With Kamala Harris's star beginning to wane after shining brightly for the first few weeks after she replaced Biden as the Democratic candidate in the 2024 presidential election, bookmakers are now giving odds of about 50:50 for a Trump win.
But what are the dangers for America and the rest of the world from having a criminal with an acute narcissistic personality disorder running the world’s largest economy, let alone the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
A criminal moreover who's idea of economic management is to lie, cheat and steal from anyone fool enough to lend him money, leave his subcontractors unpaid, then when he can fend off his creditors no longer, have himself declared bankrupt, leaving them to whistle for their money, then start over again with more borrowed money. He is the only business man ever to bankrupt a casino! How do you bankrupt a casino where the odds are stacked in your favour and people queue up to give you money!. His idea of a university is to charge large fees to students them leave them without tutors and pocket the money!
He would undoubtedly turn the Whitehouse back into the organized crime syndicate HQ it was last time he was there, and would revel in the immunity from accountability SCOTUS has granted him to commit whatever crimes he likes, and he can always pardon himself for any crimes and misdemeanors just to be on the safe side.
In the 2012 election against Hillary Clinton, Trump's team came close to arguing that it was safe to vote for him because he wouldn't keep his promises anyway. This time, it really would be better if he didn't. It would be even better if he didn't have the chance to keep them.
He has three populist planks to his platform, none of them intended to make America Great Again, and all three of them guaranteed to make Americans' poorer, and smaller both economically and in the eyes of the rest of the world. They are nothing more than populist appeals to the xenophobic, racist, white supremacist right in the USA, centred on his obsession with China, which is always pronounces in a characteristically exaggerated, deranged way, 'Chay-na!' They can be summed up in two words - xenophobic isolationism.
In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, Peter Martin, a Visiting Fellow at Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, cites the non-partisan Peterson Institute for International Economics which says that Trump's package would "[do] more damage to the US economy than to any other in the world", but there are other world economies, not just the target, China, that would be damaged by them:
The article is reformatted for stylistic consistency:
Donald Trump, that darling of white evangelical Christians, is a heartless racist who thinks disabled children should be left to die, according to a new book by his nephew, Fred C. Trump III.
On July 4th 2024, the British people voted overwhelmingly to remove the Conservative Party from office after 14 years of Conservative and Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government. The country had had enough of the chaos, incompetence and self-serving greed, sleaze and corruption of a party of entitle rich people united only by the single slogan - "What's in it for me?"; a party that had always put self and party interest and factional infighting above the national interest, comprised of people who thought the rules were for ordinary people and shouldn't apply to them; people for whom compassion is for softies and morality is the size of the bottom line on the balance sheet.
Dave, Boris and the entitled Bullingdon Boys at Oxford.
David "Call me Dave" Cameron's period in office had been a period of gratuitously cruel cuts in social services on the pretext of an internation banking collapse, while there was plenty of money to cut taxes to their rich backers. He and his Old Etonian and Oxford Bullingdon Boy pal, George Osborn, presided over a massive reduction in welfare spending which saw an increase in poverty for the first time since WWII and made food banks part of everyday life for working people and their families. As a distraction and to try to neuter the Euro-sceptic wing of his party, Cameron held a wholly unnecessary referendum on membership of the European Union which, after a spectacularly inept campaign, he lost while the referendum opened up the divisions in his party and deepened the splits, and promptly resigned to leave others to clean up the mess.
Theresa May - left to clear up Cameron's mess.
Cleaning up the mess was left to the hapless Theresa May who was handed the poison chalice of trying to negotiate a 'Brexit' agreement which included border controls, but which had no border controls between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic in line with the Good Friday Agreement which had brought peace to Northern Ireland after 30 years of de facto civil war in the province. May also had to deliver the impossible promises made by the 'leave' faction led by another entitled Old Etonian and Bullingdon Boy, Boris Johnson, such as vast sums of additional money for the NHS that had been a major element in the 'leave’ factions campaign strategy of lies and disinformation, along with stoking up racism, Islamophobia and xenophobia against the free movement of labour within the EU.
Boris Johnson's notorious referendum bus lie.
May had emerged as the 'anyone but Boris' candidate and, despite inheriting a healthy majority from Cameron, decided to hold a general election two years before she needed to, then ran a campaign so inept that she came close to losing and ended up with needing to bribe Ulster Unionist MPs to give her a 'supply and confidence' agreement in which they agreed not to vote against her in a confidence motion or oppose the Finance Bill. Her weakness further empowered the euro-sceptic faction which had now coalesced around Boris Johnson, and which rejected any Brexit agreement which threatened to treat Northern Ireland differently to the rest of the UK, which made it impossible to reach an agreement which kept the Good Friday Agreement intact.
Some readers might have been surprised to see me posting an article about an acknowledged mystic who saw a close relationship between Slav nationalism and religion, but to me Alphons Mucha is very much like the Irish patriots who identified Catholicism with Irish nationalism, not because they believed in Papal authority and the divine right of priests to meddle in national affairs but because Catholicism was a part of the identity of the Celtic Irish. So, Mucha saw the struggle for Slav self-determination as closely tied to the struggles against Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity and later Germanic Protestantism.
Like Irish History, Slav history too can be seen as an illustration of how religion poisons everything, as the Czech people seem to have realised, since they are now second only to France in the proportion of the population who openly self-identify as Atheists.
So, it's interesting to read the following article by Will Visconti, a member of the teaching staff in the Department of Art History, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia, introducing an exhibition of Alphons Macha's work in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. I've reproduced it here under a Creative Commons license as a sort of sequel to my earlier article om Mucha's Slav Epic. The article is reformatted for stylistic consistency:
When Rishi Sunak lied for his party he showed us two things:
He knows the Tory Party depends on fools who'll believe falsehoods.
He is in politics, not for the he can do for us with power but for what power can do for him.
Qualities of the spiv and conman, which, of course, endeared him to the Tory MPs, who chose him when Liz Truss crashed and burned both the economy and her career.
The lie of course, repeated by Penny Mordaunt last night, even though it had been refuted by the very Treasury civil servant they were pretending had calculated the figure, was that Labour's plans will cost the average household £2,000. (Note: not £2,000 a year, as was implied, but £2,000 over 4 years!).
But, as, Treasury permanent secretary James Bowler, revealed, the figure was based on costings supplied not by the Labour Party, or independent experts, but on notional figures dreamed up by Tory Party paid advisors who started with the £2,000 and calculated backwards, so the Treasury civil service came up with the required figure. He had warned that ministers should not present the figure as provided by the Treasury based on their estimated costings.
How Sunak's Tories tried this blatant lie as the opening salvo in his forlorn reelection campaign, is explained by Steve Schifferes, Honorary Research Fellow, City Political Economy Research Centre, City, University of London in an article in The Conversation. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
In an article today in Psychology Today, psychologist, Bernard Golden, Ph.D, explains the link between Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and Anger.
Although he doesn't name him, most of his article reads like a description of Donald Trump and his frequent loss of self-control and bouts of angry shouting, which characterised his term in the White House, when aids would frequently be sacked in a fit of rage because they had had the temerity to question him or hint at disagreement.
To us in Europe it often seems America was being run from the bedroom of an over-privileged, petulant adolescent that someone had given a Twitter account to and told him he runs the world, where the most bizarre things were tweeted in the small hours of the morning and the world would wake up to the latest outburst and half-baked policy announcement.
This behaviour is explained by his borderline personality disorder, as described by Dr Bernard Golden
Online spaces attract conspiracy theorists. Social media has helped propagate conspiracy theories faster than was possible with more traditional media. This has driven engagement with political parties that focus on conspiracy theories.
According to a news item carried today by Agence France-Presse (AFP), US antivaxx conspiracists are deliberately spreading fear and disinformation to sell quack medical kits to gullible fools and in doing so are risking the lives of anyone foolish enough to believe them. And a recent paper published by a Japanese research group has shown how extremist parties are trading on growing antivaxx paranoia, originating in Trump-supporting conspiracists in the USA, by incorporating it into the political platforms.
This team of researchers recall how Donald Trump first of all tried to take credit for developing the mRNA vaccines against Covid-19, as though he had personally directed the research and invented the science behind mRNA vaccines, then switched to curry favour with the antivaxxers by casting doubt on the need for boosters. And of course, antivaxxer conspiracy theories became a central theme of the rabidly pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theorists.
From our perspective in Europe, it seems almost incomprehensible how the political situation in the USA has degenerated to such an extent that Donald Trump may be elected as POTUS again, despite the incompetence, buffoonery and criminality that characterised his earlier term.
What was once the 'shining beacon on the hill', which set the rest of the world an example (albeit more than a little idealised) of how democracy operated to produce a prosperous, egalitarian society where aspiration and enterprise were rewarded and the economy worked for all, has degenerated to warring factions, full of mutual hate and fueled by the most ludicrous and lurid conspiracy theories.
A significant number of adult Americans now believe there is a 'deep state' run by senior Democrats, that operates as a Satanic paedophile cult and that the serial adulterer, insurrectionist and crook, Donald Trump, was personally appointed by God as their saviour, because God obviously takes a keen interest in US politics and would pick someone with a narcissistic personality disorder to do his work for him. This god also promised to ensure Trump was reelected 2020, so the fact that he was kicked out of office must have been due to the same deep state/Democrat conspiracy to steal the election - and then hide the evidence where even God can't guide Trump's supporters to it.
And of course, the serious criminal charges Trump is now facing in a number of different US courts, are all part of that conspiracy, as are the judges, prosecutors and prosecution witnesses, so the more damming the evidence and the more charges he faces are evidence of the conspiracy, not evidence of Trump's guilt and unsuitability to hold elected office, let alone be in charge of a nuclear arsenal and the US public finances, and able to appoint senior members of the judiciary.
The only real conspiracy in the USA is that run by the shadowy and rabidly far-right, pro-Trump QAnon, so how did the QAnon cult lure so many people down their particular paranoid rabbit hole to the extent that they are prepared to take up arms against their fellow countrymen and stage an attempted coup d'etat in the name of patriotism?
In the last 20 years of so, two things have featured in western culture, especially so in the United States, and recent research has shown how these are linked.
Democratization of opinion: Conflation of the belief that everyone is entitled to their opinion on every subject under the sun, as guaranteed to Americans by their constitution, and the belief that this means every opinion should carry equal weight in a debate, regardless of the evidence (or lack of it) on which it is based, or the level of expertise in the subject of the person voicing that opinion.
The attractiveness of this belief to the intellectually lazy and to those who feel alienated by the political and economic forces that shape their lives, is that they can tell themselves that they are at least the equal of the experts, and very probably their better.
For example, I was recently castigated in the social media when I disagreed with the claim that "everyone needs Jesus because without Him life is meaningless". I was informed that "This is America (it was actually Facebook!) where we are entitled to our opinions!", as though a constitutional right in one country mandates the rest of the world to respect dogma and regard it as a statement of irrefutable truth, with the implication that no-one has a right to disagree. The constitution guarantees my right to my opinion (but not your right to yours).
Similarly false claims are made by creationists daily in social media, accompanied by indignation when challenged. Creationists who couldn't define the terms 'evolution' or 'kind' and who assiduously maintain their scientific ignorance, will confidently inform the world that the millions of highly qualified working biomedical scientists who have no difficulty with the science, have it all wrong, and should listen to the creationist who knows best, having completed a 15 minute Google University degree in creationism. And they're all part of a gigantic Satanic conspiracy anyway.
The far right in politics have never been bothered about truth.
They have no concerns about the scientific validity of the claimed scientific basis for their belief in their superiority over other peoples. It's whatever excuse they think they can get away with that's importan,t and more often than not, religion provides that excuse for them.
So, while simultaneously appealing to the Christian fundamentalists who reject Darwinian evolution on doctrinaire grounds, they sell the notion of white supremacy and male superiority over women based on Darwin's social ideas, so-called social Darwinism, that Darwin got from the Christian culture he grew up in.
While Social Darwinism has been rejected by the egalitarian left in politics as having no scientific basis, it is ironic that this is the only aspect of 'Darwinism'; that the far-right embraces, but it's closeness to Christian fundamentalism makes it doubly attractive to them.
Charles Darwin, who trained for the priesthood as a young man before turning to biology, was a man of his age and took it as established fact that there was a racial hierarchy in the world and that men were naturally superior to women, because that was the reality he saw, but the reality he saw was the result of 18 centuries of Christianity. Rather than question those basic cultural assumption on which English and European imperialism depended, and which seemed to be borne out by its success in dominating the world, he looked for a scientific basis for them in the framework of the evolutionary biology he and Wallace had identified as the explanation for biodiversity and the origin of species.
Darwin was right about a great deal, but fundamentally wrong about the biological superiority of white males. Indeed, given that all species, and all races have been evolving for the same length of time, and the process of evolution has no goal but is shaped by the prevailing local environment, it makes no sense at all to talk about one species or race being more highly evolved than another. All living organisms are more or less perfectly adapted by natural selection to fit their evolutionary niche and when their environment changes, the pressure to adapt changes. There is no pinnacle; no supreme achievement of evolution. All species are liable to find themselves less than perfectly adapted to a changing environment in different places at different times and to evolve accordingly.
But Darwin saw a hierarchy, both racial and sexual - and a hierarchy that the Christian religion he was raised in accepted as the natural order and promulgated it as the right and proper form of society, much as white supremacist Christians do today, so he saw his task as explaining what he saw rather than explaining why the 'natural order' was an illusion created by circumstance. In the words of the Anglican hymn, written in 1848, just 11 years before Darwin's Origin of Species was published:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.
The circumstance was, as Jared Diamond points out in his book, Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years due to the good fortune of Europeans having several domesticable animals in Eurasia so Europeans had horsepower for work whereas much of the rest of the world never had more than manpower. Europeans also co-evolved with a range of viruses, mostly acquired by living in close proximity to domestic animals, so when they came into contact with the rest of the world, their germs devastated their societies and weakened their resistance to colonial powers.
As Diamond points out, had Bantus been able to domesticate rhinoceroses, imaging the consequences for history if Roman legions had come up against Bantu cavalries mounted in rhinoceroses. We would probably now have far right Africans trying to justify their colonization and Africanization of Eurasia and carrying off millions of white West Europeans into slavery in Africa where their descendants were being treated as a social underclass, as proving the biological superiority of the black races and why the 'white lives matter' campaign is dangerous radical extremism aimed at overthrowing the God-given order (the god being some West African local god which featured in their origin myths). White sports people would be being taunted with monkey noises and thrown bananas while thanking the West African god for their sporting success.
And enlightened scientists such as the author of the following article would be campaigning for an end to the pervading black supremacist thinking in science and decrying the influence of a black evolutionary biologist who, 170 year ago wrote a book explaining why black men were the superior form of the species and why black culture was superior to the primitive cultures of the pale-skinned races.
The author is Rui Diogo, Associate Professor of Anatomy, Howard University. His article from The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
Racist and sexist depictions of human evolution still permeate science, education and popular culture today
Human evolution is typically depicted with a progressive whitening of the skin, despite a lack of evidence to support it.
Systemic racism and sexism have permeated civilization since the rise of agriculture, when people started living in one place for a long time. Early Western scientists, such as Aristotle in ancient Greece, were indoctrinated with the ethnocentric and misogynistic narratives that permeated their society. More than 2,000 years after Aristotle’s writings, English naturalist Charles Darwin also extrapolated the sexist and racist narratives he heard and read in his youth to the natural world.
Darwin presented his biased views as scientific facts, such as in his 1871 book “The Descent of Man,” where he described his belief that men are evolutionarily superior to women, Europeans superior to non-Europeans and hierarchical civilizations superior to small egalitarian societies. In that book, which continues to be studied in schools and natural history museums, he considered “the hideous ornaments and the equally hideous music admired by most savages” to be “not so highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, in birds,” and compared the appearance of Africans to the New World monkey Pithecia satanas.
Science isn’t immune to sexism and racism.
“The Descent of Man” was published during a moment of societal turmoil in continental Europe. In France, the working class Paris Commune took to the streets asking for radical social change, including the overturning of societal hierarchies. Darwin’s claims that the subjugation of the poor, non-Europeans and women was the natural result of evolutionary progress were music to the ears of the elites and those in power within academia. Science historian Janet Browne wrote that Darwin’s meteoric rise within Victorian society did not occur despite his racist and sexist writings but in great part because of them.
It is not coincidence that Darwin had a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, an honor emblematic of English power, and was publicly commemorated as a symbol of “English success in conquering nature and civilizing the globe during Victoria’s long reign.”
Despite the significant societal changes that have occurred in the last 150 years, sexist and racist narratives are still common in science, medicine and education. As a teacher and researcher at Howard University, I am interested in combining my main fields of study, biology and anthropology, to discuss broader societal issues. In research I recently published with my colleague Fatimah Jackson and three medical students at Howard University, we show how racist and sexist narratives are not a thing of the past: They are still present in scientific papers, textbooks, museums and educational materials.
From museums to scientific papers
One example of how biased narratives are still present in science today is the numerous depictions of human evolution as a linear trend from darker and more “primitive” human beings to more “evolved” ones with a lighter skin tone. Natural history museums, websites and UNESCO heritage sites have all shown this trend.
The fact that such depictions are not scientifically accurate does not discourage their continued circulation. Roughly 11% of people living today are “white,” or European descendants. Images showing a linear progression to whiteness do not accurately represent either human evolution or what living humans look like today, as a whole. Furthermore, there is no scientific evidence supporting a progressive skin whitening. Lighter skin pigmentation chiefly evolved within just a few groups that migrated to non-African regions with high or low latitudes, such as the northern regions of America, Europe and Asia.
Illustrations of human evolution tend to depict progressive skin whitening.
Sexist narratives also still permeate academia. For example, in a 2021 paper on a famous early human fossil found in the Sierra de Atapuerca archaeological site in Spain, researchers examined the canine teeth of the remains and found that it was actually that of a girl between 9 and 11 years old. It was previously believed that the fossil was a boy due to a popular 2002 book by one of the authors of that paper, paleoanthropologist José María Bermúdez de Castro. What is particularly telling is that the study authors recognized that there was no scientific reason for the fossil remains to have been designated as a male in the first place. The decision, they wrote, “arose randomly.”
But these choices are not truly “random.” Depictions of human evolution frequently only show men. In the few cases where women are depicted, they tend to be shown as passive mothers, not as active inventors, cave painters or food gatherers, despite available anthropological data showing that pre-historical women were all those things.
Another example of sexist narratives in science is how researchers continue to discuss the “puzzling” evolution of the female orgasm. Darwin constructed narratives about how women were evolutionarily “coy” and sexually passive, even though he acknowledged that females actively select their sexual partners in most mammalian species. As a Victorian, it was difficult for him to accept that women could play an active part in choosing a partner, so he argued that such roles only applied to women in early human evolution. According to Darwin, men later began to sexually select women.
Sexist narratives about women being more “coy” and “less sexual,” including the idea of the female orgasm as an evolutionary puzzle, are contradicted by a wide range of evidence. For instance, women are the ones who actually more frequently experience multiple orgasms as well as more complex, elaborate and intense orgasms on average, compared to men. Women are not biologically less sexual, but sexist stereotypes were accepted as scientific fact.
The vicious cycle of systemic racism and sexism
Educational materials, including textbooks and anatomical atlases used by science and medical students, play a crucial role in perpetuating biased narratives. For example, the 2017 edition of “Netter Atlas of Human Anatomy,” commonly used by medical students and clinical professionals, includes about 180 divs that show skin color. Of those, the vast majority show male individuals with white skin, and only two show individuals with “darker” skin. This perpetuates the depiction of white men as the anatomical prototype of the human species and fails to display the full anatomical diversity of people.
Textbooks and educational materials can perpetuate the biases of their creators in science and society.
Authors of teaching materials for children also replicate the biases in scientific publications, museums and textbooks. For example, the cover of a 2016 coloring book entitled “The Evolution of Living Things”“ shows human evolution as a linear trend from darker "primitive” creatures to a “civilized” Western man. Indoctrination comes full circle when the children using such books become scientists, journalists, museum curators, politicians, authors or illustrators.
One of the key characteristics of systemic racism and sexism is that it is unconsciously perpetuated by people who often don’t realize that the narratives and choices they make are biased. Academics can address long-standing racist, sexist and Western-centric biases by being both more alert and proactive in detecting and correcting these influences in their work. Allowing inaccurate narratives to continue to circulate in science, medicine, education and the media perpetuates not only these narratives in future generations, but also the discrimination, oppression and atrocities that have been justified by them in the past.
Rui Diogo, Associate Professor of Anatomy, Howard University
Figures published in PLOS a few days ago point to an astonishing success rate for the self-inflicted genocide campaign waged by the MAGA/Trumpanzee cult during the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2021.
Probably as a result of the antivaxx campaign and the evangelical Christian and Repugnican-led campaign against the measures to impede the spread of the virus and lower pressure on health services such as social distancing, prohibiting indoor gatherings and wearing face-masks, the 'excess deaths' gap between Europe and the USA grew even wider.
A characteristic of Trumpanzee cultists, is their almost complete dependence on conspiracy theories to sustain their patently absurd belief in Donald Trump as some sort of divinely inspired saviour sent by God to engage with Satanic figures running the 'Deep State'.
These Satanic figures are, of course, because the only important things that happen in the world, happen in America, Democrat politicians, scientists and billionaires such as Bill Gates, led by Hilary Clinton, Barak Obama and assorted cannibalistic paedophiles. The conspiracy Trump was fighting gets ever more lurid, the more preposterous it becomes.
The 'Paedophile Deep State' conspiracy of course involved all the election officials in states where Joe Biden won in 2020, because they helped 'steal' the election from the rightful winner, Donald Trump, and all the judges who refused to overturn the result on the 'spurious' grounds that Trump's advocates could not find any evidence to support their claim, other than Trump's claim that he won really.
Another aspect of this 'Paedophile Deep State' conspiracy is the belief that the COVID-19 pandemic was fake and a pretext for injecting people with mind-controlling vaccines developed by Bill Gates, or as an excuse to stop people going to church, or that wearing face coverings was an attempt at population control because people can't breathe properly with a face covering and die of asphyxia. Of course, government health officials like Anthony Fauci, America's leading epidemiologist, were part of the conspiracy and faked the statistics such as the case numbers and deaths.
The third aspect of Trumpanzeeism is the belief that demands by black people to be treated the same as white people by the police is a conspiracy by political extremists such as anti-fascists [sic], to deprive white Christians of their rightful position as the middle and upper class of a stratified society. A society in which the poor (and Black) only have themselves to blame, welfare is a scam whereby the white middle class is robbed through taxation to subsidise fecklessness and drug dependence, and health care should be preserved for those who can afford to pay for it, the way God intended, in White Christian America.
And we shouldn’t forget the notion that Mexicans are all drug-dealing criminals and rapists who want to destroy America.
But just holding whackadoodle beliefs is itself harmless. What is harmful is the antisocial behaviour that can come from holding them, such as discouraging people from getting vaccinated against a lethal virus, encouraging them to attend super-spreader events where social distancing and wearing face coverings were seen as a disloyal political statement, and such as trying to overthrow a democratic government in a violent insurrection.
Previous research has shown that holders of conspiracy theories are more likely to indulge in criminal activities and other anti-social behaviour and less likely]y to conform to prosocial norms, often regarding laws and social norms as part of the conspiracy.
But there is some hope that at least the more anti-social consequences of holding conspiracy theories, such as those adhered to by Trumpanzees, according to the results of an interesting study by four researchers at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, Tübingen, Germany, led by Lotte Plummerer, a PhD candidate.
As described in Psychology Today by Craig Harper Ph.D.:
J-Type Beford 'Dreadnaught' ambulance from about 1975
As a background to the current industrial disputes in the UK NHS with nurses and ambulance staff striking or planning to strike in the next few days, this is a potted history of the Ambulance service, and particularly my role in it during in the 35 years from 1975 to 2010 when I finally retired.
On Easter Sunday, April 3, 1988, about an hour past what should have been the end of a 12 hour might shift, I was advising a young police constable about what he needed to do to secure the crime scene where a mother had, for no obvious reason, decided to strangle her 5 year-old son with his dressing gown cord, stab her 7 year-old daughter 21 times in the chest with a kitchen knife, stab herself, try to cut her own throat, then run half a mile across a field and drown herself in a nearby pond.
About 30 years ago, five days before Christmas on the last day of the school term, I found myself under a school bus with its back wheel parked on the chest of a 12 year-old boy. Under the bus with me were his mother and father who lived just along the road. What would you say to them? We waited together for the half hour it took for the local fire brigade to arrive and jack the bus up enough to pull the body from under the wheel.
In 1989, on a cold and frosty winter morning, I found myself in the back seat of a car which had gone under the front of a lorry, crushing both the driver’s legs and trapping them under the dashboard, pushed down by the weight of the lorry. The driver, a young woman of about 20 was on her way to start a new Job in Aylesbury. She was not familiar with the country road and lost control on a bend. Both vehicles were on the grass verge. To get to them, the fire brigade needed to remove a section of the hedge with a chainsaw. No-one thought to warn me and my patient of the noise that was about to start not three feet from us.
I had her on a drip and had set up a heart/pulse monitor and fitted a blood pressure cuff so I could monitor her condition. Trying to keep us both warm I had wrapped her and myself in blankets. It took the fire service about three quarters of an hour to pull the car out from under the lorry and remove the roof. My patient survived the ordeal and the orthopaedic team managed to save her legs..
These, and a thousand other similar jobs are dealth with every day by the crews of the UK Ambulance Services and most of the patients from them end up in the NHS being cared for by nurses and doctors backed up by an army of ancilliary staff, cleaners, porters, radiographers, physiotherapists, laboratory technicians, etc. All of these are now bearing the brunts of 12 years of Tory underfunding, continuous reorganization, unfilled vacancies and economic mismanagement and, for the last three years, a raging, life-threatening pandemic for which innadequate personal protection equipment was provided by chums of ministers handed tens of millions of our money to supply PPE that never materialised or, if it did, was unuseable, even being salvaged from the clinical waste of Turkish hospitals.
"Oh! Don't worry! You can keep the money anyway. Thanks for trying!"
GSS study showing increase in American rious “Nones”
('Black Protestant' and 'Jewish' subsumed into 'Other faiths' to give 'Other affiliation'
'No religion' includes Atheists, Agnostics and spiritual but not affiliated to any religion).
With the raucous jabber of evangelicals drowning out other, quieter, more measured voices in American politics, a non-American like me could be forgiven for thinking they are the major force in US politics, and they have had some, hopefully short-term, successes such as getting Trump elected in 2016 and him then stuffing SCOTUS with right-wing Christian extremists who promptly overturned Roe vs Wade. But there are more measured and thoughtful voices also beginning to exert a moderating and humanitarian influence, especially in the Democratic Party. They are the growing number of 'Nones', or people with no religious affiliations.
Of course this include Atheists/Agnostics, but it also includes people for whom religion is a personal thing that doesn't require affiliation to any one organised religion, although studies have shown that 'None' tends to be a half-way house between religious and Atheist as the loss of group affiliation tends to free the individual to look dispassionately at the (lack of) evidence, free from peer-pressure, and draw the rational conclusion - there is no evidential reason for religious belief.
The evidence is that the 'Nones' could have been behind Biden's win in 2020, helping to secure swing states, since 1 in 5 Americans adults and more than 1 in 3 Democrat voters are now 'None', and since 'Nones' tend to be generally more informed, it would be surprising if they weren't having an effect on US politics.
In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency, Ryan Burge, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Eastern Illinois University, USA, gives his assessment of the impact the 'Nones' are now having on American politics. The original article can be read here:
This is beginning to look like the end times for Donald Trump and his Trumpanzee cult.
The mid-term elections which were supposed to deliver a 'red wave' of Repugnican candidates as Trumpanzees took control of both houses, failed to materialise and scarcely even resembled a dribble. It looks like the Democrats will retain control of the Senate and very many of the candidates publicly endorsed by Trump either lost or won by slim margins. To make matters worse for Trump personally, his arch rival for both the Repugnican choice for the 2024 presidential election and as leader of white right extremism, Ron DeSantis, won the gubernatorial race in Florida by a landslide, setting him up for a run at the presidency.
I
wrote recently
about how the simplistic view of a linear progress for human evolution is wrong,
because the reality of the fossil and DNA record, of which there is a plentiful
supply, is that it was confused, as side branches partially diverged, then
re-joined and species such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans interbreed both
with one another with their cousin species,
Homo sapiens, and a third, as yet unidentified, species known only from
DNA, and a similar process of partial or complete divergence and remerging
probably occurred in Africa before H. sapiens emerged into Eurasia to
meet the descendants of earlier Hominin migrations.
This, of course, is exactly what we should expect from an understanding of
evolution and how it works over a large range and diverse geography.
And now, it seems the simplistic model of human cultural evolution from
'savage', through hunter-gatherer, to pastoralist and settled agriculturalist
may be wrong and the reality was as confused as that of our physical evolution.
This really isn't surprising, as cultural development is just as much an
evolutionary process as is physical evolution.
Creationists, who must subscribe to the Bronze Age mythology in the Bible and
Qur'an and so shun learning and reason, will probably find this difficult to
comprehend because, while the mythmakers appreciated that they needed stories to
explain theirs and other animal's origins, and even the origin of Earth itself,
they were ignorant of the sociology of human cultures, other than of
language.
There is the idiotic attempt to explain the origin of language with the 'Tower
of Babel' myth, but cultures were simply assumed to be the primitive warring
Middle Eastern tribal cultures that much of the Old Testament concerns itself
with, with no attempt to explain their origins. The mythmakers knew nothing
else, so assumed human culture had always been as they found it, complete with
misogyny, slavery, a hierarchy of priests and irascible and vindictive, brutal
ruling despots, and religious rituals to appease gods who closely resembled
those ruling despots, and simply set their tales in that culture.
The view of a linear progression of human cultural development is now being
challenged however, with evidence that palaeolithic cultures were as diverse as
palaeolithic people.
In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a
Creative commons license with reformatting for stylistic consistency, Vivek V.
Venkataraman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at the
University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada argues that we need to revise our
understanding of the evolution of human culture, in today's political climate of
increasing inequality, political polarization, and climate change to understand
what cultures are possible in the future. The original article can be read
here.
The origins of human society are more complex than we thought
During the Ice Age, hunter-gatherer societies built sedentary
settlements.
In many popular accounts of human prehistory, civilization emerged in a linear
fashion. Our ancestors started as Paleolithic hunter-gatherers living in
small, nomadic and egalitarian bands. Later, they discovered farming and
domesticated animals for food and service.
Before long, they progressed to complex societies and the beginnings of the
modern nation-state. Social hierarchies became more complex, leading to our
current state of affairs.
“We are well and truly stuck and there is really no escape from the
institutional cages we’ve made for ourselves,” writes historian Yuval Noah
Harari in his bestselling
Sapiens.
A new book —
The Dawn of Everything
by late anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow —
challenges this narrative. Rather than being nomadic hunter-gatherers, they
argue human societies during the Palaeolithic were, in fact, quite diverse.
Ice Age hunters in Siberia constructed large circular buildings from
mammoth bones. At Göbekli Tepe, a 9,000 year old site in Turkey, hunter-gatherers hoisted
megaliths to construct what may be the world’s “first human-built holy place.”
To Graeber and Wengrow, these examples speak to the virtually unlimited social
flexibility of humans, undermining Harari’s dark assessment about the
possibility for social change in the modern world.
As an evolutionary anthropologist and hunter-gatherer specialist, I believe
both accounts miss the mark about the course of human prehistory. To see why,
it is important to understand how anthropologists today think about nomadic
egalitarian bands in the scheme of social evolution.
Human social evolution
In the 19th-century, anthropologists like
Lewis Henry Morgan
categorized human social evolution into three stages:
savagery, barbarism and civilization. These correspond to hunting and gathering, farming and urban life,
respectively. These so-called “stage models” incorrectly view social evolution
as a steady march of progress toward civilized life.
Scholars do not take stage models seriously today. There is little
intellectual connection
between stage models and modern evolutionary approaches toward studying
hunter-gatherers.
Hunter-gatherers are profoundly
diverse in modern
times, and they were in the
past too. This diversity
helps anthropologists understand how the environment shapes the scope of
social expression in human societies.
Human societies have generally become larger-scale and more
complex over time.
Popular
accounts
typically implicate farming in kick-starting the path to “civilization” and
inequality. But the shift to farming was not a single event or a simple linear
process. There are many paths toward social complexity and inequality.
The Dawn of Everything, along with reviews in
cultural evolution and
evolutionary anthropology, suggests that complex societies with institutionalized inequality emerged
far before the dawn of agriculture, perhaps as far back as the Middle Stone
Age (50,000 to 280,000 years ago).
This is a tantalizing possibility. But there is reason to be skeptical.
Complexity on the coastline
Social complexity
emerged among hunter-gatherer populations living in resource-rich areas like
southern France
and the Pacific Northwest Coast of the United States and Canada.
So rich were the salmon runs of the Pacific Northwest Coast,
Indigenous peoples could
sustain themselves on wild foods while living a sedentary life, even evolving
complex hierarchies dependent on
slave labour.
Similarly, complex societies could have arisen in the Palaeolithic along rich
riverine systems or on
coastlines — now submerged
by sea level changes — with plentiful marine resources. But there is no
unambiguous evidence for sedentary settlements where marine sources are used
in the Middle Stone Age.
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta was the site of a communal
Indigenous hunting practice where bison were driven over a cliff.
Credit: V. Venkataraman, Author provided
But these examples represent seasonal events that did not lead to full-time
sedentary life. Buffalo jumps occurred in the autumn, and success was probably
sporadic. Most of the year these populations lived in dispersed bands.
Egalitarian origins
Anatomically modern humans have been around for
roughly 300,000 years. There
is little evidence of markers of sedentary lifestyles or institutionalized
inequality going back more than 30,000 to 40,000 years.
This does not mean that humans are naturally egalitarian. Like us, our
ancestors faced complex politics and domineering individuals. Egalitarian
social life needs to be
maintained through active and coordinated effort.
From these origins, an astonishing variety of human societies emerged. Our
politics today reflect a small and unusual slice of that diversity. Prehistory
shows us that human political flexibility is far greater than we can imagine.
Vivek V. Venkataraman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology,
University of Calgary
Published by The Conversation. Open access.
(CC BY 4.0)
Human culture has evolved as with other evolutionary process to suit it to particular environment conditions, and what we have today is the result, just as the genes we have today are the result of our physical evolution over time.
Religions are remnants of that cultural evolution and whilst they may had had some value in ensuring group cohesion and conformity, in modern, multicultural, multiethnic societys, they are merely divisive and destructive, just when we need to start to become more united and egalitarian if we are to survive the challenges ahead of us.
