The Mother’s Embrace

Sometimes, I dream. Sometimes, when they come to me with their clippers, I stir and I dream. Recollection and familiarity filtered through the song of slumber. I rarely remember my dreams, but my dreams always remember me.

I dream of a sunny afternoon. Past seasons’ saplings play host to yellowhammers and finches and sparrows. The carefully dug brook twists amongst the mossy mounds, leaving pools of water in its wake. I dream of my foot slipping along the wet dirt to plunge into such a pool. That the water’s still cold from last spring chill. I dream that I tend to a fresh new sprout, with its first leaves reaching for the warm sunshine.

I dream of the season’s first nip. I dream of a flutter of wings that brush against the hairs on my arm. In the dream, I do not notice them. Not until a mellow burn sneaks into my flesh, and I hold back the instinct of swatting at it.

“Reinar!”, I hiss over to my right.

“What – no!”, I hear hissing back at me from beyond the curtain of last season’s planted elms.

“Get over here!”

I dream of the soft squelching that his feet make against the wet moss and undergrowth as he makes his way over. I dream that I can feel him squatting down beside me, to hover over my shoulder.

“What, Jonas?!”, he snaps at me in a hushed tone.

“Look…”

I lift my arm to the light. Just in time for the bug to fill with a brilliant red.

“Huh”, I hear Reinar’s irritation deflate as he spots the mosquito. “That’s early.”

“First of the season.”

“Good sign”, he muses as the insect has its fill and flits away into the afternoon.

“Earlier and earlier each year. In a few weeks, we’ll be more rash than hide.”

“Oh joy”, Reinar mutters, but lingers by my side.

“I’ll scratch yours if you’ll scratch mine…”, I tease and send him a side-long grin.

He flushes. I can tell even through his sun-rubbed skin. I smile, in my dream, because I love making him blush. It’s still easy to. At first, he shifts uncomfortably in his squat. Until the embarrassment catches up to him, and turns to ire.

“For Mother’s mercy, Jonas!”

“What?”

“Is that what you called me over for? To taunt me?”

“Would I do that?”, I sneer and wink at him.

Sometimes, I dream that he pushes me over. That I slide down the mound and crash into the marshy pools. We laugh. I splash water at him. We’re happy. Sometimes, I dream that he is interrupted.

“Is it sickly?”, a groaning voice creaks from behind us. Reinar’s flush evaporates. We stumble, slip off the balls of our feet, and turn around. Because behind us looms our overseer. With her crown of brambles intermingled with her coarse hair. Her slanted eyes staring nowhere and everywhere. The left side of her throat and cheek is covered with a graft of bark. Her mouth is open just enough for me to see her row of jagged fangs, like deformed rose thorns. And when she speaks, she barely moves her thin lips. Her voice grinds forth from her throat like the wind rubbing boughs together in a coming storm.

“Gnestra!”, Reinar erupts and scrambles to his feet. She isn’t tall, but even when Reinar stands up, her presence lords over him.

“Yes arborist”, the askefroa hisses and stays still. The only thing of hers that moves are her left-hand fingers, grinding away at an age-old chestnut. “Is it sickly? Is it unwell?”

“What is, oh Gnestra?”, Reinar prostrates before our overseer, our tree whisperer. Sometimes I dream that I try to follow suit. Sometimes, I just stand and watch and fear.

“Your ward, of course”, the askefroa rasps. “Your responsibility. Your sprig. Is it sickly?”

“No, oh Gnestra”, I answer back. “It is growing well.”

“Then why… oh why… does it demand two arborists to tend to it?”

Reinar looks at me. He’s afraid. He’s frustrated. Rarely, he’s hateful. But every time he turns away and darts back past the curtain of saplings. Back to his own ward. It is a season of alders. And mine is growing well. I am proud of it. I am proud of my work. But sometimes I dream that I make it sickly, just so that Reinar and I can work together to make it better.

The askefroa stares at me. She stares at my young alder. She sees all, and her eyes are as black as resin stained with old blood. I dream that I wait for punishment. That I wait for her judgement. A heavy weight that hangs from around my neck, on the inside of my garments, burns against my skin at her baleful stare.

“Then carry on, arborist”, she simply states. “Carry on with your devoir.”

I bow. She waits until I turn back to my ward. And then she’s gone. Sometimes I dream that I feel the moss under my feet shift as she passes by. Sometimes, I dream that she filters away between the trees, the young and the infant, and touches each branch and stem like one would their child. I dream that she sings. Sometimes I dream that she sings with her dead voice, that fearful hiss and gnarl. Sometimes, she sings the song of my sleep. A song that isn’t hers. Not really. Sometimes, her song dims my dreams. Sometimes, I fall into that song, without hope or effort to ever dream again.

Sometimes, I dream that it is dark. I’m laying in my cot. The ceiling above me rises high. It was painted, once. It is hard to see with what. Ivy and hops clamber up the walls, and creep along the beams. I lay there, and imagine what the ceiling once showed. I imagine a master’s dinner for his apostles. I imagine sacrifice. I imagine hope. I dream that I am in my cot and paint the ceiling over and over again. I lay in the darkness, imagining, and hold my hand tight around my talisman.

“What is that?”, Reinar whispers through the darkness from the next cot over.

“What?”, I defensively answer, and pull my blanket up to my chin to hide it.

“The thing in your hand?”, he pushes.

Sometimes, I dream that I lie. That I say that there is nothing in my hand. I release my talisman, and instead reach over the gulf between cots to take his hand. Reinar doesn’t push any more. We lay in the darkness, hands clutched, and do not talk about it again.

Sometimes, I relent, and I show him.

I can hear him stiffen and swallow a terrified gasp. I feel shame rise to the tip of my ears. And I quickly hide it away again.

“A cross?!”, he nearly chokes in the darkness.

We hold our breath in fear that someone heard him. But no one else stirs from their rest.

“Are you mad?!”, Reinar hisses at me.

“Do you know what they’ll do if they catch you with it?”

“You can’t have that!”

“Hide it!”

“Throw it away!”

“Bury it!”

“Destroy it!”

It doesn’t matter what I answer. Reinar says the same things. I see his eyes, in the darkness. Wide. The whites showing around his blue irises. Bulging with panic. I am tempted to do as he says. But I can’t bring myself to. I tell myself, and him, that he is overreacting. That the Circle won’t care. That Gnestra won’t care. But I do not convince him. And I do not convince myself. I keep the steel cross hidden away. Under my blanket. In my hand. Beneath my garment.

Our whispered arguments falter. Silence reigns the halls again. I stop imagining the many ways the ceiling was once painted. I turn my back to Reinar. We stay silent, and sleep with the gulf unbridged between our cots. I clutch at my cross, and scratch at the mosquito bite, to numb myself to the silence.

I dream when they come to me with their shears and pincers. I dream of the morning congregation. Most times, we take our morning gatherings in the courtyard of the complex. But not this time. We are below ground. The air is cold and damp. High above our heads, the arched ceiling is broken. The walls are polished clean, to reflect as much light as possible down onto the atrium floor. The hall is dotted with strangely arched and knotted trees. I cannot make out what kind. The loam is soft beneath my naked feet. Most times, the overseers, the whisperers, or the Mother’s Maid do not preach. They hum in unison, channelling the Mother’s song for us arborists to hear. The song is never the same, but always familiar. Like something you once heard before your memories could form. Organic and endlessly shifting.

The whisperers pass among us arborists, and offer us Mother’s Milk. Meant to represent her sap and blood. The bowls are not carved, but grown.

At my side stands Reinar. I cast him a thin smile of reconciliation. He sees it. I know he does. But he does not return it. His jaw is clenched. He is still angry. Still afraid for me. It pains me, but yet, I am happy. He cares. And I promise myself to talk to him later.

I dream that Gnestra interrupts my attempts to catch Reinar’s eye. She strides up to me with a bowl and lifts it up for me to sip. I bend my head and drink. The milk is bitter this morning. More bitter than it usually is. But I think little of it. The kitchen’s goat is old.

The humming ceases. The whisperers line the atrium walls. And the Mother’s Maid steps up onto the heavy roots at the end of the hall. Roots as thick as trees themselves, roots that have broken through the end wall and wind their way through the soil. By standing on top of them, the Mother’s Maid is elevated enough to be seen from the back rows of arborists. She wears simple robes, the colour of pale linen, stained brown and green from garden work. Her wide, amber eyes scan our faces. She looks stoic. And sad. But calm and determined.

“The Mother loves you”, she begins. Her voice carries effortlessly across the massive atrium. It isn’t coarse like Gnestra’s. It is heavy, like a summer storm shower. Weighted. Rich. And she speaks to each of us gathered just as naturally as if it were a personal audience. “All of you. All of us. Despite what… we have done to her in the past. Despite our negligence, our apathy, our forgetfulness… or our crimes.”

Many of my peers shift uncomfortably by the mention. Reinar stiffens. And shame makes the cross hanging from my neck all the heavier. The hall is absolutely silent for a beat.

“Though some more than others, we all had a part in the Cataclysm”, the Mother’s Maid continues. Her willowy mane flits and stirs even down here where barely a breeze reaches. “Our Mother was vibrant and healthy once. And we, her children, had a duty to tend to her just as she tended to us. We failed that duty. Some, many, rejected her love. Her health turned to sickness. To frailty. And eventually, collapse. And as she collapsed around us, she could no longer protect us against the hollow heart of the world.”

“It is our duty as wayward children, more so than ever, to tend to our Mother now that she is ailing. It is our duty to give everything to nurse her back from death’s door. Not just because of a sullied conscience. Not just because we failed her once. But because her death would spell the doom of everything. And she is-… I am, ever so proud of each and every one of you for dedicating yourselves to her now that she needs us more than ever.”

I shift my eyes along the lines of arborists. We stand before the voice of the Circle of Muorra, the Mother’s Maid herself, and listen to her mournful pride. I spot Gnestra striding toward me between the rows. Her black eyes pinned on me. I glance at Reinar, but he sets his eyes straight ahead and doesn’t acknowledge me. I grow nervous.

Gnestra stops before me. I try to bend down, but my knees and neck are stiff. She holds out her hand to me, but I do not know what she wants. I glance once more to Reinar, and catch him looking away. He’s now the only peer around me that isn’t looking.

My overseer won’t wait for me to understand what she wants. She reaches out for my throat. I try to stagger away, but my feet won’t move. I look down and see grey tendrils straining out of my feet, out from between my toes and from under my nails, that reach down into the loam. Gnestra interrupts my mounting panic by grabbing onto my linen poncho and she pulls me down to her. She snatches the cord around my neck and snaps it off. My cross dangles from her hand in front of my face. I hear a wave of gasps from my neighbours. From everyone except Reinar.

“Which is why it is so important for us to remember the signs of how the rejection of our Mother came to pass”, the Maid continues. “Which is why it is important for us to stay vigilant against the symbols of the past that lead us here. And if they crop up, meet them with dire consequences. Because it is our duty to serve our Mother. And if we cannot prevail to serve with our hearts, we will have to serve with our flesh.”

I dream that Gnestra holds my cross high for all to see. I try to reach out for it. For her. But it is hard. My shoulder is stiff. And as I try to grasp for the steel, the insect bite on my arm itches more than ever. I look down and see a budding shoot pierce the raw bubble of flesh and spread sickly pinkish leaves. I turn to Reinar. He’s looking at me now. Finally. But his tanned hide has gone pale. His eyes sunken with horror. He wears pain and fear on his face, and it hurts me. More than the roots taking hold from under my toenails. More than the shoot breaking my skin to search for light. More than my lungs cracking and ripping. I try to say something nice to him. I try to ask him for help. I try to say that I love him. But as my lips part, my tongue feels rough and coarse and won’t move in my mouth.

I dream of voices. Of arboritsts crying out in shock and fear. Of the Maid soothing the congregation. But the harder I try to hear exactly what she says, I instead hear the song. The tune behind the whisperer’s humming. I see Reinar shy away. His eyes shot with red. I see him cower. I see him run out of the atrium, and I cannot run after him. My feet won’t move. I feel something pop behind my eyes. It hurts, but it is a dull hurt. The song soothes it like a warm balm. I see shadows in my sight. Blurry outlines shifting in front of my eyes, like wriggling worms. I try to blink them away, but with each attempt my lids grow heavier. For a moment, I catch a glimpse of one of the crooked trees. And I can make out a pattern to the grotesque knots and gnarls in the pale bark. I see a nose. An eye. And even a mournful face.

But the song grows clearer. Even though the whisperers aren’t humming. And my dream dissipates to deep slumber.

Sometimes, when they come with their clippers and shears to prune and cut me, I dream. I dream of planting trees in our new forest. I dream of resting, hand in hand with Reinar. I dream of his face twisted in terror. I dream of my mute lips and stiffening joints. But then the song soothes me again.

But sometimes, I still dream…

/Sebastian Lindberg 8/4-2021

Distracted From the Edge

What if the world was ending.

I mean, it is, just still so slowly that the 24-hour news cycle can’t catch up. But imagine that it was. Soon. Within the four year range of most elected officials’ attention span, let’s say. Do you think that, in such a case, humanity could get its shit together to do something about it? Or would we just keep fapping about with our reality shows and petty tribalisms?

I saw “Don’t Look Up” last night, and though I have no interest of turning this column into a media review feed, the film caught me discomfited. Not for poor execution, or cumbersome length, but because the satire struck too close to home. So close that it’s arguably not satire at all. Which, to be fair, the best satire should do. Hit too close to the mark for comfort. Straddling the line between cringe and prophecy so precariously that it’s about to tumble into horror.

But aside from the vexatious notion that the film is too nostradamic for comfort, it also left me exhausted. Again, not for lack of quality, but because this isn’t the first time we’ve pointed out the absurdity of civil discourse. “Wag the Dog” mocked us by playing fetch with our fickle attentions to distract from political scandal, and the rally-’round-the-flag syndrome hasn’t gotten less relevant since the 90’s. Because we still do that. All the time. Back in the 70’s, “Network” warned us about capitalism twisting mass-insanity into profit, and now, 50 years later, we have made insanity a prerequisite for success. Just fucking look at Tik-Tok.

We’re not learning a gods damned thing. These films were supposed to warn us about the direction we were heading in. Now, they read like instruction manuals.

“Don’t Look Up” felt like it wanted to be provocative. But the only thing it can legitimately claim to have provoked is disappointment. With ourselves. With our leadership. And with how fatally easy it is to distract us from scientifically certified fact.

Where the film fails as a message is that our doomsday was predicted by peer-reviewed science way back in 1988, when James Hansen sat in front of Congress and told them up front about global warming. What did we do? There was a short-lived furor, with political promises that were never fulfilled, just until the next episode of the Cosby Show came on. “Don’t Look Up” fails as satire only in that it’s 33 years late. It’s slow on the uptake. Which deflates its satirical nature. Because today, it doesn’t read as satire as much as utter and absolute condemnation.

Which brings us back to the point. If the world was ending, would we get our collective shit together? No. We wouldn’t. Because we aren’t. Instead we act wilfully delusional in its face and prove utterly incapable of parsing the end of days from celebrity relationships or new smart device releases. And by now we’re getting so far past the point of no return that there’s very little point in laughing at the simpletons that let themselves be marched off the cliffs to the sound of mad piping. Because that’d just leave us laughing at ourselves.

… and a Happy New Year too.

/Sebastian Lindberg 28/12-2021

A Break From the Bleakness

It’s that time of year again. The dark time when we light all the candles we can get our hands on and tie our hopes for a better future on our habitual understanding of the cyclical nature of our planet’s revolution around the sun.

Essentially; it’s dark now, but since it’ll get lighter it follows that it must also get brighter.

Which isn’t, y’know, strictly speaking true. Horror and tragedy live in sunshine just as much as in shadow. But maybe it’s worthwhile to try and put a hopeful spin on things. At least once a year.

…

Nope. Got nothing.

At a young age, I had some close encounters with the shitty side of human behaviour. Which, in turn, lead me to seek out the darker parts of myself. To tear them out, cast them away, and never forget them lest they come creeping back to fill their passing’s void. A formative lesson which I wouldn’t give up for all the happiness in the world.

But… spending two decades sifting through oneself and others for the worst qualities of Man, to catalogue them, and fashion weapons to fight them, tends to calibrate the compass to find only that. The monstrous, the fault lines, the stains. Growing older, this single-mindedness has become painfully apparent to be not just habit, but compulsion.

Not that it’s not a useful trait, still. We’re human after all. There’s always envy and greed and anger and fear and other vile sides of ourselves that crop up like fungus to be isolated, treated, and cleansed. It is a life-time effort. One I had an early start with. And it makes me an excellent devil’s advocate, attuned as I am to the kinks and dents and corruptions in arguments, organizations, or personalities.

However, it also makes me an insufferable friend. Because it is an exhausting thing to have a friend who constantly spots the worst sides of you. And though it’s important to be able to recognize, isolate, and come up with solutions to problems, within yourself and without, it’s easy to forget that it’s also important to be able to stop. If only for a bit.

It’s coming on Yule. It’s dark out. And we’ve been on a long slide downward for years, ever since they shot that gorilla. There’s plenty that is broken, and it serves no one to shy away from that. Nothing will be fixed if we do. But likewise, there’s nothing wrong with taking a break from it either. To take care of one another, warts and all. Even a racist grandmother gets lonely. A co-dependent cousin also feels isolated and scared. Even stone-faced rocks of Gibraltar need hugs.

It’s been some difficult years. We’re all tired. No matter the side of the fences. I don’t know about you, but I definitely need a reminder. To take a break. To be kind. And try to have a joyous Yule, even if it’s hard. Especially if it’s hard.

/Sebastian Lindberg 21/12-2021

Weeding Out the Smokers

While most other governments around the western world are struggling to accomplish much of anything, the New Zealand leadership turn on governance hard mode by proposing to ban tobacco.

The details are a tad more lenient than just a straight ban. The idea is that peddlers won’t be allowed to sell tobacco to fourteen-year-olds by 2027. A ban that will only move up the age brackets as the years go on. Which, in essence, means that the next generation of smokers will never ever be legally allowed to start the habit.

It’s a bold policy. Cutting off the fresh supply of addicts for the tobacco companies without stepping on the toes of those already hooked. And I would applaud the gumption of the proposal… but…

I’m not a smoker. I find cigarettes disgusting, even if I’m not above a hookah or pipe every once in a blue moon. So personally, I don’t see a problem with aggressively phasing out habitual cigarette smoking. But it’s easy to quote how much smoking costs society (around 1’852 billion USD annually worldwide), or how fundamentally smoking erodes people’s health (according to WHO, more than seven million people die directly from smoking every year worldwide, and nearly 1.2 million people from passive smoking). To harass cigarettes as filth-ridden stress relief engineered to maximize reliance and addiction is low hanging fruit. It’s easy to make it look reasonable to try and get rid of the habit. At least to make sure than no one new gets hooked.

But where do we draw the line?

That’s the thing with any distinction, innit. The line. If we’re only going to run a cost-benefit analysis to ascertain whether habits should be allowed in our society, it’s not just cigarettes that should be in our cross hairs.

Take alcohol, for example. I enjoy drink, as opposed to a smoke, which reflexively means I wouldn’t support a ban on booze. But regardless of my subjective preferences, alcohol isn’t an unproblematic substance either (with some 3 million deaths worldwide annually, and close to uncountable associated costs to society). And who’s to say that drinking is a more important part of western society than smoking is?

And humans have plenty of habits that endanger us. That levy costs upon our neighbours. Our reliance of coffee supplant food crops in the “third world”, making communities drought sensitive, not to mention that the morning drug triggers our neural receptors not unlike central stimulating hard drugs. Teenagers and adult teenagers rely on energy drinks to displace a sound lifestyle, which disturb untold hormonal balances in our bodies and acutely prohibits neural development in prototype humans – that is to say – teenagers. And our very existences is held together by our habit of hurling ourselves down along speedways in flimsy metal containers with more inertia than speeding bullets. Humanity gets itself hooked on a myriad of unhealthy habits that potentially costs more than they’re worth.

Granted, smoking is the lowest of low hanging fruit among our many questionable decisions. And it isn’t good for anything that rubbing a good one out won’t just as well accomplish. Yet, it is a slippery slope for a liberal society to start outlawing the dumb shit we do to our selves.

But what else can we do? What else can we do to stop smokers from weighing the rest of us down with their emphysema and lung cancer? What are we supposed to do to stop dumb decisions? Deny the self-inflicted care and health services when their poor choices finally come back and bite them in the ass? Speaking of slippery slopes…

/Sebastian Lindberg 14/12-2021

Hiding in Happiness

Think positive. Count your blessings. Don’t focus on the grim side of life. Be happy. Smile more. Look on the bright side. Be grateful for what you have. Be happy. Don’t be glum. Don’t be sad. Be happy. Enjoy yourself. Be happy. Be happy. Be happy.

I have a nagging suspicion that I might come off as a tad of a grump this week. Because just as it happens, I loathe every single encouragement I wrote above.

Why though? Loathing is such a strong word. And all those things are such positive sentiments! They’re the foundation for peoples’ happiness. Hating on them is like kicking philosophical puppies. They make the world a better place.

They don’t though. Thinking positive has never made the world anything other than what it already is. Smiling more has never practically changed anything. Looking on the bright side of life, on its own, has never, ever, uncrucified anyone. Never on its own has it made things better. At best, it has only ever made things seem better.

And seeming is not, has never been, nor will ever be, the same as being.

But putting a bit of paint on the dour nature of things has never actually hurt either, has it? Why the hate? We can’t just walk around with the weight of a crumbling world on our shoulders, can we? Look, serotonin is one helluva drug. The mother of all, one might say. It feels good to be happy. No one can deny as much. But as with every high, there follows the problem of addiction…

I often wonder why grumps like myself are shunned as we are. That people run away from your gloom as if it’s some infectious disease that they might catch if they spend too much time around you. Which is the reason why us grumps often put on a show. A happy mask to blend in and be accepted. Because the fear is that if you manifest yourself as you feel, people will shun you like a plague. You fear becoming The New Millennium Leper. So you smile, despite it all.

This behaviour brings with it questions. Why do people fear someone’s misery like it’s a disease? Like it catches? Well, the easy answer is that it might. That one person’s gloom becomes another’s well to fall into. But that’s not how mental states function. The blues is not a contagion. And yet, people behave as if it is. Why? Well, one potential reason is that even those happy people feel it. The doom. And when they see it, they shudder, are reminded of what nests within them too, and flee back to their lollipop lands of cotton candy and unicorns. Anything to beat back everything that isn’t just perfectly splendid.

Look, I’m not a grump because I enjoy it. But it’s hard not to be a little dour when you look at the state of the world. With war, greed, capitalism, futurelessness, collapsing ecological systems, super storms, fascism, fanaticism, spineless leadership, corrupt leadership, or simple malignant leadership, with famine, continent-wide wildfires, failing states, failing welfare, failing pensions, failing housing markets, failing economies, failing cultures, and just a general sort of unease about the state of something that we had such high hopes for once, y’know? I think a certain dose of glumness is appropriate if we take stock of the state of our vaunted civilization. And if you’re in such a state of frenzied cheer all the time, I’m beginning to doubt that you’re facing the same music as the rest of us are.

Which brings us back to the serotonin. The happy juice that people seem so dependent on. I’m beginning to think that all these manic merry-makers aren’t so much successes of contentedness as they are absolute crazed junkies. For the happy juice, see? People so afraid of their duly doses of doom and gloom that they’ve chosen the way of chasing the Delighted Dragon instead.

They’re hiding. Hiding from the woe and grief that us others can’t fathom that they can’t see. Or, rather, won’t look at. Because if they did, they’d come down from their high. And the Gods only know how long they’ve been up there. Decades, maybe. And maybe they’re not convinced they’d survive the crash. Maybe that’s why they flee from those of us that aren’t as hooked on wide smiles and sunshine and rainbows.

That’s why I don’t like those motivational poster-children. That’s why I vomit a little bit in my mouth whensoever I hear people say “be happy” or “think positive” or “look on the bright side”. Because those incitements reek of fear. They ooze of dread. And seem to suggest that it is better to hide in happiness than to face your problems and fight up-hill.

/Sebastian Lindberg 7/12-2021

Reproductive Privileges

The William formerly known as a Prince got slammed by egocentric humanists after drawing the lamest possible Malthusian conclusions available for the Holocene Extinction. That, perhaps, possibly, human population growth is responsible for “huge challenges for conservationists”.

Which, you know, is fact. Facts that have for years been presented by credible organizations such as the WWF. That the biggest cause of animal extinction isn’t poaching or trophy hunting, but by human habitat expansion. By agricultural expansion. By sheer human presence.

To be fair, the complaint does sound a little tone deaf from the former Prince of the world’s greatest former empire. Just the fact that he’s responsible for three children (which constitutes a net gain outta two people) sours his voice on the matter. The fact that his silver spoon is directly forged from slavery and globalism and militant imperialism is another. So fair dinkum, criticise the shit out of him.

Doesn’t mean he’s wrong though.

The human population growth on Earth is exponentially fucking insane. You don’t have to invent chess or be an economist to realise that exponential growth is impossible to sustain. Exponential growth in a system will inevitably cause either A) a plateau effect, B) a collapse of the function, or C) a collapse of the system. The desperately humanist among us hope that the world’s human population will level out somewhere between 10 and 11 billion people, because some bright motherfucker somewhere calculated that’s the roof of Earth’s ability to sustain a human population. A population we’ll probably hit in about 80 years. Mind you that those calculations do not factor in the existence of any other biotope or ecology other than what directly serves the human populations. Only farms, cities, grazing grounds, and not an acre of natural habitat. Mind you that the prognosis of 10-11 billion people is the culmination and completion of the Holocene Extinction.

You might say it’s the human winning condition. We will have done it; make every single life form that isn’t itself a part of our great machinery extinct. Hooray…

Africa isn’t the root of this problem. It’s a big part of it, as the human population of Africa has doubled every twenty years since a while back, but the continent is just catching up. The West and the East already ballooned and made an utter mess of our natural habitats in Europe, America, and Asia. So no; the problem isn’t Africa or Africans. But in Africa, it’s conceivable to avert an ecological catastrophe that’s already come and gone in much the rest of the world. Which is a good reason to pay the continent some extra attention as far as over-population goes.

See, if you want to do something about all the shit in your beds, the first best idea is to not shit in the fifth. It’s a good first step before you figure out what you’re going to do with your four first sets of sullied linens.

But what are we supposed to do? Enact even more draconian conditions for IMF and World Bank aid to African countries? Do a neo-colonialism on African reproductive rights before continuing on to America, Asia, and Europe?

Essentially, I guess, yes. Sadly. Inhumanely. If we come to the conclusion that the preservation of our natural habitats and ecological systems, that humanity’s role as custodian is more important than our role as exploiter, we need to act. Against to curb our own impulses. Because as racist old Malthus concluded two hundred years ago; if humanity can expand, it will. We, sadly, have to force us to keep our spunk in our sacks and our uteri parasite-free. Least ’till we’ve disassociated the reproductive ability from being considered a hedonistic right to a holistic responsibility.

I mean, granted, according to CCP example, we haven’t been very good at controlling our population growth in the past, even when we’ve wanted to. But what’s the option? Just lean back in the comfort of our supremacist entitlements and forget about the problem altogether? Seems pretty shitty to me.

Sure, ridicule former royalty all you want. Point out that the William formerly known as Prince is part of the problem himself. That could be a constructive effort. But if you reject mathematical certainty on the basis of humanistic supremacy and colonialist guilt and/or rage… tsk, tsk, then your doomsday-inducing privileges are showing.

/Sebastian Lindberg 30/11-2021

The Spymaster Who Cried

The wolf is complaining that the boy is selling his sheep on the other side of the fence, as Washington lobby organization Atlantic Council sponsors a study to target one Swedish, one Turkish, one South African, and two Israeli surveillance tech firms that sell their services to Russia and China.

The highlighted companies that the report masquerading as a scientific study specify is BTT (Turkey), Cellebrite (Israel), Verint (Israel), Vastech (South Africa), and MSAB (Sweden), with MSAB receiving extra mention. Probably because of Sweden’s kissing-cousins-esque relationship with NATO. To be fair, the report “Surveillance Technology at the fair” isn’t coy about its loyalties and interests. An early excerpt puts their allegiances and grievances plain for all to read:

“This paper categorizes these companies as potentially irresponsible proliferators because of their willingness to market outside their continents to nonallied governments of the United States and NATO—specifically, Russia and China. By marketing to these parties, these firms signal that they are willing to accept or ignore the risk that their products will bolster the capabilities of client governments that might wish to threaten US/NATO national security or harm marginalized populations. This is especially the case when the client government is a direct US or NATO adversary.”

In essence; the Atlantic Council in Washington DC doesn’t mind the privatization of surveillance tech development and sales, so long as the post-Cold War hegemony reigns supreme. They point out how, for example, MSAB sold surveillance equipment used against political dissidents in Hong Kong and Myanmar. Which, granted, is a bad look. But how that is more irresponsible than selling their services to the US, a nationalistic bully with a documented history of spying on its own population, it fails to make clear.

I always feel like I have to qualify my criticisms, and this by far no exception. I think it is bad to sell surveillance technology to fascist police states, which both Russia and China qualifies as in my book. But I think it’s bad to sell surveillance technology to anyone. Whether the buyer is Russia or the US or China or the EU. Surveillance upon a civilian population, your own or someone else’s, is a bad thing. Especially in this our day and age when it’s so very easy to do it. Hell, we’re practically surveilling ourselves with all our social media and digitalized habits. And there is functionally no difference between spying on journalists or political opponents and spying on terrorists. There’s no practical distinction other than ideological labels that our overlords work very hard at making us believe in.

Selling spyware to Russia and China is bad. People get black-bagged and killed because of it. And the US has absolute no high horse to sit on, and should shut up and sit their asses down in the shame corner along with their rivals. This lobbyist excuse of a research paper stinks like a global capitalist whining that they’re no longer the biggest player on the board. It reeks of privilege and a one hundred percent internalized belief in their own propaganda. And the argued return from globalism to the same turn-of-the-century nationalistic fervour and protectionism that set off the Great War practically makes me gag.

BTT, Cellebrite, Verint, Vastech, MSAB, and all the rest, shouldn’t be ashamed and ostracized because they peddle their cloak-n-dagger wares to dystopian authoritarian states like Russia and China. They should be ashamed and ostracized because of the cloak-and-dagger wares they sell, period, regardless to whom.

Because you cannot misuse spyware. It’s all just spying.

/Sebastian Lindberg 23/11-2021

The Iron Curtain 2.0

We are seeing the birth of a new Iron Curtain on the eastern border of the EU. In an inverted kind of way. Fortifying along the edge of the Belarusian border in Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. And along that line of demarcation, people are dying.

By now, I believe most of us have seen videos and pictures from the Polish-Belarusian border, where Minsk-sponsored refugees try desperately to negotiate freezing temperatures, barbed wire, tear gas, Polish military and border patrols. All for a Belarusian promise of safe conduct to Germany. Horrifying feeds engineered to tug at our heart strings.

As with any manipulative publicity stunt and aggressive ass-hattery, there’re plenty of sides on show. The EU, and the US by proxy, blame Belarus’ Lukashenko and his puppetmaster Putin for taking a play from the Erdogan playbook and engineer the catastrophe. Belarusian state media drag the EU’s response, Poland’s in particular, through the mud, and call out the Union for it’s humanitarian hypocrisy. According to the few witness accounts extracted from the militarised border, there are stories about Belarusian military police abuse, lies, violence, drug dosing, stealing identification papers and passports and money, and plain cattle herding. Meanwhile, among the human traffickers from Istanbul that profiteer from desperate refugees by sending them on to Lukashenko’s cynical hybrid war gambit, we find absolutely zero sympathy or expressed responsibility for the crisis.

And in the freezing winter woods of Białowieża, people freeze to death.

And the more you read about the crisis, the harder it gets to take sides in it. Theories abound that Lukashenko is trying to force a military crisis that would require Russia to properly occupy Belarus, and thus cement his own power in the country against its population. Poland, with its increasing politicised xenophobia, homophobia, islamophobia and just general populist phobia-centric government, is a real low hanging fruit to be made to look corrupt, fascist, and cruel. And to be fair, colonial EU can easily be traced back to pretty much every refugee crisis in the world, which begs criticism of its privileged and exclusive view of humanitarianism. Likewise, there’s plenty of responsibility to levy against the regimes in the over-represented nationalities massing along the borders. Not to mention the human traffickers, whether motivated by misguided sympathy or callous greed, who seem incapable or unwilling to accept any responsibility for the deaths they actively cause or directly influence.

Absolutely no one involved in this failure of diplomacy, this international fiasco, looks good. It smells of Belarusian desperation and cynicism. Russian machiavellian manipulation. Polish fascism. EU moral corruption. The failure of state in the Middle East. All of which has caught thousands of desperate people in the middle. People who’re so desperate that they’ll believe some fairytale of some fabled northern utopia to escape their misery.

It all stinks of desperation. Every single side of it. Desperation not to lose what little or what plenty that you have. Accumulating in a twisted bramble of madness that absolutely no one will benefit from. The sort of desperate madness that breeds world war, come to think of it…

/Sebastian Lindberg 16/11-2021

An Abdication of Innocence

This week sets the stage for the trial of the police-murdering delinquent of Gothenburg. At 17 years old, the suspect had been exiled from the city after having stabbed a fellow criminal in the neck mid-day on a tram when he was only 15 years old. And then he went and gunned down a cop having a chat with a local.

And now the Swedish justice system have to try and figure out what the hell to do with this minor. And by extension, all the other minors that murder with abandon all across the Nordic wellfare state. With murder suspects as young as 13 years old.

For decades, Sweden has been submerged in policies and propaganda that highlight the sanctity of children. To raise their voices and influence without the accompanying responsibility. Which, as a general rule, serves children well. But as with every statistical group of people, there are outliers. Those that don’t flourish under protections, but take advantage and subvert. Sweden has seen an onslaught of under-age murderers popping caps in asses for years, as henchmen in violent gangland wars. Because older ringleaders have realised that they can use these nimrod minors without much danger. Instead of ten to twenty years in prison, these children serve a few years in juvie, and then get out. Ready to return once more to the grinder, to be popped off by another junior delinquent hoping to earn their stripes.

How is a liberal nation supposed to handle such an undermining of its principles? Even according to the few of these murderous monsters that have been interviewed by journalists, the solution is to just let them “eat each other until we’re finished”. That those that die, except for a few stark exceptions, are the very people that cause the problem. That they’re somehow a self-sanitizing issue. Of kids. Killing kids.

Which is a difficult premise for society to swallow…

Here’s another: Once you’ve taken a life, you should no longer be considered a child.

What constitutes a child, in most western countries, is someone below a certain age. Depends on the country. In Sweden, it’s 18. But that’s just a standardised template. Anyone with half a mind of reason will realise that all people don’t come into adulthood at the same time. Maturity and the rate thereof varies. I’ve met 15-year olds with more maturity than an “adult”, and kids that probably will never grow up. Never have. But before the age of 18, people are legally considered children and not fully responsible for their actions. The responsibility just sort of… evaporates, legally speaking. The parents aren’t responsible. The schools can’t be. The police can’t be. It’s just… gone.

I propose that as soon as you take someone’s life, their future and potential, into your own hands, you have taken a wilful step across a threshold that you can never go back from. Whether that is sticking a knife into the neck of another human being at the age of 15, or gunning down a police officer by mistake at the age of 17. You are an adult. Irrevocably. Morally. Reasonably. And should be tried as such.

No privilege should stand without qualifications. No protections should be absolute. And maybe putting murderous children into an isolated bin for a decade or two won’t help them. Won’t teach them about the consequences of their actions and rehabilitate them into the good graces of society. But that’s not what happens now either. They’re just churned back out onto the streets, a few paltry years of juvenile corrections later, to be eventually gunned down by another 17-year old.

“For everything we do in life, Sweetheart, there’s a price.” And once you have murdered someone you have cashed in your chit of childhood innocence. Cashed it in, revoked its protections, and should reap your consequences accordingly. Because if you’re big enough to take someone’s life, you must be big enough to eat your peas.

/Sebastian Lindberg 9/11-2021

26 Years of Making It Worse

Hot on the heels of Halloween, it’s time for another spooky tradition. COP is back at it again. For the 26^th time.

I tend toward the bitterly meandering when it comes to climate change responsibility. Paragraphs of wild abandon , tangles of red threads, and enough vitriol to choke on. So I will endeavour to be brief and concise.

This is the 26^th annual Conference of the Parties (COP). 26 times, world leaders have met to constructively combat the threat of climate change, and by extension, the man-made Holocene Extinction.

Since COP began in Berlin of 1995, carbon dioxide emissions have steadily increased by about 36%. The point was decrease them.

In 1988, NASA climate scientist James Hansen correctly predicted the speed, intensity, and consequences of global warming. Even Margaret Thatcher proposed stringent action. But somewhere along the line, the momentum was lost.

The scientific consensus of global warming of this intensity being man-made is near absolute. No peer-reviewed science to the opposite has been published, according to Naomi Oreskes’ paper “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” from 2014.

We know that the global oil industry, from nations to corporations, deliberately undermine the validity of the global climate change catastrophe through lobbyism, propaganda, and hate campaigns.

And we know that despite 26 years of world leader debate and deliberation, the problem gets worse. Not better.

Which leads us to assume one, or all, of three conclusions: That world leaders, despite whatever they say and claim and profess, are either uninterested in the definitive science of climate change, complicit and profiteering from the mechanisms behind climate change, or utterly impotent to do anything about climate change. One or all of those statements look like they’re true. Either way, it comes back to the blah, blah, blah of Thunberg’s disdain.

Suffice to say, I’m not optimistic.

But you don’t need optimism to strive. You don’t need hope to struggle on. It’s easier with it, but it is by no means a necessity. Especially when the alternative is some cold comfort apathy in the face of obliteration. Because even if our leaders are standing in the way of the preservation of our habitat, at the very least we have the opportunity to shame them to death while they obstruct us.

In lieu of big ones, it’s the little victories you have to savour…

/Sebastian Lindberg 2/11-2021