What is productivity?

#44 Borders and Suffering

I live in a safe country in the Middle East. It's a sentence that doesn't register with most people. It's true though. Jordan hasn't been involved in a major war in over 50 years, crime rates are low, and despite the lack of a functioning democratic system, people here enjoy a lot of rights and freedoms.

Until you cross the northern border into Syria. Or briefly drive through Syria to get to Lebanon. Or cross the western border into Palestine and Israel. Or the eastern border into Iraq. Or, arguably, even the southern border into Saudi Arabia.

We could spend years debating what has happened to make the Middle East what it is today. But what I find baffling is how much of your life, your opportunities, your right to survive depends on which side of a border you live on.

I wrote about the 2023 Türkiye-Syria earthquakes for work - 60,000 dead, 1.5 million homeless. If you were a Syrian refugee in Türkiye, you got international search and rescue. If you were a Syrian displaced inside your country rather than across the border, you got the hands of your neighbours.

For the first month of the war, I wrote about Gaza. October 7 was horrific. But if you were north of that border, you had one of the best healthcare systems in the world and one of the strongest militaries backing you. If you lived south of that border, then within the first weeks, your water was cut off, your trade routes were cut off, fuel ran out, hospitals shut down, telecoms shut off. Maybe you planned for years to murder Israelis. Maybe you were just born.

In the last few weeks, I've been writing about Lebanon. Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel for a year now. Israel has been retaliating in the spirit of 4 eyes for one eye (i.e. 4 times as many strikes; see here). If you live south of that border, you get an air siren alarm and and a bomb shelter. If you live north of that border, you might get an SMS, or else maybe you'll see the post on X of some high-ranking Israeli with the aerial image of your house, or maybe nothing at all, and if you have a car, you can try to drive away. 71 Israelis have been killed and around 70,000 displaced. Some 2,300 Lebanese have been killed and around 750,000 displaced. Maybe your life's ambition was the destruction of Israel.

Jean-Jacque Rousseau wrote:

"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, 'Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.'"

I thought that was naive. I thought so because chimpanzees fight wars and lions kill cubs and orcas kill for pleasure. I thought law is what it takes. And according to researchers like Chris Blattman and the generations of academics that paved his way, that's true.

But I think Rousseau wasn't wholly mistaken. "You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all." The chimpanzee thinks the territory is his. The lion thinks the pack is his. The orca thinks all life is his. So yes, ownership is the problem. You cannot take a life if you do not believe you have the right to it. But you don't require legislation to create ownership. It's a product of selfish desite. It's something we feel before we even learn to speak or walk.

My first word was "da!" (there!) and a confidently thrown out arm. "That thing. I want it." We are born screaming in displeasure at our mothers reclaiming their bodies. We scream out every desire, then verbalise it, then take it, until eventually socialisation and self control kick in.

Our fatal flaw isn't our own. It's in the nature of the world. Best hope it isn't by intelligent design because it would spell doom for the goodness of our God(s). The first commandment of Christianity is, "Thou shalt have no other Gods before me." Apparently, even God needs to ensure their survival before caring for the world.

See, the problem is this. Any life is a product of all life that came before. So all life resembles life that survived. We would not survive if we did not put our lives above those of others. Hence, all life that perpetuates itself must be selfish.

#42 Airstrikes and Empathy

You know the absolute irritation that comes from people saying, "you have to have been there!" "It's nothing like I imagined!"

Well, apparently they have a point. I've spent every working day of the past year reading, talking, and writing about Syria. I know what it looks like, I know the statistics, I've talked to my Syrian colleagues in Syria and those abroad. But I had never felt the mind-numbing strain of refreshing syria.liveuamap.com 20 times a day to try and keep up with the rapidly deteriorating security situation. I'd never sat on a roof after work to catch the last sunlight and then looked up to see smoke from yet another airstrike rising. I'd never been woken in the night by thunder, confused and terrified.

#41 Lord of the Rings - The Rings of Power: Unpopular Opinion

I liked this series. And I mean, really liked it. Not on the first viewing though.

The reason I rewatched this, after being vaguely disinterested on the first run, is that I woke up at 3:30 a.m. on a weekend and, for a lack of anything useful to do, decided to rewatch the first episode. And was instantly hyped.

Grand List of Reasons Why this Series Rules on the Second Watch Through:

Knowing why people matter. Think about how Lord of the Rings starts. It starts with a couple of characters, adding more and more as the adventure progresses, peaking in the creation of the fellowship. By the time the fellowship breaks apart, we already know and care about everyone. We want to see all their adventures. Here, we start off the other way round. We meet all of the characters separately, and have no idea why their storylines are at all relevant to the larger story (= Galadriel's hunt for Sauron). It makes it phenomenally hard to care. But once you've seen the whole thing play out, you know exactly why we need to cut from the orks in the Southlands to the racists (elvists?) in Numenor. Or how monumental a roll the dwarves play in the fate of the elves.

The Plot Twist. SPOILER. After the reveal that Halbrand is Sauron, every single interaction between him and Galadriel becomes hilarous. Seriously, the amount of inside jokes the showmakers added is glorious. "Hiding in plain site" gets a whole new meaning- Halbrand: Not so long ago, men like me were fighting alongside [the orks]. Galadriel: Men like you, not you yourself. Halbrand: You're wrong. I ask you. Also, the rage in Galadriel becomes so much more meaningful, and especially Halbrand's reaction to it, when you realise that he recognises himself in her, and that she hates him more for being so similar to her. I love this plot twist, it's truly exquisit. But if you're not "in the know", you miss out on so much that makes the show interesting.

The Obvious. You care a hell of a lot more about people (even fictional ones) you know than about strangers.

Details, Set-Up, and Getting It. Did anyone remember Adar's line about how Sauron was seeking, "Not power of the flesh, but over flesh?" Because I didn't. I had no idea why Galadriel reacted when it came up again in episode 8, and this is literally the crux of everything that happens afterwards. Or, did anyone actually see the horse being lifted onto the boat by the pully system? And am I the only one who wasn't thinking about Numenor sailing towards the Southlands when that goes down? And the Adar/ Halbrand animosity?

#40 The drying up of Syria

Oh boy do I have a lot to say about the water crisis in northeast Syria. 30 pages, it turns out. But, as I jokingly told my colleague, the story has a 1-sentence summary: There's no water and the sheep are dying.

Let me back it up just enough for this story to make sense.

When people think of Syria, they think of the desert (geographically speaking, that is...) But the northeast actually produces much of its own food, and used to be an exporter of cotton - decidedly a thirsty crop! That of course came at a cost of overextracting groundwater.

Not to dispare, Syria also has the Euphrates river, a river whose relevance cannot be overstated. But dispare we shall, because the Euphrates is, if not drying up, at least drying. If you look at news sources that aren't aligned with Turkey, you'll find an extremely clear and very much one dimensional narrative on this matter. I'm not here to evaluate any country's policies, but what I will say is that the Euphrates is strongly affected by climate change, and that the same drought causing massive crop failures and livestock deaths across Syria is also affecting Turkey.

Ah yes, the drought. Syria is a dry country, and its irrigation infrastructure was badly damaged in the war, and anyways, farmers can't afford the fuel to pump water onto their fields even where water is available. So rainfall really, really matters. And rain has been scarce since late 2020.

So, where are we at?

Water stations aren't working (at full capacity) because there isn't enough energy from the dams on the Euphrates, and the water levels in the Euphrates are too low for the pumps to reach. People are spending money they don't have (i.e. indebting themselves) buying unregulated water from water trucks and pumping water up from boreholes. Which means people are getting ill from unsafe water.

People are massively affected by electricity rationing, again because of the Euphrates. Some communities that rely on the network are reporting less than 2 hours of electricity a day, and everything that entails.

The impact on agriculture cannot be overstated. In the northeast, rainfed crops failed last year, flat out failed. Even irrigated crops saw a huge drop in harvests. To an area that relies on agriculture for income and food, and that doesn't have the funds to import food (especially at COVID/ Ukraine food prices), this is a massive issue. This means livelihoods lost, food is unaffordable, malnutrition is rising. And, there's no fodder for animals - hence the dying sheep (and goats, cows, etc.).

I don't want to conclude with, "everything is terrible and there's nothing we can do." But what can we do? Without a long-term solution to the Syrian crisis, with sanctions still in place - banning structural aid for all areas of control in Syria - with ISIS on the rise again and the international community becoming increasingly involved in the newest European conflict, I can't think of anything to do other than shouting into the void and hoping someone answers the call.

#39 Madagascar and a changing climate 

Every now and then, the news becomes too much for me to handle. It happens when I read about food shortages in Afghanistan, Cuba or Syria. It happens when I read about the Ethiopia war. Or, in this case, when I read about Madagascar.

Madagascar almost wrote history last year. Why? Because it was a hair’s bredth away from becoming the first country to experience climate change induced famine due its 3-year drought. It isn’t over yet, the drought has followed the country into the new year. However, now it is making headlines with back-to-back storms that have seriously harmed the country’s citizens and their food security.

We can’t negotiate with the climate, it doesn’t know the concept of justice. Instead, it impacts developing countries the most - those in areas where crops barely grow, where there are no resources to make infrastructure resilient to storms, where people settle in flood-prone areas because they can’t afford any more, where children are taken out of school to work as food prices rise in response to shortages. There is a reason why developed countries are committed to giving 100 bn $ annually for climate action in developing countries. And yet while we fail to meet those targets, its the people who have least blame to carry for climate change that suffer the most. 

#38.4 Cherry - “Don’t ever join the fucking army.”

One of my favourite things this movie is the juxtaposition between the scene of Cherry’s enlistment and his first time in action. He is promised purpose, but when he risks his life to save another man and later wants to know whether the man survived, seargent says, “Quit worrying about it so much.”

And it just begs the question, if the purpose wasn’t to save a life, what was it then?

#38.3 Cherry: set-up and pay-off

This movie breathlessly runs us through half a lifetime of constant motion and a descent into desperation at breakneck speed. Yet it never feels rushed or unbelievable because of how well the story is set up. Yes, it has distinct chapters that feel so different from each other they might as well be different movies. But there are still visual parallels, twin scenes so to speak, that make the story so plausible.

The obvious example is Cherry using Xanax against his panic attacks while at college, and Xanax later turning into a gateway drug. The two scenes here do a similar thing. The parallels are obvious, even down to the slight pause before the moment of aggression and then the use of the right arm to slam the door or throw the toaster to the left. Except - in the first, he’s being abandoned by the woman he loves and in the second, his toast was burnt. 

Which is to say, everything Cherry experiences in his descent is an escalation of parts of who he already was. I understand this to mean that drug use, aggression, a lack of direction, surrender to another person - none of these things are innately bad, just as Cherry was never bad. They only become problematic when the balance tips toward aggression, crime, despair, and codependency. 

#38.2 Cherry: The ribbon

One of my favourite details about this movie is that Emily wears a white ribbon around her neck when Cherry first meets her - of course signalling her innocence, purity and youth. Later, they use that same ribbon to tie off their veins when they do heroin, standing in contrast to everything the ribbon stood for.

#38.1 Cherry - Light

This is going to be a series of posts about the movie Cherry (2021) because I don’t know how else to get this out of my system.

First up, the use of light.

#37 Alex Rider

Look, nobody asked me to write an overly serious review of a teen series whose target demographic I no longer fit. But, what can I say. I’m nostalgic.

The Alex Rider series is basically James Bond but the plot matters and there’s no sex, and I ate those books up as a child. According to our Lord and saviour, Wikipedia, there are 13 books in this series, which is 5 books more than I know. There was also a movie in 2006 which, needless to say, I loved but also came at almost 50% loss (US$ 20 million). Now Amazon - and Anthony Horowitz - are back on it with a series which IMDB graced with a 7.6 star rating. 

My hot take is that it’s fast-paced and engaging, intercut with Alex doing fun stuff accompanied by great music (I’m definitely thinking of Burning Down by Everyone You Know). Speaking about good music, the amount of Jake Bugg makes me legitimately happy. And that photo I chose? That’s the face of someone whose about to belt out “Seen It All”. Try not to enjoy that, I dare you.

Obviously, all the fun and games is also whack as heck at times. They tried to tone it down for the screen, so if you were expecting a billionaire to try to murder a child in a real-life version of a videogame, ya ain’t gettin’ it. However, the last episode of season one should have stayed on the cutting room floor. And I really do mean the entire thing. I would describe the effect as akin to dumping an alien into the Hunger Games. Yes, it’s YA and it’s supposed to be a little fantastical, but you just didn’t know when to call it a day.

All the same, the youthfulness gets two thumbs up. Alex, even being aged-up from the books, is a school child. He depends on his friends, gets nervous around his crush, struggles in school, gets into trouble and actually gets told off for it. He’s also stubborn and believes all the weight of the world rests on his shoulders. He also has these lines that just- I mean, cue this exchange:

Alex: “[shares his conspiracy theory] Do you believe me?” MI6 Agent: Concerned silence. Alex: “Yeeahh. I’ve gotta go.” MI6 Agent: “Where?” Alex (a literal school child): “To do your job for you.” Struts away.

I’m sorry, do you have any idea how stupid you sound? Also so accurate to how I experienced the world as a teen.

What bothers me though is that the weight of the world actually does rest on his shoulders. In season two, it is ultimately up to Alex alone to save over a million lives. And I cannot get behind that messaging.

#36 Gender and Climate Change

It turns out that more women die due to natural disasters than men.

I’m sure all of you had many different reactions, ranging from “duh, women are weaker” to “that can‘t be true”. But it is true, and it’s got little to do with women’s physical constitution.

Take the 2004 Tsunami in South- and South-East-Asia. More women died than men, and it’s largely attributable to girls not learning to swim and climb trees because those are considered “male activities”. Take a different tsunami on the Indonesian coast. Again, it was mostly women that died, but this time because the men were out at sea. In case that confuses you as much as it does me, tsunamis build most of their height as they approach the coast. In any case, women were home in their coastal villages, tending to their dependents, cooking and the likes, and this division of labour made them more vulnerable.

But it’s not just disasters. It’s everyday things. Like women cooking over open fires in badly ventilated huts, which makes them more likely to die from exposure to black smoke. Or women being responsible for fetching water, an increasingly burdensome task as water becomes more scarce. Or women being less likely to own their land, making it harder for them to adopt climate resilient agricultural strategies like agroforestry, besides having worse access to information on such techniques.

Let me be very clear though. This doesn’t mean all women - it depends on socio-economic status, local context, age, marital status, health, and much more. In some cases, men are more vulnerable because they are more likely to work outdoors, some widowed men are burdened with the tasks their wives used to complete, and such. And what about everyone who doesn’t fit neatly into the female / male categories? Because we are talking about gender here, and the social norms and attitudes that go with it.

Still, we live in a world in which more women than men are poor, have worse access to resources, take care of children, the elderly and the sick, fetch fuelwood and water and such, whcih makes them more vulnerable to climate change. That should be reflected in our efforts to increase climate resilience, because resilience means resilience of everyone. Nobody is safe until everyone is safe should extend far, far beyond the big C.

[This is part four of a short series recounting experiences I had with refugees in Calais.]

In my last three posts, I shared stories of people who were friendly, open, engaging, resilient, helpful, and so much more. Obviously, not everyone is like that. In the interest of honesty, I want to talk about the bad experiences as well. It’s not really fair - making one in four posts about bad experiences when it’s maybe one in a few hundred refugees who actually cause trouble. Alas.

There really are only two experiences I had. The first was when I was standing at the van, handing out food packs. The idea of Care4Calais’s food packs are that a group of 4 people gets a set of staple ingredients that provide them with 2 day’s worth of food for cooking. Rice, oil, onions, tomatoes, such things. It’s principally hard to explain to people they need 3 friends to even get a pack, and often they don’t have 3 people they actually cook with. So, you get plenty of confusion (which is often alleviated by someone who’s willing to wait a long time or even miss out on his own food pack in favour of translating), and some discontent.

This one guy took it to the next level though. He very angrily demanded that we give him - just him - two packs. He wasn’t physical, he wouldn’t even push if someone got in the way. But he was shouting, and edging closer to try and reach into the van, with a mass of people behind him becoming increasingly angry at him for holding up the whole distribution. And I thought, hot damn, that’s so selfish of him.

Why did I think that? Because, of course, I had no idea what was actually going on. He doesn’t live in that camp (Hospital, we call it), but lives in the city center. Care4Calais used to distribute food packs there as well, but the government forbade it. He was drunk, but he was also arguing that since they weren’t distributing food to him and his friends anymore, he should be allowed to have two packs to take back to them. Which, fair enough. Still rude, still drunk, still too loud. But not unreasonable, not selfish, not aggressive. Rules and etiquette are hard when you’re just trying to survive.

And the other experience - well, let’s just say I was sitting in a park and someone really wanted to persuade me to sleep with him. It was super uncomfortable - which I told him over and over and over - but ultimately, when I got up and walked away, he didn’t follow. So, not okay. But not dangerous, either. Not even malicious. Just inappropriate. 

[This is part three of a short series recounting experiences I had with refugees in Calais.]

How do you interact with someone who shares zero languages with you? When you don’t speak any Kurdish and he doesn’t speak any European language?

The guy I’m referring to just kind of ended up hanging out with me. Pointing things out, laughing with me. During the distribution, he watched to see what I was doing, and once he caught on, he translated for me. Told people to move up in the line when they weren’t paying attention, to stay on their cones if they didn’t know to do that. We also celebrated the absolutely fantastic show Alvaro was pulling off, persuading the guys that the donated t-shirt they were getting was awesome (”My friend, you look like a supermodel!”) After, when I was collecting litter, he insisted on helping. And then we fist-bumped and went our seperate ways. 

[This is part two of a short series recounting experiences I had with refugees in Calais.]

There’s a fun fact about Eritrea, which is that the Eritrean national football players keep disappearing. Seriously. Pretty much any time they go to play a game abroad, some of them take the chance to flee Eritrea. Maybe one day, when I’ve done more research, I’ll write about why. But what’s important to know is that a lot of people try to flee, and a lot of people’s asylum claims are rejected in Europe.

So, enter left stage an Eritrean man who speaks perfect German. 4 years in Germany, if my memory doesn’t betray me. As I sat around practicing my sewing (and being laughed at by him because he’s just that much better than me), he told me how he got to Europe.

It started with him walking across the border and into Ethiopia. Ethiopia has a river that flows downstream into Sudan, which is now famous for having carried the corpses of victims of the Ethiopian civil war into Sudan. This is the river he travelled down with a group of other refugees. They couldn’t travel the whole way by boat - because of the police, I believe - so they swam parts of it. One jerrycan strapped to each hip, swimming an hour at a time, sometimes longer. Hoping not to be eaten by crocodiles. I’m not kidding. That’s apparently something he witnessed.

They made it into Sudan and travelled in vans and cars (”We were 12 people in a Toyota. A Toyota!”) to Libya. Libya, I gather, is a country where plenty of the refugees get stopped unwillingly and for extended periods. Often because they don’t have enough money for the crossing to Europe. This man, too, spent a year in a Libyan refugee camp, sleeping on the floor, shoulder to shoulder, he said. Trying to find a boat, paying off the smugglers who pay off the coast guard who rat them out anyways, at least sometimes. But he made it to Italy eventually. 

So then from Italy to Germany. Germany, where he learned German. Germany, where he worked odd jobs. Germany, where people wouldn’t answer him if he asked for directions on the street. We had a good laugh talking about how distant and borderline rude Germans are compared to the Eritreans. He told me that if I ever meet an Eritrean woman, she’ll invite me in to eat their national dish. The French camp he was in, we called it BMX, is also known for the strong sense of community. Everyone is from Eritrea. When you arrive on site, you’ll find them playing volleyball. The women as well. When the food arrives, all the individual packs are put into crates, all the bread is put into a big bag. He said, if you’re hungry, you go take some food. And if things need to be cleaned, everyone gets up and does it together. The children (there are very, very few) run around, play, don’t necessarily even stay with their parents. Apparently, with about 200 adult men walking about, there’s still no cause for concern. As I said, it’s a community. A real community, not what we Germans understand that word to mean.

[This is part one of a short series recounting experiences I had with refugees in Calais.]

At the end of a distribution with Care4Calais, Simon came over to me and said, “Go over to that Ethiopian family. They have absolutely beautiful children, and they speak German.” For context, I was the only volunteer at that time who spoke German.

So, I walked over to find two families - 6 people plus an 8 1/2 months pregnant woman - who spoke absolutely fluent German. 5 years they’d spent in Germany before their asylum claim was rejected. And this is the exact moment when you have to wonder what even makes you German, and what makes those children who only ever lived in Germany “not German”. Why does the state have the right to deport them but not me? 

In any case, they had tried to take a boat to the UK the night before. But the police caught them and they lost everything - their tents, their sleeping bags, their clothing - everything. 

This is one of the least proud moments of my life. They asked me to call 115 for them, through which you can claim accomodation. It’s the French social services, as I later found out. You see, while they were fluent in German, they spoke neither French nor English. I was so unsure of whether I was even allowed to make the call, but I tried to do it quickly, before anyone would notice, with one eye on the vans because everyone else was already packing up. After two minutes on hold, I hung up and told them I would have to leave. 

#34: The police versus the refugees: Qu’est-ce qu’elles font?

On my very first day of volunteering with Care4Calais, I was trying to understand a contradiction: The French authorities have a cycle of constant evictions of refugee camps in Calais (every 48 hours, all camps are cleared), further installing fences and boulders to discourage settlement. But then La Vie Active rolls up and distributes food, water, and takes the refugees to showers, all paid for by the government. And then they expend huge sums on preventing the refugees from making 34 km crossing into the UK, just beyond the English Channel, but they also seem to do little to deport them. So, what’s going on?

Some basics. Calais became a well-known center for refugee movements around the time of the 2015/16 refugee “crisis”, when the so-called “jungle” reached a refugee population of up to 10,000 people at a given time. The jungle was cleared in 2016 - not for the first time, but this time, things are different. The site is blocked off by tall fences topped with NATO barbed wire and constant police presence. Multiple new sites sprung up, and it is these that are evicted every 48 hours to prevent fixed points. 

All this does not prevent refugees from coming to Calais. That’s because they aren’t actually coming here, they are only passing through. According to local sources, and also from my own experience, most of them never wanted to come here at all. How many people have I met that speak fluent German because they spent years in Germany while their applications were being processed? But their asylum got rejected in an EU country and they head out to the UK as their last resort. To get to the UK, they have to pass through Calais.

The UK, however, pays copius amounts of money to France to prevent this exact thing from happening. This year, the deal pays €63 million to France to secure the coastline. The sea is currently the main route for migrants to cross, with security around lorries becoming so tight as to make it virtually impossible for refugees to travel through the tunnel. The waterway too is extremely difficult to manage. Recently, I spoke to an Ethiopian family (two kids and a 8-months pregnant woman) who tried to cross. Everybody was fluent in German, of course. The police caught them, confiscated the boat along with their tents, sleeping bags, clothing, and everything else. Even if the police doesn’t catch them, the smugglers like to overbook their boats. Like another (also Ethiopian) family who got separated, the mother crossing while the father and their two sons had to stay behind. Sometimes the motor breaks down and they just drift back to shore (if their lucky), or have to be rescued. You meet them often, the people who have tried many, many times. 

Okay, so money from the UK explains why France would want to stop refugees from coming to Calais, and why they would stop them from crossing. Every now and then, the state plans resettlements or “mise à l’abri” events where the camps get evicted and the refugees get housed around France, away from Calais. They come back though, they always do. You wouldn’t believe the animosity these guys feel against the French authorities - wouldn’t believe it unless you saw the animosity of the police against them.

Then there’s the water - but that’s not the government’s decision at all. In 2017, after the jungle was taken down, local organisations and refugees took the prefecture to court, demanding that drinking water, toilets and showers be provided to the refugees. They won, and after the prefecture + ministry for internal affairs fought the order and took it to the high court, water was provided. Negligence, the court called it, to not provide water. They have a point, you know.

So that’s where we’re at. The financial incentives from the British, the court order by the French high court, and the obdurance and resilience of the refugees.