoeuvre for years. Come into an area just outside town to get cheap real estate, ruin local businesses with cheap prices, employ people at minimum wage so that municipalities and state/provincial governments end up effectively having to provide top-ups - and the ruin is complete. Of everybody and everything.

Amazon merely does it on an even lower cost base. Get stupid local governments to bid (can you imagine the utter stupidity of anyone actually "paying" for an Amazom warehouse?), then running a military operation of having people running around filling orders with no breaks for no money. There are many descriptions online of the hell it is, from the UK and US. Gernany has no Walmarts because they insisted on work standards that Sam's boys could not tolerate - don't know about Amazon.

Still your average modern twit sails blindly to their doom blissfully unaware that hailing Uber sends money to California instead of local taxi drivers. Money gaily sent off to a central collection house instead of being spent locally,the only rationale being it's a bit cheaper for you personally upfront. Gradually, all these centralized businesses hollow out local economies. Then you pay for more welfare as taxi firms go bust. Enjoy your cheap ride! Disruptors, these firms call themselves. Spot on.

The whole thing is an extension of the offshoring of jobs to China. Now the offshoring is to send money to some app developer in a place far away who is feted as a business hero.

And so we blindly march to the destruction of our societies apparently saving a loonie at a time, until eventually nobody can afford anything because we all work crap jobs. The rich get incredibly richer and the plebs stand around wondering what hit them.

And people slave to develop apps that will let them hit the hackpot, screw everyone else.

Nobody ever claimed the average dude or dudette wandering down the street glued to their phone actually had reasoning power, after all. They might have a PhD, but they're still terminally stupid, because they simply do not bother to think, and say "hang on a minute!". No, saving a nickel now means they regard themselves as smart.

And Bezos laughs at hundreds of millions of dummies, collects their data as well as money, and becomes a de facto emperor.

I buy local, I use the post office. I would not pay a dime for an Amazon warehouse in land or subsidies. Let the predator pay his own way.

Careful What You Wish For

With so many cities, including Toronto, vying to become Amazon's second headquarters, they might be mindful of some basic truths about Jeff Bezos and his business practices:

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' wealth increases by $275 million every single day. Meanwhile, Amazon workers have to rely on food stamps and public assistance just to survive. This is what a rigged economy is all about. pic.twitter.com/Ty7ECxvOkl

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 22, 2018

Now what was that thing Jesus said about rich men, camels and eyes of needles?