#london school if economics and political science

[floweringpear]

september 21, 2023

royal courts of justice

[archivlibrarianist]

"Urania (1916-1940) was a radical journal that sought to erase the gender binary. It is now available through LSE Digital Library. We believe it to be the most complete collection of this privately circulated journal in the world and an important primary resource for anyone researching LGBTQ+ history."

The London School of Economics and Political Science's digital library can be found here. Issues of Urania can be found here.

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Mary Kaldor

Mary Kaldor was born in 1946. Kaldor is a scholar known for pioneering the concepts of new wars and global civil society. She is the author of several books, and is currently Director of the Conflict Research Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Kaldor was also a founding member of European Nuclear Disarmament. In 2003, she was recognized with a CBE for "services to democracy and global governance".

Image source: LSE Library

[tjeromebaker]

Reflexiones feministas sobre los cuidados | Lieta Vivaldi M. / Daniela Alegría F. (Coordinadoras)

En este libro dialogan variadas reflexiones sobre los cuidados desde distintas disciplinas: filosóficas, jurídicas, políticas, así como de diversas perspectivas que están estrechamente vinculadas con la práctica concreta -cuidadoras, profesionales...

“No se nace mujer: se llega a serlo” (Simone de Beauvoir). Reflexiones feministas sobre los cuidados DESCRIPCIÓN El envejecimiento de la población mundial, las políticas neoliberales, y más recientemente eventos como la pandemia producto del COVID 19, han contribuido a visibilizar lo frágil y vulnerable que es la vida y, la cantidad de cuidados que se requieren para sostenerla. En este libro…

[bob425608]

【毕业证 成绩单】办英国LSE毕业证,教育部留服认证Q/微892798920伦敦政治经济学院毕业证,Bachelor,Master,成绩单,LSE硕士文凭,LSE研究生文凭,改LSE成绩单GPA,学位证,留信/使馆认证,offer申请学校London School of Economics and Political Science Diploma,Degree,Transcript

[probablyasocialecologist]

Ending mass human deprivation and providing good lives for the whole world's population can be accomplished while at the same time achieving ecological objectives. This is demonstrated by a new study by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and the London School of Economics and Political Science, recently published in World Development Perspectives. About 80% of humanity cannot access necessary goods and services and lives below the threshold for "decent living." Some narratives claim that addressing this problem will require massive economic growth on a global scale, multiplying existing output many times over, which would exacerbate climate change and ecological breakdown. The authors of the new study dispute this claim and argue that human development does not require such a dangerous approach. Reviewing recent empirical research, they find that ending mass deprivation and provisioning decent living standards for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments. This would ensure that everyone in the world has access to nutritious food, modern housing, high-quality health care, education, electricity, induction stoves, sanitation systems, clothing, washing machines, refrigerators, heating/cooling systems, computers, mobile phones, internet, and transport, and could also include universal access to recreational facilities, theaters, and other public goods. The authors argue that, to achieve such a future, strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification. In the Global South, this requires using industrial policy to increase economic sovereignty, develop industrial capacity, and organize production around human well-being. At the same time, in high-income countries, less-necessary production (of things like mansions, SUVs, private jets and fast fashion) must be scaled down to enable faster decarbonization and to help bring resource use back within planetary boundaries, as degrowth scholarship holds.

July 25 2024

[nenelonomh]

the university masterlist

there are many excellent universities around the world, each offering unique programs and opportunities. here are some highly regarded institutions to consider (and what subjects they're renowned for):

united states:

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ massachusetts institute of technology (mit): renowned for its programs in engineering, computer science, and physical sciences.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ harvard university: known for its law, business, and medical schools.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ stanford university: excels in business, engineering, and the sciences.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ california institute of technology (caltech): focuses on science and engineering.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ university of california, berkeley (ucb): strong in a wide range of disciplines, including engineering, business, and the sciences.

united kingdom:

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ university of oxford: offers a broad range of programs and is known for its rigorous academic environment.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ university of cambridge: excels in sciences, engineering, and humanities.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ imperial college london: specializes in science, engineering, medicine, and business.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚london school of economics and political science (lse): focuses on social sciences.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ university college london (ucl): offers a wide range of programs and is known for its research output.

australia:

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ university of melbourne: known for its strong research programs and diverse academic offerings.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ australian national university (anu): excels in research and offers a wide range of programs.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ university of sydney: offers comprehensive programs and has a strong research focus.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ university of queensland (uq): known for its research and teaching excellence.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ university of new south wales (unsw): strong in engineering, business, and sciences.

canada:

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ university of toronto: offers a wide range of programs and is known for its research excellence.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ university of british columbia (ubc): strong in research and offers diverse academic programs.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ mcgill university: known for its medical and law programs.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ university of alberta: offers strong programs in engineering, business, and sciences.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ university of montreal: known for its research and diverse academic offerings.

when applying to and considering universities, it’s important to consider what programs and environments best suit your interests and goals.

do you have a specific university in mind?

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

SARS-CoV-2 is now circulating out of control worldwide. The only major limitation on transmission is the immune environment the virus faces. The disease it causes, COVID-19, is now a risk faced by most people as part of daily life.

While some are better than others, no national or regional government is making serious efforts towards infection prevention and control, and it seems likely this laissez-faire policy will continue for the foreseeable future. The social, political, and economic movements that worked to achieve this mass infection environment can rejoice at their success.

Those schooled in public health, immunology or working on the front line of healthcare provision know we face an uncertain future, and are aware the implications of recent events stretch far beyond SARS-CoV-2. The shifts that have taken place in attitudes and public health policy will likely damage a key pillar that forms the basis of modern civilized society, one that was built over the last two centuries; the expectation of a largely uninterrupted upwards trajectory of ever-improving health and quality of life, largely driven by the reduction and elimination of infectious diseases that plagued humankind for thousands of years. In the last three years, that trajectory has reversed.

The upward trajectory of public health in the last two centuries Control of infectious disease has historically been a priority for all societies. Quarantine has been in common use since at least the Bronze Age and has been the key method for preventing the spread of infectious diseases ever since. The word “quarantine” itself derives from the 40-day isolation period for ships and crews that was implemented in Europe during the late Middle Ages to prevent the introduction of bubonic plague epidemics into cities.

Modern public health traces its roots to the middle of the 19th century thanks to converging scientific developments in early industrial societies:

The germ theory of diseases was firmly established in the mid-19th century, in particular after Louis Pasteur disproved the spontaneous generation hypothesis. If diseases spread through transmission chains between individual humans or from the environment/animals to humans, then it follows that those transmission chains can be interrupted, and the spread stopped. The science of epidemiology appeared, its birth usually associated with the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in London during which the British physician John Snow identified contaminated water as the source of cholera, pointing to improved sanitation as the way to stop cholera epidemics. Vaccination technology began to develop, initially against smallpox, and the first mandatory smallpox vaccination campaigns began, starting in England in the 1850s.

The early industrial era generated horrendous workplace and living conditions for working class populations living in large industrial cities, dramatically reducing life expectancy and quality of life (life expectancy at birth in key industrial cities in the middle of the 19th century was often in the low 30s or even lower). This in turn resulted in a recognition that such environmental factors affect human health and life spans. The long and bitter struggle for workers’ rights in subsequent decades resulted in much improved working conditions, workplace safety regulations, and general sanitation, and brought sharp increases in life expectancy and quality of life, which in turn had positive impacts on productivity and wealth.

Florence Nightingale reemphasized the role of ventilation in healing and preventing illness, ‘The very first canon of nursing… : keep the air he breathes as pure as the external air, without chilling him,’ a maxim that influenced building design at the time.

These trends continued in the 20th century, greatly helped by further technological and scientific advances. Many diseases – diphtheria, pertussis, hepatitis B, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, etc. – became things of the past thanks to near-universal highly effective vaccinations, while others that used to be common are no longer of such concern for highly developed countries in temperate climates – malaria, typhus, typhoid, leprosy, cholera, tuberculosis, and many others – primarily thanks to improvements in hygiene and the implementation of non-pharmaceutical measures for their containment.

Furthermore, the idea that infectious diseases should not just be reduced, but permanently eliminated altogether began to be put into practice in the second half of the 20th century on a global level, and much earlier locally. These programs were based on the obvious consideration that if an infectious agent is driven to extinction, the incalculable damage to people’s health and the overall economy by a persisting and indefinite disease burden will also be eliminated.

The ambition of local elimination grew into one of global eradication for smallpox, which was successfully eliminated from the human population in the 1970s (this had already been achieved locally in the late 19th century by some countries), after a heroic effort to find and contain the last remaining infectious individuals. The other complete success was rinderpest in cattle9,10, globally eradicated in the early 21st century.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, global eradication programs were very close to succeeding for two other diseases – polio and dracunculiasis. Eradication is also globally pursued for other diseases, such as yaws, and regionally for many others, e.g. lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, measles and rubella. The most challenging diseases are those that have an external reservoir outside the human population, especially if they are insect borne, and in particular those carried by mosquitos. Malaria is the primary example, but despite these difficulties, eradication of malaria has been a long-standing global public health goal and elimination has been achieved in temperate regions of the globe, even though it involved the ecologically destructive widespread application of polluting chemical pesticides to reduce the populations of the vectors. Elimination is also a public goal for other insect borne diseases such as trypanosomiasis.

In parallel with pursuing maximal reduction and eventual eradication of the burden of existing endemic infectious diseases, humanity has also had to battle novel infectious diseases40, which have been appearing at an increased rate over recent decades. Most of these diseases are of zoonotic origin, and the rate at which they are making the jump from wildlife to humans is accelerating, because of the increased encroachment on wildlife due to expanding human populations and physical infrastructure associated with human activity, the continued destruction of wild ecosystems that forces wild animals towards closer human contact, the booming wildlife trade, and other such trends.

Because it is much easier to stop an outbreak when it is still in its early stages of spreading through the population than to eradicate an endemic pathogen, the governing principle has been that no emerging infectious disease should be allowed to become endemic. This goal has been pursued reasonably successfully and without controversy for many decades.

The most famous newly emerging pathogens were the filoviruses (Ebola, Marburg), the SARS and MERS coronaviruses, and paramyxoviruses like Nipah. These gained fame because of their high lethality and potential for human-to-human spread, but they were merely the most notable of many examples.

Such epidemics were almost always aggressively suppressed. Usually, these were small outbreaks, and because highly pathogenic viruses such as Ebola cause very serious sickness in practically all infected people, finding and isolating the contagious individuals is a manageable task. The largest such epidemic was the 2013-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, when a filovirus spread widely in major urban centers for the first time. Containment required a wartime-level mobilization, but that was nevertheless achieved, even though there were nearly 30,000 infections and more than 11,000 deaths.

SARS was also contained and eradicated from the human population back in 2003-04, and the same happened every time MERS made the jump from camels to humans, as well as when there were Nipah outbreaks in Asia.

The major counterexample of a successful establishment in the human population of a novel highly pathogenic virus is HIV. HIV is a retrovirus, and as such it integrates into the host genome and is thus nearly impossible to eliminate from the body and to eradicate from the population (unless all infected individuals are identified and prevented from infecting others for the rest of their lives). However, HIV is not an example of the containment principle being voluntarily abandoned as the virus had made its zoonotic jump and established itself many decades before its eventual discovery and recognition, and long before the molecular tools that could have detected and potentially fully contained it existed.

Still, despite all these containment success stories, the emergence of a new pathogen with pandemic potential was a well understood and frequently discussed threat, although influenza viruses rather than coronaviruses were often seen as the most likely culprit. The eventual appearance of SARS-CoV-2 should therefore not have been a huge surprise, and should have been met with a full mobilization of the technical tools and fundamental public health principles developed over the previous decades.

The ecological context One striking property of many emerging pathogens is how many of them come from bats. While the question of whether bats truly harbor more viruses than other mammals in proportion to their own species diversity (which is the second highest within mammals after rodents) is not fully settled yet, many novel viruses do indeed originate from bats, and the ecological and physiological characteristics of bats are highly relevant for understanding the situation that Homo sapiens finds itself in right now.

Another startling property of bats and their viruses is how highly pathogenic to humans (and other mammals) many bat viruses are, while bats themselves are not much affected (only rabies is well established to cause serious harm to bats). Why bats seem to carry so many such pathogens, and how they have adapted so well to coexisting with them, has been a long-standing puzzle and although we do not have a definitive answer, some general trends have become clear.

Bats are the only truly flying mammals and have been so for many millions of years. Flying has resulted in a number of specific adaptations, one of them being the tolerance towards a very high body temperature (often on the order of 42-43ºC). Bats often live in huge colonies, literally touching each other, and, again, have lived in conditions of very high density for millions of years. Such densities are rare among mammals and are certainly not the native condition of humans (human civilization and our large dense cities are a very recent phenomenon on evolutionary time scales). Bats are also quite long-lived for such small mammals – some fruit bats can live more than 35 years and even small cave dwelling species can live about a decade.

These are characteristics that might have on one hand facilitated the evolution of a considerable set of viruses associated with bat populations. In order for a non-latent respiratory virus to maintain itself, a minimal population size is necessary. For example, it is hypothesized that measles requires a minimum population size of 250-300,000 individuals. And bats have existed in a state of high population densities for a very long time, which might explain the high diversity of viruses that they carry. In addition, the long lifespan of many bat species means that their viruses may have to evolve strategies to overcome adaptive immunity and frequently reinfect previously infected individuals as opposed to the situation in short-lived species in which populations turn over quickly (with immunologically naive individuals replacing the ones that die out).

On the other hand, the selective pressure that these viruses have exerted on bats may have resulted in the evolution of various resistance and/or tolerance mechanisms in bats themselves, which in turn have driven the evolution of counter strategies in their viruses, leading them to be highly virulent for other species. Bats certainly appear to be physiologically more tolerant towards viruses that are otherwise highly virulent to other mammals. Several explanations for this adaptation have been proposed, chief among them a much more powerful innate immunity and a tolerance towards infections that does not lead to the development of the kind of hyperinflammatory reactions observed in humans, the high body temperature of bats in flight, and others.

The notable strength of bat innate immunity is often explained by the constitutively active interferon response that has been reported for some bat species. It is possible that this is not a universal characteristic of all bats – only a few species have been studied – but it provides a very attractive mechanism for explaining both how bats prevent the development of severe systemic viral infections in their bodies and how their viruses in turn would have evolved powerful mechanisms to silence the interferon response, making them highly pathogenic for other mammals.

The tolerance towards infection is possibly rooted in the absence of some components of the signaling cascades leading to hyperinflammatory reactions and the dampened activity of others.

An obvious ecological parallel can be drawn between bats and humans – just as bats live in dense colonies, so now do modern humans. And we may now be at a critical point in the history of our species, in which our ever-increasing ecological footprint has brought us in close contact with bats in a way that was much rarer in the past. Our population is connected in ways that were previously unimaginable. A novel virus can make the zoonotic jump somewhere in Southeast Asia and a carrier of it can then be on the other side of the globe a mere 24-hours later, having encountered thousands of people in airports and other mass transit systems. As a result, bat pathogens are now being transferred from bat populations to the human population in what might prove to be the second major zoonotic spillover event after the one associated with domestication of livestock and pets a few thousand years ago.

Unfortunately for us, our physiology is not suited to tolerate these new viruses. Bats have adapted to live with them over many millions of years. Humans have not undergone the same kind of adaptation and cannot do so on any timescale that will be of use to those living now, nor to our immediate descendants.

Simply put, humans are not bats, and the continuous existence and improvement of what we now call “civilization” depends on the same basic public health and infectious disease control that saw life expectancy in high-income countries more than double to 85 years. This is a challenge that will only increase in the coming years, because the trends that are accelerating the rate of zoonotic transfer of pathogens are certain to persist.

Given this context, it is as important now to maintain the public health principle that no new dangerous pathogens should be allowed to become endemic and that all novel infectious disease outbreaks must be suppressed as it ever was.

The death of public health and the end of epidemiological comfort It is also in this context that the real gravity of what has happened in the last three years emerges.

After HIV, SARS-CoV-2 is now the second most dangerous infectious disease agent that is 'endemic' to the human population on a global scale. And yet not only was it allowed to become endemic, but mass infection was outright encouraged, including by official public health bodies in numerous countries.

The implications of what has just happened have been missed by most, so let’s spell them out explicitly.

We need to be clear why containment of SARS-CoV-2 was actively sabotaged and eventually abandoned. It has absolutely nothing to do with the “impossibility” of achieving it. In fact, the technical problem of containing even a stealthily spreading virus such as SARS-CoV-2 is fully solved, and that solution was successfully applied in practice for years during the pandemic.

The list of countries that completely snuffed out outbreaks, often multiple times, includes Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Bhutan, Cuba, China, and a few others, with China having successfully contained hundreds of separate outbreaks, before finally giving up in late 2022.

The algorithm for containment is well established – passively break transmission chains through the implementation of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as limiting human contacts, high quality respirator masks, indoor air filtration and ventilation, and others, while aggressively hunting down active remaining transmission chains through traditional contact tracing and isolation methods combined with the powerful new tool of population-scale testing.

Understanding of airborne transmission and institution of mitigation measures, which have heretofore not been utilized in any country, will facilitate elimination, even with the newer, more transmissible variants. Any country that has the necessary resources (or is provided with them) can achieve full containment within a few months. In fact, currently this would be easier than ever before because of the accumulated widespread multiple recent exposures to the virus in the population suppressing the effective reproduction number (Re). For the last 18 months or so we have been seeing a constant high plateau of cases with undulating waves, but not the major explosions of infections with Re reaching 3-4 that were associated with the original introduction of the virus in 2020 and with the appearance of the first Omicron variants in late 2021.

It would be much easier to use NPIs to drive Re to much below 1 and keep it there until elimination when starting from Re around 1.2-1.3 than when it was over 3, and this moment should be used, before another radically new serotype appears and takes us back to those even more unpleasant situations. This is not a technical problem, but one of political and social will. As long as leadership misunderstands or pretends to misunderstand the link between increased mortality, morbidity and poorer economic performance and the free transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the impetus will be lacking to take the necessary steps to contain this damaging virus.

Political will is in short supply because powerful economic and corporate interests have been pushing policymakers to let the virus spread largely unchecked through the population since the very beginning of the pandemic. The reasons are simple. First, NPIs hurt general economic activity, even if only in the short term, resulting in losses on balance sheets. Second, large-scale containment efforts of the kind we only saw briefly in the first few months of the pandemic require substantial governmental support for all the people who need to pause their economic activity for the duration of effort. Such an effort also requires large-scale financial investment in, for example, contact tracing and mass testing infrastructure and providing high-quality masks. In an era dominated by laissez-faire economic dogma, this level of state investment and organization would have set too many unacceptable precedents, so in many jurisdictions it was fiercely resisted, regardless of the consequences for humanity and the economy.

None of these social and economic predicaments have been resolved. The unofficial alliance between big business and dangerous pathogens that was forged in early 2020 has emerged victorious and greatly strengthened from its battle against public health, and is poised to steamroll whatever meager opposition remains for the remainder of this, and future pandemics.

The long-established principles governing how we respond to new infectious diseases have now completely changed – the precedent has been established that dangerous emerging pathogens will no longer be contained, but instead permitted to ‘ease’ into widespread circulation. The intent to “let it rip” in the future is now being openly communicated. With this change in policy comes uncertainty about acceptable lethality. Just how bad will an infectious disease have to be to convince any government to mobilize a meaningful global public health response?

We have some clues regarding that issue from what happened during the initial appearance of the Omicron “variant” (which was really a new serotype) of SARS-CoV-2. Despite some experts warning that a vaccine-only approach would be doomed to fail, governments gambled everything on it. They were then faced with the brute fact of viral evolution destroying their strategy when a new serotype emerged against which existing vaccines had little effect in terms of blocking transmission. The reaction was not to bring back NPIs but to give up, seemingly regardless of the consequences.

Critically, those consequences were unknown when the policy of no intervention was adopted within days of the appearance of Omicron. All previous new SARS-CoV-2 variants had been deadlier than the original Wuhan strain, with the eventually globally dominant Delta variant perhaps as much as 4× as deadly. Omicron turned out to be the exception, but again, that was not known with any certainty when it was allowed to run wild through populations. What would have happened if it had followed the same pattern as Delta?

In the USA, for example, the worst COVID-19 wave was the one in the winter of 2020-21, at the peak of which at least 3,500 people were dying daily (the real number was certainly higher because of undercounting due to lack of testing and improper reporting). The first Omicron BA.1 wave saw the second-highest death tolls, with at least 2,800 dying per day at its peak. Had Omicron been as intrinsically lethal as Delta, we could have easily seen a 4-5× higher peak than January 2021, i.e. as many as 12–15,000 people dying a day. Given that we only had real data on Omicron’s intrinsic lethality after the gigantic wave of infections was unleashed onto the population, we have to conclude that 12–15,000 dead a day is now a threshold that will not force the implementation of serious NPIs for the next problematic COVID-19 serotype.

Logically, it follows that it is also a threshold that will not result in the implementation of NPIs for any other emerging pathogens either. Because why should SARS-CoV-2 be special?

We can only hope that we will never see the day when such an epidemic hits us but experience tells us such optimism is unfounded. The current level of suffering caused by COVID-19 has been completely normalized even though such a thing was unthinkable back in 2019. Populations are largely unaware of the long-term harms the virus is causing to those infected, of the burden on healthcare, increased disability, mortality and reduced life expectancy. Once a few even deadlier outbreaks have been shrugged off by governments worldwide, the baseline of what is considered “acceptable” will just gradually move up and even more unimaginable losses will eventually enter the “acceptable” category. There can be no doubt, from a public health perspective, we are regressing.

We had a second, even more worrying real-life example of what the future holds with the global spread of the MPX virus (formerly known as “monkeypox” and now called “Mpox”) in 2022. MPX is a close relative to the smallpox VARV virus and is endemic to Central and Western Africa, where its natural hosts are mostly various rodent species, but on occasions it infects humans too, with the rate of zoonotic transfer increasing over recent decades. It has usually been characterized by fairly high mortality – the CFR (Case Fatality Rate) has been ∼3.6% for the strain that circulates in Nigeria and ∼10% for the one in the Congo region, i.e. much worse than SARS-CoV-2. In 2022, an unexpected global MPX outbreak developed, with tens of thousands of confirmed cases in dozens of countries. Normally, this would be a huge cause for alarm, for several reasons.

First, MPX itself is a very dangerous disease. Second, universal smallpox vaccination ended many decades ago with the success of the eradication program, leaving the population born after that completely unprotected. Third, lethality in orthopoxviruses is, in fact, highly variable – VARV itself had a variola major strain, with as much as ∼30% CFR, and a less deadly variola minor variety with CFR ∼1%, and there was considerable variation within variola major too. It also appears that high pathogenicity often evolves from less pathogenic strains through reductive evolution - the loss of certain genes something that can happen fairly easily, may well have happened repeatedly in the past, and may happen again in the future, a scenario that has been repeatedly warned about for decades. For these reasons, it was unthinkable that anyone would just shrug off a massive MPX outbreak – it is already bad enough as it is, but allowing it to become endemic means it can one day evolve towards something functionally equivalent to smallpox in its impact.

And yet that is exactly what happened in 2022 – barely any measures were taken to contain the outbreak, and countries simply reclassified MPX out of the “high consequence infectious disease” category in order to push the problem away, out of sight and out of mind. By chance, it turned out that this particular outbreak did not spark a global pandemic, and it was also characterized, for poorly understood reasons, by an unusually low CFR, with very few people dying. But again, that is not the information that was available at the start of the outbreak, when in a previous, interventionist age of public health, resources would have been mobilized to stamp it out in its infancy, but, in the age of laissez-faire, were not. MPX is now circulating around the world and represents a future threat of uncontrolled transmission resulting in viral adaptation to highly efficient human-to-human spread combined with much greater disease severity.

While some are better than others, no national or regional government is making serious efforts towards infection prevention and control, and it seems likely this laissez-faire policy will continue for the foreseeable future. The social, political, and economic movements that worked to achieve this mass infection environment can rejoice at their success.

Those schooled in public health, immunology or working on the front line of healthcare provision know we face an uncertain future, and are aware the implications of recent events stretch far beyond SARS-CoV-2. The shifts that have taken place in attitudes and public health policy will likely damage a key pillar that forms the basis of modern civilized society, one that was built over the last two centuries; the expectation of a largely uninterrupted upwards trajectory of ever-improving health and quality of life, largely driven by the reduction and elimination of infectious diseases that plagued humankind for thousands of years. In the last three years, that trajectory has reversed.

The upward trajectory of public health in the last two centuries Control of infectious disease has historically been a priority for all societies. Quarantine has been in common use since at least the Bronze Age and has been the key method for preventing the spread of infectious diseases ever since. The word “quarantine” itself derives from the 40-day isolation period for ships and crews that was implemented in Europe during the late Middle Ages to prevent the introduction of bubonic plague epidemics into cities1.

Rat climbing a ship's rigging. Modern public health traces its roots to the middle of the 19th century thanks to converging scientific developments in early industrial societies:

The germ theory of diseases was firmly established in the mid-19th century, in particular after Louis Pasteur disproved the spontaneous generation hypothesis. If diseases spread through transmission chains between individual humans or from the environment/animals to humans, then it follows that those transmission chains can be interrupted, and the spread stopped. The science of epidemiology appeared, its birth usually associated with the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in London during which the British physician John Snow identified contaminated water as the source of cholera, pointing to improved sanitation as the way to stop cholera epidemics. Vaccination technology began to develop, initially against smallpox, and the first mandatory smallpox vaccination campaigns began, starting in England in the 1850s. The early industrial era generated horrendous workplace and living conditions for working class populations living in large industrial cities, dramatically reducing life expectancy and quality of life (life expectancy at birth in key industrial cities in the middle of the 19th century was often in the low 30s or even lower2). This in turn resulted in a recognition that such environmental factors affect human health and life spans. The long and bitter struggle for workers’ rights in subsequent decades resulted in much improved working conditions, workplace safety regulations, and general sanitation, and brought sharp increases in life expectancy and quality of life, which in turn had positive impacts on productivity and wealth. Florence Nightingale reemphasized the role of ventilation in healing and preventing illness, ‘The very first canon of nursing… : keep the air he breathes as pure as the external air, without chilling him,’ a maxim that influenced building design at the time. These trends continued in the 20th century, greatly helped by further technological and scientific advances. Many diseases – diphtheria, pertussis, hepatitis B, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, etc. – became things of the past thanks to near-universal highly effective vaccinations, while others that used to be common are no longer of such concern for highly developed countries in temperate climates – malaria, typhus, typhoid, leprosy, cholera, tuberculosis, and many others – primarily thanks to improvements in hygiene and the implementation of non-pharmaceutical measures for their containment.

Furthermore, the idea that infectious diseases should not just be reduced, but permanently eliminated altogether began to be put into practice in the second half of the 20th century3-5 on a global level, and much earlier locally. These programs were based on the obvious consideration that if an infectious agent is driven to extinction, the incalculable damage to people’s health and the overall economy by a persisting and indefinite disease burden will also be eliminated.

The ambition of local elimination grew into one of global eradication for smallpox, which was successfully eliminated from the human population in the 1970s6 (this had already been achieved locally in the late 19th century by some countries), after a heroic effort to find and contain the last remaining infectious individuals7,8. The other complete success was rinderpest in cattle9,10, globally eradicated in the early 21st century.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, global eradication programs were very close to succeeding for two other diseases – polio11,12 and dracunculiasis13. Eradication is also globally pursued for other diseases, such as yaws14,15, and regionally for many others, e.g. lymphatic filariasis16,17, onchocerciasis18,19, measles and rubella20-30. The most challenging diseases are those that have an external reservoir outside the human population, especially if they are insect borne, and in particular those carried by mosquitos. Malaria is the primary example, but despite these difficulties, eradication of malaria has been a long-standing global public health goal31-33 and elimination has been achieved in temperate regions of the globe34,35, even though it involved the ecologically destructive widespread application of polluting chemical pesticides36,37 to reduce the populations of the vectors. Elimination is also a public goal for other insect borne diseases such as trypanosomiasis38,39.

In parallel with pursuing maximal reduction and eventual eradication of the burden of existing endemic infectious diseases, humanity has also had to battle novel infectious diseases40, which have been appearing at an increased rate over recent decades41-43. Most of these diseases are of zoonotic origin, and the rate at which they are making the jump from wildlife to humans is accelerating, because of the increased encroachment on wildlife due to expanding human populations and physical infrastructure associated with human activity, the continued destruction of wild ecosystems that forces wild animals towards closer human contact, the booming wildlife trade, and other such trends.

Because it is much easier to stop an outbreak when it is still in its early stages of spreading through the population than to eradicate an endemic pathogen, the governing principle has been that no emerging infectious disease should be allowed to become endemic. This goal has been pursued reasonably successfully and without controversy for many decades.

The most famous newly emerging pathogens were the filoviruses (Ebola44-46, Marburg47,48), the SARS and MERS coronaviruses, and paramyxoviruses like Nipah49,50. These gained fame because of their high lethality and potential for human-to-human spread, but they were merely the most notable of many examples.

Pigs in close proximity to humans. Such epidemics were almost always aggressively suppressed. Usually, these were small outbreaks, and because highly pathogenic viruses such as Ebola cause very serious sickness in practically all infected people, finding and isolating the contagious individuals is a manageable task. The largest such epidemic was the 2013-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, when a filovirus spread widely in major urban centers for the first time. Containment required a wartime-level mobilization, but that was nevertheless achieved, even though there were nearly 30,000 infections and more than 11,000 deaths51.

SARS was also contained and eradicated from the human population back in 2003-04, and the same happened every time MERS made the jump from camels to humans, as well as when there were Nipah outbreaks in Asia.

The major counterexample of a successful establishment in the human population of a novel highly pathogenic virus is HIV. HIV is a retrovirus, and as such it integrates into the host genome and is thus nearly impossible to eliminate from the body and to eradicate from the population52 (unless all infected individuals are identified and prevented from infecting others for the rest of their lives). However, HIV is not an example of the containment principle being voluntarily abandoned as the virus had made its zoonotic jump and established itself many decades before its eventual discovery53 and recognition54-56, and long before the molecular tools that could have detected and potentially fully contained it existed.

Still, despite all these containment success stories, the emergence of a new pathogen with pandemic potential was a well understood and frequently discussed threat57-60, although influenza viruses rather than coronaviruses were often seen as the most likely culprit61-65. The eventual appearance of SARS-CoV-2 should therefore not have been a huge surprise, and should have been met with a full mobilization of the technical tools and fundamental public health principles developed over the previous decades.

The ecological context One striking property of many emerging pathogens is how many of them come from bats. While the question of whether bats truly harbor more viruses than other mammals in proportion to their own species diversity (which is the second highest within mammals after rodents) is not fully settled yet66-69, many novel viruses do indeed originate from bats, and the ecological and physiological characteristics of bats are highly relevant for understanding the situation that Homo sapiens finds itself in right now.

Group of bats roosting in a cave. Another startling property of bats and their viruses is how highly pathogenic to humans (and other mammals) many bat viruses are, while bats themselves are not much affected (only rabies is well established to cause serious harm to bats68). Why bats seem to carry so many such pathogens, and how they have adapted so well to coexisting with them, has been a long-standing puzzle and although we do not have a definitive answer, some general trends have become clear.

Bats are the only truly flying mammals and have been so for many millions of years. Flying has resulted in a number of specific adaptations, one of them being the tolerance towards a very high body temperature (often on the order of 42-43ºC). Bats often live in huge colonies, literally touching each other, and, again, have lived in conditions of very high density for millions of years. Such densities are rare among mammals and are certainly not the native condition of humans (human civilization and our large dense cities are a very recent phenomenon on evolutionary time scales). Bats are also quite long-lived for such small mammals70-71 – some fruit bats can live more than 35 years and even small cave dwelling species can live about a decade. These are characteristics that might have on one hand facilitated the evolution of a considerable set of viruses associated with bat populations. In order for a non-latent respiratory virus to maintain itself, a minimal population size is necessary. For example, it is hypothesized that measles requires a minimum population size of 250-300,000 individuals72. And bats have existed in a state of high population densities for a very long time, which might explain the high diversity of viruses that they carry. In addition, the long lifespan of many bat species means that their viruses may have to evolve strategies to overcome adaptive immunity and frequently reinfect previously infected individuals as opposed to the situation in short-lived species in which populations turn over quickly (with immunologically naive individuals replacing the ones that die out).

On the other hand, the selective pressure that these viruses have exerted on bats may have resulted in the evolution of various resistance and/or tolerance mechanisms in bats themselves, which in turn have driven the evolution of counter strategies in their viruses, leading them to be highly virulent for other species. Bats certainly appear to be physiologically more tolerant towards viruses that are otherwise highly virulent to other mammals. Several explanations for this adaptation have been proposed, chief among them a much more powerful innate immunity and a tolerance towards infections that does not lead to the development of the kind of hyperinflammatory reactions observed in humans73-75, the high body temperature of bats in flight, and others.

The notable strength of bat innate immunity is often explained by the constitutively active interferon response that has been reported for some bat species76-78. It is possible that this is not a universal characteristic of all bats79 – only a few species have been studied – but it provides a very attractive mechanism for explaining both how bats prevent the development of severe systemic viral infections in their bodies and how their viruses in turn would have evolved powerful mechanisms to silence the interferon response, making them highly pathogenic for other mammals.

The tolerance towards infection is possibly rooted in the absence of some components of the signaling cascades leading to hyperinflammatory reactions and the dampened activity of others80.

Map of scheduled airline traffic around the world, circa June 2009 Map of scheduled airline traffic around the world. Credit: Jpatokal An obvious ecological parallel can be drawn between bats and humans – just as bats live in dense colonies, so now do modern humans. And we may now be at a critical point in the history of our species, in which our ever-increasing ecological footprint has brought us in close contact with bats in a way that was much rarer in the past. Our population is connected in ways that were previously unimaginable. A novel virus can make the zoonotic jump somewhere in Southeast Asia and a carrier of it can then be on the other side of the globe a mere 24-hours later, having encountered thousands of people in airports and other mass transit systems. As a result, bat pathogens are now being transferred from bat populations to the human population in what might prove to be the second major zoonotic spillover event after the one associated with domestication of livestock and pets a few thousand years ago.

Unfortunately for us, our physiology is not suited to tolerate these new viruses. Bats have adapted to live with them over many millions of years. Humans have not undergone the same kind of adaptation and cannot do so on any timescale that will be of use to those living now, nor to our immediate descendants.

Simply put, humans are not bats, and the continuous existence and improvement of what we now call “civilization” depends on the same basic public health and infectious disease control that saw life expectancy in high-income countries more than double to 85 years. This is a challenge that will only increase in the coming years, because the trends that are accelerating the rate of zoonotic transfer of pathogens are certain to persist.

Given this context, it is as important now to maintain the public health principle that no new dangerous pathogens should be allowed to become endemic and that all novel infectious disease outbreaks must be suppressed as it ever was.

The death of public health and the end of epidemiological comfort It is also in this context that the real gravity of what has happened in the last three years emerges.

After HIV, SARS-CoV-2 is now the second most dangerous infectious disease agent that is 'endemic' to the human population on a global scale. And yet not only was it allowed to become endemic, but mass infection was outright encouraged, including by official public health bodies in numerous countries81-83.

The implications of what has just happened have been missed by most, so let’s spell them out explicitly.

We need to be clear why containment of SARS-CoV-2 was actively sabotaged and eventually abandoned. It has absolutely nothing to do with the “impossibility” of achieving it. In fact, the technical problem of containing even a stealthily spreading virus such as SARS-CoV-2 is fully solved, and that solution was successfully applied in practice for years during the pandemic.

The list of countries that completely snuffed out outbreaks, often multiple times, includes Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Bhutan, Cuba, China, and a few others, with China having successfully contained hundreds of separate outbreaks, before finally giving up in late 2022.

The algorithm for containment is well established – passively break transmission chains through the implementation of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as limiting human contacts, high quality respirator masks, indoor air filtration and ventilation, and others, while aggressively hunting down active remaining transmission chains through traditional contact tracing and isolation methods combined with the powerful new tool of population-scale testing.

Oklahoma’s Strategic National Stockpile. Credit: DVIDS Understanding of airborne transmission and institution of mitigation measures, which have heretofore not been utilized in any country, will facilitate elimination, even with the newer, more transmissible variants. Any country that has the necessary resources (or is provided with them) can achieve full containment within a few months. In fact, currently this would be easier than ever before because of the accumulated widespread multiple recent exposures to the virus in the population suppressing the effective reproduction number (Re). For the last 18 months or so we have been seeing a constant high plateau of cases with undulating waves, but not the major explosions of infections with Re reaching 3-4 that were associated with the original introduction of the virus in 2020 and with the appearance of the first Omicron variants in late 2021.

It would be much easier to use NPIs to drive Re to much below 1 and keep it there until elimination when starting from Re around 1.2-1.3 than when it was over 3, and this moment should be used, before another radically new serotype appears and takes us back to those even more unpleasant situations. This is not a technical problem, but one of political and social will. As long as leadership misunderstands or pretends to misunderstand the link between increased mortality, morbidity and poorer economic performance and the free transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the impetus will be lacking to take the necessary steps to contain this damaging virus.

Political will is in short supply because powerful economic and corporate interests have been pushing policymakers to let the virus spread largely unchecked through the population since the very beginning of the pandemic. The reasons are simple. First, NPIs hurt general economic activity, even if only in the short term, resulting in losses on balance sheets. Second, large-scale containment efforts of the kind we only saw briefly in the first few months of the pandemic require substantial governmental support for all the people who need to pause their economic activity for the duration of effort. Such an effort also requires large-scale financial investment in, for example, contact tracing and mass testing infrastructure and providing high-quality masks. In an era dominated by laissez-faire economic dogma, this level of state investment and organization would have set too many unacceptable precedents, so in many jurisdictions it was fiercely resisted, regardless of the consequences for humanity and the economy.

None of these social and economic predicaments have been resolved. The unofficial alliance between big business and dangerous pathogens that was forged in early 2020 has emerged victorious and greatly strengthened from its battle against public health, and is poised to steamroll whatever meager opposition remains for the remainder of this, and future pandemics.

The long-established principles governing how we respond to new infectious diseases have now completely changed – the precedent has been established that dangerous emerging pathogens will no longer be contained, but instead permitted to ‘ease’ into widespread circulation. The intent to “let it rip” in the future is now being openly communicated84. With this change in policy comes uncertainty about acceptable lethality. Just how bad will an infectious disease have to be to convince any government to mobilize a meaningful global public health response?

We have some clues regarding that issue from what happened during the initial appearance of the Omicron “variant” (which was really a new serotype85,86) of SARS-CoV-2. Despite some experts warning that a vaccine-only approach would be doomed to fail, governments gambled everything on it. They were then faced with the brute fact of viral evolution destroying their strategy when a new serotype emerged against which existing vaccines had little effect in terms of blocking transmission. The reaction was not to bring back NPIs but to give up, seemingly regardless of the consequences.

Critically, those consequences were unknown when the policy of no intervention was adopted within days of the appearance of Omicron. All previous new SARS-CoV-2 variants had been deadlier than the original Wuhan strain, with the eventually globally dominant Delta variant perhaps as much as 4× as deadly87. Omicron turned out to be the exception, but again, that was not known with any certainty when it was allowed to run wild through populations. What would have happened if it had followed the same pattern as Delta?

In the USA, for example, the worst COVID-19 wave was the one in the winter of 2020-21, at the peak of which at least 3,500 people were dying daily (the real number was certainly higher because of undercounting due to lack of testing and improper reporting). The first Omicron BA.1 wave saw the second-highest death tolls, with at least 2,800 dying per day at its peak. Had Omicron been as intrinsically lethal as Delta, we could have easily seen a 4-5× higher peak than January 2021, i.e. as many as 12–15,000 people dying a day. Given that we only had real data on Omicron’s intrinsic lethality after the gigantic wave of infections was unleashed onto the population, we have to conclude that 12–15,000 dead a day is now a threshold that will not force the implementation of serious NPIs for the next problematic COVID-19 serotype.

UK National Covid Memorial Wall. Credit: Dominic Alves Logically, it follows that it is also a threshold that will not result in the implementation of NPIs for any other emerging pathogens either. Because why should SARS-CoV-2 be special?

We can only hope that we will never see the day when such an epidemic hits us but experience tells us such optimism is unfounded. The current level of suffering caused by COVID-19 has been completely normalized even though such a thing was unthinkable back in 2019. Populations are largely unaware of the long-term harms the virus is causing to those infected, of the burden on healthcare, increased disability, mortality and reduced life expectancy. Once a few even deadlier outbreaks have been shrugged off by governments worldwide, the baseline of what is considered “acceptable” will just gradually move up and even more unimaginable losses will eventually enter the “acceptable” category. There can be no doubt, from a public health perspective, we are regressing.

We had a second, even more worrying real-life example of what the future holds with the global spread of the MPX virus (formerly known as “monkeypox” and now called “Mpox”) in 2022. MPX is a close relative to the smallpox VARV virus and is endemic to Central and Western Africa, where its natural hosts are mostly various rodent species, but on occasions it infects humans too, with the rate of zoonotic transfer increasing over recent decades88. It has usually been characterized by fairly high mortality – the CFR (Case Fatality Rate) has been ∼3.6% for the strain that circulates in Nigeria and ∼10% for the one in the Congo region, i.e. much worse than SARS-CoV-2. In 2022, an unexpected global MPX outbreak developed, with tens of thousands of confirmed cases in dozens of countries89,90. Normally, this would be a huge cause for alarm, for several reasons.

First, MPX itself is a very dangerous disease. Second, universal smallpox vaccination ended many decades ago with the success of the eradication program, leaving the population born after that completely unprotected. Third, lethality in orthopoxviruses is, in fact, highly variable – VARV itself had a variola major strain, with as much as ∼30% CFR, and a less deadly variola minor variety with CFR ∼1%, and there was considerable variation within variola major too. It also appears that high pathogenicity often evolves from less pathogenic strains through reductive evolution - the loss of certain genes something that can happen fairly easily, may well have happened repeatedly in the past, and may happen again in the future, a scenario that has been repeatedly warned about for decades91,92. For these reasons, it was unthinkable that anyone would just shrug off a massive MPX outbreak – it is already bad enough as it is, but allowing it to become endemic means it can one day evolve towards something functionally equivalent to smallpox in its impact.

Colorized transmission electron micrograph of Mpox virus particles. Credit: NIAID And yet that is exactly what happened in 2022 – barely any measures were taken to contain the outbreak, and countries simply reclassified MPX out of the “high consequence infectious disease” category93 in order to push the problem away, out of sight and out of mind. By chance, it turned out that this particular outbreak did not spark a global pandemic, and it was also characterized, for poorly understood reasons, by an unusually low CFR, with very few people dying94,95. But again, that is not the information that was available at the start of the outbreak, when in a previous, interventionist age of public health, resources would have been mobilized to stamp it out in its infancy, but, in the age of laissez-faire, were not. MPX is now circulating around the world and represents a future threat of uncontrolled transmission resulting in viral adaptation to highly efficient human-to-human spread combined with much greater disease severity.

This is the previously unthinkable future we will live in from now on in terms of our approach to infectious disease.

What may be controlled instead is information. Another lesson of the pandemic is that if there is no testing and reporting of cases and deaths, a huge amount of real human suffering can be very successfully swept under the rug. Early in 2020, such practices – blatant denial that there was any virus in certain territories, outright faking of COVID-19 statistics, and even resorting to NPIs out of sheer desperation but under false pretense that it is not because of COVID-19 – were the domain of failed states and less developed dictatorships. But in 2023 most of the world has adopted such practices – testing is limited, reporting is infrequent, or even abandoned altogether – and there is no reason to expect this to change. Information control has replaced infection control.

After a while it will not even be possible to assess the impact of what is happening by evaluating excess mortality, which has been the one true measure not susceptible to various data manipulation tricks. As we get increasingly removed from the pre-COVID-19 baselines and the initial pandemic years are subsumed into the baseline for calculating excess mortality, excess deaths will simply disappear by the power of statistical magic. Interestingly, countries such as the UK, which has already incorporated two pandemic years in its five-year average, are still seeing excess deaths, which suggests the virus is an ongoing and growing problem.

It should also be stressed that this radical shift in our approach to emerging infectious diseases is probably only the beginning of wiping out the hard-fought public health gains of the last 150+ years. This should be gravely concerning to any individuals and institutions concerned with workers and citizens rights.

This shift is likely to impact existing eradication and elimination efforts. Will the final pushes be made to complete the various global eradication campaigns listed above? That may necessitate some serious effort involving NPIs and active public health measures, but how much appetite is there for such things after they have been now taken out of the toolkit for SARS-CoV-2?

We can also expect previously forgotten diseases to return where they have successfully been locally eradicated. We have to always remember that the diseases that we now control with universal childhood vaccinations have not been globally eradicated – they have disappeared from our lives because vaccination rates are high enough to maintain society as a whole above the disease elimination threshold, but were vaccination rates to slip, those diseases, such as measles, will return with a vengeance.

The anti-vaccine movement was already a serious problem prior to COVID-19, but it was given a gigantic boost with the ill-advised vaccine-only COVID-19 strategy. Governments and their nominal expert advisers oversold the effectiveness of imperfect first generation COVID-vaccines, and simultaneously minimized the harms of SARS-CoV-2, creating a reality gap which gave anti-vaccine rhetoric space to thrive. This is a huge topic to be explored separately. Here it will suffice to say that while anti-vaxxers were a fringe movement prior to the pandemic, “vaccination” in general is now a toxic idea in the minds of truly significant portions of the population. A logical consequence of that shift has been a significant decrease in vaccination coverage for other diseases as well as for COVID-19.

This is even more likely given the shift in attitudes towards children. Child labour, lack of education and large families were the hallmarks of earlier eras of poor public health, which were characterized by high birth-rates and high infant mortality. Attitudes changed dramatically over the course of the 20th century and wherever health and wealth increased, child mortality fell, and the transition was made to small families. Rarity increased perceived value and children’s wellbeing became a central concern for parents and carers. The arrival of COVID-19 changed that, with some governments, advisers, advocacy groups and parents insisting that children should be exposed freely to a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus to ‘train’ their immune systems.

Infection, rather than vaccination, was the preferred route for many in public health in 2020, and still is in 2023, despite all that is known about this virus’s propensity to cause damage to all internal organs, the immune system, and the brain, and the unknowns of postinfectious sequelae. This is especially egregious in infants, whose naive immune status may be one of the reasons they have a relatively high hospitalization rate. Some commentators seek to justify the lack of protection for the elderly and vulnerable on a cost basis. We wonder what rationale can justify a lack of protection for newborns and infants, particularly in a healthcare setting, when experience of other viruses tells us children have better outcomes the later they are exposed to disease? If we are not prepared to protect children against a highly virulent SARS virus, why should we protect against others? We should expect a shift in public health attitudes, since ‘endemicity’ means there is no reason to see SARS-CoV-2 as something unique and exceptional.

We can also expect a general degradation of workplace safety protocols and standards, again reversing many decades of hard-fought gains. During COVID-19, aside from a few privileged groups who worked from home, people were herded back into their workplaces without minimal safety precautions such as providing respirators, and improving ventilation and indoor air quality, when a dangerous airborne pathogen was spreading.

Can we realistically expect existing safety precautions and regulations to survive after that precedent has been set? Can we expect public health bodies and regulatory agencies, whose job it is to enforce these standards, to fight for workplace safety given what they did during the pandemic? It is highly doubtful. After all, they stubbornly refused to admit that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne (even to this very day in fact – the World Health Organization’s infamous “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne” Tweet from March 28 2020 is still up in its original form), and it is not hard to see why – implementing airborne precautions in workplaces, schools, and other public spaces would have resulted in a cost to employers and governments; a cost they could avoid if they simply denied they needed to take such precautions. But short-term thinking has resulted in long-term costs to those same organizations, through the staffing crisis, and the still-rising disability tsunami. The same principle applies to all other existing safety measures.

Worse, we have now entered the phase of abandoning respiratory precautions even in hospitals. The natural consequence of unmasked staff and patients, even those known to be SARS-CoV-2 positive, freely mixing in overcrowded hospitals is the rampant spread of hospital-acquired infections, often among some of the most vulnerable demographics. This was previously thought to be a bad thing. And what of the future? If nobody is taking any measures to stop one particular highly dangerous nosocomial infection, why would anyone care about all the others, which are often no easier to prevent? And if standards of care have slipped to such a low point with respect to COVID-19, why would anyone bother providing the best care possible for other conditions? This is a one-way feed-forward healthcare system degradation that will only continue.

Finally, the very intellectual foundations of the achievements of the last century and a half are eroding. Chief among these is the germ theory of infectious disease, by which transmission chains can be isolated and broken. The alternative theory, of spontaneous generation of pathogens, means there are no chains to be broken. Today, we are told that it is impossible to contain SARS-CoV-2 and we have to "just live with it,” as if germ theory no longer holds. The argument that the spread of SARS-CoV-2 to wildlife means that containment is impossible illustrates these contradictions further – SARS-CoV-2 came from wildlife, as did all other zoonotic infections, so how does the virus spilling back to wildlife change anything in terms of public health protocol? But if one has decided that from here on there will be no effort to break transmission chains because it is too costly for the privileged few in society, then excuses for that laissez-faire attitude will always be found.

And that does not bode well for the near- and medium-term future of the human species on planet Earth.

(Follow the link for more than 100 references and sources)

[pers-books]

Obituary

William Russell obituary

Stage and screen actor who was part of the original cast of Doctor Who

Michael Coveney Tue 4 Jun 2024 17.40 BST

William Russell, left, as Ian Chesterton, with William Hartnell as the Doctor, Jacqueline Hill as Barbara and Carole Ann Ford as Susan in the Doctor Who serial The Keys of Marinus, 1964. Photograph: BBC

On 23 November 1963 – the day after the assassination of President John F Kennedy – the actor William Russell, who has died aged 99, appearing in a new BBC television series, approached what looked like an old-fashioned police box in a scrapyard, from which an old chap emerged, saying he was the doctor. Russell responded: “Doctor Who?”

And so was launched one of the most popular TV series of all time, although the viewing figures that night were low because of the political upheaval, so the same episode was shown again a week later. It caught on, big time, with Russell – as the science schoolteacher Ian Chesterton – and William Hartnell as the Doctor establishing themselves alongside Jacqueline Hill as the history teacher Barbara Wright and Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman.

Russell stayed until 1965, returning to the show in 2022 in a cameo appearance as Ian and, since then, participating happily in all the hoop-la and fanzine convention-hopping, signing and schmoozing that such a phenomenon engenders.

Before that, though, Russell had achieved prominence in the title role of the ITV series The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956-57) – he was strongly built with an air of dashing bravado about him; he had been an RAF officer in the later stages of the second world war – and as the lead in a 1957 BBC television adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, transmitted live in 18 weekly episodes.

William Russell on the set of the 1950s television series The Adventures of Sir Lancelot. Photograph: Mirrorpix/Getty Images

When Sir Lancelot went to the US, the first British TV import to be shot in colour for an American audience, Russell rode down Fifth Avenue on a horse in full regalia, like some returning, mystical, medieval knight in the heart of Normandy. The show was a smash hit.

By now he was established in movies, playing a servant to John Mills in The Gift Horse (1952) and a clutch of second world war action movies including They Who Dare (1954) opposite Dirk Bogarde, directed by Lewis “All Quiet on the Western Front” Milestone – he met his first wife, the French model and actor Balbina Gutierrez on a boat sailing to Cyprus to a location shoot in Malta – and Ronald Neame’s The Man Who Never Was (1956), the first Operation Mincemeat movie, in which he played Gloria Grahame’s fiance.

Until this point in his career, he was known as Russell Enoch. But Norman Wisdom, with whom he played in the knockabout comedy farce One Good Turn (1955) objected to his surname because he felt (oddly) that it would publicise a vaudevillian rival of his called Enoch. So, somewhat meekly, and to keep Wisdom happy, he became William Russell, although, in the 1980s, for happy and productive periods with the Actors Touring Company and the RSC, he reverted to the name Russell Enoch. Later, he settled again on William Russell. All very confusing for the historians. His doorbell across the road from me in north London bore the legend “Enoch”.

He was born in Sunderland, the only child of Alfred Enoch, a salesman and small business entrepreneur, and his wife, Eva (nee Pile). They moved to Solihull, and then Wolverhampton, where William attended the grammar school before moving on to Fettes college in Edinburgh and Trinity College, Oxford, where his economics tutor was the brilliant Labour parliamentarian Anthony Crosland.

But Russell didn’t “get” the economics part of the PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) course and switched, much to Crosland’s relief, to English. In those years, 1943-46, he worked out his national service and appeared in revues and plays with such talented contemporaries as Kenneth Tynan, Tony Richardson and Sandy Wilson.

Derek Ware, a fight co-ordinator, runs through a scene with Russell during a break in filming the Doctor Who story The Crusades at the BBC studios, Ealing, in 1965. Photograph: Mirrorpix/Getty Images

On graduating, he played in weekly rep in Tunbridge Wells, fortnightly rep at the Oxford Playhouse and featured, modestly, in the Alec Guinness Hamlet of 1951 at the New (now the Noël Coward) theatre. He had big roles in seasons at the Bristol Old Vic and the Oxford Playhouse in the early 60s, while on television he was in JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls with John Gregson, and was St John Rivers in Jane Eyre.

He played Shylock and Ford (in the Merry Wives of Windsor) in 1968-69 at the Open Air, Regent’s Park, before joining the RSC in 1970 as the Provost in Measure for Measure (with Ian Richardson and Ben Kingsley), Lord Rivers in Norman Rodway’s Richard III and Salisbury in a touring King John, with the title role played by Patrick Stewart.

His billing slipped in movies, but he played small parts in good films such as Superman (1978), starring Christopher Reeve, as one of the Elders; as a passerby drawn into the violence in the Spanish-American slasher film Deadly Manor (1990); and in Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch (1980), a sci-fi futuristic fable about celebrity, reality TV and corruption, starring Romy Schneider and Harvey Keitel.

With John Retallack’s Actors Touring Company in the 80s, he was a lurching, apoplectic Sir John Brute in John Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife, possessing, said Jonathan Keates in the Guardian, “a weirdly philosophical elegance”; a civilised Alonso, expertly discharging some of the best speeches in The Tempest; and a quick-change virtuosic king, peasant, soldier and tsar in Alfred Jarry’s 1896 surrealist satire Ubu Roi in the Cyril Connolly translation.

Back at the RSC in 1989, he was the courtly official Egeus in white spats (Helena wore Doc Martens) in an outstanding production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by John Caird, and both the Ghost and First Player in Mark Rylance’s pyjama-clad Hamlet directed by Ron Daniels. In 1994 he took over (from Peter Cellier) as Pinchard in Peter Hall’s delightful production of Feydeau’s Le Dindon, retitled in translation An Absolute Turkey, which it wasn’t.

He rejoined Rylance in that actor/director’s opening season in 1997 at the new Shakespeare’s Globe. He was King Charles VI of France in Henry V and Tutor to Tim in Thomas Middleton’s riotous Jacobean city comedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Many years later, in 2021, his son Alfred Enoch (Dean Thomas in the Harry Potter movies), would play on the same stage as a fired-up Romeo.

Russell is survived by his second wife, Etheline (nee Lewis), a doctor, whom he married in 1984, and their son, Alfred, and by his children, Vanessa, Laetitia and Robert, from his marriage to Balbina, which ended in divorce, and four grandchildren, James, Elise, Amy and Ayo.

 William Russell Enoch, actor, born 19 November 1924; died 3 June 2024.

-- I'm a bit annoyed there's no mention of the fact that William continued to play Ian Chesterton for Big Finish.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

A new report has found that climate lawsuits being filed against companies are on the rise all over the world, and most of them have been successful.

The report by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) — Global trends in climate change litigation: 2024 snapshot — said that roughly 230 climate cases have been brought against trade associations and corporations since 2015, more than two-thirds of which have been filed since 2020.

“Climate litigation… has become an undeniably significant trend in how stakeholders are seeking to advance climate action and accountability,” said Andy Raine, the United Nations Environment Programme’s deputy director of law division, as The Guardian reported.

One of the fastest growing types of litigation concerns “climate washing.” According to the report, 47 of these lawsuits were filed against governments and companies last year.

The report stated that there had been “more than 140 such cases filed to date on climate washing, making this one of the most rapidly expanding areas of litigation,” a press release from LSE said.

Of the almost 140 climate-washing cases between 2016 and 2023, 77 had reached official decisions, with 54 being found in favor of the claimant.

Most climate cases that have been filed in the past have been against governments. In the United States, 15 percent of climate cases filed in 2023 were against companies, while 40 percent of cases in the rest of the world involved companies.

In 2023, more than 30 “polluter pays” lawsuits filed worldwide sought to hold corporations accountable for climate harms allegedly stemming from their production of greenhouse gas emissions.

Six “turning off the taps” lawsuits challenging the funding of activities and projects not in line with climate action were identified in the report.

The report’s analysis was based on more than 2,600 climate cases compiled by Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change. Approximately 70 percent of these lawsuits have been filed since the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015, with 233 having been filed in 2023.

Climate lawsuits have been brought in 55 total countries, with cases having been filed in Portugal and Panama for the first time.

The authors of the study confirmed that climate litigation has been increasing in the Global South, noting that “over 200 climate cases from these countries are recorded in the Global database, comprising around 8% of all cases.”

The U.S. had the most climate litigation cases filed last year with 129. The United Kingdom had the second highest number with 24, followed by Brazil with 10, Germany with seven and Australia with six.

The U.S. also had the most documented climate cases with a total of 1,745. Australia has had 132 overall, with just six filed in 2023.

[frank-olivier]

Semiconductors: The Driving Force Behind Technological Advancements

The semiconductor industry is a crucial part of our modern society, powering everything from smartphones to supercomputers. The industry is a complex web of global interests, with multiple players vying for dominance.

Taiwan has long been the dominant player in the semiconductor industry, with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) accounting for 54% of the market in 2020. TSMC's dominance is due in part to the company's expertise in semiconductor manufacturing, as well as its strategic location in Taiwan. Taiwan's proximity to China and its well-developed infrastructure make it an ideal location for semiconductor manufacturing.

However, Taiwan's dominance also brings challenges. The company faces strong competition from other semiconductor manufacturers, including those from China and South Korea. In addition, Taiwan's semiconductor industry is heavily dependent on imports, which can make it vulnerable to supply chain disruptions.

China is rapidly expanding its presence in the semiconductor industry, with the government investing heavily in research and development (R&D) and manufacturing. China's semiconductor industry is led by companies such as SMIC and Tsinghua Unigroup, which are rapidly expanding their capacity. However, China's industry still lags behind Taiwan's in terms of expertise and capacity.

South Korea is another major player in the semiconductor industry, with companies like Samsung and SK Hynix owning a significant market share. South Korea's semiconductor industry is known for its expertise in memory chips such as DRAM and NAND flash. However, the industry is heavily dependent on imports, which can make it vulnerable to supply chain disruptions.

The semiconductor industry is experiencing significant trends, including the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), and the increasing demand for 5G technology. These trends are driving semiconductor demand, which is expected to continue to grow in the coming years.

However, the industry also faces major challenges, including a shortage of skilled workers, the increasing complexity of semiconductor manufacturing and the need for more sustainable and environmentally friendly manufacturing processes.

To overcome the challenges facing the industry, it is essential to invest in research and development, increase the availability of skilled workers and develop more sustainable and environmentally friendly manufacturing processes. By working together, governments, companies and individuals can ensure that the semiconductor industry remains competitive and sustainable, and continues to drive innovation and economic growth in the years to come.

Chip War, the Race for Semiconductor Supremacy (2023) (TaiwanPlus Docs, October 2024)

Dr. Keyu Jin, a tenured professor of economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that many in the West misunderstand China’s economic and political models. She maintains that China became the most successful economic story of our time by shifting from primarily state-owned enterprises to an economy more focused on entrepreneurship and participation in the global economy.

Dr. Keyu Jin: Understanding a Global Superpower - Another Look at the Chinese Economy (Wheeler Institute for Economy, October 2024)

Dr. Keyu Jin: China's Economic Prospects and Global Impact (Global Institute For Tomorrow, July 2024)

The following conversation highlights the complexity and nuance of Xi Jinping's ideology and its relationship to traditional Chinese thought, and emphasizes the importance of understanding the internal dynamics of the Chinese Communist Party and the ongoing debates within the Chinese system.

Dr. Kevin Rudd: On Xi Jinping - How Xi's Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World (Asia Society, October 2024)

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

[charlotte-of-wales]

Happy 51st birthday to Crown Prince Haakon of Norway!

Born on 20 July 1973, Haakon Magnus is the heir apparent to the Norwegian throne as the only son of King Harald V and Queen Sonja.

Haakon is a trained naval officer and, as crown prince, a top military official in the Norwegian Armed Forces. He holds a BA in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MSc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics.

Haakon married Mette-Marit Tjessem Hoiby, on 25 August 2001, at Oslo Cathedral. The couple have two children together: Princess Ingrid Alexandra of Norway (19) and Prince Sverre Magnus (17). Haakon is also the stepfather to Mette-Marit's son, Marius Borg Hoiby.

[scotianostra]

On September 19th 1778, Henry, Lord Brougham, the Scottish Whig statesman and jurist was born in Edinburgh.

Researching this post I came across the pronunciation for Brougham" it says it is generally today pronounced as the monosyllabic "broom", although if Lord Byron has it right, its northern, Scottish root should be the two-syllable "brew-am", itself a softening of the older "brooch-ham" or "bruff-ham", in turn a corruption of the ancient Saxon estate of Burgham in Westmoreland). I must say that us in Edinburgh, at least wityh the people I know have always pronounced it as "Bro-ham", there are two streets baring the name a mere minute or two from my flat, and I have frequented the are for over two decades. Anyway that's my pronunciation lesson over, on to the man himself.

Born to a family of ancient but otherwise unremarkable English gentryfrom Cumberland. His father, Henry Brougham Sr, whom Henry Jr. later derided as a "weak man", had no profession, but simply taken residence in Edinburgh. After being educated in the High School of the city, Henry Brougham enrolled at the University of Edinburgh. Brougham demonstrated an early penchant for science - a paper on optics was published in the Transactions of the Royal Society still within his first year, at the tender age of 17. After a couple of more papers, Brougham was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in March 1803. But Brougham lay his scientific interests aside, and embarked on a legal career in 1800, being called to the Scotch bar 1802.

To support himself during his legal studies, Brougham set about writing. His first treatise, on colonial economic policy started him off. He hoped to set himself up as an expert on colonial trade issues. It exhibited the imprint of the Scottish school, but not all the way. Despite his well-directed attack on the slave trade and mercantilism, Brougham defended the retention of the colonies, seeing them consistent with the principles of free trade and useful for excess population and the maintenance of industrial profits. To me this doesnt really tally with being anti-slavery, but these were different times....

Brougham's real breakthrough was in founding, together with Edinburgh friends Sydney Smith, Francis Horner and Francis Jeffrey, The Edinburgh Review, in 1802. All of whom have appeared in previous posts.

Brougham contributed numerous articles to the Review and helped set it on its path as the prominent Whig quarterly (in contrast to its Tory rival Quarterly Review). In the early years, Brougham wrote most of the economics articles of the Edinburgh Review, particularly those relating to colonial policy, until John Ramsay McCulloch joined the Review in 1818. Beyond economics, Brougham was indefatigable contributor on science and literature. Brougham authored a famously humiliating critique of the young Lord Byron's poetry in the 1808 Review, to which Byron replied with his biting English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Brougham's later vicious critique of another romantic poet, John Keats, is said to have killed him.

Brougham carried on his legal career through the early years of the Review. But finding Scotland confining,he eventually moved to London, where he enrolled at Lincoln's Inn in 1807 and was called to the English bar. One of Brougham's early English cases was the celebrated petition of British merchants in the House of Commons in early 1808 against the Orders in Council, blockading trade with French ports.

Brougham's legal reputation and the success of the Edinburgh Review gave Brougham entry into the political world. He gravitated quickly into the circle called the Foxite Whigs,. With their help, Henry was elected a Whig member of parliament in 1810, he participated in the Bullionist debate in 1811 and at the next election he ran for a competitive seat in Liverpool in 1812, but lost.

Brougham returned to parliament again in 1816, and would hold a series of seats, continuously remaining in parliament until 1830. He made a reputation for himself as a Whig leader in the House of Commons, a powerful orator and ardent promoter of laissez-faire, anti-slavery, tort and educational reform But to the general English public, Brougham was perhaps best known as the defender of Queen Caroline against charges of adultery in 1820.

Brougham was a comrade and popularizer of the London classical economists, and was a founder of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) in 1825 and University College London in 1828, so a busy man!

In 1830, Brougham was brought into Earl Grey's Whig cabinet as Lord Chancellor (effectively, minister of justice), and raised to a peerage in the process as the first "Baron Brougham and Vaux". Brougham moved his ground of operations from Commons to Lords. He was a a leading figure behind the Parliamentary Reform bill of 1832, the abolition of slavery act of 1833 and the expansion of the jurisdiction of Old Bailey. He remained Chancellor under Viscount Melbourne's government in 1834.

Away from politics he was the designer of a four-wheeled, horse-drawn style carriage that bears his name. Brougham holds the House of Commons record for non-stop speaking at six hours!

As I mentioned earlier, Brougham Street and Brougham Place in Edinburgh are named in his memory.

[bob425608]

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[mariacallous]

We live today amid the dregs of time. A sense of doom is shared on all sides of the political spectrum. Democratic politics in the West has turned into a clash between two extinction rebellions and two nostalgias: an extinction rebellion of climate activists who are terrified that if we don’t radically upend our way of life, we shall destroy life on Earth, and an extinction rebellion of the “great replacement” right, which lives in fear that if something doesn’t change, it is the end of our way of life. The right is nostalgic for the past. The left is nostalgic for the vanished future. Radically different in their goals, they share one common vantage point: an apocalyptic imagination.

It is in the context of this creeping eschatological position that one can assess the originality and importance of Jonathan White’s In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea. White, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, offers an original reading of the current crisis of democracy by defining it as a temporal regime and arguing that an “open future,” one that is not predetermined but is shaped by human agency, is a precondition for the successful functioning of democratic regimes. In his view, “When the future seems to be closing in, institutions organized around the idea of persistent disagreement and changing opinion start to look out of place.”

By contrast, the reigning characteristic of our “age of emergency” is that there is no room for error. If certain decisions are not taken today, it no longer matters whether they will be taken up tomorrow. It will be too late.

White’s argument is that, just as humans die in the absence of air to breathe, democracy can die from the inability to dream collectively. What makes democracy work is a productive tension between a near future and a distant and utopian future. The near future is the one we can plan for—the one that politicians promise to voters and remains at the center of democratic accountability. What the government did yesterday and what the parties pledge for tomorrow will always be the bread and butter of electoral politics.

White, however, is correct to insist that the distant and utopian futures, ones radically different from today’s reality, are also constitutive for democratic regimes. Distant futures are the basis for political hope today and the motivation for deferring the gratification of immediate political goals. Take the future out of democratic politics and elections turn into civil wars with ballots or a never-ending crisis management.

But today our relationship to the future is marked by collective distrust. The resulting imbalance between democracy as a project and democracy as a projection of futures—whether economic, demographic, or technological—is at the center of the West’s current crisis. Uncertainty about the future, and the resulting hope that tomorrow can be radically different from today, are the hallmarks of the democratic idea. The question is whether uncertainty is still possible in our current age of emergency.

White sees the future as a political idea that has gone through different historical iterations, not all of which have productive relationships to democracy.

His consideration of rational calculation is a useful case study. White makes clear the opportunities, and far greater risks, to assuming that the future can be mastered by experts who have mastered the scientific method and the use of statistical data. This faith was on the ascent in the early 20th century, White explains, when new forms of accounting inspired confidence in the power of business to project future earnings. The market forecaster was the new sage, and technocracy as a collective tool to solve the ills of man was infectious. Planning would become a new mantra and a way that ideologies of very different stripes could make sense of what came next.

But how does this impulse to rationally plan the future square with the open-mindedness of democracy and its inherent uncertainty principle? It would seem to be in contradiction. As White writes, “To assume the stability of people’s preferences is to discount the worth of a political process that seeks to change them.” One definition of democracy, offered by the political scientist Adam Przeworski, is a system in which elections cannot be changed ex post or predicted ex ante. Some things have to be left open to chance if a democracy is to be worthy of the name.

It is here that White’s stress on the utility of aspirational futures becomes a separate and essential dimension. Were everything to be left to expert planning or price signaling, the world of imagination would rapidly become impoverished. We would be taking our social cues from rational planners and prognosticators. Although White doesn’t mention him, the late sociologist Erik Olin Wright’s decadeslong research program on “real utopias” is instructive. Wright never lost sight of conceiving in bold yet imaginable terms a world of tomorrow that was also rooted in today’s pragmatic realities, squaring the circle of a wishful long game and the acceptance of the here and now.

In arguing for the critical importance of the future for the success of the democratic project, White is highly persuasive. But in trying to answer how the future could be reimagined, his analysis is less convincing. Out of fear of alienating, it seems, a progressive constituency, he stands guilty of diluting his most salient points while preaching the return of an old ideological politics. When trying to suggest the way out of the current age of emergencies, White starts to sound like a nostalgic leftist. His plea for the return of the revolutionary party strongly committed to a future project sounds noble but is ultimately unrealistic, as the absence of any suggestions for how to create this collective ideological project in his book seems to attest. In recent decades, the spontaneous resurrection of ideological politics has become the left’s version of alchemy.

White’s most important suggestion is also the least inspirational. In his view, the only way to escape the trap of a politics of emergency is to confront head-on the apocalyptic appeal of both the climate left and the great replacement right. Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the first to assert that the discourse of crisis is the native language of any genuine democracy. Democratic politics, he claimed, need drama. “As the election approaches,” Tocqueville observed in his classic travelogue, Democracy in America, “intrigue becomes more active and agitation lively and more widespread. The entire nation falls into a feverish state. … As soon as fortune has pronounced … everything becomes calm, and the river, one moment overflowed, returns peacefully to its bed.”

Democracy thus operates by framing the normal as catastrophic, while promising that all crises are surmountable, thus framing catastrophe as normal. Democratic politics functions as a nationwide therapy session where voters are confronted with their worst nightmares—a new war, demographic collapse, economic crisis, environmental horror—but are convinced they have the power to avert the devastation. In other words, democratic politics is impossible without a persistent oscillation between excessive overdramatization and trivialization of the problems we face. Elections lose their cogency when they fail to convince us that we’re confronting an unprecedented crisis and that we have it in our power to avert it.

It is at this point that the climate left ceases to be a friend of democracy—not because it is wrong in its judgment of the existential threat of global warming, but because its apocalyptic discourse prevents democracy from finding its necessary solutions. As White argues convincingly, “The sense of finality that fills today’s world is central to its volatility.”

In this context, it is worth comparing the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s to the extinction rebellion of today. It is impossible to overstate the apocalyptic impact of the atomic bomb. For a world emerging from the ashes of World War II, the bomb was the end of the world imagined. But in political terms, preventing nuclear disaster was far easier than preventing climate disaster. To prevent nuclear disaster, it was enough for Soviet and American leaders to refrain from using the ultimate weapon. There was no time dimension. The success was to persuade the leaders of the two superpowers of what not to do. In a nuclear disaster, almost all of humanity will die simultaneously.

It is not the same with a climate disaster. It will take a longer time. At least initially, there will be winners and losers. And success will be measured not by telling leaders what not to do, but by convincing them to do certain things without necessarily a consensus around what might work. So, while the threat of nuclear disaster succeeded in mobilizing a global response that was a political success, the risk is that the climate emergency can result in fatalism and demobilization.

This banalization of catastrophe is the only way to make democracy work. Ultimately, this is also White’s important and necessary conclusion, one that he is shy to endorse. As the literary critic Frank Kermode argued, “Crisis is a way of thinking about one’s moment, and not inherent in the moment itself.” Our apocalyptic views of crisis and catastrophe are ways of making sense of the world, of rendering it intelligible.

White diagnoses today’s actually existing system of Western democracy as one exhausted of political imagination. The diagnosis is appropriate, but we should look closer to the cultural factors that have caused this exhaustion.

Reinhart Koselleck, the German intellectual historian, is helpful here in that he always insisted that modernity is defined in the dialectic between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation.” But recently, something radical has again happened to both dimensions of our existence. Humankind’s recent collective migration into virtual reality redefines how we understand experience. Do we have war experience if we spent countless hours playing war games on our computer or if we religiously followed reports of ongoing wars happening elsewhere?

At the same time, the expectations about our own mortality are undergoing dramatic transformations. Could it be that we have reached the moment when nations start to look mortal while individuals are reluctant to take their own mortality for granted? It might be safe to argue that the changing demography of Western societies, their aging and shrinking, is one of the factors of the exhaustion of political imagination. Does an often childless younger generation view the future the same way that previous generations focused on the life of their children did? Is the diminishment of the nation-state in most parts of the West not at least partially responsible for the decline of the future? Is collective imagination, particularly a collective demographic imagination, in elective affinity with the nation-state?

And is the impotence of our collective imagination not related to the fact that, for some, particularly those resident in Silicon Valley, immortality is a project to be achieved in the very near future? Some informed observers believe the person who will live for 200 years has already been born. In this perversely paradoxical sense, anxiety about the apocalypse is fueled by our hope to cancel it forever. In our secular world, apocalypse is simply our own death.

In the same way that the invention of the modern individual was a precondition for the emergence of democracy in modern times, it is the hope of individual immortality that marks the end of collective dreams. Many would agree with Woody Allen when he explained, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”

The vanishing future is probably the most critical element for the current crisis of democracy. But it can’t be overcome by simply advocating for more democracy. And while White may not offer the needed answers, he is doing something even more important, and long overdue, by asking the right questions.

[dagwolf]

October 19, an Israeli Parliament ethics committee suspended Knesset member Ofer Cassif for 45 days after he warned that an “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces is underway. Cassif is an ex-professor in political science and philosophy with a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. He has represented the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash-Ta’al) coalition in the Knesset since 2019.

...Cassif describes how former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon set the stage for deteriorating conditions in Gaza after pushing through the 2004 disengagement plan. He also details the genocidal implications of Jewish supremacist Bezalel Smotrich’s “subjugation plan” and the ways the plan is being implemented in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack.