Hello, Floodly friends! Link roundups are back after a delightfully relaxing holiday. We’ve been spared from the worst of the fires and smoke haze up here in sunny Brisbane, but sending lots of love and solidarity to those worse affected than us. I did get to be part of a very nice mutual aid effort run by a friend of a friend who visited Brisbane from Canberra and collected 700+ P2 masks to bring back (Canberra, apocalyptically enough, has run out of masks) so that was nice, and made me feel 0.0001% less helpless.
Speaking of feeling less helpless, we kicked off the new decade here at Flood Media with a piece by Liam Flenady on the bushfires and the left’s response to the climate crisis more broadly. Go and read it if you haven’t already - it’s a clearheaded piece of strategic thinking that avoids both false hope and overdone existential despair. “Let’s make new year’s resolutions to cut out of our diet anything incompatible with strategically building our power,” writes Flenady, “[that is], shaming people for their consumption habits, engaging in endless social media culture wars, obsequiousness to the ALP, etc. The fires burnt those tactics - there’s only ashes there now.”
With the, erm, unfortunate result in the UK election, I would like to formally declare that friendship is ENDED with UK politics, and now US politics is my best friend. To that end, I gave my partner a Bernie 2020 shirt for Christmas and will soon be following the run-up to the Iowa caucus with the near-obsessive interest that brought me close to a nervous breakdown in early December 2019. Anyway! Here’s a good piece from Bhaskar Sunkara on Bernie’s “class-struggle social democracy”, and why it still presents the possibility for change, despite not following the classic model for socialist advances.
“Quite simply, despite the promising revival of socialist ideas, despite the recent growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, despite the popularity of left-wing leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we’re in an almost unprecedented state of weakness. But we can’t just wait for street movements to appear out of nowhere. We need to contest elections, to use the opportunity to communicate our message to millions. More than that we need to actually win those elections and “exercise power” today, laying the groundwork for more radical change in the future, while at the same time depriving the Right of strength.”
Some may say that I should have included this in the last link roundup of 2019, and to those people I say: I only discovered it after I was already on holidays. So, a little late, but here anyway is the Outline’s ‘Worst Takes of the 2010s’. Are you still not convinced? There’s a piece in there entitled ‘How the cancer victim at the centre of Breaking Bad justifies my skepticism of Holocaust survivors’. Also, for Chapo listeners, the C L A S S I C Megan McArdle piece on the Grenfell fire is always worth a revisit. Apart from being a source of disgusted laughter, this piece also serves as a good reminder of just how craven and foul the general media class is. Let’s support left-wing independent media in 2020! (Our Patreon is here.)
Continuing with the theme of dissecting the decade that was, but in a slightly more serious way, here’s Pete Davis in Current Affairs with “reflections on life on the Left in the 2010s.” It is, like most Current Affairs content, pretty US-centric, but still does a great job analysing and coalescing the events and general vibes of both the 2000s and the 2010s. As someone who was born in the 1990s (well, 1991), it’s kind of strange to experience the mental shift of seeing the 2000s and 2010s as ‘part of history’ rather than just the very recent past. So far, I have to say, it mostly sucks! But, as Davis points out, there is hope. ““If not now, when?” takes on a deeper meaning in the age of climate catastrophe. And the new generation coming up in the 2010s—Generation Z—felt this urgency the strongest.”
Thanks to Floodcast contributor and all-round good egg Declan for pointing me to this essay, which not only chronicles the fate of the deranged website Verrit, but also talks some very good sense about the pointless liberal obsession with facts, reason, and logic (particularly virulent among journalists).
“If you asked the four odd million Australians (at last count) who don’t believe in man-made climate change why they hold that position, none of them would say “because I am not partial to facts”. They would point to their own set of facts and truths that back up their view. That these facts and truths would be called bullshit by NASA et al is not the point. In fact, it’s very likely that these people think that NASA and the Bureau of Meteorology and the UN are in the business of peddling lies and should be ignored at all costs. ”
If you would like to read about how to actually talk to people who disagree with you, might I recommend my piece on the topic, in the Spring 2019 issue of Overland.
That’s all for this week! We are looking forward to bringing you lots of phresh new content this year, including an exciting new podcast series that will be launching shortly. Stay tuned!