Članci i kolumne

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seln
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#51 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by seln »

Zašto Lionel Messi nije mogao prihvatiti ponudu da besplatno igra za Barcelonu

Znam da ćete pomisliti da pričam gluposti, i sam to pomišljam kad ovo od nekoga čujem, ali: postoje trenuci kad nevolja hudog bogatstva čovjeka rastuži baš kao nevolja hude sirotinje. Čitam tako prije nekoliko dana intervju čuvenog odvjetnika iz Barcelone i bivšeg zastupnika u katalonskom parlamentu Joana Laporte. Predsjednik čuvenog nogometnog kluba iz njegovih najuspješnijih i financijski najberićetnijih dana, uvjereni nacionalist i idealist, koji je zaneseno govorio da je nogometni klub Barcelona najsjajnije oružje katalonske buduće neovisnosti, lani se, usred strašne financijske krize u koju je Barcelona upala usljed lošeg upravljanja tvrtkom, vratio na čelo kluba, s namjerom da ga spasi.

Prvo što mu je na um palo, bila je, o tome tek danas govori, ideja kako da usred nepojamne besparice sačuva najveću Barceloninu dragocjenost, ali i najvećeg proizvođača dodatne financijske i svake druge vrijednosti, Lionela Messija. Laportina ideja istodobno je bila savršeno logična i suluda: predložit će Messiju da za Barcelonu igra besplatno, sve dok se financijske prilike ne poprave. A kada se prilike poprave, njegov će mu se klub svojski odužiti. Tako je on to predložio čovjeku za kojeg mnogi tvrde da je najbolji nogometaš u povijesti ove igre. Ovaj je rekao da će razmisliti.

Joan Laporta, idealist i kapitalist, Messiju je dao genijalnu ponudu. Umjesto novca, kojeg je već zaradio toliko mnogo da ga ne bi uspio potrošiti u stotinjak krajnje rastrošnih ljudskih života, ponudio je Messiju da učini nešto što bi ga izdvojilo i izuzelo ne samo iz priče o svim drugim nogometašima i sportašima, nego, možda, i o svim drugim uspješnim, naplativim i stvarno bogatim ljudima našega doba. Ponudio mu je da bude veći od novca – koji mu ionako više ne treba, jer za njega više nema što kupiti – i od sustava zasnovanog na novcu. Na njemu je bilo samo da prihvati, i postat će svetac i revolucionar. I ništa ga to neće koštati. Osim što će njegova ionako visoka marketinška cijena postati još mnogo, mnogo veća.

Laporta je dobro znao kome takvu ponudu upućuje. Da ju je slao nekome drugom, a ne Messiju, bio bi budala, a ne čuveni odvjetnik i političar, jedan od najuspješnijih menadžera u povijesti sporta. Ali Messi je već zaradio sve novce ovoga svijeta, a uz novce ljubav i poštovanje ne samo navijača Barcelone, nego i stotina milijuna ljudi koji vole nogometnu igru. Ti ljudi uz nogomet imaju i svoje male ljudske živote, imaju svoje nezaokružene i nezacijeljene materijalne egzistencije nad kojima svakodnevno strepe, a Messi će im postati njihov mali zemaljski bog prihvati li Laportinu ponudu. Jer tako će pokazati, time će potvrditi da možda, ipak, postoji nešto što je veće od novca. Nakon što on to učini, stotine milijuna ljudi širom svijeta neće se više baš toliko plašiti otkaza na poslu, i neće tako očajnički težiti za većom zaradom pod svaku cijenu. Prihvati li Laportinu ponudu, on će i svijetu i samome sebi doći kao osloboditelj. Messi će izvesti ljude iz sužanjstva novcu, on će ih prevesti preko pustinje i uvesti u neku novu povijesti i u novo vrijeme njihovih života.

Međutim, Messi to nije prihvatio. U suzama je otišao u drugi klub, koji će ga plaćati trideset i pet milijuna eura, neto po sezoni. Tolika će mu biti osnovna plaća. Otišao je istinski nesretan, nemoćan da promijeni vlastitu sudbinu na isti onakav način na koji je nemoćan svaki od milijuna onih njegovih obožavatelja koji jednog dana više nisu mogli otplaćivati kredit za stan ili kuću. Oni su, kao i Lionel Messi, robovi novca. Kada si siromašan, ili kada si s ove strane televizijskog ekrana niz koji teče utakmica Lige prvaka, učini ti se da je cinična ova tvrdnja. Jer, reći ćeš, nije isto robovati vlastitom siromaštvu, nego nesposobnosti da se iščupaš iz procesa bogaćenja. Ali u malenom ljudskom životu, i u čovjekovoj glavi i srcu, koji se na svaki berićet lako naviknu, dok se na jad i bijedu ne naviknu nikad, patnja je zapravo ista. Zato u ljudskoj povijesti i jesu tako vrijedni i pamćeni ljudi koji su uspijevali ići mimo svijet, pa im se moglo da budu ono što nesretni Messi nije uspio biti.

A zašto nije uspio? Zato što nije imao maštu koja bi mu to omogućila. Sve on zna o svijetu u kojem se zarađuju milijuni, kao što zna sve i o toj zapravo jednostavnoj igri, koja je s razvojem kapitalizma – ili imperijalizma kao najvišeg stadija kapitalizma? – uzdignuta u jednu od najplaćenijih čovjekovih djelatnosti. Pritom, geni su mu se rasporedili tako da je brz i okretan, te da je način njegove okretnosti kao programiran za nogometnu igru. U tom Messijevom genetskom čudu mašta ne igra baš nikakvu ulogu. Kao što ni veliki novci ne pospješuju čovjekovu imaginaciju. Sirotinja štošta izmašta, glad je od majmuna stvorila čovjeka. Novac od čovjeka dosad nije stvorio ništa drugo nego onog koji se očajnički trudi da stekne još više novca. Nesretnik Messi nije tu nikakav izuzetak.

Dok na zagrebačkim raskrižjima u autu čekam da se upali zeleno, često gledam one nevjerojatne žonglere i žonglerice, koji u tridesetak sekundi izvedu šou, i onda idu od auta do auta i prikupljaju sitniš od onih koje su uspjeli impresionirati. Katkad, riječ je o čudu koje je itekako usporedivo s čudima Lionela Messija. I riječ je o fantastičnom prerasopredu gena, o rođenim talentima upravo za ono čime se ti mladići i djevojke žonglirajući bave. Razlika između najboljih među njima i Lionela Messija u slučajnom je rasporedu prioriteta proizašlom iz načina na koji se razvijalo kapitalističko društvo. Moglo se dogoditi, vjerujte mi da jest – ja to znam, ja sam pisac, i mogao bih vam o tom napisati roman – da žonglerice i žongleri s raskrižja velikih europskih gradova danas zarađuju kao veliki i slavni nogometaši, a da Lionel Messi i svi drugi nogometaši žive od sitniša vozača koji čekaju zeleno na semaforima. Razlika između žonglerica i žonglera s jedne, i Messija s druge strane nije u vještini i talentu, razlika je u slobodi. Oni su slobodni nakon što zarade za hranu i spavanje, a on, izgleda, nikad nije slobodan.

miljenko jergović 18. 10. 2021.
I Miljenko zna srati kvake, gore nego Ines Mrenica.
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ExNihilo
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#52 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by ExNihilo »

Nadasve dobar tekst o evropskom skepticizmu prema nuklearnoj energiji i energetskoj katastrofi do kojeg isti može dovesti.
Abandoning Nuclear Power Would Be Europe’s Biggest Climate Mistake

Until 2011, Paul Bossens was an entrepreneur quietly running a small IT business in Leuven, not far from the Belgian capital of Brussels.

Aside from an interest in the environment — he’s an enthusiast for electric cars who delights in his shiny gull-wing Tesla Model X — Bossens, 68, wouldn’t have called himself politically committed. “I was never really one to be an activist or a protester,” he says. “I was too busy running my firm.”

Then one day, in a casual conversation with a colleague, he found himself talking about nuclear power.

Belgium had passed a law in 2003 ordaining nuclear’s phaseout by 2025, and the first reactor shutdowns were expected in 2015. People were just beginning to ponder the consequences: Belgium depends on its atomic reactors for almost half its electricity, and the first wave of closures alone would have shuttered nearly 15% of the country’s output.

“I thought nuclear power must be dangerous, so we needed to find another way to generate electricity and get on with replacing it,” recalls Bossens. “And he said: ‘No, nuclear power has hardly ever killed anyone.’”

Surprised by the answer, Bossens did his own research and found that his colleague was right. Despite all the stories about the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power is one of the safest ways to produce electricity, being responsible for just 0.07 deaths per terawatt-hour generated, while coal and oil are responsible for 24.6 and 18.4 deaths respectively. (Wind is responsible for 0.04.)

Bossens found himself increasingly warming to nuclear’s virtues. Not only is it reliable while producing zero carbon emissions, but it is also pretty practical in a small country such as Belgium, generating huge quantities of power from a relatively klix footprint. The country’s two nuclear plants occupy less than 400 acres of land.

“I felt that if I had been given the wrong facts, others had been, too,” he says. So Bossens wrote a presentation based on his research and started touring the country speaking to whoever would have him — rotary clubs, schools. It wasn’t easy to get bookings at the beginning, he recalls, but he was encouraged by the receptiveness of his audiences. His aim, as he saw it, wasn’t simply to save Belgium’s threatened reactors. It also was to set the story straight on nuclear power.

Europe has long had mixed emotions about atomic energy. Not all European Union countries have it; only 13 of the bloc’s 27 members have reactors, while some, such as Austria, are long-standing opponents. There is a tradition of anti-nuclear activism: The first mass protests against reactor construction took place at Wyhl in Germany back in 1971. And some countries that once had reactors no longer do; Italy voted to scrap its entire fleet after the Chernobyl accident in the 1980s.

Yet the drift toward the exit now goes beyond the skepticism in places like Belgium or Germany, which have set official policies for nuclear power’s phaseout. Elsewhere, much of the continent is steadily denuclearizing by default.

As recently as 2000, Europe generated almost a third of its electricity from nuclear fission, the highest proportion of any region. Since then, capacity has dwindled as plants have closed without being replaced. Meanwhile, Germany embarked on its radical plan to phase out its reactors early and replace them with renewables at a projected cost, by 2025, of around $580 billion. By last year, nuclear output from Europe’s 123 reactors had dropped to just 24% of electrical generation — a multi-decade low.

Further declines are likely, according to Foratom, the European nuclear industry association. It commissioned a report two years ago to look at nuclear’s likely contribution to achieving Europe’s net-zero goals by 2050. The most optimistic scenario, it concluded, was that nuclear might just about hold its present share of generation, which itself would grow sharply as transport and heating were electrified in the future. The other options were gloomier, with the low case suggesting nuclear’s share of electricity generation might fall to as low as 5%.

Recent events are raising hard questions about the wisdom of this trajectory. The flip side of denuclearization is greater reliance on “new” renewables (mostly wind and solar, excluding hydro), whose output is mainly variable, as well as carbon-emitting gas. These sources rose from 17% of total electricity production in 2000 to 40% in 2019.

A gas squeeze this autumn has highlighted the perils of this tilt, with its consequent dependence on strategic competitors such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia for energy supplies. Meanwhile, rocketing prices have dismayed consumers and even caused some energy-dependent industries to curb output or shut down.

An unexpected hiccup in the output of renewables has deepened this malaise. Wind speeds have mysteriously declined across much of the continent this year. According to U.K. data for onshore wind in the second quarter, that led to falls in wind output of around 20%, leaving power shortfalls there, too.

As world leaders prepare to gather in Glasgow for the COP26 climate conference in November, many European countries find themselves in an awkward diplomatic position. Among their central demands for the conference is to accelerate coal’s phaseout. But at the same time, they are quietly restarting their own coal-fired plants.

The biggest worry, though, is that Europe has somehow taken a wrong turn and made its own decarbonization harder. “The electricity transition is happening but not with the urgency required,” says Dave Jones of Ember, a climate think tank. “Emissions are going in the wrong direction.”

*****

Not far from the center of Brussels stands a striking stainless-steel structure, with nine spheres suspended on long tubular arms. Built for the 1958 World’s Fair, the Atomium represents a cell comprising iron atoms. But it’s also a symbol of faith in technical progress — one that reflects Belgium’s embrace of atomic science.

As a producer of uranium from its then-colony in Congo, Belgium was an enthusiastic early adopter when President Dwight D. Eisenhower offered other nations access to civil nuclear technology in his “Atoms for Peace” speech in 1953. The country commissioned its first reactor in 1962. Most of its present fleet was built in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The switch from adoption to phaseout was less driven by public demand than by the tortuous dynamics of Belgian federal politics. The 2003 plan was slipped into complex coalition discussions by the country’s two Green parties (one Flemish, the other French-speaking) after they did unexpectedly well in the 1999 elections. It prohibited the building of new reactors and mandated the retirement of existing ones when they came to the end of their design lives.

“The law was passed, but because it was so far in the future, no one really cared about it,” says Ronnie Belmans, an energy expert and honorary chairman of the board at Belgian grid company Elia Group SA. “Indeed, it’s a mistake to believe that Belgium has ever had a proper debate about what sort of energy policy it should have.”

Only now, as the final phaseout draws near, are the implications truly dawning. Of Belgium’s seven reactors, the oldest two will close in 2022 and 2023, with the last five shutting by 2025. (The first wave of closures planned for 2015 was postponed because of Belgium’s unpreparedness.)

The main worry is the sudden loss of nearly half of the country’s electricity output. Bossens says that when several reactors closed for maintenance and safety checks in 2014, Belgium came close to instituting rolling blackouts to deal with the deficit: “They were actually planning lists of communes that would have their power curtailed,” he recalls.

Plans for replacement generation capacity have attracted criticism because they involve not only commissioning new gas-fired stations, but also subsidizing owners for running them only for short operating lives (the idea being that new technologies such as hydrogen will supplant gas in a few years).

True, there is a possibility under the 2003 law to reprieve the two newest reactors to protect security of supply, and the government intends to make a decision next month when it knows how much capacity developers have bid to build and operate under its new subsidy regime.

But the operator of the nuclear plants, France’s Engie SA, has already warned that the delay in getting an answer means the reactors will have to close anyway. It doesn’t have the time to carry out the refurbishments to keep even two going beyond 2025. (Cynics point out that Engie, which operates no nuclear reactors outside Belgium and owns France’s largest gas utility, is relaxed either way.)

A decade after Angela Merkel’s post-Fukushima decision to axe Germany’s nuclear power stations, few experts still support early closures. Even energy analyst Michael Liebreich, no friend of nuclear, has branded such closures a “climate tragedy,” robbing consumers of abundant, cheap and zero-carbon power.

Take a plant such as Isar 2 in Bavaria, built in 1988, which produced 11.5 TWh of electricity in 2018, more than four-fifths of the entire output of Denmark’s 6,100 wind turbines. With just 33 years on the clock, it could continue producing for decades. Yet it is condemned to close next year as part of Germany’s “Energiewende” effort.

The sad result of this policy can be seen in the emissions data. Despite a decade of effort and heroic levels of spending on renewables, Germany’s electricity grid remains one of the dirtiest in Europe. In 2019, it produced 343 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour generated. The U.K., which kept its nuclear reactors open, emitted just 228 grams, while France, with its large nuclear fleet, produced just 54 grams.

None of this has given Belgium’s government pause, even though the phaseout will likely take it in a similar direction. In 2019, Belgium’s grid had a carbon intensity of 184 grams of CO2 emitted per kilowatt-hour. Research by Ember suggests this could rise to 229 grams by 2030, an increase of almost 25%, based on submissions the last Belgian government made to the EU in 2019.

Why make it harder to go green? The main reasons for implementing a nearly 20-year-old plan have to do with safety. Concerns about the Chernobyl or Fukushima accidents still resonate, not least because their consequences in a small, crowded country like Belgium would be dramatic. Instituting a 600-square-kilometer exclusion zone, as Japan did after its accident, would devour 2% of the country’s territory and displace hundreds of thousands of people. There are also concerns about the safe storage of nuclear waste. But no reactor in Europe shares the flawed design of the Chernobyl one, and seismic events of the sort that caused Fukushima are unknown to the area. Sixty-five years after the start of the world’s first civil nuclear reactor at Calder Hall in the U.K., there remains no evidence of anyone’s health being jeopardized by radiation releases from a European nuclear plant.

The Belgian government insists that scrapping nuclear won’t deflect it from its climate goals, and that it won’t be following the Energiewende model in dramatically stepping up fossil-fuel use.

“Our plan is not to replace nuclear energy with gas but to increase renewable energy — the only energy source which is consistently getting cheaper,” a ministry spokesman says. Yet it is hard to gauge these aspirations until the country’s long-term climate plans are revealed.

For all the periodic talk about a nuclear renaissance, Europe last commissioned a new nuclear power plant 14 years ago. Romania’s Cernavoda 2, a Canadian-designed reactor ordered by the Nicolae Ceaucescu regime before its fall in 1989, came online in 2007. Since then, not a single new nuclear megawatt has surged onto the grid.

Just six reactors are under construction. Of these, two pioneering projects to build EPR models — one in France and one in Finland — are running years late and wildly over budget. (The Finnish project, at Olkiluoto, which was scheduled for completion in 2009, is expected to enter operation in 2022.) Then there is one Slovak plan involving Russian technology, and the 22 billion-pound EPR project at Hinkley Point C in the U.K. that is not expected to be commissioned until the late 2020s.

This has left Europe with an increasingly aged reactor population. In 2000, just 2% of the total were more than 30 years old. By 2020, that had risen to 86%.

Europe not only faces the looming cliff’s edge of reactor retirements, but its nuclear-operating countries also have been left vulnerable to involuntary closures if, for instance, wear and tear mean elderly reactors’ lives cannot be extended. Britain’s main operator, Electricite de France SA, recently announced that its entire fleet of advanced gas-cooled reactors – which date from 1976 to 1989 – would have to close before 2030 due to corrosion and cracking in their graphite cores.

That will remove around 15% of Britain’s entire generating output. Hinkley Point C, the one station on order, will replace only 7% when its reactors come online in the late 2020s. “Unfortunately, in the U.K., we have taken it to the wire,” says Tom Greatrex, head of the Nuclear Industry Association, a U.K. trade body. “We are facing a capacity gap.”

*****

A host of reasons explains the long-term dip in nuclear construction. The Chernobyl accident in 1986 put most projects on hold as regulators reassessed the safety of operations. Many were later scrapped. Then, in the 1990s, as privatization swept the electricity sector, new owners sweated their (often lavish) endowment of assets rather than invest in new plants. What they did build tended to be gas power stations, taking advantage of the surge in cheap and secure (if now depleted) North Sea gas. As nuclear programs ended and supply chains withered, the costs of getting back into the nuclear game rose.

“Politicians have not yet grasped the scale of the problems they have created by failing to think ahead,” says Yves Desbazeille, chief executive of Foratom. His organization estimates that just maintaining nuclear’s proportion of power at today’s levels by 2050 requires the construction of 113 gigawatts on top of the 7.8 gigawatts under construction today. That essentially means replacing everything that currently exists in just two decades.

Restarting the nuclear industry is not the work of a moment, Desbazeille warns. “It takes a long time to set up a program. You have to get the design, license it, find the sites where you can start building.” The high costs and overruns associated with the few existing projects come from the fact they are “first of a kind” designs after decades of inertia.

That’s why Britain’s Hinkley Point project will produce power priced at 92.50 pounds per megawatt-hour in 2012 money — a price that compares unfavorably with the latest U.K. offshore wind projects, which have come in at below 40 pounds per megawatt-hour.

Nuclear’s payback only comes when countries build a fleet of similar reactors, creating the supply chain that allows for consistent delivery and drives down costs. For instance, South Korea has built reactors programmatically since the 1980s, which is why its costs are close to $2,000 to $4,000 per kilowatt, compared to $8,000 for the U.K.’s last completed one-off project, Sizewell B, in the 1990s, according to research by the Energy Technologies Institute. Simplification of design and smaller modular designs that can be factory-built might drive down costs further.

Certainty about policy is especially important to reduce the cost of capital, critical in an industry where huge sums are required upfront. Financing represents around 70% of the cost of nuclear per megawatt-hour. Ironically, countries that exit their nuclear programs, like Belgium and Germany, make it harder for those that wish to stay in.

Reigniting investment will not be easy. Many in the industry believe that it will require a level of political engagement not seen since France’s 1970s Messmer plan (conceived after the 1973 oil shock), which created the 58-strong reactor fleet that largely survives today. There are signs that some acknowledge the challenge. Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson and France’s President Emmanuel Macron have both given speeches in the past month calling for a renewal of nuclear investment — the latter signaling a reversal of his predecessor’s plan to cut France’s nuclear output from 70% to 50% of its electricity. A number of central European countries — notably Poland — are planning investments, albeit driven as much by fear of dependence on Russia for gas as by any longer-term climate goal.

But nothing is simple in nuclear politics. If renewal is to happen, many think nuclear must be included in the EU’s “taxonomy” — which classifies energy sources as “green” for investment purposes. However, divisions in the bloc mean that is far from certain. Germany, for instance, has gathered support from Austria, Denmark, Luxembourg and Spain to oppose such a move.

Ultimately, much depends on whether new nuclear is seen as vital in the battle to reduce emissions. Some think not. Mycle Schneider, a Paris-based anti-nuclear activist, argues that, aside from its cost, nuclear simply takes too long to build in the few years we have available to decarbonize.

“Every euro invested in new nuclear power plants makes the climate crisis worse because now this money cannot be used to invest in efficient climate protection options,” he has said.

Nuclear proponents say the costs of ignoring it could be higher. The only zero-carbon alternatives are carbon capture, which has yet to be proved at scale, and renewables, which pose as-yet-unsolved intermittency problems. Desbazeille is skeptical that variability can be solved by storage technology. “It is a fairy tale that we are building enough storage to back up renewables,” he says. “In total there is just 24 minutes of storage in the EU.”

*****

If politicians are to be convinced to back nuclear, Paul Bossens thinks public opinion must endorse it, too. After a decade on the road with his presentation, he feels the mood is now changing, perhaps impelled by the hard choices of the climate debate.

“The majority of the population is not against nuclear as a solution to the climate, but they are afraid to say it,” he says. “There’s still a lot of social pressure against it, and if you say you are pro, the loudest voices still say: ‘You are a bad guy, it is dangerous.’”

Recent polls in Belgium give some credence to this claim. A survey by broadcaster RTL in September showed 47% of Belgians are against the phaseout and only 30% favor it. A majority favor keeping nuclear in the energy mix. Germany has seen similar results — albeit with a majority, if a narrowing one, still favoring the phaseout.

Pro-nuclear activism may be a minority activity — Bossens’ pressure group 100 Terawatt Hours (a reference to Belgium’s annual electricity consumption) counts its membership in dozens, not thousands. But he thinks it’s a force multiplier having non-industry participants speaking up in favor of atomic power.

“People always assume anyone pro-nuclear must be funded by the industry,” he says. “When you tell them you are just a private citizen, they almost fall off their chair.”

The pro-nuclear movement is morphing in other ways, too. Historically, it has tended to put its case dryly, as if arguing on the facts alone is the way to change people’s minds. Appeals to emotion have been left to its opponents. Now organizations such as Mothers for Nuclear, a group founded by two nuclear workers in the U.S. but with a base in Europe, seek explicitly to appeal to feelings as well as reason.

It presents nuclear’s dense energy output (the factor that keeps its physical footprint small) as a pro-nature choice, helping to preserve pristine landscapes and habitats for future generations. “We think it’s possible to be positive about both nature and humanity,” says its European director, Iida Ruishalme, a Finnish cell biologist who lives in Switzerland. “We want our children and their children to have the energy to lead a fulfilling life.”

It is a bold turnaround, associating nuclear with nature in this way. Early anti-nuclear movements grew out of another mothers’ movement, Women Strike for Peace, whose opposition to atmospheric testing was that atomic fallout was poisoning their children. When Rachel Carson published her seminal environmentalist tract “Silent Spring” in 1962, she located her motivation for investigating humankind’s “tampering” with nature in the development of atomic science.

Going from believing nuclear is dangerous to thinking that it’s vital is a big jump. And proponents don’t have that long to convince the public. Every day brings nuclear power’s ultimate demise a step closer. And even the most powerful appeals may not be enough to derail Belgium’s phaseout.

On a drizzly day a few weeks ago, on a concourse in front of Brussels Central railway station, Bossens and his colleagues convened a “Stand Up for Nuclear” rally to trumpet their opposition to the phaseout. (Stand Up is a loose coalition of pro-nuclear bodies from around the world convened by the American pro-nuclear campaigner Michael Shellenberger.) A ragged group of about 200 people gathered to listen to short speeches by activists from 11 countries, including the U.S. and South Korea.

Among the speakers was an activist from Finland, Tea Toermaenen. Her frustration was evident. “It is infuriating to see other countries shutting down nuclear plants prematurely when we know that extending the life of existing plants is one of the most cost-effective things we can do for the climate,” she said. “The people of Belgium deserve better leaders. You have been let down.”

Nierika
Posts: 4115
Joined: 17/03/2020 00:41

#53 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by Nierika »

Zanimljiva dijalog-kritika o filmu "Toma", nisam se često susretala s ovom formom, pejstam u nastavku:
https://offns.rs/off-screen/film/srecni ... 93el3ioS5w
Dva smo sveta različita
Home/OFF-SCREEN/Film/Dva smo sveta različita

Dva smo sveta različita
By Redakcija|02/11/2021|Film
Mi, filmski kritičar Jovan Marković i dramaturškinja Mina Petrić, imali smo vrlo zanimljiv razgovor na temu filma Toma, zbog čega smo, i sad kad se medijska popularnost filma polako stišava, odlučili da svoje stavove suočimo u tekstu. Jovan igra odbranu, a Mina napad.

Generalni utisak
Mina:

Kad god pričam sa prijateljima o Tomi naiđe ona čuvena rečenica: „Pa dobro, ALI bolji je od proseka domaće produkcije.“ To je tačno, ALI pitam se kad ćemo prestati da se tapšemo po leđima jer se poredimo s gorim od sebe. Pogotovo što kritike i prikazi ovog filma koji je bolji od lošeg skoro jednoglasno proglašavaju Tomu vatrometom emocija (čast izuzecima), pa što dublje zalazimo u kritičarski diletantizam i elementarnu filmsku neobrazovanost, naslovi kritika postaju sve afektivniji dok ne dođemo do samog dna – Film od koga krvari duša. Je l’ tebi, Jovane, krvarila duša? Meni nije.

Jovan:

Iako ni meni nije krvarila duša tokom gledanja, ne mogu da prenebregnem činjenicu da su mnoge duše iz publike šibali „i orkani i tornada“, da citiram Tominu pesmu. To znači da je ovaj film pre svega prihvatila publika, na bazičnom, emotivnom nivou i da bi u tom pogledu mediji/kritičari svakako malo šta mogli da promene. Možemo se složiti da bi kritičari trebalo da zadrže nešto hladniji pristup i ne podlegnu afektu, ali mislim da su oni samo konstatovali činjenično stanje, a da nisu oni, kao što si rekla, film proglasili vatrometom emocija, jer on to naprosto jeste. E sad, da li se film igra tim emocijama preko granica ukusa, drugim rečima – da li je to patetično – to je drugo pitanje kojim bi kritika mogla da se bavi.

Mina:

Pitam se šta je izazvalo tu kolektivnu histeriju, kako publike tako i kritike. I kad je to postalo neumesno kritikovati nešto jer nije dovoljno dobro? Moj je utisak da je Toma mogao biti zaista dobar film. Obrisi tog dobrog filma vide se u finalnoj verziji, ali su preopterećeni različitim stranputicama i digresijama, uobičajenim boljkama domaćeg filma, tako da sa Tome pre izlazim razočarana nego dirnuta.

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Mina: Plaky
Preuzeto sa: letterboxd

(PS: Zahvaljujući prijateljima iz organizacije festivala Obnova, film Toma gledala sam na novosadskoj premijeri pod otvorenim nebom Kineske četvrti. Hvala drugarima!)

Jovan:

Što se mog opšteg utiska tiče, on je pozitivan. Ukoliko imam u vidu da je Toma napravljen da bude bioskopski hit, što znači da bude pre svega vrlo komunikativan, rezultat mi je za nijansu premašio očekivanja, jer ta komunikativnost nije postignuta nauštrb estetskih kvaliteta. A što se tiče tvog komentara o standardima, mislim da kontekst domaće produkcije ipak ne možemo zaobići, naročito u slučaju filmova koji računaju na široku publiku i koji su i napravljeni da se prikazuju na ovim prostorima (bivša Jugoslavija). Sumnjam da će Toma imati veliki odjek u inostranstvu, jer je na neki način već omeđen izborom teme – kao što je i muzika Tome Zdravkovića mogla da zaživi samo ovde.

Mina:

Da, ali onda opet govorimo o kvalitetu u odnosu na naše standarde, a ne o kvalitetu po sebi. U redu, ne živimo u vakuumu i svesni smo konteksta, ali ja želim neki drugi standard domaće produkcije i zato neću da pristanem na to da hvalim ovaj film koji mu nije dorastao. Ne zato što su njegovi autori nedorasli već zato što se baš kako kažeš „kalkulisalo jeftinim emocijama“ umesto da se uloži vreme i trud u scenario te da emocija organski izađe iz priče.

U potpunosti se slažem sa tobom da ovaj film neće biti popularan u inostranstvu, a mislim da to nema nikakve veze sa kontekstom, već sa tim što Toma naprosto nije dovoljno dobar film i njegova premisa nije održiva van konteksta lokalnih mitova i cele svite likova koji Tomu prate u filmu, a čija je funkcija samo da ih mi kao publika prepoznamo i tapšemo se po glavi jer smo videli i prepoznali Miku Antića i Zorana Radmilovića.

Jovan:

Slažem se donekle. Naš film je generalno razapet između dve struje: evropske arthaus koja teži da se dopadne festivalima u inostranstvu i komercijalne koja ima za cilj da puni bioskope i obraća se pretežno domaćoj publici. I ova prva struja je zapravo dominantna kod nas u poslednje dve decenije, a tako je bilo i ranije, ako imamo u vidu da je nama alternativni izraz poput crnog talasa bio dominantan, dok je komercijalni bioskopski film bio potcenjen i nedovoljno razvijan. U tom smislu, za mene je ovo korak napred: od Zone Zamfirove, preko Montevidea, došli smo do Južnog vetra i Tome, koji su filmski daleko pismeniji i uzbudljiviji. Ta vrsta filma u svojoj biti je holivudska i okrenuta je kreiranju/održavanju kolektivnih mitova. A kako je Holivud uspeo da svoje mitove prenese celom svetu? Mislim da je samo jednim delom za to zaslužan umetnički kvalitet.

Mina:

U potpunosti se slažem sa tobom. I, da otklonim nerazumevanje, ne tražim ni ja od Tome izvanredan umetnički kvalitet, šta god to bilo, već da bude dosledan svojoj misji. U redu, ako se želeo jedan melodramski filmski hit alla Holivud (a ja sam to jako želela od Tome), Toma to nije. Ako se želela jedna autorska limunadica kako ti to zoveš „razbarušene“ strukture, Toma to isto nije. Tomin problem je što je između.

Scenario
Mina:

Kad govorimo o problemu domaćeg filma (koji teži da bude žanrovski), po meni, govorimo pre svega o scenariju. Veoma je osetno da je Tomu pisalo mnogo ljudi, što ne mora po sebi da bude problem, ali u ovom slučaju je evidentno da se scenaristi i scenaristkinja nisu složili o čemu je film Toma. Možda to i nije krivica scenarističkog tima već produkcijskih zahteva, bilo kako bilo, nismo ovde da delimo krivicu već da analiziramo film. Ti si, Jovane, u svojoj kritici filma Nečista krv primetio da taj film liči na poduži trejler za seriju, što se ne može u potpunosti reći i za Tomu, ali Toma takođe obiluje slepim ulicama priče, koje nemaju baš nikakvo dramaturško opravdanje, osim možda da nam predstave likove koje ćemo gledati u najavljenoj seriji. Zašto, na primer, prisustvujemo sceni u kojoj Toma nagovara svog mlađeg brata da započne muzičku karijeru? Kako to radi za ovu priču, i šta je, pobogu, priča ovog filma?!

Jovan:

Mogu da navedem o čemu je ovaj film za mene. Recimo, o jednom stavu da život treba proživeti intenzivno, ne štedeći se, što se vrlo eksplicitno naglašava u barem dve replike: kada Toma parafrazira svog prijatelja Miku Antića koji kaže da je život jedna novčanica koju treba potrošiti odmah, a ne usitniti je, jer se za siću ništa ne može kupiti; kada Tomu izbacuju iz kockarnice, jer je počeo da kocka i pare koje nema, kaže: „i kada gubim, ja dobijam“. To je, dakle, jedan stav po kome se život meri bogatstvom iskustva, a ne onim što smo stekli, po kome je trošenje/davanje, naizgled paradoksalno, čin umnožavanja. Takođe, ovaj film je i o želji koja u potpunosti nikada ne može biti zadovoljena, o konstantnom osećaju nedostatka, ali koji je istovremeno i pokretač. Slično filmu Građanin Kejn (već vidim ljude kako se mršte na ovu paralelu), rosebud Tome Zdravkovića je cigančica u koju je bio zaljubljen u detinjstvu i koja postaje simbol gubitka, ali i neka vrsta ideala za kojim se kroz život traga. Takav simbol nije do kraja prevodiv u reči, to je više prazno mesto u Tominom životu koje on pokušava da popuni na različite načine, nekada konstruktivno, nekada ne.

Mina:

Evo mrštim se na paralelu s Građaninom Kejnom (ne mrštim se, smejem se)! Dakako da nije prevodiv u reči, zato i gledamo film koji bi trebalo da govori slikama, dakle radnjom (osvrnuću se još na cigančicu kasnije). Ti sada citiraš dijalog, ali u kojoj meri radnja ovog filma zaista potkrepljuje takav stav? Za mene, u pogledu strukture još mnogo veći problem od digresija (koje nisu male ni zanemarive) je činjenica da film poseduje nekoliko snažnih narativnih tokova od kojih nijedan nije glavni, a koji prete da preuzmu film, jer se nije pazilo na meru i ritam, samo nek je šareno...

Odličan početak filma, koji nas in medias res ubacuje u dramatičnu situaciju Tomine borbe za život, nagoveštava da ćemo gledati film o sukobu dva pogleda na svet – Tominog hedonističkog i doktorovog pragmatičnog (oni bi u tom slučaju bili u odnosu glavnog i centralnog lika). E to je onda film o kome govoriš, film koji kaže da život treba živeti punim plućima! Plot u kome Toma polako lomi skoro pa neprijateljski nastrojenog doktora i pretvara ga u svog velikog prijatelja, koji ga na kraju čak danonoćno leči i vozi na turneju, mogao je, za mene, da bude vrlo uspešan (setimo se samo oskarovca Green Book iz 2018. sa sličnom premisom) da nije ubrzo napušten zarad podjednako jake melodramske priče o Tominom odnosu sa Silvanom Armenulić (što je u konstelaciji o kojoj govorim mogao biti samo podplot), koja se, opet, s podjednako nebrige, gubi i vraća kako priča meandrira. Da nije muzike koja kalemi emociju, moja bi pažnja vrlo lako skliznula s filma i otišla daleko, daleko… Zato i kažem na početku da sam razočarana, volela bih da sam videla film sa tako snažnom porukom koju navodiš, a nisam. I odbijam da je u njega učitam jer on to nije zavredio.

Jovan:

Znao sam da ćeš reći da citiram dijalog, a ne radnju. To sam naveo samo kao punchline koji treba da akcentuje poruku, koja je već prisutna u slici/radnji. Mislim da je ona i te kako vidljiva, počevši od tog odnosa sa doktorom, ali i kroz delove koji nam prikazuju prošlost i odnose sa drugim ljudima. Recimo, za razliku od Silvane, Toma nije toliko okrenut građenju karijere, vodi se instiktom i emocijom, ne igra na sigurno i nije konformista. Zato on i može da kreira, a ona ne.

Što se tiče strukture, film je prilično čvrsto postavljen, u dva aspekta. U prvom, to je ukrštanje sadašnjosti i prošlosti, dva vremenska plana međusobno uspešno komuniciraju. U drugom aspektu, put koji Toma prelazi ima donekle bajkovitu ili mitsku kompoziciju, jer se taj put gradi uz pomoć raznih pomagača/mentora. Tu je na početku njegov drug iz detinjstva Rama, zatim ga preuzima Silvana, pa se pojavljuje menadžer, njegova druga žena Gordana i na kraju doktor koji ga vodi na poslednju turneju.

Mina:

U bajci ili mitu, tj. monomitskoj stukturi o kojoj govoriš, junak je delatan. On upada u specijalni svet u kom mora da se izbori sa nedaćama i da se vrati promenjen. Toma nema cilj i samim tim nema ni promenu. A kad je toliko toga domaštano zašto nije i malo vere u našeg junaka? Zašto ne vidimo kako se Toma malo i bori za sebe? Da nešto hoće? Da ga nešto muči osim veltšmerca, kafanskog derta i neuzvraćene ljubavi?! Pritom, to što je film biografski nikako ne opravdava scenarističke probleme…

Prvo, jednom brzom google pretragom može se doći do važnih činjenica Tomine biografije koje su izostavljene iz filma (dva braka i jedno dete npr.) što znači da je, sasvim opravdano, pravljena selekcija materijala. Ona je svakako korisna i neophodna prilikom snimanja bilo kog biopic-a, jer igrani film nije medij koji se može na isti način opteretiti informacijama kao publicistika. Ono što jeste problem je nepostojanje vidljivog dramaturškog principa po kome su epizode iz Tominog života uopšte odabrane (na primer, zašto treći brak, a ne prvi?), što je samo posledica nepostojanja jasne priče i stvara utisak potpune proizvoljnosti.

Međutim, Toma odlazi i korak dalje, te svesno lažira i menja biografske podatke, što je vrlo problematično budući da ne govorimo o davnoj prošlosti i legendi, već da živi svedoci Tominog života postoje. Nije prvi put u istoriji da biografski film prikazuje sasvim pogrešne informacije, setimo se samo kontroverze oko A Beautiful Mind (u kom je jedan priličan skot prikazan kao dobar i duševan čovek), ali pitam se – s kojim ciljem se to radi u Tomi?

Jedino što se može uhvatiti kao jasna tendencija autora iz scene u scenu jeste da se prikaže koliko je dobar lik bio Toma. A da li je? Meni to iz ovog filma nije jasno, jer ne verujem filmu u smislu junakove biografije, to jest znam da me film obmanjuje (doktor i njegova žena fiktivni su likovi, a pesma Za Ljiljanu uz koju je publika šmrcala uopšte nije nastala u kontekstu u kom je predstavljena), a ne mogu ni da se prepustim filmskoj laži u smislu da uživam što me vodi neka priča, jer priče nema. Mi više od dva sata meandriramo kroz Tomin život (malo Tominog života i puno domaštane a nemaštovite nadogradnje) i skupljamo poene jer smo prepoznali nekog poznatog. Utoliko više, pokušaj da se Tomina smrt iznebuha simbolički poveže sa smrću Jugoslavije deluje zaista neprijatno. Da ne kažem – neprihvatljivo. Nepažljivo. Ne-ne.

Jovan:

Na nekom nivou, ovo jeste i film o Jugoslaviji, tačnije jugonostalgiji, osećanju koje, čini mi se, u velikoj meri funkcioniše slično kao i ovaj Tomin rosebud – jugonostalgija je takođe jedno prazno mesto, nastalo iz traume, iluzija u koju svako, često pijan, situira neko svoje, vrlo maglovito značenje. Jedino što iz jugonostalgije teško nešto pozitivno može da proistekne, a Toma je svoj nedostatak kompenzovao kroz stvaranje pesama. Zato je i meni taj poslednji nivo značenja pomalo odbojan, naročito ta završna turneja.

Mina:

Što bi rekao jedan naš zajednički prijatelj: „Toma je toliko očigledno napravljen za bumere da neću ni da se smatram publikom.“ Kad si kod rosebud-a da prokomentarišem Rušku… Neverovatno mi patetično i tanko deluju sve njene scene. Ne samo da mi je to kao motiv, da se izrazim stručno-scenaristički – bljutavo, nego je uz motiv koji je mogao biti realan duh iz detinjstva (očevo zlostavljanje) sasvim nepotreban. Rosebud je razlog za istragu, razlog zbog kog se uopšte odvija priča filma Građanin Kejn. Koja je Ruškina funkcija u Tomi? Zašto se vraćamo toj mladoj Ciganki? Pa zato što je Romkinja u kadru razlog da se čuje malo muzike, da se podsetimo nečeg iskonskog, telesnog, divljeg i kako god još da se Romi koriste, (da ne kažem zloupotrebljavaju) u domaćem filmu i šire. Samo još da Bjela shvati da nije Kusta. A i mi da prestanemo da skraćujemo imena reditelja ko da smo zajedno piškili u pesku. Dakle Bjelogrlić i Kusturica.

Jovan:

Opet jedna replika 🙂 Toma kaže kako mu je duša ciganska, on zaista ima mnogo pesama u kojima se Cigani i Ciganke pominju i to jeste neki njegov nukleus, u simboličkom smislu. Ona filozofija rasipanja o kojoj sam govorio vezuje se za Rome i pre Kuste, Saše Petrovića, pa verovatno i pre Puškina. Naravno da je to stereotip koji realnim Romima možda donosi više štete nego koristi, ali ovo je film o čoveku koji je i sam pisao jednu kolektivnu narodnu poeziju koja je u biti bazirana na opštim mestima.

Mina:

Vidiš, nisam to znala o Tominim pesmama, ali smatram da to i ne moram da znam kad idem na film, već da film to treba da mi pokaže. Šta je trebalo? Da vodim tebe da mi šapućeš šta je sve Toma napisao pa da nas izbace s projekcije? Izvinjavam se na digresiji…

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Da li je? Da li je zaista?
Preuzeto sa: Letterboxd

Jovan:

Što se tiče pitanja istine… Jasno je da ovo nije film koji bi dekonstruisao mit o Tomi, naprotiv, služi da ga dodatno učvrsti. Meni je možda nedostajalo malo te mračnije njegove strane, naglašenije (auto)destrukcije. S druge strane, jasno mi je i da je ovaj Toma u filmu više simbol nego realan lik, kao što je uostalom i kolektivno sećanje na njega jedan mit. Iskreno, voleo bih da vidim i suprotan film, ne nužno o Tomi, nego film koji bi se generalno kritički odnosio prema svim tim legendama iz perioda bivše Jugoslavije, čija glorifikacija zaista ume ponekad da iritira. U tom svetlu treba razumeti i tu paralelu Toma-Jugoslavija: kako se film bliži kraju on sve više postaje simbol.

Ali, zašto kažeš da strukturu ne opravdava to što je film biografski? Ja mislim suprotno. Biopic dozvoljava, po meni, razbarušenu dramaturgiju, jer je život po svojoj strukturi suprotan klasičnim pravilima scenaristike po kojima bi, recimo, tema morala biti jasna. Naravno, biopic nije (barem ne još uvek) film snimljen u real-time-u, sa milionima likova, digresija i sličnog, jasno je da i takav film mora biti o nečemu, jer, kao što si rekla, autori biraju šta će iz nečijeg života prikazati i kako će to uraditi, ali je ta tema ipak prilično slobodnija ili ih može biti više. Na osnovnom nivou, publika gleda film o Tomi. A tek na nekim drugim nivoima, to može biti film o još nečemu, univerzalnijem. Već sam pisao šta je za mene.

Mina:

Da, život ne podleže scenarističkim pravilima, ali da sam htela da gledam kafanski život otišla bih u kafanu, a ne na film koji se reklamira kao komercijalni hit. Dobri biografski filmovi i te kako imaju temu, jer su životi o kojima vredi govoriti filmskim jezikom oni koji su prevazilazeći prepreke postigli ovaj ili onaj uspeh ili upravo slavno propali. Protagonista ovog filma je samo „tužan čovek“ i u stilu nekog arthaus junaka bleji dok upada iz jedne životne situacije u drugu. Da su se autori tvrdo držali činjenica Tominog života možda bih i razumela tvoj argument jer bi onda filmski materijal bio opterećen dokumentarističkim namerama, da je ovo garažni ili niskobudžetni film – isto razumem, ali ovako ne.

Režija
Mina:

Režija filma mi uglavnom deluje dosledno, a valja pohvaliti i fotografiju, kostim i scenografiju. Trajanje filma, doduše, iz razloga koje sam već navela, ozbiljno gazi granice pristojnosti… Jedino što mi nije jasno jeste kako je produkcija filma, koja je u svakom drugom pogledu na vrlo visokom nivou, dozvolila tako upadljivo ošljarenje u montaži scena pesme. Ili muzika kasni za slikom ili obrnuto, ne sećam se, i to u skoro svakoj pesmi. Pomislila sam čak da je to namerna stilizacija, jer je toliko velika greška da bi bila slučajna. Ali, pošto je to i jedino mesto na kom se vidi tako gruba intervencija, bojim se da nije stilizacija… Zašto, dakle? Je l’ bagovao projektor? Da li je na festival Obnova poslata nezavršena verzija filma? Ne razumem…

Jovan:

Te neusaglašenosti muzike i otvaranja usta bio sam svestan samo na početku. Ne kažem da posle toga nije bilo, ne znam, samo nisam obraćao pažnju. Ja bih montažu generalno pohvalio, jer je dinamična, imamo mnogo zanimljivih montažnih sekvenci koje sažimaju velike delove priče, rezovi su često asocijativni, povezuju dobro motive i prave efektne prelaze uz pomoć muzike, što je u ovakvom filmu jako bitno. Celokupni stil filma deluje kao napredak za Bjelogrlića koji je u Montevideu prilično bio konvencionalan.

Gluma
Mina:

Vidim da su se svi nešto raspomamili oko Tominog nosa, ko da je Gogoljev, a nije, mada je zanimljivo zamišljati kako je u sred filma nos otpao i započeo sopstvenu muzičku karijeru… No, maska možda jeste too much, u smislu da je blago suzila ekspresivne mogućnosti lica Milana Marića, ali meni zaista nije smetala da poverujem Mariću da je Toma. Zapravo, čini mi se da je gluma najveći adut ovog filma. Još mi je zanimljivija Tamara Dragičević, čija je Silvana žena od krvi i mesa, čije postupke možemo da razumemo i opravdamo, a sjajan je i Andrija Kuzmanović kao simpatični producent, ma kao i cela glumačka ekipa…

Jovan:

Za glumu se slažem, odlična je; Marić igra nestvarno i naročito mi se sviđa Tomina duhovitost koju je preneo, ne znam kakav je Toma bio zapravo, ali znam ljude iz sličnog miljea i to je potpuno pogođen senzibilitet, način na koji se ti ljudi šale, na koji te šale izgovaraju. Kod Tamare Dragičević me je fascinirala dozirana melanholija i umor koji emituje igrajući Silvanu, kao uspešnu ženu koja ipak ne živi život onako kako bi u dubini duše želela, kao da životni izbori ipak nisu bili njeni. Pored njih dvoje, izdvojio bih i neke manje role: Milana Kolaka kao Novicu Zdravkovića, Denisa Murića kao Ramu i Sanju Marković koja briljira u ulozi Gordane.

Mina:

Imam samo dva problema sa kastingom. Prvi, manji, je Petar Benčina u ulozi doktora. Da sam pročitala scenario verovatno bih u toj ulozi zamislila upravo takvu jednu klark-kentovsku fizionomiju, kakvu poseduje Petar Benčina. I da me ne shvatiš pogrešno, nemam nikakve zamerke na njegovu glumu, mislim da je dobro izneo ulogu. Ali, pogledavši film, čini mi se da je u ovoj odluci trebalo zaobići prvo i očigledno rešenje, te postupiti iz kontre. Slojevitija bi, čini mi se, ta uloga bila da je dodeljena nekom fizički krhkijem čoveku, koji se bori da bude upravo taj stameni supermen kog vidimo, ali mu ne uspeva. No, to se nije desilo, prema tome, možemo samo da pohvalimo Petra Benčinu, zajedno sa celom glumačkom ekipom.

Jovan:

Ima smisla to što kažeš da bi efekat možda bio i jači da ga je igrao neko potpuno drugačije fizionomije, ali mi je Benčina bio prilično uverljiv i mislim da glumac takve pojave ima mnogo potencijala i da ćemo njegove dobre role tek gledati. Problem sam više imao sa replikama koje su za njega napisane, kao što je slučaj u sceni rasprave između njega i Tome kada izgovori neku prilično pretencioznu rečenicu o ljudskoj duši.

Mina:

Joj da… Uh. Priča se o duši kao da je film ekranizacija ruskog romana iz devetnaestog veka… Drugi moj problem s kastingom, ideološke prirode, jeste seksualizacija tela Milene Radulović. Telo Milene Radulović nije telo bilo koje glumice, mada bi način na koji su scene seksa snimljene bio izlišan, kakav god da je kasting. Mogu samo da zamislim da je pristanak na tu vrstu tretmana golotinje, za samu glumicu mogao biti način da ne pristane na ulogu uboge žrtve, da prekine taj narativ, odbije da bude tipski kastingovana, ne znam… I moramo reći da ona to, dakako, nije, sasvim suprotno – Milena Radulović je sigurno jedna od najhrabrijih žena našeg savremenog društva. Ali činjenica da je produkcija upravo igrala na medijsku popularnost lika Milene Radulović, glumice koja je prijavila silovanje, te je ta ista produkcija odlučila da njen (i samo njen) lik svuče u jednoj montažnoj sekvenci seksa koja nije dostojna ni seksplitejšn filmova šezdesetih je, u najmanju ruku, ljigava. Da, sasvim ljigava.

Jovan:

Nisam siguran šta da mislim. Meni je instinktivno zasmetalo isto na projekciji, ali sam posle razmišljao da li ta reakcija dolazi baš iz ovoga što si ti objasnila – da nesvesno očekujemo od Milene Radulović neki stroži kodeks. Možda mi zapravo i ne smeta što se radi o Mileni, više rediteljski pristup, kao što si rekla, kakav god da je bio kasting.

Zaključak
Jovan:

Srećni ljudi ne pišu kritike.

Mina:

Ne brini, Jovane, to što voliš Tomu neće uticati na naše prijateljstvo.

About the Author: Redakcija, Mina Petrić and Jovan Marković
Redakcija magazina Iz Off-a
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#54 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by ExNihilo »

Max Weber, liberalizam, i mandatorna vakcinacija.


Max Weber Would Make Covid Vaccination Mandatory

Here’s a real-life trade-off I want you to ponder. Say you’re a policymaker and, like me, a classical liberal — that is, somebody who generally puts a premium on individual freedom. You’re now dealing with another wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections and looking at scenarios your advisors have placed before you.

In one, you’re keeping vaccinations against Covid-19 strictly voluntary, to safeguard the freedom of people to make their own decisions, sound or unsound. But the statistical models say that this path leads to insufficient uptake and a spike in hospitalizations that would overwhelm clinics and require doctors to make brutal triage decisions.

Hospitals would have to choose whom to treat among Covid patients and also between them and patients suffering from all other conditions. They would have to postpone care for cancer sufferers, for example, because there just isn’t enough space or staff. Your statistics tell you that many of those people will die preventable deaths, through no decision of their own.

To avoid that scenario you could override your liberal instincts and mandate vaccinating either certain professions or the whole population, except those people who for certifiable medical reasons are unable to get shots. That would ultimately mean coercion, which you hate. It could also lead to demonstrations and social turmoil, which is the last thing you want.

Still, you’re the decider. And you must weigh the freedoms and rights of everyone in your society. Not in some philosophy textbook, but here and now.

This is the choice now confronting policymakers in Austria, Slovakia, Germany and other countries experiencing their worst Covid outbreaks yet. Austria this month decided at first to impose another lockdown just for unvaccinated people, then expanded it to the whole population. In February, it’ll become the first country to make shots mandatory. Slovakia is mulling the same step, as are parts of Germany, and other countries in the region. Unsurprisingly, Europeans are protesting in the streets again, from Vienna to Brussels and Rotterdam.

Would you and I, as freedom lovers, have taken this Austrian step? When I pondered this question in June I said that, while there’s a strong moral and legal case to say yes, it was wiser to keep vaccination voluntary. My head still tells me that this is the better way. But my heart now says something else.

My internal conflict was best described by the German sociologist Max Weber in a speech he gave at a Munich bookstore in 1919, as Germany threatened to descend into post-war revolutionary chaos. In it, Weber described two approaches to politics, translated somewhat awkwardly as the “ethic of conviction” and the “ethic of responsibility.”

Policymakers in the conviction camp, Weber observed, care above all about their own ideological or moral purity. They want to be right, no matter what consequences their decisions have in the real world. In Weber’s words, “If an action of good intent leads to bad results, then, in the actor’s eyes, not he but the world, or the stupidity of other men, or God’s will who made them thus, is responsible for the evil.”

Those with the responsibility mindset, by contrast, take “account of precisely the average deficiencies of people,” Weber went on. The responsible types don’t even have “the right to presuppose their goodness and perfection.” Instead they understand that they must answer for all consequences of their decisions, including unintended and unpredictable ones.

In today’s circumstances, those average deficiencies include the susceptibility of so many people to conspiracy theories and disinformation. And the consequences can be expressed in cold, hard trade-offs, like the scenario I sketched above.

There are lots of other trade-offs to consider. For example, mandating vaccination, if it slows hospitalizations to a manageable pace, can also prevent renewed school closures. Remember that, throughout the pandemic, nobody ever asked the children before suspending their rights. And they’ve been suffering. Many, especially those from poor households, have fallen far behind academically and face worse prospects in their careers and lives. Some, for whom school may have been an escape from dysfunctional families, have been abused. Globally, depression and anxiety among kids has doubled during the pandemic, to an estimated 25.2% and 20.5% respectively.

Mandating vaccination can’t be the final word. Such a difficult decision must be embedded in thousands of other steps, from weighing how to enforce the requirement to building out hospital capacity and communicating the fast-changing science of inoculation.

And yet, it appears that there’s no way around vaccine mandates in some parts of the world if we ever want to defeat this virus. Our convictions may recoil from that step, but our sense of responsibility must prevail. I’m sure Max Weber would agree.
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#55 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by ExNihilo »

Skroz dobar o biologiji i evoluciji novih Covid sojeva.
Omicron Needs 3 Evolutionary Surprises to Wreak Havoc

There’s a lot to be learned about the omicron coronavirus variant, but scientists already know enough to prescribe a rational response to the threat. As the world waits for data, there’s plenty of useful knowledge that comes from evolutionary biology.

Revamping vaccine formulas and updating travel restrictions to slow down and catch omicron infections make sense, even understanding that the new variant might well fizzle out. Failing to prepare for a worst-case scenario would be a potentially disastrous mistake.

That worst case would require the coincidence of three simultaneous evolutionary advances. The variant would have to be transmissible enough to defeat the now-dominant delta strain and thereby spread throughout the human population. It would have to be virulent enough to overwhelm hospitals and provoke damaging lockdowns and restrictions. And it would have to be novel enough to infect and sicken the growing number of people who are immune to previous versions of SARS-CoV-2 by virtue of vaccines or previous illness.

That combination of evolutionary surprises is possible, but not all that likely. Scientists have been so surprised by the number of mutations in omicron that they’ve been calling it “insane,” but they don’t yet know what they mean.

Some researchers are scrambling to test how well omicron can stand up to the antibodies that are elicited by existing vaccines, and preliminary data show it can bypass these antibodies more readily than existing variants. But antibodies provide only part of the protection immune systems generate, so their potential vulnerability is only part of the story.

On a more optimistic note, the chair of the South African Medical Association, Angelique Coetzee, observed that infections in many of her patients were mild — an indication that omicron is probably not vastly more virulent than existing strains. But since mild cases are common with delta as well, it will take a few weeks to see how they compare.

In the meantime, an understanding of evolution can also inform predictions and decision making — sorting out what’s likely from what’s possible from what’s extremely improbable.

There are two important parts of evolution.

The first is the generation of new diversity through mutations and other genetic changes. In 2020, scientists were thinking that SARS-CoV-2 would do this more slowly than influenza viruses, but because the new virus has spread to so many people in such a short time, it’s getting millions of chances to stumble on new combinations of genes. SARS-CoV-2 can generate new variants by mutations as well as a process called recombination, by which viral particles exchange genetic material.

The other component of evolution is natural selection; survival of the fittest in response to what scientists call evolutionary pressure.

Evolutionary pressure would favor new variants that spread faster than existing versions. That’s why delta took over, and now accounts for more than 99% of cases in the U.S.

There are different ways the virus can become more transmissible. It can get better at multiplying fast in parts of the human respiratory tract where it’s easily aerosolized. It can stumble on better ways to survive in the air, and it can improve its ability to invade the cells of a new host. But delta is already good at all of these — so a successful new variant will have to beat tough competition.


Immunity creates a new evolutionary pressure, bestowing a bigger advantage to newcomers that can evade antibodies from vaccination or past infection. Jesse Bloom, a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has already jumped into studying omicron, and told me by email that his educated guess is that vaccines will remain at least somewhat effective in preventing severe disease and death.

Then there’s a big wild card: whether the new variant will cause more severe or less severe disease. There’s no evolutionary pressure to make the virus more deadly, so new variants might be more or less deadly by chance. (There’s even a best-case scenario where a new variant comes to dominate and proves relatively harmless, thereby turning the pandemic into something like the flu or the common cold.)

Given what’s known, then, revamping the existing vaccines makes sense, because they’re unlikely to cause different or worse side effects. Moderna has already announced it will start work on making a new booster adjusted for omicron. And BioNTech, Pfizer’s partner, has promised to start getting ready to do the same.

This happened once before. Last week, I learned from Harvard University vaccine researcher Dan Barouch that a previous variant called beta posed enough of a potential threat to prompt pharmaceutical companies to create a new, beta-targeted version of their vaccines. The altered vaccines were never deployed because beta petered out. It couldn’t compete with the ultra-transmissible delta. That could happen again, but hurrying to update the vaccines is a risk worth taking.

Travel restrictions make sense, too, despite objections that they unfairly punish countries such as South Africa for doing good surveillance work and warning the rest of the world.

Since the new variant has already appeared in many other countries, a better approach for the U.S. would be to change travel policy across the board — shifting the focus away from reliance on vaccine passports alone and requiring everyone entering the country to undergo thorough testing for omicron and an appropriate quarantine period. The omicron variant is probably already in the U.S., but it will be easier to understand and combat if it’s not continuously pouring in through unfettered travel.

As for the longer-term outlook, Bloom said that at some point the virus should hit a plateau in its ability to spread between people. Before the pandemic, he studied influenza evolution and indeed, flu viruses keep exchanging pieces of genetic information so they can evade immunity. But they don’t become wildly more transmissible or more deadly year after year. So there’s some hope that science and good policy can keep a step ahead of the virus that causes Covid-19.
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#56 Re: Članci i kolumne

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Dobar o budućnosti šaha, i trenutnim šahovskim zvijezdama.


Chess Is an Esport Now. Get Used to It.

The hit Netflix show “The Queen’s Gambit,” combined with pandemic lockdowns and online play, has brought chess to new popularity. That’s put a twist on a world chess championship match that starts Friday, pitting incumbent Magnus Carlsen against a Russian challenger, Ian Nepomniachtchi (Nepo, for short). The future of chess may be at stake.

Chess championship matches have often represented clashes of styles and cultures. Bobby Fischer vs. Boris Spassky in 1972 was the brash, arrogant solo American beating back the Soviet chess empire and heralding Cold War victory. The Garry Kasparov vs. Anatoly Karpov matches of the 1980s and 1990 showed a heady young dissident overthrowing a loyal communist. More recently, the contests have been less political. In 2013, Carlsen beat Viswanathan Anand to capture the title when he was just 22 years old, a triumph of youth over experience.

Now Carlsen’s behavior is turning his match against Nepo into a referendum on heady flamboyance. Typically, a world chess champion would go into seclusion for months, studying his opponent’s games while working closely with secretive “seconds.” But Carlsen seems more inclined to taunt, and to remain in the public eye.

He recently opined that he is lucky to be facing Nepo rather than two other potential challengers, Fabio Caruana or Ding Liren. That’s the kind of trash talk most sports competitors frown upon for fear of motivating opponents.

Carlsen also has been engaging in online marathons of “bullet chess,” exactly the kind of attention-disrupting, energy-draining stunt contenders are supposed to avoid. In a bullet game, each player has only one minute for all the moves. The pace is so rapid the games are hard to watch, much less play. Carlsen also made a recent appearance in Dortmund, Germany, in part to pose for a photo with a Norwegian soccer player. Nepo, in contrast, claims to have done an “insane amount of work” for the event.

Will the fast thinking of bullet chess help Carlsen see more moves during the much slower time controls of the match with Nepo? (A championship game can easily last four hours or more.) Or maybe the bullet success will intimidate Nepo?

Carlsen also is making it clear that for him, chess is a business proposition. His parents set up a company in his name when he was 16, and the commercial empire since has expanded. Carlsen has worked as a fashion model, endorsed an online sports betting site, and worked with a Norwegian water company. He sponsors a leading chess app and has organized his own series of online chess tournaments, played with more rapid time controls, during the pandemic. Those events arguably have attracted more attention than any of the mainstream tournaments.

Carlsen is probably at the point where even a loss in the match would barely affect his income stream, and that is a dangerous motivational place to be.

Nepo is considered a super-talented but inconsistent player, one who does not bounce back well from adversity. But if he stays focused he could pose a formidable challenge. He was never expected to be a challenger in the first place, so he may feel he has little to lose and, in accord with his naturally aggressive style, he can take all the chances he wants. Carlsen is considered the superior player, perhaps the greatest ever, and remains a heavy favorite with the sports betting sites.

As for the future of chess, Carlsen has argued that the mainstream matches of classical chess are too slow and yield too many draws. He would prefer a time limit of around 25 minutes per game per player to become the default. Why shouldn’t the world of chess switch over to a system that spectators seem to prefer?

If Carlsen retains his title, he may well lead such a switch, and it would be hard for the chess establishment to resist. If Nepo wins the match, Carlsen might secede from the current system, causing the chess world to splinter.

What we are seeing in the lead-up to this match is this: A healthy chess world is going to be a more diversely organized chess world, with a lot of disagreement over which forms of chess are most important. Twitch streaming and YouTube already have joined the mix. Chess is likely to retain its recent popularity, but in doing so it will fully realize its klix as the esport it has already become. The good news is that if you don’t like the outcome of the upcoming chess drama, you can find another one to watch the next day.
Ako koga zanima, Carlsen je ubio hljeb u protivniku. :D
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#57 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by ExNihilo »

Dobar o inflaciji, elastičnosti naše potražnje, i supstituciji dobara.


Finding Your Power in a Higher-Priced World

I am fairly compulsive about always having my keys with me. But after a series of mishaps, I got locked out of my apartment last week. It was after midnight so I had to call a 24-hour locksmith and he told me he'd be at my door in about half an hour. I spent those minutes panicking over how much it was going to cost. I felt so vulnerable; I needed this service. It was the only way I could get home. And given my desperation and late hour, he could charge almost any amount. After all, prices are set where supply meets demand. I had a very strong, or what we economists call inelastic, demand to get into my home, and there are a limited supply of 24-hour locksmiths. He had all the power.

Or did he? As I waited, I realized I did have some control. If he quoted an astronomical price, I could always decline, get a hotel room and find a lower-priced locksmith during normal business hours when I had more market power. I calculated what my walk-away price was, which was roughly the cost of a hotel, the value I put on the convenience and comfort of getting into my home that night, and the cost of a daytime locksmith. If the locksmith quoted me a higher price than that number, I’d walk.

Thankfully, the locksmith quoted a high, but not outrageous number, below my walk-away price. It turns out my demand was not so inelastic and he knew it, or maybe he just didn’t want to take advantage. The experience illustrated how pricing power has evolved, and it offers some insight into how this latest bout of inflation may play out differently than before.

We’ve all been there. Maybe not being locked out of our home or car, but there have been times when we desperately needed something and there was a limited supply of it. It is happening a lot more lately. New York, where I live, and other states have anti-gouging laws that aim to prevent customers from getting ripped off when they're desperate. It's supposed to protect consumers.

But as an economist, I tend to be pro-gouge. Often, high-price mark-ups are what prevent shortages or underground markets from popping up to charge even higher prices. During the early pandemic days some small businesses worked extra hard to procure personal protective equipment and were slapped with fines for charging higher prices. Next time they may not bother, and that means less PPE for everyone.

That emergency has passed, PPE is now plentiful. But consumers face a new challenge: an economy plagued with other shortages and rising prices that most of us aren't used to. Historically, one of the costs of inflation is the uncertainty it creates, which means sellers increase prices and no one knows if that is a valid new price or just an opportunity to mark it up. Similar to the 1970s, we're hearing many accusations that merchants are marking up prices just to take advantage of consumers in a confusing moment.

But the world has changed now, and price gouging is harder to get away with. I had more power than I would have had 20 years ago because I could price hotels on my phone. As consumers we are all more empowered. If you go to Target and see a high price for the latest toy of the season, you can check on Amazon.com to see if other vendors have it in stock and what they're charging. You can also use apps to compare gasoline prices in your neighborhood, which helps offset some of the increases.

Technology like this is one reason why there's been so much deflationary pressure in the last few decades. Odds are today’s inflation would be even higher without our ability to comparison shop. It also means inflation today is less likely to reflect gouging, and it may not get to the double digit levels we’ve seen in the past.

Not only can we shop around, we also have more possibilities for substitution. Take the recent story about a New York woman who had a car reservation that Hertz didn't honor. She was also in a desperate spot: she needed to drive to western New York for Thanksgiving and the only car offered cost $1,800. There was a time she’d be stuck, but she had options. Even if there were no cars in New York, she might have hired an uber or black car to take her to her upstate destination for about $1,000 (assuming the 6-hour drive she estimated), and then rented a car there for cheaper to go home. Still an expensive option, but probably cheaper than what Hertz was offering (she eventually found a defective economy car for $943).

How consumers find substitutes when the price of one good goes up is an important part of inflation measurement and dynamics. It can be controversial, since inflation indices account for substitution differently and how they’re measured can make a big difference. But this may be less of an issue today because technology makes it easier to find close substitutes.

Shortages and rising prices are a new experience for many Americans. There are still situations where we face inelastic demand, but fewer goods — even an emergency locksmith — are truly inelastic anymore. You can take this as a small comfort as we deal with rising prices.
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#58 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by L u c i f e r »

"Ako govorimo o formiranju novih riječi, Hrvati su u apsolutnoj prednosti, a sada ne samo da su izmislili riječ, nego i novo jelo zasnovano na tradicionalnim ćevapima.

Iako su najpoznatiji ćevapi oni u Bosni i Hercegovini, mnogi u regiji trude se oko ovoga specijaliteta.

Osjetivši potrebu da i ćevape nazovu svojim imenom, u jednom hrvatskom restoranu su ih nedavno proglasili "mljevenicima", ali na tome nije stalo.

Na YouTube kanalu "Gastro tražilica", koji snima zabavne emisije o hrani, osvanuo je video gdje je predstavljen prvi ćevarak, odnosno ćevap s čvarcima."


Vrijeme je za novo jelo: GOVAP.
Pravi se od smjese ćevapa i govana.
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#59 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by ExNihilo »

Dobar o značaju rasta populacije i makroekonomskim efektima istog.
America Would Be More Happy With More People

It is one of the most worrisome economic statistics of a year that was full of them: In 2021, according to the Census Bureau, the U.S. population grew at the slowest rate in recorded history.

This poor performance was due to slowing immigration, low birth rates, and of course a high number of deaths from Covid. Total population grew by just 0.1%, or 392,665. Even measured in absolute terms, that increase is smaller than during the confluence of World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic.

Inflation and unemployment rates get a lot of attention, justifiably. But this macroeconomic news ought to be of at least equal concern. That’s because — in economies as well as careers — what’s important is not only the level of achievement but also the momentum. The goal is to have a series of ascending successes pushing you toward successively stronger positions.

For all its flaws, the United States is a marvelous collection of invented and evolved institutions. It took a lot of work to get here. At the margin, it costs relatively little to allow more people to enjoy and benefit from America’s Constitution, its favorable business environment and its nuclear umbrella. In the terminology of economics, the U.S. is a public good. Allowing more people in the country is like allowing more people to fill the empty seats in a theater for an excellent performance: Why not?

One simple implication is that the more patriotic you are, the more you ought to believe in a large and growing population. Most of America’s founders certainly had that expectation. Alternately, you might think there is nothing special about American institutions, as many a cynic has argued, and be indifferent about the size of its population. But to arrive at that conclusion, you have to deny there is significant value in the basic American framework.

A growing population also brings practical advantages. Consider the year’s debate over the effect of stimulus on inflation. It doesn’t seem, with a 6.8% inflation rate, that America quite got the balance right. With a significantly growing population, macroeconomic policy is much easier. The growing demands of an increasing number of workers and consumers is itself a form of economic stimulus. But these demands are not in general inflationary, because they are offset by more work and higher output. Those boosts in supply will tend to offset inflationary pressures, and they also will maintain economic growth. A significantly growing population is a kind of macroeconomic free lunch.

More anecdotally, have you ever visited a city and felt a sense of stagnation and decline? For me, that feeling is more common in a city that is losing residents rather than gaining them. There seem to be fewer and less diverse restaurants, theaters, even street musicians.

In contrast, the most exciting states, cities and neighborhoods have lots of new venues and new people. Over the last decade the three fastest growing states, in percentage terms, are Utah, Idaho and Texas. I’ve recently visited the latter two and felt a palpable sense of excitement and ambition.

The relationship between population and dynamism holds at the national level as well, though it is harder to see because declines are not always so concentrated in a single geographic locale. But a country’s mood cannot help but be affected by how many people it has and their ability to make unique contributions to society.

America’s population is not declining right now, but it is not doing much better than holding steady. That brings its own mood of stasis and complacency. And let me be so bold as to suggest that, more than most countries, America is highly dependent on its own sense of optimism and growth. Otherwise, how is it to remain a top innovator? How will it pay off all its debts?

The most common argument against a growing population is that it harms the environment. But any potential solutions to environmental problems involve innovation, and more people means more potential innovators. It is the growing, dynamic societies that are most likely to improve green energy.

Yes, America is in a funk, and low population growth is both a cause and symptom. But this crisis need not be permanent — and one way to solve it is simply to make and bring in more happy people.
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#60 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by ExNihilo »

Dobar o sociologiji nevakcinisanih.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/opin ... nated.html
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#61 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by _BataZiv_0809 »

ExNihilo wrote: 05/01/2022 02:39 Dobar o sociologiji nevakcinisanih.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/opin ... nated.html
Sto to ne spavas :D

De c/p, ne da mi da citam, trazi pare.
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#62 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by ExNihilo »

_BataZiv_0809 wrote: 05/01/2022 02:45
ExNihilo wrote: 05/01/2022 02:39 Dobar o sociologiji nevakcinisanih.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/opin ... nated.html
Sto to ne spavas :D

De c/p, ne da mi da citam, trazi pare.
The Unvaccinated May Not Be Who You Think


Back when a viral pandemic killing millions around the world was just the plot of a scary movie, the film “Contagion” was lauded for how accurately it depicted the way such an outbreak would occur.

On the science of viral contagion, it was quite sharp, clearly explaining things like R0 (the measure of how widely one infection could spread to others, on average).

Of the human dimension of contagion, it did not prove as prescient. In the movie, fearful nurses walked off the job at the start of the pandemic, which begins to end as soon as vaccines become available, with people lining up eagerly for their turn.

The opposite happened in real life. Despite enormous personal risk, almost all health care workers stayed on the job in the first months of the Covid pandemic. Despite vaccines being widely available since spring in the United States, tens of thousands of people are dying every month because they chose not to be inoculated.

The failure of the United States to vaccinate more people stands out, especially since we had every seeming advantage to get it done. As early as the end of April of this year, when vaccines were in dire short supply globally, almost every adult who wanted to get vaccinated against Covid-19 in the United States could do so, free of charge. By June, about 43 percent of the U.S. population had received two doses while that number was only about 6 percent in Canada and 3 percent in Japan.

Now, just a few months later, these countries, along with 44 others, have surpassed U.S. vaccination rates. And our failure shows: America continues to have among the highest deaths per capita from Covid.

Science’s ability to understand our cells and airways cannot save us if we don’t also understand our society and how we can be led astray.

There is a clear partisan divide over vaccination — Republicans are more likely to tell pollsters that they will not get vaccinated. Some Republican politicians and Fox News hosts have been pumping out anti-vaccine propaganda. The loud, ideological anti-vaxxers exist, and it’s not hard to understand the anger directed at them. All this may make it seem as if almost all the holdouts are conspiracy theorists and anti-science die-hards who think that Covid is a hoax, or that there is nothing we can do to reach more people.

Real-life evidence, what there is, demonstrates that there’s much more to it.

Almost 95 percent of those over 65 in the United States have received at least one dose. This is a remarkable number, given that polling has shown that this age group is prone to online misinformation, is heavily represented among Fox News viewers and is more likely to vote Republican. Clearly, misinformation is not klix.

Second, reality has refuted dire predictions about how Americans would respond to vaccine mandates. In a poll in September, 72 percent of the unvaccinated said they would quit if forced to be vaccinated for work. There were news articles warning of mass resignations. When large employers, school districts, and hospital systems did finally mandate vaccines, people subject to mandates got vaccinated, overwhelmingly. After United Airlines mandated vaccines, there were only 232 holdouts among 67,000 employees. Among about 10,000 employees in state-operated health care facilities in North Carolina, only 16 were fired for noncompliance.

The remarkable success of vaccine mandates shows it is not firm ideological commitments that have kept everyone from getting vaccinated, and that the stubborn, unpersuadable holdouts may be much smaller than we imagine.

Let’s start with what we do know about the unvaccinated.

There has been strikingly little research on the sociology of the pandemic, even though billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on vaccines. The assumption that some scientific breakthrough will swoop in to save the day is built too deeply into our national mythology — but as we’ve seen, again and again, it’s not true.

The research and data we do have show that significant portions of the unvaccinated public were confused and concerned, rather than absolutely opposed to vaccines.

Some key research on the unvaccinated comes from the Covid States Project, an academic consortium that managed to scrape together resources for regular polling. It categorizes them as “vaccine-willing” and “vaccine-resistant,” and finds the groups almost equal in numbers among the remaining unvaccinated. (David Lazer, one of the principal investigators of the Covid States Project, told me that the research was done before the mandates, and that the consortium has limited funding, so they can poll only so often.)

Furthermore, its research finds that the unvaccinated, overall, don’t have much trust in institutions and authorities, and even those they trust, they trust less: 71 percent of the vaccinated trust hospitals and doctors “a lot,” for example, while only 39 percent of the unvaccinated do.

Relentless propaganda against public health measures no doubt contributes to erosion of trust. However, that mistrust may also be fueled by the sorry state of health insurance in this country and the deep inequities in health care — at a minimum, this could make people more vulnerable to misinformation. Research on the unvaccinated by KFF from this September showed the most powerful predictor of who remained unvaccinated was not age, politics, race, income or location, but the lack of health insurance.

The Covid States team shared with me more than a thousand comments from unvaccinated people who were surveyed. Scrolling through them, I noticed a lot more fear than certainty. There was the very, very rare “it’s a hoax” and “it’s a gene therapy,” but most of it was a version of: I’m not sure it’s safe. Was it developed too fast? Do we know enough? There was also a lot of fear of side effects, worries about lack of Food and Drug Administration approval and about yet-undiscovered dangers.

Their surveys also show that only about 12 percent of the unvaccinated said they did not think they’d benefit from a vaccine: so, only about 4 percent of the national population.

In law, “dying declarations” are given special considerations because the prospect of death can help remove the motivation to deceive or to bluster. The testimony we’ve seen from unvaccinated people in their last days with Covid, sometimes voiced directly by them from their hospital beds, gets at some of the core truths of vaccine hesitancy. They are pictures of confusion, not conviction.

One woman who documented her final days on TikTok described being uncertain about side effects, being worried about lack of F.D.A. approval, and waiting to go with her family to get the shot — until it was too late.

Or consider Josie and Tom Burko, married parents who died from Covid within days of each other, leaving behind an 8-year-old daughter. They hadn’t taken the pandemic lightly. They were “100 percent pro-vaccination,” a close friend told The Oregonian afterward, but Josie reportedly had a heart murmur and chronic diabetes and worried about an adverse reaction. Tom reportedly had muscular atrophy, and similar worries. Afraid, they had not yet gotten vaccinated.

It’s easy to say that all these people should have been more informed or sought advice from a medical provider, except that many have no health care provider. As of 2015, one quarter of the population in the United States had no primary health care provider to turn to for trusted advice.

Along with the recognition of greater risk, access to regular health care may be an important explanation of why those over 65 are the most-vaccinated demographic in the country. They have Medicare. That might have increased their immunity against the Fox News scare stories.

One reason for low vaccination rates in rural areas may be that they are “health care and media” deserts, as a recent NBC report on the crises put it, with few reliable local news outlets and the “implosion of the rural health care system” — too few hospitals, doctors and nurses.

Plus, let’s face it, interacting with the medical system can be stress-inducing even for many of us with health insurance. Any worry about long-term side effects is worsened by a system in which even a minor illness can produce unpredictable and potentially huge expenses.

Then there is the health system’s long-documented mistreatment of Black people (and other minorities) in this country. Black people are less likely to be given pain medication or even treatment for life-threatening emergencies, for instance. I thought of those statistics while reading the poignant story of a Black physician who could not persuade her mother to get vaccinated because her mother’s previous interactions with the medical system included passing out after screaming in agony when a broken arm got manipulated and X-rayed without sufficient care for her pain.

While the racial gap in vaccination has improved over the last year — nonwhite people were more likely to express caution and a desire to wait and see rather than to be committed anti-vaxxers — it’s still there.

In New York, for example, only 42 percent of African Americans of all ages (and 49 percent among adults) are fully vaccinated — the lowest rate among all demographic groups tracked by the city.

This is another area in which the dominant image of the white, QAnon-spouting, Tucker Carlson-watching conspiracist anti-vaxxer dying to own the libs is so damaging. It can lead us to ignore the problem of racialized health inequities with deep historic roots but also ongoing repercussions, and prevent us from understanding that there are different kinds of vaccine hesitancy, which require different approaches.

Just ask Nicki Minaj.

About a month ago, the rap artist made headlines after tweeting that she was worried about vaccines because she had heard from her cousin that a friend of his had swollen testicles after being vaccinated. (Experts pointed out that, even if this had happened, it was most likely caused by a sexually transmitted disease.) She was justifiably denounced for spreading misinformation.

But something else that Minaj said caught my eye. She wrote that she hadn’t done “enough research” yet, but that people should keep safe “in the meantime” by wearing “the mask with 2 strings that grips your head & face. Not that loose one.”

“Wear a good mask while researching vaccines” is not the sentiment of a denier. She seemed genuinely concerned about Covid, even to the point that she seemed to understand that N95s, the high-quality masks that medical professionals wear, which have the “2 strings that grips your head & face,” were much safer.

Lazer said that the Covid States Project’s research showed that unvaccinated people who nonetheless wore masks were, indeed, more likely to be Black women. In contrast, those who were neither vaccinated nor masked were more likely to be Republicans, and more likely to be rural, less educated and white. (Among the vaccinated, Asian Americans were most likely to be still wearing masks.)

Lazer also highlighted an overlooked group with higher levels of vaccine hesitancy: young mothers. They were hesitant, both for themselves and their children, an alarming development especially if it starts affecting other childhood vaccinations. Similarly, from real-life data, we know that only a little more than one-third of pregnant women are vaccinated, which has led to many tragic stories of babies losing their mothers just as they are being whisked into the neonatal intensive care unit after an emergency cesarean section.

It may well be that some of the unvaccinated are a bit like cats stuck in a tree. They’ve made bad decisions earlier and now may be frozen, part in fear, and unable to admit their initial hesitancy wasn’t a good idea, so they may come back with a version of how they are just doing “more research.”

We know from research into human behavior but also just common sense that in such situations, face-saving can be crucial.

In fact, that’s exactly why the mandates may be working so well. If all the unvaccinated truly believed that vaccines were that dangerous, more of them would have quit. These mandates may be making it possible for those people previously frozen in fear to cross the line, but in a face-saving manner.

Research also shows that many of the unvaccinated have expressed concerns about long-term effects. Consider an information campaign geared toward explaining that unlike many drugs, for which adverse reactions can indeed take a long time to surface, adverse effects of vaccines generally occur within weeks or months, since they work differently, as the immunologist Andrew Croxford explained in The Boston Review. Medical professionals could be dispatched to vaccination clinics, workplaces and stores to get that point across. (Yes, medical professionals are overwhelmed, but the best way to reduce their burden is to vaccinate more people.) This would let some hesitant people feel like they had “done their research,” while interacting with a medical professional — the basis for more trust.

Finally, consider something hidden amid all the other dysfunction that plagues us: fear of needles.

Don’t roll your eyes. Prepandemic research suggests that fear of needles may affect up to 25 percent of adults and may lead up to 16 percent of adults to skip or delay vaccinations. For many, it’s not as simple as “suck it up”: It’s a condition that can lead to panic attacks and even fainting. During the pandemic, a study in Britain found that as many as one in four adults had injection phobia, and that those who did were twice as likely to be vaccine-hesitant. Research by Covid States shows that about 14 percent of the remaining unvaccinated mention fear of needles as a factor.

Countries with far higher rates of vaccination, Canada and Britain, have responded by mobilizing their greatest strength: a national health care system. Cities in Canada held clinics aimed especially at people with such anxiety, which included privacy rooms and other accommodations. Britain’s national health care system offers similar accommodations.

I’ve yet to find a systematic program in the United States addressing this fear. Worse, many of our public communications around the vaccines feature images of people getting jabbed with a needle, even though that can worsen anxiety.

In researching, I was inundated with stories from people who struggled with this fear and were often unable to find help. Some women said they were treated like drug seekers because they asked for a single anti-anxiety pill to get through a shot. (They also said their male family members and friends had an easier time.) It may seem hard to believe that people might risk their lives over seemingly small fears, but that’s exactly how people behave in many situations.

Of course, there are some people who it seems will never be persuaded. One strategy that has been shown to work is to highlight deceptive practices. In campaigns to keep teens from smoking, advertisements pointed out how the tobacco industry manipulated people. For Covid, the unvaccinated could be shown that they have been taken in by people who have misled them even while those people themselves got vaccinated.

Just recently, there was a brief glimpse at how Fox News actually looks behind the camera: Everyone in the office was wearing masks, even as the hosts have often talked about the alleged tyranny of it all. Stars like Tucker Carlson rant against vaccines, even as their network says that more than 90 percent of full-time employees have been vaccinated. Realizing that one may have been conned and manipulated by opportunists who do not practice what they preach may — just may — be the breakthrough for some.

Responding to our societal dysfunctions has been among the greatest challenges of this pandemic, especially since this includes a political and media establishment stirring up resentment and suspicion to hold on to power and attention in an increasingly unresponsive political system.

Anger — and even rage — at all this may be justified, but deploying only anger will not just obscure the steps we can and should try to take, it will play into the hands of those who’d like to reduce all this to a shouting match.

Instead, we need to develop a realistic, informed and deeply pragmatic approach to our shortcomings without ceding ground to the conspiracists, grifters and demagogues, and without overlooking the historic inequities in health care and weaknesses in our public health infrastructure. It’s not all fair, and it is not a Hollywood ending, but it’s how we can move forward.
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sinuhe
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#63 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by sinuhe »

Godinama prije korone za antivaxere su vazile obrazovane mlade zene. Na Zapadu je to zadnjih godina postao problem jer nisu dozvoljavale da se djeca vakcinisu.
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#64 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by sehohari »

sinuhe wrote: 05/01/2022 06:26 Godinama prije korone za antivaxere su vazile obrazovane mlade zene. Na Zapadu je to zadnjih godina postao problem jer nisu dozvoljavale da se djeca vakcinisu.
Ne baš
Mislim, smatrale su se obrazovanim, ali u sociologiji, društvenim naukama i tkd. A i prije je postojao taj veoma ružan stereotip prosječnog antivaxxera
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n+1
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#65 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by n+1 »

Evo dobar članak apropos aktuelnog hipermoralisanja vezano za uslove u kojima su radnici u Kataru gradili infrastrukturu za svjecko.

Ukratko, vjerovatnoća da će migranti koji su gradili stadione poginuti na poslovima kući (uglavnom Bangladeš, Nepal, i Indija) tri puta je veća, novac koji su za svoj rad primili u Kataru je life-changing u odnosu na satnice koje imaju kod kuće (minimalna plata u Kataru je 4-8 puta viša od one u Indiji), a kada bi OECD zemlje koje morališu usvojile migrantske politike identične onima koje ima Katar, siromaštvo bi globalno bilo iskorijenjeno. :D
Migrant Workers Face Worse Choices Than Building World Cup Stadiums


The global financial crisis of 2008 dealt a blow to thousands of Indian laborers. They were set to join hundreds of thousands of compatriots providing the workforce for a construction boom in Dubai. Then the world economy spasmed, the price of oil tanked and international finance dried up. Hundreds of construction projects across the United Arab Emirates stalled. And the workers were left stranded at home, work permits in hand.

Three years later, survey teams deployed across India to interview thousands of these workers, many who managed to get to jobs in the UAE just before the crisis hit and others who drew the short straw: Hired by the same construction company just a few months later, they never left India and had to settle for a local job.

Their lives took very different paths: Those who shipped out to the Gulf, researchers found, earned four times as much as those who stayed, a gain on par with the wage gap between a university-educated worker and an illiterate laborer in India.

The World Cup in Qatar has drawn the spotlight onto the plight of its migrant workers – 2.2 million of them in 2020, according to statistics from the United Nations. That is 50% more than a decade earlier, when Qatar won the rights to host the tournament. Nearly 80% of them come from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka.

Human rights organizations have come down hard on FIFA for not doing more to guarantee the rights of these desperately poor laborers who built the gleaming stadia where the matches are being played. They protest exploitative work, rampant wage theft and high death rates, as well as the lack of unions and the use of coercive contracts that tie migrants to a single employer.

And yet Qatar’s minimum wage ranges from four to eight times that in India. Much like the Indian workers who made it to Dubai before the global financial crisis slammed the door shut, the laborers that got jobs building Doha’s stadia are the lucky ones.

“It is a life-transforming amount of money,” said Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development, who led the research on Indians in the UAE. “It can mean the difference between life and death for a family member who gets sick, between opening a business and not opening a business, between getting off the farm or staying on the farm permanently.”

Migrant work in places like Doha, Dubai and beyond is, in fact, the most powerful tool the world knows to reduce poverty. As Glenn Weyl, a research economist at Microsoft who teaches at Yale, noted in a paper for the “Normative Ethics and Welfare Economics” conference at the University of Chicago several years back, migrant work in the Persian Gulf does more to reduce global inequality than the combined welfare states of the rich world.

“If the OECD countries adopted policies similar to Qatar’s,” Weyl wrote, “such adoption would likely exhaust the supply of poor migrants globally and thus essentially not just eliminate global absolute poverty, but also elevate nearly all individuals outside the global middle class into this group.”

The benefits of migrant work cannot be ignored. A study by economists at the World Bank and Yale University of a lottery in Bangladesh to allocate visas for migrant work in Malaysia’s palm oil plantations found that remittances doubled the income of winner households in Bangladesh, compared with loser households. It increased their consumption and their investments in land and housing. They were less indebted and had lower poverty rates.

Winning the visa lottery delayed migrants’ marriage and paused new family formation. In households of married migrants, women’s participation in decision-making increased markedly. Winners invested more in their human capital – enrolling in vocational training and language courses.

There is, of course, a legitimate fight to be had to ensure that wages are not stolen and working conditions are humane.

Acknowledging the potential for abuses, governments in some countries have gotten involved in managing the process. For instance, the Bangladeshi lottery was put in place by the governments of Malaysia and Bangladesh to end recruitment malpractices. The program reduced intermediation fees to $400 per migrant, from the $3,000-$4,000 that private recruiters used to charge.

New Zealand’s Recognized Seasonal Employer scheme, an agricultural guest-work program for nationals of poor South Pacific island countries, raised the household incomes of poor families in Tonga typically by a factor of ten and increased child schooling and Tongans’ self-reported standard of living. A study by researchers at the World Bank placed it “among the most effective development policies evaluated to date.”

Critics of the conditions migrant workers toil in – who often seem to deem cheap migrant work in rich countries as inherently exploitative and wrong – too often lose sight of a critical question: What is the counterfactual?

Take, for instance, the tragic reports of deaths of immigrant construction workers in the construction sites across Qatar. These reports rarely consider the alternatives these workers have.

Maheshwor Shreshta of the World Bank estimated, for instance, that the two-year mortality of Nepali migrant workers in Malaysia and the Persian Gulf countries was 1.3 per thousand. The mortality rate of average Nepali men with the same age distribution was more than three times higher: 4.7 per thousand.

The critique of the “exploitation of desperate migrants” often assumes that their decision to migrate is based on misinformation and fraud. It may seem like a good idea, but the outcome will inevitably be horrible. One could also make the contrary case, though.

In fact, the flood of outrage and criticism from many developed country NGOs and pundits about the dangers of migrant work might prevent prospective migrants in the world’s poorest countries from taking a step that might drastically improve their lives.

“National and international media have given considerable attention to the numbers of Nepali workers who die abroad, and to the exploitative conditions they work under,” Shreshta wrote. “This focus could give potential migrants a misleading impression of mortality rates.”

In one field experiment with Nepali workers, Shreshta found that inexperienced prospective migrants overstated the mortality risk of migration by seven times. And many still wanted to go. If you faced their choices, chances are that you would as well.
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konoplja
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#66 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by konoplja »

Dobar clanak Financial Times-a o Njemackoj ekonomiji.
Uvid u trenutno stanje ekonomije i industrije ovisne o povoljnom prirodnom plinu, preispitivanje modela na kojem je industrija izgradena, kao i buduci izazovi s kojima se drzava suocava. Ukljucujuci komentare bitnih ljudi poput vice-kancelara i ministra ekonomije Habecka, ministra financija Lindera i direktora BASF-a Brudermüllera.
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#67 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by _BataZiv_0809 »


Ne, liječnici nisu manje plaćeni od nogometaša

https://www.index.hr/mobile/vijesti/cla ... ajnovije_m

Interesantna perspektiva
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JohnnyS
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#68 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by JohnnyS »

_BataZiv_0809 wrote: 20/12/2022 19:31
Ne, liječnici nisu manje plaćeni od nogometaša

https://www.index.hr/mobile/vijesti/cla ... ajnovije_m

Interesantna perspektiva
Baš sam išao postaviti članak i kao liječnik koji ima u obitelji profesionalnog sportaša slažem se s tekstom od do
omar little
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#69 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by omar little »

Nije frisko, izaslo prije nekoliko tjedana, ali nije me bilo na forumu. Zanimljivo, posebno za one koji su slabo pratili dogadjaje i informirali se preko dominatnog narativa.

Ovaj uvod je nebitan, ali nudi kratki opis analize (ima cetiri dijela).
Seven and a half years ago, journalism began a tortured dance with Donald Trump, the man who would be the country’s forty-fifth president—first dismissing him, then embracing him as a source of ratings and clicks, then going all in on efforts to catalogue Trump as a threat to the country (also a great source of ratings and clicks).

No narrative did more to shape Trump’s relations with the press than Russiagate. The story, which included the Steele dossier and the Mueller report among other totemic moments, resulted in Pulitzer Prizes as well as embarrassing retractions and damaged careers. For Trump, the press’s pursuit of the Russia story convinced him that any sort of normal relationship with the press was impossible.

For the past year and a half, CJR has been examining the American media’s coverage of Trump and Russia in granular detail, and what it means as the country enters a new political cycle. Investigative reporter Jeff Gerth interviewed dozens of people at the center of the story—editors and reporters, Trump himself, and others in his orbit.

The result is an encyclopedic look at one of the most consequential moments in American media history. Gerth’s findings aren’t always flattering, either for the press or for Trump and his team. Doubtless they’ll be debated and maybe even used as ammunition in the ongoing media war being waged in the country. But they are important, and worthy of deep reflection as the campaign for the presidency is about, once again, to begin.
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trum ... part-1.php
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#70 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by GandalfSivi »

Malo stariji clanak, ali cita se bolje i od jedne knjige…

https://www.politico.com/amp/news/magaz ... ory-484793
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Nepenthe11
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#71 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by Nepenthe11 »

Mpre suza hahahhahahahaha, ma kaže sad ću ga kresnut :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

Netko je sinoć na zagrebačkoj Remizi ukrao tramvaj. Evo gdje je pronađen

SINOĆ je oko 23 sata netko iz spremišta na zagrebačkoj Ljubljanici ukrao ZET-ov tramvaj i provozao ga po Trešnjevci
:lol: :lol: :lol:

https://www.index.hr/vijesti/clanak/net ... 53143.aspx
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#72 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by n+1 »

Da se malo oživi i ova tema. Odličan o raspadu Pax Americane.
You're not going to like what comes after Pax Americana

Yesterday, as you may have heard, Hamas launched a massive surprise attack on Israel, crossing the border from Gaza and seizing or assaulting towns nearby after a huge rocket bombardment, killing hundreds. Scenes of Hamas soldiers taking Israeli captives into Gaza have proliferated across the internet. Israel has responded by declaring a state of war, and the fighting between the two sides promises to be more destructive and vicious than anything in recent memory.

As many have pointed out already, this attack is probably an attempt to disrupt the possibility of an Israel-Saudi peace deal, which the U.S. has been trying to facilitate. Such a deal — which would be a continuation of the “Abraham Accords” process initiated under Trump —would make it more difficult for Hamas to obtain money from Saudi benefactors; it would also mean that every major Sunni Arab power recognizes the state of Israel, meaning that Hamas’ image as anything other than a client of Shiite Iran would be shattered.

If Hamas succeeds in scuttling an Israel-Saudi deal, it will be a blow to U.S. prestige and to U.S. claims to be a stabilizing, peacemaking influence. But even if an Israel-Saudi deal eventually goes through, this attack is a demonstration of America’s decreasing ability to deter conflict throughout the world.

Nor is this the only recent outbreak of interstate conflict. In recent weeks, Azerbaijan has moved to fully reclaim the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, sending 120,000 ethnic Armenians fleeing for their lives — a massive episode of ethnic cleansing. The main reason for this was Russia’s preoccupation with its Ukraine invasion; Azerbaijan defeated Armenia in a war in 2020 and took formal control of Nagorno-Karabakh, but Russia stepped in and prevented further violence. With Russian power waning, Armenia has tried to rapidly pivot to the U.S., but this was not sufficient to prevent Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing.

Meanwhile, Serbia is building up troops on its border with Kosovo, whose independence has been in dispute since the U.S. intervened against Serbia in the 1990s. The U.S. and some of its allies recognize Kosovo as independent from Serbia, but Serbia, Russia, China, and a few other European countries don’t.

These are just a few signs of an unraveling global order. Pax Americana is in an advanced state of decay, if not already fully dead. A fully multipolar world has emerged, and people are belatedly realizing that multipolarity involves quite a bit of chaos.

What was Pax Americana? After the end of the Cold War, deaths from interstate conflicts — countries going to war with each other, imperial conquest, and countries intervening in civil wars — declined dramatically.

Civil wars without substantial foreign intervention are very common, but except for the occasional monster civil war in China or Russia, they don’t tend to kill many people; it’s when countries send their armies to fight beyond their borders that the big waves of destruction usually happen. And for almost 70 years after the end of World War 2, this happened less and less. Historians call this the Long Peace. The lowest level of interstate conflict came from 1989 through 2011, after the collapse of the USSR, when the U.S. became the world’s sole superpower.

Political scientists and historians have many theories for why the Long Peace happened (and there are even a few who think it was just a statistical illusion). Democratic peace theory says that countries fought less because their people brought their leaders under tighter control. Capitalist peace theory says that the spread of global trade and financial links made war less attractive economically; it’s also possible that rich countries are more materially satisfied and thus less likely to fight. The UN and other international organizations may have also tamped down conflict.

But the simplest and most parsimonious explanation for the Long Peace is that American power kept the peace. If countries sent their armies into other countries, there was always the looming possibility that America and its allies could intervene to stop them — as they U.S. did in the Korean War in 1950, the Gulf War of 1991, Bosnia in 1992 in Bosnia, Kosovo in 1999, and so on. Soviet power occasionally helped as well, as when the USSR helped India intervene to end the Bangladeshi genocide in 1971. But overall the Soviet Union was a revisionist power that was more likely to start wars than end them, while the U.S. and its allies, being the most powerful bloc, preferred to keep the status quo.

Of course, it’s difficult to draw the line between interventions that prevent conflict and interventions that stir it up. Was the Vietnam War a U.S. attempt to halt a North Vietnamese takeover of South Vietnam, or was it the U.S. intervening in an internal South Vietnamese civil war? The answer depends on your point of view. But note that even the possibility of an intervention that ultimately makes a conflict worse can still serve as a deterrent. If there’s a crazy guy who will go anywhere there’s a fight and start shooting bullets into the crowd, that’s a good reason to avoid starting a fight.

In fact, the outbreak of interstate conflict in the late 60s and early 70s fits the Pax Americana theory quite well. The U.S. was absorbed with the war in Vietnam during those years, and thus had far fewer resources and attention available to intervene in other conflicts. When the cat is away, the mice will play, as they say.

The U.S. thus functioned as a global policeman. The movie Team America: World Police made fun of this idea, but also kind of supported it. As long as the U.S. and its alliances were sitting there waiting to throw their weight into any interstate conflict, there was inherent risk involved in any sort of extraterritorial intervention.

Or so the theory goes, anyway. It’s not easily possible to test the Pax Americana hypothesis empirically, for the same reason that it’s hard to know what causes recessions. American power affected the whole globe, so it’s hard to do a cross-country analysis. And there aren’t that many interstate wars, so data is sparse. Your best bet would probably be to construct some sort of measure of how susceptible a country was to the risk of U.S. intervention — some quantitative definition of a U.S. “sphere of influence” — and then to look at how shocks to America’s intervention capability, like the Vietnam War, differentially affected countries that were more or less subject to U.S. intervention. But the data set would be very small, and there would be a lot to control for, and so I’m not sure how much I’d trust this empirical exercise.

Pax Americana died in stages over the last two decades; people have been writing about its death for a while now, and there were a number of factors that killed it. First there was the Iraq War, which was a clear-cut case of the U.S. starting a major international conflict rather than interceding to stop one. Saddam Hussein was brutal, but after his 1991 defeat he was only brutal within his borders. Yet he was attacked anyway; the U.S. behaved like a revisionist power at a time when it should have been guarding the status quo.

If the U.S. threat of intervention doesn’t depend on whether or not you send your army outside of your borders — if the U.S. might just attack you anyway because they don’t like you — then the incentive to avoid interstate conflict is reduced. Iraq also weakened U.S. appetite for intervention.

At the same time, the U.S. was becoming militarily weaker. The War on Terror reoriented the U.S. military toward counterinsurgency and away from defeating enemy armies. The defense-industrial base was allowed to wither — in 1995, the U.S. could produce about 30 times as many artillery shells as it can now, and China can produce about 200 times as many ships as the U.S. This is a catastrophic loss of hard power, and it means that even a modest diversion of U.S. military resources (like the Ukraine War) can largely remove the threat of U.S. intervention elsewhere.

Finally, a new great-power coalition arose that was capable of matching or exceeding U.S. power. China’s massive growth has given it a manufacturing capacity as great as the entire West combined, meaning that even if we could fix the problems with our defense-industrial base, we’d be outmatched in a protracted one-on-one fight.

(Also, if you’re tempted to say that the U.S. still spends a lot more than China on its military, please remember that this is not actually true; including off-budget spending, China spends almost the same amount as the U.S., and once you take purchasing power differences into account it almost certainly spends more.)

Real or potential conflict with this New Axis, as I’ve been calling it, now basically absorbs all the military attention of the U.S. and its allies. The Ukraine War is tying down almost all of Europe’s military potential and diverting some U.S. resources as well. The threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is so huge and catastrophic that it will absorb all of the American military attention and resources that aren’t going to Ukraine — and even that may not be enough to win.

Thus it’s little surprise that the threat of interstate conflict is starting to reemerge in Europe and the surrounding regions. The world is a more ungoverned, lawless place than it was 20 or even 10 years ago. I think Zheng Yongnian of the Chinese University of Hong Kong put it best last year:

“The old order is swiftly disintegrating, and strongman politics is again ascendant among the world’s great powers,” wrote Mr. Zheng of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. “Countries are brimming with ambition, like tigers eyeing their prey, keen to find every opportunity among the ruins of the old order.”

Like tigers eyeing their prey. The world is starting to revert into a jungle, where the strong prey upon the weak, and where there is a concomitant requirement that every country build up its own strength; if your neighbor is a tiger, you should probably grow some claws of your own. Old scores that had to wait can now be settled. Disputed bits of territory can now be retaken. Natural resources can now be seized. There are many reasons for countries to fight each other, and now one of the biggest reasons not to fight has been removed.

Right now Europe, the Middle East, and the Russian periphery are the locus of conflict. But the biggest danger may be in Asia, which is engaging in an unprecedented arms race. Despite Putin’s aggression, it’s in Asia where the rise of China has disrupted the existing balance of power the most severely. Anyone who is under the illusion that Asia is inherently a more peaceful place than Europe or the Middle East should read some history from before 1980.

Anyway, Pax Americana always had an expiration date. If the U.S. had avoided the Iraq War and maintained its defense-industrial base, it could have prolonged its hegemony by about a decade, but ultimately the rising power of China would have ensured the return of the multipolarity that existed before World War 2. In any case, it’s over now, and until and unless a new dominant global coalition of nation-states can be forged — either a Chinese-led global order or some kind of expanded democratic hegemony that includes India and large other developing nations — we’re going to have to re-learn how to live in the jungle.

Over the past two decades it had become fashionable to lambast American hegemony, to speak derisively of “American exceptionalism”, to ridicule America’s self-arrogated function of “world police”, and to yearn for a multipolar world. Well, congratulations, now we have that world. See if you like it better.
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dale cooper
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#73 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by dale cooper »

Dobar članak. Uglavnom mnogo više razloga za zabrinutost nego li optimizam sa krajem pax americane. Koliko god Amerika imala manjkavosti
u svojoj spoljnoj politici, drugi potencijalni igrači koji bi ispunili nastali vakum su mnogo gore opcije, posebice za male zemlje i narode.
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Sanjarko
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#74 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by Sanjarko »

Nije dobar članak. Mislim ok je ali nije uračunato u njemu da svim Engleskog uticaja itd državama raste pravo populacija. Od Amerike do Australije.

Imaju sve one solidan TFR i zbog imigracije i dobre integracije, a ne asimilacije tog stanovništva rast ozbiljan populacije.

Tako da će Americi rasti populacija s oko 320 miliona sada na oko 420 miliona. Znači za oko 100 miliona rast ili za 1/3 skoro rast. Ako zadrže standard bit će samo jača Amerika ali i ostale ove države Engleskog uticaja itd.

Nemogu reći Anglo-saksonske ili Anglo države ali Engleskog uticaja itd države da.

Dok će čitavoj Europi padati populacija, EU će izgubiti oko 100 miliona ljudi, Rusija oko 25, Turska tu i tamo, populacija joj ostaje približno ista. Kini će se strmopizditi populacija s 1,5 milijardi na 1 milijardu stanovnika možda i na manje, na oko 800 miliona stanovnika. Indiji će rasti još jedno vrijeme populacija, onda će se stabilizirati i početi da opada isto tako.

Jedino će tzv Arapskim državama rasti populacija ali bi ja rekao državama Arapskog uticaja itd. S oko 500 miliona na oko 1 milijardu stanovnika.

Dok čitavoj Africi će se uvećati populacija s oko 1,5 milijardi na oko 4 milijarde stanovnika.

Naravno ako se nešto ne dogodi šta bi moglo ovo sve promijeniti.

X faktor neki.
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piupiu
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#75 Re: Članci i kolumne

Post by piupiu »

Sanjarko wrote: 08/10/2023 04:29 Nije dobar članak. Mislim ok je ali nije uračunato u njemu da svim Engleskog uticaja itd državama raste pravo populacija. Od Amerike do Australije.

Imaju sve one solidan TFR i zbog imigracije i dobre integracije, a ne asimilacije tog stanovništva rast ozbiljan populacije.

Tako da će Americi rasti populacija s oko 320 miliona sada na oko 420 miliona. Znači za oko 100 miliona rast ili za 1/3 skoro rast. Ako zadrže standard bit će samo jača Amerika ali i ostale ove države Engleskog uticaja itd.

Nemogu reći Anglo-saksonske ili Anglo države ali Engleskog uticaja itd države da.

Dok će čitavoj Europi padati populacija, EU će izgubiti oko 100 miliona ljudi, Rusija oko 25, Turska tu i tamo, populacija joj ostaje približno ista. Kini će se strmopizditi populacija s 1,5 milijardi na 1 milijardu stanovnika možda i na manje, na oko 800 miliona stanovnika. Indiji će rasti još jedno vrijeme populacija, onda će se stabilizirati i početi da opada isto tako.

Jedino će tzv Arapskim državama rasti populacija ali bi ja rekao državama Arapskog uticaja itd. S oko 500 miliona na oko 1 milijardu stanovnika.

Dok čitavoj Africi će se uvećati populacija s oko 1,5 milijardi na oko 4 milijarde stanovnika.

Naravno ako se nešto ne dogodi šta bi moglo ovo sve promijeniti.

X faktor neki.
Kako god da je, mi se moramo prestati ponašati kao virus. Za tih 10 milijardi koje će tek doći Zemlja neće biti baš zgodno mjesto za život. Image
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