2020: The year every thing changed & why it’ll get worse

By
Martyn Bradbury
-
28
2025

Alt Right Nazis and white supremacy incels to the right of me.

Woke Identity Politics micro aggression policing cancellation squads to the Left of me.

Here I am stuck in the Class Left with you.

Black Lives Mattered.

Trump’s grotesque attempt to steal the election mattered.

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Covid 19 mattered.

Covid 81.9million infected.

Covid 1.7million dead.

Covid $28 Trillion in costs to the global economy.

Unprecedented.

Zoom.

Working from home.

Lockdown.

Fake news.

Disinformation.

QAnon conspiracy theories.

Ellen cancelled.

The climate crisis broke record after record.

Billionaires made billions more while the poor, millennials, gig economy, the homeless, working class and beneficiaries got fucked.

White men of mediocrity like Trump, Boris Johnson and Bolsonaro managed to obscenely fuel the pandemic through their incompetence.

Democracy was wounded and found broken.

People ran to the State and demanded the State protect them while the Right wing tried to convince everyone we didn’t need the State to protect them.

The Right were punished politically.

The sense of solidarity and sacrifice this unique universal experience created has rebuilt a public mandate for collectivism.

It will be sorely tested in 2021.

At the beginning of the year the woke screamed anyone criticising China was xenophobic…

…TDB however argued from the very beginnings of the outbreak that this wasn’t a fucking identity politics issue, but had all the ingredients of a global pandemic.

TDB 1 – Woke 0.

When history looks back on 2020, New Zealand can hold its head up.

We were challenged, and our collective will combined to act in the common good. We didn’t need authoritarian measures, we simply explained the science and our well educated populace acquiesced.

But this pandemic was just the first climate crisis wave unleashed by overpopulation, 24/7 global supply chains and habitat destruction.

After every major pandemic, there is social unrest…

“So when our Sickness, and our Poverty Had greater wants than we could well supply; Strict Orders did but more enrage our grief, And hinder in accomplishing relief.”

That’s how the British poet George Wither explained a spreading rebellion against social-distancing rules. Seeing quarantines and lockdowns as unfair and tyrannical punishments, people were taking to the streets. The year was 1625, the place was London, the disease was plague.

…The peasant revolt in the 1300s, the civil unrest in the 1600s and the civil disobedience in the 1900s. The strict measures required to snuff out pandemics always makes the lives of the poorest unliveable, we haven’t seen the economic whiplash of Covid yet, especially amongst small business owners and those who were already vulnerable.

The desperate and newly desperate will swell globally and cause enormous cultural tensions.

These waves of social disruption will reverberate around a rapidly warming planet.

  • Trump & Georgia – All eyes will still be on Trump during January as the final days in the Bunker start to play out for him. Is Trump a craven coward who is pulling one last scam to shake down his followers for hundreds of millions or is he really a full blown sociopath who will launch a military strike against China or Iran? If the Dems can win Georgia they finally take control of the Senate and they will have actual power, the Corporations will not like that. Expect one of Biden’s first challenges to be a wave of climate refugees crossing the Southern Border.
  • China – Their Wolf Diplomacy to whip up nationalistic fervour is masking a fear of internal revolt. Expect China to violently take Hong Kong, sabre rattle over Taiwan and threaten anyone in the West who says otherwise to send a domestic and international message of brutal strength.
  • Covid – It will continue to disrupt enormously. The issues of rolling out this vaccine to everyone will be a huge challenge that will need to become an annual ritual requiring 75% to gain herd immunity. The logistics of that are huge and we will be lucky to reach 75% globally by the end of 2022, so the economic damage won’t really start healing for another 2 years.
  • Climate Crisis & Social Unrest – The economic stresses of Covid alongside more climate extremes will see a wave of famines in 2021.

There will be pressures caused by mass migration into Western countries who will already be grappling with intense social economic frictions.

The venal excesses of Wall Street Billionaires and their never ending wealth gains will cause enormous social distortions and lead to economic radicalisation.

Social Media disinformation will continue to polarise debate and create alternate realities.

Late stage Capitalism never looked so ripe for collapse.

 

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28 COMMENTS

  2. Whilst I agree with your general theme -that the shit is going to hit the fan big time in 2021- there are a few points that I disagree about, Martyn.

    ‘If the Dems can win Georgia they finally take control of the Senate and they will have actual power, the Corporations will not like that.’

    Why will the corporations not like that? The corporations own both parties. (It was Clinton who uneased the banks by repealing Glass-Stegall.)

    ‘Expect one of Biden’s first challenges to be a wave of climate refugees crossing the Southern Border.’

    Are you talking about Californians desperate to leave the failed state and head for Chile?

    Movement northwards has almost dried up completely, and Mexicans have been heading south for quite a while. Could it be out-of-control Covid in the US? (still the hub of infection and systemic failure}. Or the collapse in shitty-job opportunities in the US? (now that unemployment is at around 22% and small businesses are closing by the score every day).

    ‘ Expect China to violently take Hong Kong’ ???

    They already have it, without violence. The deal was done in 1997.

    ‘sabre rattle over Taiwan’

    The mainland Chinese have been sabre-rattling ever since the Kuomintang stole the Chinese gold in 1949 and, after invading Taiwan and murdering the Taiwanese leaders, declared martial law and set up the American puppet military state.

    On the matter of the shit hitting the fan in 2021, never forget that the current global financial crisis commenced in the year 2000, that the American crisis re-erupted in 2007 and was bailed out in 2008, and since then the system has been running on fraud, speculation and money-printing.

    Also, don’t forget that the Fed hit the panic button in September 2019, when the repo market blew up (seized up) PRIOR to any mention of Covid.

    The peaking of oil extraction in 2007 was masked by highly anti-environmental, low-EROEI fracking, which held the system together a little longer. But that too has peaked and is on the way down.

    The system is fucked, but most people still don’t realise it.

    ‘Social Media disinformation will continue to polarise debate and create alternate realities.’

    It’s not only the social media that are promulgating disinformation: the mainstream media and the politicians are too: so many snouts in the trough wanting their rorts to continue! And certainly no policies founded on the reality of our collective predicament.

    I’ll say it again: The system is fucked, but most people still don’t realise it.

    I think they will realise by the end of 2021, though.

    Happy New Year, bearing in mind that even that is wrong (phony). The new year actually commenced on 25th December on the Northern Hemisphere, when the Sun started to rise measurably earlier and further to the east (as worked out at least 5,000 years ago). Stonehenge and all that.

    In the Southern Hemisphere the new year commenced on or about 25th of June.

    It’s amazing what a bit of fake religion can do to a society.

    Perhaps I should add, it’s amazing what a bit of fake economic theory can do to a society.

  4. “People ran to the State and demanded the State protect them while the Right wing tried to convince everyone we didn’t need the State to protect them.”

    This always gets me. Do they realise that they contradict every policy and political statement they ever made with this? It’s literally the antithesis of politics, and in the very least, the dissolution of society and any kind of law! So bascally the Right say we don’t need them. Ok. We are in agreement. Can they go away now?

    I was thinking the other day that things wouldn’t be so bad if the law didn’t just protect the weathy. If we reverted to caveman clubbings of anyone who stood in our way, life could find it’s way back to normal pretty quickly. Once you spend 8 hours a day looking for food, have a snooze in a nice quiet environment free of cars, maybe sit round the fire telling stories about how crap the old days were, you have minimal time left for clubbings. But the capitalist machine eats people non-stop.

    • Even then there was a clear hieracrchy though – and cavemen too had a society of “haves” and “have nots”. Especially those unwilling or unable to hunt were shunned and embarrassed (not too dissimilair to the “benny bashing” we have now). Chieftains were rarely pacifists (invading other tribes was common), and the less said about the oracles/soothsayers/priests etc (with their endless sacrifices to appease “the gods”) the better. And as for women’s rights/equality – forget it.

  5. Climate change ‘will be our generations nuclear moment’
    WELL – THAT IS THE WORST REALITY WE WILL ALL FACE -AS WE WILL ALL PERISH.

    AS IT WILL MAKE OUR LIVES IMPOSSIBLE TO CARRY ON.

      • It is an engineering feat that enhances the development prospects of the region (a.k.a. greater bay area). What invasion? Hong Kong and Macau were returned to China since 1997 and 1999 respectively.

        • come on Fumikun ,,,how do you explain away the stealth construction which made it invisible until it was to late.

          Also why is it so long ??? , don’t tell me geography…. next you’ll be telling me it’s just a coincidence that it looks large enough that tanks could drive down it….

          It’s a bridge to far … ‘The Coming War on China, from award winning journalist John Pilger, reveals what the news doesn’t’
          https://youtu.be/vAfeYMONj9E

  6. Finally someone else who seeing that the Chinese’s populace are pretty pissed off with their government. Not sure the saber-rattling is going to save Winnie-the-Pooh.

    Winnie-the-Pooh problem is, he not delivering on the promise of prosperity and social mobility. If anything most Chinese’s now see themselves as going backwards. They see massive class distinctions, plus a growing disconnect from the elects and the rests.

  7. I see the Aussies are ABSOLUTELY DETERMINED to keep fucking the planet as fast as possible. Indeed, not content with burning coal for electricity generation and exporting it to anyone who will take it, they have decided to have a go at wrecking a portion of Antarctica, and increase their carbon footprint in the process, promoting atmospheric conditions that increase the probability of out-of-control fires and devastating droughts in Australia and elsewhere.

    Not only all that but they also want to squander money and resources for something that is totally unnecessary at a time when their economy and finances are in deep shit.

    Fortunately, there is a lot of evidence the following example of collective insanity won’t get past the planning stage because the system will collapse before it does.

    ‘Australia is planning to build Antarctica’s biggest infrastructure project: a new airport and runway that would increase the human footprint in the world’s greatest wilderness by an estimated 40%.

    The mega-scheme is likely to involve blasting petrel rookeries, disturbing penguin colonies and encasing a stretch of the wilderness in more than 115,000 tonnes of concrete.

    The government in Canberra says the project on the Vestfold Hills of Princess Elizabeth Land is necessary to provide year-round access for scientists and emergency teams to Davis research station, Australia’s most southerly base in Antarctica. Strategic concerns are also a consideration; Australia is keen to counter China’s growing presence on the frozen southern continent.

    Environmental scientists say the multi-billion-dollar plan is a waste of money, and could lead to a destructive construction race among territorial rivals.

    “It’s unprecedented in the Antarctic in terms of the scale of investment and the impact on the environment. Although it is being done in the name of science, very few scientists are enthusiastic. This is more about flag-waving. It is about firming up Australia’s presence and our claim,” said Shaun Brooks, an environmental scientist at the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies of the University at Tasmania.

    He estimates the project would add 40% to the existing infrastructure on the continent, which would be damaging and unnecessary.

    “I can’t help thinking this will become a white elephant. How can you justify a multi-billion-dollar runway for a base with only 19 people during the winter and which has been maintained without problems since 1957?” Brooks said.

    Australia’s proposed new airstrip would be 2.7km long and 40 metres wide, and – unlike existing ice and gravel runways in Antarctica – it would be a permanent structure built on top of the landscape with cement and 11,500 concrete blocks, each weighing more than 10 tonnes.

    Pollution, dust, noise and carbon emissions are further problems. Shipping the materials from Hobart is expected to take more than a decade and about 100 icebreaker voyages. The government says the land would be flattened by blasting, crushing and filling with a total 3m cubic metres of earthworks. The project will require the construction of a storage area for explosives, land reclamation from the sea for a new wharf, new tanks for aviation fuel and a 4km access road.

    As well as the destruction of wildlife habitat during construction, the operation of the completed airport would bring regular disruption to breeding colonies of southern giant petrels, seals and Adélie penguins…..’

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/31/a-real-bad-precedent-australia-criticised-for-antarctica-airport-plan

    And, having ‘Saved the Whales’, industrial humans have since decided to make the oceans unlivable for them.

    ‘…in 2020, 50 years on from the release of the album, whales are once again in the global headlines for all the wrong reasons. A new series of threats to whales have appeared. Commercial whaling has started to return, with Norway and Japan among the countries that have abandoned the IWC ban. And whaling is the least of it. Collisions with ships, bycatch from fishing, habitat loss due to the climate emergency and a global plastic pollution crisis are hitting whales from all directions on a scale unknown in the 1970s.

    Most pernicious of all, however, is the noise.

    “Shipping has increased by 300% in the past two decades and noise is a massive issue,” says Helen McLachlan, fisheries programme manager for the Worldwide Fund for Nature. “Sound in the water is really important for the toothed whales like sperm whales, which use sound to identify prey and to navigate. If you upset those functions then you are undermining that animal’s ability to survive.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/31/calls-from-the-deep-do-we-need-to-save-the-whales-all-over-again

    The sooner the system collapses, the better. That said, the human toll will be horrific during the collapse phase.

    However, carrying on the way we have been renders the Earth uninhabitable for humans anyway.

    We’re fucked if we allow the system to collapse, and even more fucked if we try to keep it going.

    ’44 south has already alluded to the fact that ‘It is not just capitalism that is coming to an end…
    We are.’

    How we live during the meltdown phase is what is important.

    And the indications on that front are not good. Greed and stupidity are still reigning supreme.

    • That was a good article on Australia’s self-destructive big-business mindset, manfred

      In NZ the self-destructive big-business mindset is more subtle and quite well obfuscated. A lot of people genuinely believe we are ‘doing the right things’ as we march down the road of self-destruction towards self-annihilation.

      Where is the ice?

      Not here:

      https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

      Of course not all Australians are fuckwits:

      Dr Andrew Glikson
      Earth and Paleo-climate scientist
      ANU Climate Science Institute
      ANU Planetary Science Institute
      Canberra, Australia

      ‘An Orwellian climate while Rome burns
      by Andrew Glikson

      The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein.

      As the world is trying to hopefully recover from the tragic effects of COVID-19, it is reminded there is no vaccine for the existential threat for its life support systems posed by global warming, nor for the looming threats of future wars and nuclear wars fueled by warmongers and $trillion preparations by military-industrial complexes….’

      https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/search/label/Andrew%20Glikson

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