Censorship as First Step to Totalitarianism

Last night I finished reading Thomas Mann's Diaries for the second time. The Nobel Prize winner was considered one of the giants of the first half of the 20th century. This volume covers the years 1918-1921 and 1933-1939. The former is post-WWI and the latter highlights the rise of Hitler and the years leading up to WWII.

There are a number of recurring themes that make an appearance in his diaries. I was surprised at how often he took a med to sleep, and how often he mentions being uneasy and anxious. He continually mentions what he's reading (Tolstoy, Cervantes, Proust, etc.) and many of the names of people he is corresponding with.

His concerns regarding the restrictions on speech and free thought get increasingly highlighted in the late 30s. What's discouraging is seeing many of his observations playing out yet again in our own time. Here is the opening to one of Michael Shellenberger's emails from thesubstack Public News:

A little over a year ago, I participated in a public event in London with Russell Brand and Matt Taibbi. While there, I expressed my bewilderment at the censorship we had uncovered. It wasn’t the first time. When Matt and I testified before Congress in February, I also described being disoriented. After all, growing up progressive in the 1980s and 1990s, free speech was a foundational value, both for radical Leftists like myself at the time and for more moderate liberals. To watch liberal and Leftist Democrats demand censorship right in front of me was jarring, to say the least. I wondered aloud, “What is going on?” And I kept wondering until I found some answers.

I believe that my colleagues and I are now much closer to having a unified field theory of contemporary totalitarianism. We have published hundreds of articles so far on the censorship and other totalitarian tactics, including the weaponization of the FBI and CIA and the lawfare aimed at incarcerating Donald Trump, that we’ve been documenting. If I had to sum it up, I would say that there are at least four core drivers, all of which I described in a conversation I had yesterday with Russell...

--Michael Shellenberger

Are Shellenberger and friends being alarmist? How ironic that Gallup polls show that left-leaning Democrats are the ones most in favor of censoring free speech, while simultaneously declaring that Republicans are the ones determined to destroy democracy. Are the former leaders of the Sixties "Free Speech Movement" now its adversaries?

"Say it ain't so, Joe."

Miscellaneous News Gleanings: Green Elitism, Lithium Mining, EVs, and the War on Lawns

Items of note from various sources the past couple days.

The first is from Michael Shellenberger:

Green Elitism Behind Farmer Crackdowns
What role is the World Economic Forum playing?
 

Farmers in the Netherlands reduced nitrogen pollution by nearly 70% through a voluntary system. But the government says that is not enough and is demanding that they cut pollution by another 50% by 2030.
By the Dutch government’s own estimates, 11,200 farms out of the roughly 35,000 dedicated to dairy and livestock would have to close under its policies; 17,600 farmers would have to reduce livestock; and total livestock would need to be reduced by one-half to one-third. The Dutch government has demanded that animal farming stop entirely in many places.

EdNote: Is there not a global food shortage in the making already? What's the deal here? Is this the beginning of a more widespread trend? How will this impact the price of steak?

Item Two: Lithium shortages coming

Satellite view of salt flats in Bolivia and Argentina
that are rich in Lithium.

Another article I read was about the Lithium shortages that are coming... EVs are dependent on batteries, but Lithium Inflation is up 750%. More than half the world's Lithium comes from So
uth America, but those countries have two things going against Lithium. (1) Leaders who want more of the profits from mining in their countries. (I can't entirely blame them) and (2) indigenous people who are protesting mining altogether, like they do in the U.S. ... "Protect our water" groups. What we have is competing Green objectives colliding.

Here's the story from the Wall Street Journal:

South American setbacks for lithium, a key battery component, worry the electric-vehicle industry.

Lithium is an essential element in EV batteries. Less than 2% of the world's lithium comes from the U.S., though actually 4% is available but we have designated it as off limits. 

* * * 

Item Three: The War on Lawns.

Thursday's NYTimes eNews daily had a story on the war on lawns.

Early in the piece the authors write, "But while the lawn may be a powerful symbol of American postwar prosperity, it’s also an ecological dead zone that’s sucking the nation’s aquifers dry."

OK, so my initial reactions to the story ran like this. First, it seems to me that there's an inherent hatred of suburbia that I've never fully understood. People in Manhattan don't have lawns. So why this assault on yet another aspect of the suburban lifestyle?

It brings to mind the assault on SUVs twenty years ago. Well guess what? SUVs are useful for taking eight kids to a soccer game. They save gas because you don't have to take three vehicles. And when you have a hobby farm, pickups and SUVs are quite useful for conveying hay or feed.

Until I read this NYTimes piece (it looks like an opinion presented as news) I never knew lawns were a "powerful symbol" of anything. Then again, when things get cast in a political light, everything tends to be turned into symbols of one kind or another.

And when you look at a map of the U.S. from above, what percentage of the U.S. is covered with lawns? It has to be less than 5%. Most of the country is mountains, forests, plains and lakes. Can this small slice of American landscape really suck the entire North American aquifers into an ecological dead zone? 

I'm skeptical. 

* * * 

A Few Notes from Michael Shellenberger's San Fransicko

This past six months or so I have been researching the topic of homelessness ever since I read about the 2007 St. Louis County initiative called End Homelessness In Ten (EHIT). The EHIT story caught my attention mostly because by 2020 homelessness in the region not only continues but seems to have doubled.

It would be easy to make a barbed remark here about politicians creating slogans for programs. MAGA and Build Back Better aren't the first such declarations. In Duluth the population has been in the 86,000-87,000 range for the 35 years I have lived here, but because of the the need to expand our tax base the former mayor Don Ness initiated a 90/20 goal. That would be a population of 90,000 by 2020. 

It was a worthy objective, and hopefully the effort produced a few insights as to where the obstacles lay.

* * * 

In order to gain a better understanding of homelessness I created a Google Alert on the topic which delivers a daily feed of news stories about this issue. This is how I became aware of Michael Shellenberger's San Fran-sicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. 

Shellenberger is not immune to controversy. His book Apocalypse Never created something of an upheaval because he had been for two decades a super-advocate for environmental action. When he began running into young people who were planning to not have families because of their belief in an environmental apocalypse, he realized that environmentalists had been striing the "end of the world chord" a little too hard. At first, they felt they needed to make enough noise to create awareness. Instead, they created a fear vibe that permeated a generation. Panic is not rational and difficult to reason with. 

That was his last book. His latest is about California. Here are a few notes.

Between 2008 and 2019, 18,000 companies including Toyota, Charles Schwab, and Hewlett Packard, fled California due to a constellation of problems sometimes summarized as “poor business climate." California has the highest income tax, highest gasoline tax, and higher sales tax in United States, spends significantly more than other states on homelessness, and yet has worse outcomes.

California has had its share of troubles for decades, he notes, but things have grown exponentially worse in the past ten years.

I was confused. So I have been a progressive in this Democrat all of my adult life, I find myself asking a question that sounded rather conservative. What were we getting for our big high taxes? And why after 20 years of voting for ballot initiatives promising to address drug addiction, mental illness, and homelessness, had all three gotten worse? Why had progressive Democratic elected officials stopped enforcing many laws against certain groups of people, from people suffering mental illness and drug addiction in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle, to heavily armed and mostly white anarchists in Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis?

Shellenberger says he wrote San Fransicko because he didn’t have the answers to those questions and he felt he needed them. I identified with that feeling because it's what drove me to read hundreds of pages of think tank reports on this issue so as to organize my own thinking. My aim is to apply what I learn to our community, just as Shellenberger's intent is to get clarity about his city.

From 2005 to 2020, San Francisco experienced an astonishing 95% increase in unsheltered homelessness has the number of permanent supportive housing units offered by the city rose from 6487 to 10,051.

Today San Francisco has the greatest quantity of permanent supportive housing units per capita of any major city in the United States. It has 11 permanent supportive housing units per thousand people which is nearly 3 times as much as New York City and Chicago and over six times as much as Miami-Dade County. All of that and yet the sheltered homeless population of New York City, Chicago and Miami fell 11, 10 and 50% respectively between 2005 and 2020 whereas San Francisco’s rose 95%. Why was that?

* * *

Correcting Another Narrative

One of the canards that people have repeated so often that it's accepted as truth is that Ronald Reagan was responsible for the closing of mental institutions. Shellenberger, leaving no stone unturned, digs into this a little further unearth's this.

While it's true that as California’s governor Reagan oversaw the closure of mental hospitals, he didn’t start the de-institutionalization. It began nationally in the 1930s, mostly to save money. The closure of California’s mental hospitals began in earnest in the 1950s, more than a decade before Reagan became governor. The emptying of state mental hospitals continued at the same rate between 1959 and 1969. By the time Reagan took office in 1967 nearly half the patients in California state mental hospitals had already been released.

As for the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, it was a creation of civil libertarians, mental health professionals, and anti-psychiatry activists. Sponsored by two Democrats, it passed by a 77-1 vote. It would’ve passed even had Reagan vetoed it. And while Reagan, as president, cut over 300,000 workers from Social Security insurance and Social Security disability insurance, he reversed course a year and a half later. By the end of his presidency nearly 200,000 won back their benefits.  

In reality it was a Democrat who got the de-institutionalization of psychiatric hospitals rolling. President John F Kennedy proposed successfully proposed and successfully advocated a crucial 1963 reform that required the federal government to fund community mental health centers but leave it to the states to fund these mental hospitals. 

In 1963, JFK argued that medical advances would enable "most of the mentally ill to be successfully and quickly treated in their own communities and return to a usual place in society." 

Optimism may be good at the beginning, but when the problems worsen, it seems new approaches need to be considered. 

Shellenberger has an issue with the abundance of human poop on the sidewalks and the acceptance of open air addiction communities. Most of us have images in our heads of Amsterdam's Needle Park. Shellenberger flew there to see it for himself and discovered that it has all been cleaned up. The outcomes were troublesome and unhealthy. Amsterdam solved their problem by having the police and social workers working together to help individuals get off the junk and on to a new kind of life. 

This is not what's been happening in California. 

More can be said, but our research has only just begun. 

Related Link

The Mismanagement of Man (Review of San Fransicko)