Though we might find it hard to imagine, we cannot now rule it out: the possibility of systemic collapse in the United States. The degradation of federal government by Donald Trump and Elon Musk could trigger a series of converging and compounding crises, leading to social, financial and industrial failure.
The collapse of the neoliberal hegemon! We will have our raw turnips in the dark and we will be happy!
Just because someone fails to believe in God doesn’t mean they’ve not a millennarian eschatology.
I look forward to it as well – a great reset, just not the one they envisaged. Not even sure I’d live through it, but better to die on your feet etc
and industrial failure
Yeah, ‘cos cheap reliable energy leads to that. And isn’t industrial failure what greens _want_ to happen?
Just because someone fails to believe in God doesn’t mean they’ve not a millennarian eschatology.
Do you mean a bucket list?
“Though we might find it hard to imagine,”
That ‘we’ is to cover all of us i.e. everyone except George. It just wouldn’t be true if he used the first person singular because it’s his recurring wet dream.
A series of converging and compounding crises, leading to social, financial and industrial failure.
Spiralling immigration, benefits and net zero will bring those about anyway. The only question is when.
I can understand George’s concern. The prospects of the USA were so much better when it was run by a mad black man who won a Nobel Peace Prize for starting lots of wars and latterly sheltered behind a demented old crook while he systematically wrecked civil society by stirring up racial tensions and creating new humans who had the physical characteristics of the sex that was the opposite of what they truly were. The fact that the State didn’t understand the people it was ruling and failed to insert another puppet for the mad man to continue must have been a horrible trauma for George.
It could be wildfires, a pandemic or a financial crisis. The super-rich will flee to their bunkers – the rest of us will have to fend for ourselves
How does George Monbiot plan on fending for himself? He’d be lucky to become the sex slave of a postapocalypso motorcycle gang that couldn’t find Louis Theroux.
If (or when) another pandemic strikes, which could involve a pathogen more transmissible and even more deadly than Covid-19 (which has so far killed 1.2 million people in the US), it will hit a nation whose defences have been stood down.
Just two more weeks to slow the spread!
Paradoxically, with his trade wars and assault on global standards, Trump could help to desynchronise the system and reintroduce some modularity. But, as he simultaneously rips down circuit breakers, undermines preparedness and treats Earth systems as an enemy to be crushed, the net effect is likely to make human systems more prone to collapse.
Trump stopped funding transgender ballet in Lesotho – here’s how that means EVERYONE YOU LOVE WILL DIE
I think if I was GM I’d be more worried that the US Federal govt doesn’t collapse under the yoke of the Trump/Musk Terror. If they manage to strip out trillions of dollars of spending, and life continues for the average person pretty much as it has, maybe even gets better due to lower taxes and faster economic growth due to lower regulation, then the Left is SOOL.
“Covid-19 (which has so far killed 1.2 million people in the US)”
As if he knows. Indeed, as if anyone knows.
The symptoms, including death, were much the same as those of other respiratory infections, the dreaded “flu-like illnesses”. (I have lately discovered that this modern expression has been adopted because research revealed that many diagnoses of flu are wrong because the patient is not host to an influenza virus. Did you ever!)
Moreover, the tests for the Sars-2 virus itself seem to be pretty poor. Further, deaths were attributed to Covid-19 if those poor tests suggested that the deceased was infected even if it was most unlikely to have been the infection, if it existed, that killed him.
In summary, no fucker knows, not within a factor of – shall we guess? – ten. Or twenty. Or more.
I do get fed up with people stating as “facts” stuff that nobody can possibly know or is ever likely to know.
“It could be wildfires, a pandemic or a financial crisis. ”
Wildfires? Which were mostly caused because rich people moved out to the forest areas and didn’t do the controlled burnings like the poor people did, because they didn’t want to get dirty?
I know we call these people innumerate, but they really have no idea of scale or reality, do they? It’s all just about what’s in the news, and they put it all together. Wildfire new story. Something about Orange Man Bad. x+y.
I am finding the wailing and gnashing of teeth over Trump 2 most invigorating. Even the comments section at The Times is a source of amusement these days, thanks to the legions of bedwetters making ever-more hysterical claims about the imminent end of everything. It’s like a legion of inadequate teenage wankers has taken to the interwebs to moan about their fathers.
Following dearime’s last point, I’m sure I have claimed to have flu at least half a dozen times but am not 100% convinced in retrospect that I have ever had it. I certainly tested positive for covid once and felt pretty grotty for a week but I didn’t lose my sense of taste or have respiratory problems. Who knows?
@Marius: I once had a flu-like illness so bad that I took to my bed for a week and can still remember the year: the summer of ’72. I was young, fit, slim, and it put me on my back. Still, I learnt to do The Times crossword, there was that.
And that’s it. I’ve certainly had nasty colds but the record there was the mother-and-father of a cold that lasted Jan-March 2020. In retrospect it might have been Covid I suppose but I’ll never know.
The most sceptical say: “Covid, if it even exists” and they seem to have a serious point though I am not remotely qualified to judge.
For me one of the big lessons of the whole episode is what backward sciences virology and epidemiology are. I had assumed they might be as advanced as bacteriology. Stupid boy!
“I once had a flu-like illness so bad that I took to my bed for a week and can still remember the year: the summer of ’72. I was young, fit, slim, and it put me on my back.”
That happened to me at about the same time, I was about fourteen. I couldn’t eat for about a week and spent the time in bed, occasionally dry heaving. I’ve had flu type bugs since, but never as bad as that first bout.
“I’m sure I have claimed to have flu at least half a dozen times but am not 100% convinced in retrospect that I have ever had it. ”
I think I had it once, and ironically I caught it in China. I went on holiday there (this was in 2006) and I knew I was coming down with something when I got on the plane home. By the time we landed I was feeling pretty groggy. Somehow I managed to summon the energy and concentration to drive back from the airport. Once home took to my bed, not to rise for about a week. By far the worst I’ve ever felt. I would have been 35 at the time, and pretty fit and healthy too, I was a regular gym goer then. Covid was a case of the sniffles in comparison.
I remember a couple of bad doses of, probably, flu in the 70s when I was in my 20s. A few days in bed and I was pretty much OK. Then nothing similar until one bout in my 50s which laid me low for nearly a month – just felt weak as hell for a long time. I’ve had many colds over the years – snuffles developing into a cough – I’m just recovering from one now. I feel rough for 2 or 3 days and then just have to deal with the snot and expectoration.
As for COVID, got through all the lockdown with nothing & then a few rough days well after. I only knew it was COVID by doing a test.
That was an entertaining read.
A lot of what he calls “collapse” would be both welcome and fun.
I get a picture from his words of the dispossessed rising up to riot and pillage, with normies being unable to stop them due to loss of governmental control. And then I laugh.
Our government forces – our police – exist mostly to guard the skells from retribution by the normies.
Riot against me at a time when the police are not functioning? Cool! I have enough arms to equip and outfit my extended family. In earlier times, I would hesitate to do this, because the police would then come after me. The police generally make life safer for lawbreakers, not for the law-abiding.
And at least 51% of my society – probably much more – will stand with me.
George, you’re not threatening me, you’re teasing me.
I urge you to read Trust the Evidence a blog written by Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan, both at Oxford (sorry, BiS) and the latter Prof of Evidence-based Medicine. They point out that what the media (and researchers with an axe to grind) call “‘flu” is really ILI (Influenza-Like Illness), roughly a third of which are the result of infection by an influenza type of virus, a third rhinovirus (common cold), and a third completely unknown. They’re busy eviscerating the dreadful Covid enquiry and highlighting the lack of investigation into virus safety during the panicdemic.
My wife and I and our kids all had swine flu in 2009(?). That was genuinely bad. Caused me professional issues as I was medically unfit to do my job for a while. My wife, who is a tough, fit cookie, was knocked properly sideways for about a month. Three months later I had some leave and we all went skiing over New Year with friends and family. We were *still* not right: we were in bed at 8pm on New Year’s Eve, wiped out. At that point I was extremely fit with a resting pulse in the mid 40s. Made no odds. I was in shit state. Kids not too bad.
Covid was similar initially, and we had two days of feeling dreadful, but I got hold of some ivermectin from a Middle East hand and, either because it works or coincidentally, we were back on our feet within a couple of hours of taking it. The loss of smell lasted three months mind you.
A friend of my son was staying with us and caught “covid”. Or at least tested positive. No one else felt bad or had a + test.
She didn’t feel ill but did worry because she’d lost her sense of smell. Given that her job was as a sommelier this was a bit concerning.
But in a few days she was okay again.
She’s now the chief wine buyer for a group of up market restaurants.
Monbiot doesn’t understand that the federal government in the US doesn’t run the nation.
If the federal government were to fall, it would just mean the states and the businesses in them are no longer fettered by federal rules. You’d probably see a massive improvement in the economy . . . at least once we got the whole ‘what are we going to use for money’ thing figured out.
Granted, it might destroy *the rest of the world*, but . . .
‘The degradation of federal government by Donald Trump and Elon Musk’
HAH! They are the ANTIDOTE to the degradation that has lasted for decades.
The Covid-19 fiasco was in some ways a replay of the 1976 Swine Flu Fiasco.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” — Mark Twain
Gamecock hasn’t taken a flu vaccine since one made him sick 50 years ago. He never took the Covid vaccine. He was planning to originally, but availability was restricted, and by the time available, too many questions had come up. Government restriction of information convinced him something wasn’t right.