Structure-hitters and the Rapture-ready - the tag team from hell

[arendt]

Structure-hitters and the Rapture-ready - the tag team from hell
by arendt

Because of the Kansas tornado, I was re-reading the Bruce Sterling novel "Heavy Weather". Written in 1994 in the then hot genre of cyberpunk, it had the requisite plot threads of ecological and poltical dystopia. But, what struck me was just how on-target Mr. Sterling was about how society would devolve.

Of course, what he said was, in typical cyberpunk fashion, totally over the top, outrageous stuff. But thirteen years later, you sorta gotta wonder if maybe, just maybe, he was plugged into something. (Spoiler-alert!) Here is the main soliloquy of the book:

"There are certain things, certain activities, that transparently require doing. What's more, there are people who recognize the necessity to do them, and who can do them, and are even willing to do those things. The only challenge in the situation is that these necessary things are unbearably horrible and repugnant things to do.

"(We do it for)...survival. Survival of humanity, and of millions of endangered species. A chance for humanity to work its way out...But, there's not any government in the world that can stand up publicly, and say coldly and openly, that the eight billion people on this collapsing planet are at least four billion people too many.

"We never aim to exterminate any ethnic group; we simply work consistently to lower global birthrates and raise global death rates...taking steps to increase the global death rate doesn't make death into murder. An epidemic isn't genocide, its just another epidemic...Instead of saving thousands of harmful human lives through public-health measures like clean water and sewers, why not train doctors to do elaborate costly measures, like neural brain scans?...A fad here, a twist there, a brief delay in shipping to some hard-hit famine site, or a celebrity scandal to chase off news coverage of some lethal outbreak. The current muddled semi-legal situation with drugs, that was a work of genius. A great source of finance for anybody's underground, and people who shoot up heroin are extremely reckless and credulous.

"The whole military policy of "structure hits" was based on destroying enemy infrastructure - avoiding the political embarrassment of battlefield deaths so that the enemy populace died of apparently natural causes. It was Luddism write large - the first deliberate policy of natural Luddism."

Let's check off his points.

1) Nobody dares to say there are too many people. Check.

In fact, the fundamentalist whackos are now claiming that people who refuse to have children are 'shirking their duty". Insane.

2) We don't invest in public health. We tacitly create the conditions for epidemics. Check.

At home, we have destroyed our public health system. Again the rapture-ready are convinced that vaccinations are a plot to destroy them or Satan's work. So we are growing the Petri dish for massive epidemics again. Almost like it was planned.

3) We pour medical resources into low rate-of-return technologies, while ignoring real killers. Check.

Big Pharma can't put enough scientists on the next Viagra knockoff, meanwhile research into deadly tropical diseases has to beg from rich people like Gates and Buffet. And, dirt cheap interventions like Vitamin A capsules or saline packages to prevent cholera deaths - stuff that literally costs pennies per dose - is not funded because it is not profitable. Cruel.

4) Sturcture-hitting has become our main tactic in world of asymmetric warfare. Check.

The U.S. pioneered the "structure hit" in the First Gulf War. We blew away the best infrastructure in the Arab world and embargoed medical supplies. And over the next ten years, half a million children in a country of 25 million people, died of preventable diseases. We structure hit Serbia; didn't lose one single soldier; ruined their economy; and won the war. The Israelis have been structure hitting Gaza and the West Bank for decades: bulldozing houses, bombing UN supplied infrastructure. And what was their failed war in Lebanon last year? Nothing but structure hitting back into rubble, all the infrastructure that the Lebanese spent 25 years re-building.

Of course, our four year demolition of Iraq is the center-piece of structure hitting. No sooner did John "death squads" Negorponte show up in country than did the Holy Mosque of Karbala get demolished in a four hour military operation by unidentified terrorists. This started the best structure hit ever - the Sunni-Shia Civil War - get your enemies to split into factions and structure hit each other back into the Stone Age. Cold-blooded murder.

----

(Tin foil hat on.) :tinfoilhat:

No question that Sterling was prescient about life in the near future - in the same depressingly B-movie, Edward Hopper way as his fellow cyberpunker, William Gibson. The only question is "Are there really people out there coordinating the breakdown of civilization?"

Well, let's see. The leadership of the authoritarian fundamentalist movement, the secretive Coalition for National Policy (who vetted George W. Bush in a secret meeting prior to his nomination) coordinates the ruinous fundamentalist opposition to birth control and to science in general. Someone paid the bills for the Neocons ("The crazies" as George H.W. Bush called them.) for thirty years - from Richard Pipes and his B-Team hysteria about the Soviet Union right up to Dick Cheney's stovepipe operation to start the Iraq War. You can't make me believe that 50 guys - some of whom can't wear socks without holes in them - took over Washington all by themselves. And, what is the policy of the neocons (who are still driving the bus)? It is mayhem, structure-hitting abroad and dis-investment in public health at home. Those are the two main candidates for coordination: the Christo-fascist zombie death cult leadership and the Neocon mercenary death worshippers. The tag team from hell.

We report, you decide.

(Tinfoil hat off).

[kestrel91316]

1. Part of me firmly believes that the top 1% wealthiest people in the world

DO believe that most of humanity are just "useless eaters", and better gotten rid of.

[arendt]

2. Ah, but you see, that makes you a (gasp) "conspiracy theorist" :sarcasm:

I am firmly convinced that the media monopoly has been essential to
controlling society, ever since mass literacy arrived. Any true insight is
branded as a conspiracy theory, and its proponents are demonized and
denied access to the monopoly media.

That is why the internet is as revolutionary as the printing press. And, we
are getting to the point where the powers that be are going to start
confiscating/censoring the net, just as happened after Protestant pamphlets
started the Reformation.

The problem is, I don't see any place comparable to a Protestant duchy or
country in which to hide from the on-rushing Catholic Inquisition. Tell me
where in the world the secular powers are committed to an open internet.
Not here (despite the Libertarian fringe). Not China. Not Russia. Not England,
with its Official Secrets Act.

arendt

[arendt]

3. front page kick n/t

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. But some of your points aren't consistent

Sterling had his character say "we simply work consistently to lower global birthrates", but you then talk about a fundamentalist movement trying to increase birthrates. And then you say the same fundamentalist movement is against vaccinations - which would increase the death rate. So which do you see going on?

The American health system isn't significantly decreasing the population (by a small amount, perhaps, compared to what might happen, but American life expectancy is still basically in the top tier in the world). It can be argued that the USA, along with other developed countries, isn't doing enough for public health in developing countries; we can also argue we don't do enough for family planning in them either - it's more a problem of complete neglect rather than a careful plan to drive the world population figure exclusively in one direction (which was what Sterling was writing about in his novel).

So this lack of direction doesn't point to an evil conspiracy about halving the potential world population. The profit motive is what's really going on - as you say, drug companies concentrate on the profitable drugs to correct the developed world lifestyle, or 'recreational' drugs like Viagra - because the money's there. There's a lack of compassion which means people don't vote for politicians who will use taxes for combating developing world health problems.

As for 'structure hits' - well, you can say that shows a small amount of guilt on the part of voters and politicians, who don't want 'numbers killed' figures to be so high. And, again, there's profit to be made by corporations rebuilding anything concrete, but not from repopulating somewhere.

Look at the bottom line for corporations, not a shadowy cabal.

[formercia]

5. Those '50 guys' are just the front men

just another layer of the onion.

[dave_p]

6. "1) Nobody dares to say there are too many people. Check."

Really? DU's full of people claiming just that. It's never quite clear whether they mean in the US or in the world, but it's sadly apparent that to some the US is the world. Nor is it ever quite clear just how many is "too many", and which ones we should be doing away with.

It is a piece of its time to that extent - a time before the rapidity of demographic slowdown became apparent. And the slowdown came not from some shadowy world government but from poor countries empowering citizens to check births rather than squander scarce resources on runaway population growth.

The observation that "Instead of saving thousands of harmful human lives through public-health measures like clean water and sewers, why not train doctors to do elaborate costly measures?" is still incisive. It's called class. But now we do it by country too. And millions die, but they're not us.

[shenmue]

7. Someone said there isn't enough social commentary in sci-fi

That's interesting, I might get that book. At least someone is trying to do something else with the genre besides replicate a tv show.

[conscious evolution]

8. Sci-fi social commentary

Read Robert Heinleins collective works.Virtually every thing he wrote had some sort of commentary to it.Some you will whole-heartedly agree with while some will having you throwing the book through the nearest window.
All of it will make you sit back and think.
He also gives lessons on how to recognize hidden elements in societal events and in how to conduct a revolution.
His posthumously published first novel 'For Us the Living' lays the groundwork for ideas he spent a career expanding upon in his writings.

[shenmue]

10. I've read "Stranger in a Strange Land"...

but not much else by him. Good idea, I should try to correct that this summer.

:)

[juno jones]

9. I used to think I had been thrust into Phil Dick's universe

Then I woke up one day to discover it was JG Ballard's. Scary.

....Sterling, Gibson and Stephenson look positively utopian at this point.