A Description of Harms - Introduction

The Dismal Catalog

This blog will mostly deal with terrible things. The reason for this is simple - I want to understand the world, and explain it to you, and in this world the most serious and important developments are usually terrible ones. But before I talk about the new that is bad, I want to have some clarity on the terrible things that are going on right now but that don't rise to the level of news not because of insufficient seriousness or insufficient importance, but because they have been going on long enough to become dull. So what follows are lists, more or less, detailing the devastation that we just take for granted. The plan for the series is as follows:

War and Rumors of War - Ongoing wars, large-scale insurgencies and collapsed states

Bad Kings - Totalitarian states, police states and particularly important oppressive dictatorships

Houses of Cards - Political systems in turmoil

Houses of Cards II - Economies in turmoil

Mother Nature will kill us all - Ecological catastrophes

Civilization, such as it is, is in a precarious situation. I don't know if we can get out of it, I don't know if there is a solution. I do know that if the goal is some kind of peace and progress, it won't come about from muddling through, but will require that the real, existing problems be deliberately addressed. This series is not about the solutions - it just describes the problems.