2017 -Year of Change?

[Stavros]

Was 2017 a good year, was it a bad year, was it the year when real change began?

In the space of a year, it appears that the radical shake-up of democratic politics across the Atlantic that was marked in 2016 by the EU Referendum in the UK and the Presidential election in the USA has faltered.

At the beginning of the year, Theresa May was in an unassailable position, way ahead of the Labour Party in the polls where Jeremy Corbyn was viewed as a disaster who would lead Labour into oblivion if May called an election in the Spring. The year ends with Mrs May presiding over a divided Cabinet, unable to govern without the support of the fringe party the DUP, having so badly managed a general election her position as Prime Minister now seems temporary, while analysts and pundits could not believe so many people voted for Labour, though it suggests if there is a radical strain in politics, it may not be good news for the parties of the 'right', as the failure of Roy Moore's campaign in Alabama also suggests. Critically, the nationalist parties of the Netherlands, France and Germany failed to make significant changes to government there, though one notes their advance in Austria and Poland.

While the UK struggled to make sense of Brexit, the fire that destroyed Grenfell Tower in London stands out as the kind of preventable disaster that underlined the belief that our government is incompetent, and indifferent to human suffering. It stands there in Notting Hill like a coffin over a dead idea, a testament to social and economic division, a wound that will not heal.

For all his bombastic rhetoric, the 45th President has in reality done nothing to prevent the development of nuclear weapons in North Korea, if that programme is indeed moving ahead successfully, not precisely known; most of the President's 'achievements' appear to consist of executive orders amending or rescinding Obama Presidency rules while the tax bill as presently written appears to be a death sentence for the USA if the experience of tax cuts in Kansas are anything to go by. The 'Guardian Grim' review of Kansas is here-
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/10/donald-trump-kansas-failed-tax-cuts

Perhaps the most telling issue in Kansas is that the Koch brothers live there but there is no sign that private enterprise has any intention of entering the market where the state has failed. 21st century capitalists are mostly concerned with playing golf, and making choices between this yacht or that villa in the Caribbean, while the rest of America can go to hell as they won't be going to Puerto Rico.

On the other hand, as noted in the other thread, medical science continues to make positive advances in its attempts to combat disease, technology is making advances in energy sources that are not based on hydrocarbons, and in the development of androids/robots, but doubts continue to exist about the freedom of the internet, and the extent to which Artificial Intelligence will replace Human Intelligence.

Perhaps the most important change in 2017 has revolved around the collapse of Harvey Weinstein's reputation and the avalanche of claims of sexual harassment and assault that have since emerged. 2017 may be recalled as the year when it changed for women, that it marked the beginning of a real change in attitudes, and that it began not in Pakistan or Nigeria, but the USA.

[buttslinger]

I agree that while Trump has been seen as accomplishing nothing, his tax bill might be remembered as the beginning of THE END if 2008 is any indication. So that's quite an accomplishment.
The Republicans in Texas offer huge corporations sweetheart deals where they pay almost no state taxes, in exchange for building factories there. But you wouldn't want to send your kids to school there, I imagine.
Medical knowledge exploded after WWII, kids all over the World learn English with their Medical Studies.
My niece made a lot of money working for EPIC SOFTWARE, it's like a universal computer program for doctors for their patients. Lots of the doctor's didn't like it, because they had to learn to type and spend a lot more time doing "paperwork"
My Dentist's daughter went to the big WOMEN's PROTEST DAY around Trump's Inauguration,...she said "Mommy, what do all those signs mean???"
For me, 2017 ate shit, but I am encouraged to hear that the USA has a secret black money op looking into UFOs. I need a lift off this shitty planet.

https://preview.ibb.co/nc0yKm/best_protest_signs_womens_march_washington_donald_ trump_38_5884aa11c09c6_700.jpg (https://ibb.co/d01SC6)

[sukumvit boy]

Thanks for starting this new thread for 2017 , Stavros et al.
The NY Times published a nice comprehensive review of 2017 :
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/reader-center/year-in-review.html

[filghy2]

I would call it the year of confusion. Trump and Brexit have predictably turned into god-awful messes and the populist tide failed to carry all before it. Whether this is sign of things getting back on track or just a precursor of more confusion remains unclear, however.

[Stavros]

A positive view of 2017 from Nickolas Kristof- an extract

"Every day, the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty (less than about $2 a day) goes down by 217,000, according to calculations by Max Roser, an Oxford University economist who runs a website called Our World in Data (https://ourworldindata.org/). Every day, 325,000 more people gain access to electricity. And 300,000 more gain access to clean drinking water.
Readers often assume that because I cover war, poverty and human rights abuses, I must be gloomy, an Eeyore with a pen. But I’m actually upbeat, because I’ve witnessed transformational change.
As recently as the 1960s, a majority of humans had always been illiterate and lived in extreme poverty. Now fewer than 15 percent are illiterate, and fewer than 10 percent live in extreme poverty. In another 15 years, illiteracy and extreme poverty will be mostly gone. After thousands of generations, they are pretty much disappearing on our watch.
Just since 1990, the lives of more than 100 million children have been saved by vaccinations, diarrhea treatment, breast-feeding promotion and other simple steps."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opinion/sunday/2017-progress-illiteracy-poverty.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

[peejaye]

So why the fuck is homelessness going up in your own country? It's currently at 307,000. That's an increase of 13,000 on last year !
STOP trying to put the world to rights & wake up to what's happening in your own country !
Just like our Government; You continuously want to give millions away in foreign aid whilst people born here are continuously persecuted by Government policy.

[Stavros]

You miss the general point, Peejaye, as the improvements to life described by Kristof do not downgrade or dismiss the specific cases which reveal problems that won't go away, such as homelessness. There are areas of extreme poverty in the US and the UK, you know that, and I know that, but was not the point of Kristof's argument.

I am not aware that citizens of the UK are being 'persecuted' by the British government, whereas neglect might be a more valid term to use.

The Foreign Aid budget, as we have discussed before, is a small part of the government's spending and is an important means whereby the UK acts as a responsible citizen in the world. A substantial amount of Foreign Aid is spent on health programmes co-ordinated by the World Health Organization that includes rolling programmes of immunisation against disease, without which millions of children would be vulnerable, and bear in mind these are also programmes offered free to children in the UK under the NHS.

If you think that the money from Foreign Aid would be better spent on projects in the UK, what projects? How much would they cost? The annual budget for the Department for Exiting the European Union is scheduled to cost £100 million a year, the cost of leaving the EU will cost even more in bureaucracy as VAT problems mount for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises who will have to pay up front for transactions, and that is without knowing if the value of the pound is going to rise or fall. Farmers watch crops rot in the fields in Cornwall because EU workers have stopped coming over to pick them; EU citizens are either not coming at all or are leaving with jobs in numerous sectors such as care homes, the NHS, schools and universities not being replaced. £100 Million spent on national suicide, which would be better spent on schools and hospitals, do you not agree?

Homelessness as a problem has increased, it could be due to personal problems, evictions for failing to pay rent under the universal credit system that doesn't seem to be working, and the more general problem of the decline in council house accommodation that we used to provide before it was slashed to ribbons by successive conservative governments since 1979, including that of Tony Blair.

Brexit is the axe hacking away at the UK, if you are outraged by homelessness, how do you think this country will look when we break from our largest trading partner with nothing to replace it? We are leaving the Single Market and the Customs Union, because that is what you voted for. We are losing thousands of jobs, because that it what you voted for. We are seeing the costs of imports rise even before we leave and it will get worse, because that is what you voted for. We face the prospect of a visit from the Fake President of the US who will demand the NHS be opened up to American corporations in trade deals to engage in an 'invest and raid' strategy where they take out more than they put in, which will in effect destroy the NHS as we know it, but which is what you voted for.

You could wake up and accept Brexit is the most damaging event to have hit the UK since 1940, and agitate to stop it. Or you can just go back to bed and pretend it is all a dream.

[peejaye]

Another year but the same old drivel again about fucking Br-exit! :why

[Stavros]

Another year but the same old drivel again about fucking Br-exit! :why

Whether or not what I say is drivel -and I note you have not bothered to debate foreign aid-, Brexit is the political reality that drives everything else in this country and will dominate 2018. So if you are fed up with it, as one of the people who voted for it, at least step forward to claim responsibility before walking away in an irresponsible manner, as if it was something to be ignored, someone else's problem.

[peejaye]

I don't give you the pleasure of debating Br-exit or anything else because it's a complete waste of time & very patronising, you just correct everyone who doesn't share your neo-liberal right of centre pro-establishment points of view.

[trish]

On the bright side, you realize you're being corrected. Others might've said, "misinformed", or "steered wrong."

[Stavros]

I don't give you the pleasure of debating Br-exit or anything else because it's a complete waste of time & very patronising, you just correct everyone who doesn't share your neo-liberal right of centre pro-establishment points of view.

A different point of view is just that, whether it is backed up with data or not, but to express it is part of a debate, whereas I find your most common response to someone who disagrees with you to be dismissive, which is your right but does not extend the debate at all. As for being neo-liberal right of centre pro-establishment I am puzzled as I am not neo-liberal or pro-establishment as you must surely know from my political history which I won't go into again, except to say that when I was NUPE shop steward in the Age of Thatcher, the working class guitar-playing electrician in our shop called me a Trotskyist, and the Irish Trotskyist called me a 'bourgeois liberal', so I guess I was doing something right. I can't really be fit into a neat category, and neither can you, which is how I prefer it. But I would also prefer you to engage with the real issues that faced us in 2017 which are not going away in 2018, which means Brexit, Brexit, and then some more Brexit. I wish it were not so.

[sukumvit boy]

Probably the most significant aspect of medical science to 'come of age ' in 2017 was gene therapy .
http://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/coming-age-gene-therapy-review-past-path-forward

[Stavros]

Probably the most significant aspect of medical science to 'come of age ' in 2017 was gene therapy .

A similar, if longer article on this subject appeared in The Guardian yesterday.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jan/15/gene-editing-and-what-it-really-means-to-rewrite-the-code-of-life

[sukumvit boy]

A similar, if longer article on this subject appeared in The Guardian yesterday.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jan/15/gene-editing-and-what-it-really-means-to-rewrite-the-code-of-life
nice article

[Stavros]

Steven Pinker has penned an article for The Guardian about 'feel good' books that he thinks you should read. It may be the antidote to those who feel with Brexit, Gun-Adept Teachers, Polish and Hungarian Nationalism, the Cyber-Warriors of Moscow, Genocidal Buddhists and so on, that the world is heading for armed Oblivion...

Progress is not just material but moral: the world has abolished human sacrifice, slavery, heretic-burning, witch hunts, duelling, apartheid and male-only suffrage. It is also decimating child labour, capital punishment and the criminalisation of homosexuality. The story is told in James Payne’s The Decline of Force, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Honor Code (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/30/simon-blackburn-honor-code-review), and Michael Shermer’s The Moral Arc – an allusion to Theodore Parker’s famous line (beloved of Martin Luther King) that the arc of the universe bends towards justice. Still bigger pictures are presented in Johan Norberg’s Progress and Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. And a deep theory of why humanity is destined to make progress may be found in David Deutsch’s dazzling The Beginning of Infinity. Deutsch presents science as a force for betterment, since it impels us to explain the world while forcing us to acknowledge our fallibility.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/26/further-reading-steven-pinker-books-to-make-you-an-optimist

[sukumvit boy]

I read and discussed Pinker's book "The Better Angels of Our Nature" on this Forum back in 2012 or 2013 ,to a groundswell of apathy ,LOL.
However the point was that the incidence of death and violence against all people and minorities , women , LGBT people and even animals has declined dramatically over the centuries and especially since 1950 .
http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1519872136&sr=1-3&keywords=better+angels+of+our+nature

[filghy2]

It's interesting that objective facts suggest that this is a better time to be alive that ever before in human history, yet people seem to be more dissatisfied that ever before in modern times. I guess it comes down to human psychology. Maybe people are dissatisfied because their circumstances are no longer improving at the rate they were previously accustomed to, or they perceive their position as slipping relative to other, or perhaps the media's tendency to focus on more sensational (usually bad) events skews their perceptions.

The worry is that peoples' poorly focused reactions to their dissatisfaction may set in train dynamics that cause things to go backwards for a while. This has happened before. The 20th century began with great optimism about continued peace and prosperity but then we had two world wars and a great depression and an associated retreat in democracy and the rule of law in many countries.

[sukumvit boy]

Eat the rich . 106219810622001062201

[Stavros]

It's interesting that objective facts suggest that this is a better time to be alive that ever before in human history, yet people seem to be more dissatisfied that ever before in modern times. I guess it comes down to human psychology. Maybe people are dissatisfied because their circumstances are no longer improving at the rate they were previously accustomed to, or they perceive their position as slipping relative to other, or perhaps the media's tendency to focus on more sensational (usually bad) events skews their perceptions.
The worry is that peoples' poorly focused reactions to their dissatisfaction may set in train dynamics that cause things to go backwards for a while. This has happened before. The 20th century began with great optimism about continued peace and prosperity but then we had two world wars and a great depression and an associated retreat in democracy and the rule of law in many countries.

It is a paradox for someone intelligent like you, but it would be folly to blame it on voters as 'idiots' which some people do, so I think the perception for many is that on key indicators they do not feel better than they were, or with those under the age of 30, are not in a better place than their parents were at their age. Key indicators in the UK are housing, wages, personal debt, low interest rates, the threat to pensions, lack of job security and a belief that politicians are out of touch. For many younger people the Brexit vote has been an additional shock, implying that the future is going to be even worse than what we have now, with the additional shame of anti-immigrant feeling dragging things down.

When you view the positives, notably in health, the diseases that destroyed lives when I was born -Smallpox, TB, Polio, Measles to name but four- have either been eliminated or reduced to marginal cases. Since the 1960s but not until then, most households have had their own internal bathroom and toilet facilities with hot and cold running water. The extent of education and health care has grown far beyond what the makers of the NHS envisaged, but has been a positive benefit to mankind as a whole, not just to citizens of the UK. Set against this, is a worrying dismissal of science, not just climate change denial, but as found in the Five Star Movement in Italy that is opposed to the vaccination of children against Measles on the basis of the -completely discredited- claims that the vaccination causes autism. Whether or not the MS5 gets this policy nationwide depends on who forms the next govt in Italy, but local implementation has seen increases in measles cases not seen elsewhere in the EU, while there is a longer term problem with the decline of funding for science across the board in a country that has excelled at since the 19th century if not before.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/23/italys-five-star-movement-blamed-for-surge-in-measles-cases
http://www.vaccineconfidence.org/italy-italian-election-leaves-science-cold/

On the downside science has reduced the amount of human labour needed to make things: a steel plant in the US employs one-fifth of the labour in 2018 that it used in 1980, but technology one day may 'set us free'. The conduct of war is no less savage than it once was, but the technology of war means that the destructive power of weapons and the air power used to deliver them means more people can be killed with fewer men. At its peak, the US in Vietnam deployed c549,500 service personnel, I don't think the deployment in Iraq exceeded 100,000 at its peak. Yet we have seen air power obliterate cities or large districts in cities.

Where we have gone backward is in conflict resolution. The peace treaties that were a feature of the 1990s -Northern Ireland, Israel and the Palestinians, Bosnia and Serbia- have been replaced by a rejection of them, notably by Israel which has led the way in violence -under Israeli Rules a state can kill anyone it wants wherever and whenever it wants to, imprison them, destroy their home, tear up their farming land, and nothing will be done to stop it. After 9/11 and as a consequence of it, states decided they can follow Israel, so that Guantanamo Bay stands as a rejection of the rule of law at any level but is little different from the penal system that arrests 14 year old girls in the illegally Occupied West Bank and tries them in secret, while the international law of armed conflict, and humanitarian law lies buried in the graves of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Gaza and the Occupied Territories.

Moreover, international chaos is now the favoured option of three states which believe it will benefit from the absence of legal restraint on warfare and the effective impotence of the WTO and the UN, namely Russia, the USA, and China. That the US is now presided over by a semi-literate moron may just be a temporary phenomenon, that his party is opposed to free trade in the broader sense, re-defining it as 'whatever we say it is', that human rights has been relegated to the museum of ignorance is one of the most worrying developments I have seen and while I don't expect to see a 'world war' as we had in the past, I believe warfare itself may be 'going online' and that the threats of the future may be economic rather than existential.

And all this so rich people can get even richer, and protect and grow their assets at our expense.

So for all the gains we have made that make life better, that have lifted millions out of poverty and given us another 25 years of life, long haul holidays, smart phones tablets and computers, the threats remain from the same places: ignorance, greed and ambition. We must always hope for a better world, but prepare for the worst.