The other day, one of the readers over at the other blog asked a question as sensible as it is timely: why do so many sane people start foaming at the mouth when the subject of this year’s US presidential election comes up? It’s a fair question.
Even by the embarrassing standards of political discourse that apply to the United States these days, the blend of sheer paralogic, parroted sound bites, and white-hot rage that can be heard from the supporters of both major party candidates is out of the ordinary. I spent some time mulling over the question, and I think I know the answer: cognitive dissonance.
That wasn’t necessary, nor is any future climate change activism required to make the same mistakes all over again. In an upcoming post, I plan on sketching out how a future movement to stop treating the atmosphere as an aerial sewer and start mitigating the ecological impact of our idiocy to date might proceed. The specific suggestions I’ll offer will be tentative, but the lessons taught by the success of the campaign for same-sex marriage rights will be incorporated in them—and so will the equally important lessons taught over and over again by the failure of other movements for social change in our time.
That can be explained by a simple thought experiment. Let’s imagine, dear reader, that you were to go into a Starbuck’s in a hip neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, and ask the people there—dyed-in-the-wool Democrats to a man, woman, gender-nonspecific individual, and child—to describe their nightmare presidential candidate, the person they’d least like to see in the White House next January.
They’d tell you that it would be a political insider openly in bed with banks and big business who spent years in public service pandering to the rich, who is also a neoconservative who pursued regime-change operations against Third World countries and was committed to military confrontation with the Russians. The candidate would have a track record supporting the kind of trade agreements that allow corporations to overturn environmental laws, and would also be dogged by embarrassingly detailed allegations of corruption on a stunningly blatant scale. The candidate would insist that everything was just fine with America, and anyone who disagreed was just being negative. Oh, and it would help if the candidate had engaged in race-baiting behavior, and had insisted that a woman’s claim that she was raped wasn’t to be taken seriously if it was directed at a member of the candidate’s own family.
That is to say, the rank and file Democrats’ idea of the worst possible President is Hillary Clinton.
Now let’s imagine that you were to hop on a Greyhound, get off in Bowling Green, Kentucky, head for the nearest Southern Baptist church social, and ask the people there—dyed-in-the-wool Republicans down to the very last lady, gentleman, and well-scrubbed child—to describe their nightmare presidential candidate, the person they’d least like to see in the White House come January.
They’d tell you that of course it would be a Yankee from New York City, which still edges out Los Angeles in the minds of many of the godly as the ultimate cesspit of evil in North America. The candidate would be a profiteer who made a pile of money exploiting vice, a wheeler-dealer who repeatedly declared bankruptcy to get out from under inconvenient debts. The candidate would be vulgar—you have no idea of the force of this word until you’ve heard it uttered in tones of total disdain by an elderly woman who’s a downwardly mobile descendant of Southern planters—and a hypocrite in religious matters, mouthing only such Christian catchphrases as might help win the election. Such a candidate would of course be on a second or third or fourth marriage, have fathered a child out of wedlock, and would fail to show any trace of pious horror toward gays, lesbians, transexuals, and the like. Finally, such a candidate would claim that America is no longer the greatest nation on Earth and has to make sweeping changes to become great again.
That is to say, the rank and file Republicans’ idea of the worst possible President is Donald Trump.
I suppose its probably too late in the game for both of the parties to do the right thing and swap candidates, so that the Republicans can go back to running a corrupt establishment neoconservative and the Democrats can field a libertine populist demagogue. Lacking such a sensible move, it’s not at all surprising that so many people have basically gone gaga, as Democratic and Republican voters try to convince themselves that they really do want to vote for someone who’s literally everything they least want in the Oval Office. That degree of cognitive dissonance does not make for calm discussions, rational decisions, or sane politics.
We can therefore expect any number of bizarre outbursts as the current race settles which of the two most detested persons in American public life gets the dubious benefit of putting a hand on the Bible next January, and becoming the notional leader of a bitterly divided nation in the throes of accelerating political, economic, and social decline. While that plays out, though, there are other dimensions of politics that deserve discussion, and some of them surfaced in a big way in response to my post last month talking about the failure of climate change activism to achieve any of its goals.
That post attracted quite a few hostile comments and no shortage of furious denunciations. A very large number of these focused on one detail in the post: the comparison I drew between climate change activism and the campaign for the right to same-sex marriage here in the United States, in that both faced a well-funded opposition that pursued a scurrilous campaign of disinformation against them. The campaign for same-sex marriage, I pointed out, triumphed anyway, so the defeat of climate change activism couldn’t be blamed on the opposition alone; the reasons why climate change activism had failed, while the right to same-sex marriage was now the law of the land, had to be taken into account.
This, however, a remarkably large number of my readers were unwilling to do. They insisted that the goal of the campaign for same-sex marriage rights was a simple, straightforward change in laws that affected very few people, while the goal of climate change activism was a comprehensive overturn of every aspect of contemporary life. Some of them got rhetorical on the grand scale, painting the sheer overwhelming difficulty of doing anything about climate change in such daunting colors that I don’t think all the climate denialists on the planet, backed by a grant from Exxon, could have equalled it. It seems never to have occurred to them to ask whether there was a way to reframe their goal into something more like same-sex marriage—something, that is, that they might be able to accomplish.
More generally, the core of the hostile response was an absolute rejection of the idea that the climate change movement should learn anything from its failure. That’s a surrender more total than anything Exxon’s board of directors could have hoped for in their fondest dreams. Movements for social change that want to win always take each temporary defeat as a learning experience, draw lessons from the failure, and change their tactics, strategy, and framing of the issue based on those lessons, then fling themselves back into the struggle with a better chance at victory. They also look at other movements that succeed and ask themselves, “How can we do the same thing with our cause?” Movements for social change that respond to failure by reaching for excuses and trying to convince themselves and everyone else that the battle could never have been won in the first place, on the other hand, get a shallow grave and a water-color epitaph.
For what it’s worth, I think there’s something even more important to be learned from the insistence that the lessons of the movement for same-sex marriage rights can’t possibly be applied to climate change activism. The same-sex marriage movement was notable among recent initiatives on the leftward end of the political spectrum for two distinctive features. The first was that it went out of its way to violate the conventional wisdom that’s governed activism in the US since the early 1980s. The second is that it won. These two things are by no means unrelated. In fact, I’d like to suggest that certain habits, which have been de rigueur for social change movements for the last thirty years, have been responsible for their near-total failure to accomplish their goals over that period.
Let’s take a look at those habits one at a time.
1. Piggybacking
This is the insistence that any movement for social change has to make room on its agenda for all the other currently popular movements for social change, and has to divert some of its time, labor, and resources to each of these other movements. Start a movement for any one purpose, and you can count on being swarmed by activists who insist they want to be your allies. Some insist that they’re eager to help you so long as you’re willing to help them, some insist that you can best pursue your goal by helping them pursue theirs, some insist that theirs is so much more important than yours that if you’re a decent person you should drop your cause and join them, but it all amounts to a demand that you divert some of your money, time, labor, and other resources from your cause to theirs.
Behind the facade of solidarity, that is, the social-change scene is a Darwinian environment in which movements compete for access to people, money, and enthusiasm. Piggybacking is one of the standard competitive strategies, and it really goes into overdrive as soon as your movement comes up with a plan to do something concrete about the problem you’re trying to solve. At this point, your allies can be counted on to insist that your plan isn’t acceptable unless it also does something to benefit their cause. You can’t just fix A, in other words; you’ve also got to do something about B, C, D, and so on to Z—and long before you get there, your plan has stopped being workable, because no possible set of actions can solve all the world’s problems at once.
One of the things that set the campaign for same-sex marriage rights apart from other movements for social change, in turn, is that it refused to fall for piggybacking. It kept its focus on its actual goal—getting same-sex couples the right to marry—and refused to listen to the many voices that insisted that it was unrealistic to pursue this goal all by itself, and they should get in line, join the grand movement for social change, and wait their turn. If they’d listened, they’d still be waiting. Instead, they succeeded.
2. The Partisan Trap
The Democratic Party is the place where environmental causes go to die. To some extent, today’s US partisan politics is the ultimate example of piggybacking; movements on the leftward end of things have been talked into believing that they should put their energy into getting Democratic candidates elected, rather than pursuing their own agendas, and as a result Democratic candidates get elected but the movements for social change find that their own causes go nowhere.
This isn’t accidental. Both US parties have perfected the art of reducing once-independent movements for social change into captive constituencies, which keep on working to elect candidates for one or the other party, while getting essentially nothing in return. The Democratic party establisnment has no more interest in seeing climate change activism succeed than their Republican opposite numbers have in seeing the antiabortion movement succeed; in both cases, that would cause the movements to fade away, as movements do when they triumph, and important captive constituencies would be lost to the parties that own them. It’s much more profitable to the party apparatchiks to toss occasional crumbs to their captive constituencies, blame the other party for the failure of the captive constituencies to achieve any of their goals, and insist every four years that their captive constituencies have to vote the way they’re told, because the other party is so much worse.
The campaign for same-sex marriage rights managed to break out of that trap despite the strenuous efforts of both parties to keep it in its assigned place. It so happens that there are a significant number of gay and lesbian people who are Republicans—who vote for GOP candidates, donate to GOP campaigns, and take part in party activities—and they bombarded their Republican legislators with letters demanding that the GOP do what it claims it wants to do, and get government off people’s backs. This played a significant role in bringing about the collapse of GOP opposition to same-sex marriage, and thus to the success of the movement.
3. Purity Politics
The creation of a movement that included Republican as well as Democratic gays, lesbians, and sympathetic straight people also violated another commandment of contemporary left-wing activism, which is that movements for social change must exclude everyone who fails any of a battery of tests of ideological purity. It’s been pointed out, and truly, that the Right looks for allies to attract while the Left looks for heretics to expel; this is one of the reasons that for the last forty years, the Right has been so much more successful than the Left.
To some extent, purity politics is simply the flipside of piggybacking. If your movement also has to support every other movement on the leftward end of things, the only people who will be attracted to your movement are those few who also agree with the agendas of every one of the other movements on the list. Still, there’s more going on here than that. I’ve written in a previous post here about the way that narratives about race in America have been transformed into a dysfunctional game in which bullying an assortment of real and imagined persecutors has taken the place of doing anything to better the lives of those affected by racial injustice. Purity politics rises out of the same dynamic, and it’s played a large role in taking any number of potentially successful movements and reducing them to five or six people in an empty room, each of them glaring suspiciously at all the others, constantly on the lookout for any sign of deviant thinking.
One of the reasons the movement for same-sex marriage rights triumphed, in turn, was precisely that it refused to get into purity politics. All that mattered, in large parts of the movement, was that you were in favor of giving same-sex couples the right to marry, and a great many people who weren’t in favor of the whole gamut of social-change movements were in fact perfectly willing to let gay and lesbian couples tie the knot. That capacity to bridge ideological divides and find common ground on a single issue isn’t a guarantee of victory, but refusing to do so is almost always a guarantee of defeat.
4. Pandering to the Privileged
No one ever built a mass movement by appealing to an affluent minority. That’s one of the major reasons why so few movements for social change these days show the least sign of becoming mass movements. Since the early 1980s, most activists have framed their appeals and their campaigns as though the only audience that mattered consisted of affluent liberals, and as often as not went out of their way to ignore or even insult the great majority of Americans—you know, the people who would have had to be on their side if their cause was going to achieve any kind of lasting victory.
I’ve discussed in other posts on this blog the extent to which class issues have become a taboo subject in contemporary politics, precisely during the decades in which the once-prosperous American working classes have been destroyed. In our collective conversation about politics, you can talk about race, you can talk about gender, you can even talk about the very rich, but if you talk about another very important divide—the divide between the people who earn salaries and have done very well for themselves, and the people who earn wages and have been driven into poverty and misery by easily identifiable policies supported across the board by the people who earn salaries—you can count on being shouted down. (One of the many advantages of having this conversation on the fringes where archdruids lurk is that the shouting is slightly muffled out here.)
A great many soi-disant radicals have thus ended up trotting meekly along after the privileged classes, begging for scraps from the tables of the affluent rather than risking so much as a raised eyebrow of disapproval from them. Real change will come to the United States when others learn, as Donald Trump already has, that the exclusion of the needs, interests, and viewpoints of wage-earning Americans from our national politics and public discourse has shattered their once-robust faith in the status quo and made them ripe for political mobilization. That change need not be for the better; if the mainstream parties continue to act as though only the affluent matter, the next person who finds a following among the wage class may have a taste for armbands and jackboots, or for that matter, for roadside bombs and guerrilla warfare; but change will come.
The movement for same-sex marriage rights had a great advantage here, in that the policy changes it wanted to put in place were just as advantageous for wage-earning same-sex couples in Bowling Green and Omaha as for salary-class same-sex couples in Seattle and Boston. (If you don’t think there are wage-earning same-sex couples in Bowling Green and Omaha, by the way, you need to get out more.) That gave their movement a mass following that, even if court rulings hadn’t made the point moot, had already begun to win votes on a state-by-state basis and would have won a great many more.
And the movement against anthropogenic climate change? If you’ve been following along, dear reader, you’ll already have noticed that it fell victim to all four of the bad habits just enumerated—the four horsepersons, if you will, of the apocalyptic failure of radicalism in our time. It allowed itself to be distracted from its core purpose by a flurry of piggybacking interests; it got turned into a captive constituency of the Democratic Party; it suffers from a bad case of purity politics, in which (to raise a point I’ve made before) anyone who questions the capacity of renewable resources to replace fossil fuels, without conservation taking up much of the slack, is denounced as a denialist; and it has consistently pandered to the privileged, pursuing policies that benefit the well-to-do at the expense of the working poor. Those bad habits helped foster the specific mistakes I enumerated in my earlier post-mortem on climate change activism, and led the movement to crushing defeat.
333 comments:
If you are interested to join us, meet us on Saturday the 27th of August 2016 at 13:00. The venue is, Vapiano, 347 Flinders Lane, Melbourne Victoria, Australia.
Send queries and comments to limitstogrowth1972[at]gmail.com.
Just look for the green wizard's hat.
P.S. I have created a webpage where I will post the details of the next meeting and any further details for those who don't frequent the comments here. The webpage can be found at wormlamp.com/gwam
8/24/16, 6:02 PM
Roy Smith said...
Location will be East Beach Park on Marrowstone Island (near Port Townsend).
All interested parties are welcome to attend!
Please direct all inquiries to roysmith95(at)live(dot)com.
8/24/16, 6:12 PM
JacGolf said...
8/24/16, 6:15 PM
Eric Backos said...
We in Northeast Ohio are following Melbourne’s example by holding well-advertised monthly meetings.
The monthly joint meeting of the Green Wizards’ Benevolent and Protective Association, Tower Number 440, and Ruinmen’s Guild, Local 440 will be held at 11:30 AM on Saturday, September 24, 2016. Our location is Ruko’s Family Restaurant, 9385 Mentor Avenue, Mentor, Ohio 44060, (440) 974-1914. Shining the Green Light! Public Welcome! Tables for Failed Scholars. Look for the table topper with the Green Wizard Hat.
Many thanks to John for the posting space on his blog.
8/24/16, 6:16 PM
Doctor Westchester said...
Thank you for this post. Comparing the success of the same-sex marriage movement and the failure of the climate change and peak oil movements has been an issue on my mind for the past year or so. Many parts of the ideas in this post I'd already worked out, but you have certainly added more to think about.
A little over five years ago, I was listening to a conversation between my minister and a female congregant lamenting why log cabin Republication just didn't become Democrats since they would be welcomed in that party. I didn't say anything but I felt that their idea was problematic. Today, I would tell them that one of the major reasons that my minister is married to his husband and the female congregant is married to her wife is because those log cabin Republications did stay with their party. I doubt that they would believe me.
8/24/16, 6:37 PM
thenoteswhichdonotfit said...
I like the way you phrase this!
It seems one think the climate movement could do is break things down into smaller, achievable goals (much like same-sex marriage could be seen as a smaller achievable goal within the greater context of promoting equality betwen people with different sexual orientations). For example, something you suggested in an earlier post - destroying the airline industry - is an achievable goal which would benefit the climate. In fact, it's been accomplished on a small scale - there are countries which have destroyed their local domestic airline industries by improving their passenger train networks, and thus destroying demand for domestic flights.
8/24/16, 6:49 PM
Ross B. said...
Bought a copy of Green Wizardry for myself and one for my Uncle Tom and Aunt Ann (who turned me on to your fantastic blog). I'm a millennial, and reading your posts has really changed my outlook on the future. I hope to be a role model for my generation, and lead us to a more responsible, sustainable future! Thanks,
Ross B.
8/24/16, 6:50 PM
Dennis Mitchell said...
8/24/16, 6:51 PM
Eric Backos said...
What? Yes, the trucks can run on biodiesel. No, burning SVO in a diesel engine takes some tinkering. Yes, we can do that. We’re men, aren’t we?
8/24/16, 6:51 PM
Jacob Coates said...
8/24/16, 7:02 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
Clinton supports the empire, Trump does not. Free trade, as you noted in an earlier post, serves the empire, so tariffs would end a big part of it. NATO, once again serves the empire, so Trump's comments on it, suggesting he'd let it fall apart, involve ending part of the empire. The list goes on, but quite a few of Trump's proposals can be described as walking away from empire. I'd be very surprised if he did, and also wouldn't be at all surprised if new wealth pumps were established, but Trump has attacked a lot of the things that make the empire tick.
I could very well be wrong, but this is what I currently think is happening.
Perhaps it's different in the US, but I've noticed here in Canada a lot of supporters of Clinton get crazed, but rarely do the (few) Trump supporters. I think it's knowledge of what Trump is proposing, the end of the American Empire, is something they claim to want (sometimes with euphemisms such as wanting the US to start acting like a "normal country"), while they support Clinton because they can't stand what it would do to their own lifestyles.
In response to the second half of your post, I think there's another problem: massive cognitive dissonance. Addressing this issue would force activists to abandon the lifestyle they love, the perks and privileges they hold dear. I can't see a way to keep sane and do it. Excluding the small number of people who walk the walk, I think too many activists drive themselves crazy, self sabotage, and engage in all the other destructive behaviors that occur when cognitive dissonance appears.
8/24/16, 7:18 PM
Thomas Mazanec said...
Puke, maybe...
8/24/16, 7:25 PM
Blue said...
I've forwarded her a link to this perfectly timed article - let's see if she can learn this lesson or if I'm going to get another screed about how it's all intertwined and you have to fix everything at once or nothing at all.
Sigh.
----------------
With that said, she's quite far ahead of the curve in her desire to learn from the past in a purely technical sense, and I have good hope that she'll be willing to do the same in a social / political sense as well.
8/24/16, 7:28 PM
Eric Backos said...
8/24/16, 7:31 PM
FiftyNiner said...
Thank you! As always, you're able to inject a needed measure of sanity and objectivity into the most exasperating of predicaments. My youngest brother just informed me within the last two weeks that I have made the most complete political turn around of anyone he has ever seen!
I probably don't see it that way completely--but I have made a calculated decision to give Donald Trump the benefit of doubt. Just maybe he can effect some needed changes for the country. Even with his extraordinary ideosyncracies I believe him to have more of the milk of human kindness than Hillary Clinton will ever know!
AN OBSERVATION: My oldest brother is exactly one month and one day older than Hillary. He had a stroke fifteen years ago. The doctor who gave us the diagnosis a month after the event called it a "light stroke." When we consulted with the neurologist he disabused us of the notion that there is anything "light" about any stroke.
My brother returned to work for a time afterwards, but after about two years of struggling with the physical demands of his job he opted for disability. My brother has commented that he cannot understand how anyone who has suffered two episode of DVT and a stroke and who is on a high dose of cumadin could think themselves capable of being President? What is worse for the country is how can the political system be so broken as to let someone's desire for the Office of President so greatly exceed their ability to discharge the duties of the office? (The last sentence is paraphrased from Senator Sam Ervin during the Watergate hearings. Ironic indeed, when one considers Hillary's role in those proceedings.)
8/24/16, 7:32 PM
Steven said...
Lol!
In my former life, I was a grad student in political science-a discipline that tends to attract left-wing people, at least at the program I was in-and still have a number of them on facebook where I can read the political essays they post. I've thus been treated to multiple screeds about how it would have been really nice if Bernie Sanders had won the primary, but he didn't, and how Donald Trump is such a horrible, disgusting racist ogre who will do horrible, disgusting things to black and Hispanic people, and any vote against Hillary is a spoiler for Trump, so if you even consider doing any such thing, you're an accomplice in Trump's horrible disgustingness and should be ashamed of yourself. (I remember one such essay having a title that was something like "Bernie Diehards: It is only your White Privilege that allows you to ignore this election!"). I've also ran across articles (on FB and the Liberal end of the intertubez) claiming that Bernie fans are all men who only hate Hillary because they're sexist (one such diatribe referred to male Sanders supporters as "Bernie Bros").
The Republican circles I've been in have been more mixed. One (a Conservative Anglican group) basically agreed not to talk about politics, but I gathered that pretty much everybody there was going to find some right-wing third party to vote for, or write in Ted Cruz. And I think that a good deal of the wage class people in the Virginia Appalachian town I live in are actually enthusiastic about Trump-though this has less to do with Trump himself and more with them hating the Republican establishment so much they'll cheer for anyone who will put a thumb in its eye.
8/24/16, 7:32 PM
fudoshindotcom said...
I'd love to see a coherent strategy for reducing carbon emissions that emphasizes the benefits of reduction for all people, rather than one that puts all it's efforts into vilifying the small number of Profiteers who gain financially from lax regulations.
8/24/16, 7:35 PM
Blue said...
So basically... can confirm, your portrayal of latte-sipping west-coast liberals is neither exaggerated nor unearned, in this post and many others.
8/24/16, 7:35 PM
SamuraiArtGuy said...
8/24/16, 7:36 PM
John Michael Greer said...
JacGolf, you're welcome and thank you. I like the Bruce Lee quote -- very apropos! As for Retrotopia, those'll be coming every other week until the story's complete.
Doctor W., I'd encourage you to tell them that and see how they respond. Next time you meet a Log Cabin Republican, you might ask him or her to explain to you exactly why he or she isn't a Democrat, so you can pass that on, too! ;-)
Notes, thank you for getting it! Yes, that's one of the things we'll be discussing in that upcoming post.
Ross, glad to hear it! Your generation and the generations rising after you are going to have to clean up a lot of really ugly messes that my generation, I'm sorry to say, has made and left for you; I hope some of what I'm doing can help with that.
Dennis, yep. Care to guess what kind of advice I'm going to offer a future climate change movement about that kind of fundraising?
Eric, excellent. Yes, and think of the way that such a campaign will offend the extremists on both sides!
Jacob, that's certainly a possibility -- why not see if you can do something to turn things down a different trajectory?
8/24/16, 7:38 PM
Robert Mathiesen said...
What Catt did was focus single-mindedly on that one issue, tossed overboard any and every other progressive cause whenever it seemed to alienate potential supporters. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage were pushed off-stage, especially after they came out with radical critiques of traditional Christianity in the 1890s ("The Woman's Bible" and "Women, Church and State," respectively) -- gently pushed off, but quite firmly. She would have pushed Susan B. Anthony off-stage, too, if Anthony had not tempered her own sails to the prevailing winds to support Catt's one goal.
Catt was opposed to war, but enthusiastically supported the US's entry into WW1 as a political necessity to gain support for women's suffrage. She argued publicly that giving women the right to vote was one of the most effective ways to ensure White supremacy in US politics forever, and to keep other races from sharing in political power. And so forth!
In short, Catt had no use for ideological purity; she sought allies wherever she might find them, even when it meant getting in bed with the devil; she refused to piggyback her cause on any other, or allow any other cause to piggyback on hers; and she addressed her appeal to the (White) poor as well as the affluent. You don't have to like her, or to agree with her views on the other hot questions of her time (and ours), to appreciate the effectiveness of her politics. And it's thanks to Catt that the 19th amendment came to be ratified, and is now part of the highest law of the land.
8/24/16, 7:47 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Thomas, that seems like a perfectly sane response to me... ;-)
Blue, I hope she gets it. Insisting that it's necessary to change everything is a great way to guarantee that you never get around to changing anything.
FiftyNiner, you're welcome. I also find a libertine populist demagogue considerably less troubling than a corrupt establishment neoconservative. As for Clinton's health problems, well, we'll see...
Steven, yes, I've seen the same thing. I wonder if the ranting Clintonistas realize how many of the people they're yelling at may just vote for Trump out of disgust at their antics!
Fudoshin, why either-or? An effective strategy deploys many different appeals all at once.
Blue, I lived in Seattle until 2004 and on the left coast until 2009, when I finally fled screaming, so my portraits are painted from life. ;-)
Samurai, and they're forgetting that at this point in 1988, Dukakis had the same lead over Bush that Clinton now has over Trump. It ain't over yet by a long shot.
8/24/16, 7:58 PM
Pinku-Sensei said...
As for what I'm doing about climate change and conservation of energy, I'm advocating for improved public transportation here in metro Detroit. That's become something of a partisan issue, but at least it's practical and helps the wage class as much as if not more than the salary class.
8/24/16, 7:59 PM
John Michael Greer said...
8/24/16, 8:00 PM
Greg Reynolds @ Riverbend said...
If not, there may be more going on than the four errors outlined above.
Greg
8/24/16, 8:07 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Mate, I hear you. You totally lost me in the second paragraph. Hehe! What would any apparently sane person be doing in a Starbucks anyway? I am a coffee snob you know. Everyone has their little vices... ;-)!
Apologies to your readers who posted: "quite a few hostile comments and no shortage of furious denunciations". I simply became bored after reading the first few of those particular comments and went off and did something else more productive with my time. Did I miss anything? ;-)! It is a shame I couldn’t use some of that emotional heat to keep the house warm during this cold winter.
You know, when either my wife or I stuffs something up and we do that from time to time, or something unprecedented and unpleasant happens, we sit down once the dust has settled a bit and have a post mortem on the subject to learn exactly what went wrong and what we can do to respond better to that - or a similar - situation in the future. The thing that I have learned from that uncomfortable process over many long years is to: Nip things in the bud before they escalate into a major problem. It is a real shame that people are in a total state of denial about the affairs of our society.
The place "where environmental causes go to die" is the funniest thing that I have read for a long while because it is so true. Hysterical, downright tea spitting all over the keyboard, and a messy business, but so very true.
I seriously question the capacity of renewable resources to replace fossil fuels because it is simply not possible to do so. And I have been verbally attacked for doing so and then talking honestly about it, despite having run the experiment. And the ludicrous claims that people make - usually directed in a form which suggests that my systems must be faulty are totally ingenuous. Then they start to make claims about some potential new technology just on the horizon. And don’t start me up about Tesla power walls… In point of fact those arguments did more to alienate my personal feelings towards so called "greenies" than any other thing. When I first moved up here, I heard local people saying similar things about "greenies" and I was a bit horrified to hear those disparagements. But I totally understand and sympathise with what they are saying now.
On a completely unrelated note, in my travels to the post office this morning to collect the mail, I spotted a local rainforest tree sapling growing along the side of the road in an area that will be mowed. Fortunately for the young tree, it is now rescued and will receive considerable care and attention and hopefully it will well and truly outlive me.
Cheers
Chris
8/24/16, 8:10 PM
Helix said...
Bullseye! Actually, I've gotten to the point that I don't even discuss this election. Well, with anyone but my friend Bob, who mainly follows politics because it's such a rich source of comedy material. I'll probably have to write him on election day -- again.
As for serious conversations, I don't think I've ever seen such vociferous support from people who basically despise them -- just not as much as they despise the other candidate. Where to begin? And why bother?
8/24/16, 8:14 PM
Eric Backos said...
8/24/16, 8:14 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
Eric -- alas you will find that most of those urban lumberjacks don't have any idea which end of the axe to grab and which to hit the tree with; nor do they care to build the muscle and suffer the aches required to accomplish that task. You're better off looking among all the actual working class men (and women) whose beards (in the case of the men) denim and flannel are not just fashion statements. You won't find them in the hipster districts.
8/24/16, 8:26 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
When I noted that we were diluting our actions to back people who I had never seen return the favor - even when I simply asked if these other movements had ever returned the favor as a prelude to asking if we weren't diluting our energy - well, you'd think I'd broken wind in church.
And how long ago was that?
8/24/16, 8:28 PM
jessi thompson said...
8/24/16, 8:34 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
Regardless of the outcome, the next four years promise to be "interesting" in all the wrong ways...
8/24/16, 8:35 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
So I don't talk about alternatives with her these days.
8/24/16, 8:37 PM
John Roth said...
I'd like to point out one rather minor item in the characterization of the same-sex marriage movement, though. Think of the term GLBT. One of these letters is not like the other. As someone who is mildly trans, I can say that I couldn't care less about whether gays have a right to marry, other than general sympathy that I have for a lot of good causes. I'm not gay, lesbian or bisexual. The transsexual-transgender movement indeed piggybacked on the gay rights movement. There were a lot of people who didn't like that, didn't think it would work, and thought they'd get betrayed, but it worked, and now the promissory note is in fact being repaid.
That doesn't dilute your main point, which is that things do need to be solved one piece at a time. Trying to solve the world just doesn't work.
8/24/16, 8:46 PM
Helix said...
In addition to this, such a movement is not going to get the support of those outside affluent circles, and they're somebody's constituency too. I saw this during the Vietnam era, where among my peers it was mainly college students (who could look forward to becoming affluent) who actively protested the war. They developed a kind of disdain for rank-and-file workers, who either supported the war, or adopted a "my country, right or wrong, my country" position. I found it very odd that said college liberals claimed solidarity with the rank-and-file, but on the most pressing issue of the day, looked down on them. Each group despised the other, and neither were looking for common ground.
I see a bit of the same thing going on in the climate-change debate. Among my circle of acquaintances, the college-educated white-collar set are in almost universal agreement that climate change is real and caused by human activities. Not that any of them have made any significant changes in their own lives to reduce their personal impact. Most climate-change deniers I know are blue- (or green-) collar types.
Once again, I am noticing that each camp holds the other in contempt -- not a good development if any positive action is to take place. So the questions is, is there any common ground here, and are there specific proposals that could be put forward that might get support from both camps. I'm thinking of things like federally supported weatherization programs for residential buildings. It's pretty clear to me at this point that this issue is going to have to be addressed in an incremental fashion, if indeed it can be addressed at all.
8/24/16, 8:53 PM
Carl Dolphin said...
At the end of the protest, I was sharing some apples I had grown, and The Question I had been waiting for came up from two women "are you Vegan?" I said "no" and immediately I could feel the cold shoulders. I was going to go to lunch with them, but they suddenly had something to do. I really don't see how being vegan is relevant to wanting these poor animals sent to sanctuaries. It's not like I'm protesting at a slaughter house and then going out for a cheese burger. Them wearing VEGAN t-shirts doesn't help our cause either, as it alienates a lot of people.
Overall though the public is supportive of our action and hopefully soon the animals will be free. Baltimore aquariums near you is looking for a suitable sea pen and eventual release of there 12 dolphins. Also SeaWorld is stopping any breeding of their Orcas. Yeah!
8/24/16, 8:53 PM
jessi thompson said...
8/24/16, 8:54 PM
Robert Tweedy said...
I've been wondering why the screaming over politics has been so much more loud this cycle. I chalked it up to forgetting what the screaming was like in 2012. After reading your paragraphs about cognitive dissonance, perhaps I'm right and the screaming actually is louder.
Here's a possible example of the CD effect this cycle. Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic, has written on his blog that he formally endorses Hillary because he was getting death threats after pointing out some of Hillary's flaws. He didn't endorse Trump or any other politician. He has talked about Trump and Hillary in equal measure, but got death threats from some Democrats.
I don't remember death threats being thrown around in 2008 or 2012, but my memory isn't what it used to be. The fear seems to be much higher this cycle.
8/24/16, 8:55 PM
Shane W said...
I have a question to pose to professed progressives on the ADR: if progress is the civil religion of our time, and we're no longer progressing, and progress has ended sometime well in the past (I pick 1978, when I was three, b/c I read somewhere that that was when average American incomes stopped rising, but the year/date can be contested, so long as it's well in the past), why continue with "progressive" politics? If we're not progressing, and haven't progressed for quite some time, what's the appeal of "progressive" politics? I'm interested in why people on the list are still "progressive", after JMG has discussed the myth of Progress and the civil religion of progress on this blog and put it in book form (After Progress) For me, I pretty much just dismiss people's continued "progressive" politics as an outward expression of the religion of progress in political form that just hasn't died off yet, and secondly as the psychology of previous investment--these people are just way too invested in "progressive" politics to jump ship now. This is of personal interest to me b/c a fellow local ADR reader identifies as "progressive", and I was questioned in true "purity test" fashion by another attendee of our short-lived Green Wizards group about my "progressive" bonafides.
There is hope! I'm working at a local vineyard/winery in my home county, and the topic of carbon footprint came up, he readily offered that he travels (drives, flies) too much, and that travel is the biggest source of atmospheric CO2--no prompting by me. Recognition is the first step--I've never encountered anyone upfront about it before--the only types I've met in the past are the ecohypocrites who have huge carbon travel footprints that they're totally unaware of/go unacknowledged.
@Eric,
blue collar, here I come! I'm going to be working in the warehouse of a certain well known Bourbon distillery, where my grandfather worked as a government man (gauger, alcohol tax, etc.) I'm kind of stoked. Bourbon seems like a good long descent kind of job, we've been making it here for hundreds of years, and I'm even okay w/the Horsemen of the Apocalypse role, as well (alcoholism will play an important role for people unable to cope with the future bearing down on us, as it did during the Soviet collapse, and will play an important role in bring mortality up and reducing the 7 million of us overpopulating the planet)
8/24/16, 9:05 PM
Doubt Truth to be a Liar said...
I recently picked up Dark Age America and look forward to reading it.
With regards to today's post, I must say I strongly disagree with the assertion that the gay marriage advocates avoided the mistakes made by climate change activists. The gay marriage movement didn't avoid the mistakes as much as they covered it up with a very slick and effective propaganda campaign.
Take pandering to the privileged for example. The gay marriage movement certainly did a fair bit of that, which explains why the passage of same sex marriage in New York was won by wealthy hedge fund managers and tea party sympathizers. The slick piece of propaganda used to cover up such pandering argues that gay marriage benefits the salaried class or the rich as much as it does wage earners.
The reality of the situation is that for much of its history the institution of marriage has never benefited poor people.
This is true even today as wages continue to stagnate or decline and the social safety net disappears, making it much harder for people to start much less maintain families. Let's not mention the obvious fact that when poor people get married they compound their debts, while couples who are well off compound their wealth.
I suppose one could argue that wage earners and salaried professionals are equal under the law when it comes to their freedom to marry, but this too is erroneous reasoning as laws can have differential impacts in the area of responsibilities depending on the parties involved.
This doesn't really take away from your criticism that such mistakes need to be avoided, but to show that avoiding them isn't the only way to help your movement gain some steam. Sometimes you can play the propaganda game and cover up the mistakes too.
8/24/16, 9:08 PM
Charles Richardson said...
You are my favorite polymath blogging today and your post today epitomizes why I think so.
Do you really think that organized one-issue activism will be of use in mitigating the Long Descent, or reducing the human wreckage when that happens in earnest?
I thoroughly enjoy your peerless analytic bent, but do you have a punchline issue that could be pressed in this fashion that you yourself think would, say, completely locally stop some of the implosion, or mitigate things long enough for some of us embedded in the belly of the beast to get out a small group of people intact and re-establish sane community? I'd love to hear about that if you are thinking in that direction.
What you did get me thinking about, was that we should all be "preppers" in human nature, small scale political process and leadership, moderating discussions, and consensus building. Those skills may be just as important as gardening to budding wizards facing a trek through Mordor to try to build a better Shire on the other side.
8/24/16, 9:21 PM
tokyo damage said...
I've read several op-eds speculating like, "The Repubs might turn into a populist, worker's party, and the Dems might turn into a coalition of the rich plus people of color", which , IF it turns out like that, would be a perfect example of your account of the Victim/Savior game.
Definitely we're going to see a 'polarity reversal' of the parties, something we haven't seen since LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act and the whole South went Republican.
And, as for your critics' doom-and-gloom predictions 'discouraging beyond what Exxon would hope for'? Speaking for myself anyway, your OWN doom-and-gloom predictions are one of my favorite things about you, so I hope you're not planning on giving them up anytime soon!
8/24/16, 9:29 PM
Donald Hargraves said...
As for the state of the race, I recently had a Hard-Core Trumpian tell me that if I didn't vote for Trump I was voting for Clinton! Proof to me as to how weak both candidates are, as I usually get that from my democrat friends "you're not with us, you're against us" stuff (and got it until I demanded better – and got a roaring silence in response).
8/24/16, 9:52 PM
Joel Caris said...
Piggybacking sounds a lot to me like the social activism equivalent of inserting yourself into a pre-existing stream of money. I tried to find the post in which you talked about that some time back to link to and haven't had luck, but it seems to be the same basic idea of finding someone else's success and then getting in on it to your benefit rather than going through the hard work of creating your own success.
This post is giving me a lot to think about, especially since I've been mulling the idea of getting back into some kind of political activism. Granted, I'm not sure that's realistically going to happen in the near future just because I'm so busy, but if the right opportunity came along, I might not be able to resist. I would love to get on board with a focused but blended movement dedicated to building a high speed rail system throughout the country in an effort to combat climate change, create better and more comfortable long-distance transit options, and speed the death of the airline industry. I also think there could be some real opportunity to work this message across party lines. The Republican Party seems to be highly opposed to any sort of rail support, but I suspect that has more support among the party apparatchik than it does among the membership. I've taken Amtrak commonly enough to note that it's far from just a mode of transport for affluent liberals; if anything, they're more likely to be flying. Granted, I didn't find out the political leanings of my fellow passengers, but I suspect there were quite a few Republicans on board, either out of appreciation of train travel or it being the most accessible mode of travel for them.
On another issue, I've been formulating a series of posts on the local food movement for my new blog. While perhaps not as clear cut in its success as the same sex marriage movement--which had a very specific goal that has been very clearly achieved--I still think the local food movement has been one of the more successful political movements I've seen in my time. Granted, it has its issues, too, and I think pandering to the privileged is far and away the most pressing. That said, there is a good chunk of the movement that crosses traditional lines and brings in a diverse set of people. My time and involvement in the movement has often had me meeting and interacting with liberals, affluent and otherwise, but I've also run into a fair share of conservatives. There's a very strong libertarian undercurrent to the movement and conservative, libertarian branches to it, as well as another strong evangelical Christian branch that sees local, organic food as basically being closer to God (I believe I'm representing that more or less correctly; my claims come from a number of blogs that I've seen and read rather than through more direct, personal experience).
As part of that series of posts I hope to do, I'd like to look at some of the ways the local food movement could reorient itself, especially as the affluent liberal effect seems to be creeping deeper into it. This post should really help me formulate some of those thoughts, as well as to better trace out some of the reasons it's had the successes it has and some of the reasons it's stalled out in other ways.
I'm really looking forward to you sketching out some possible activities for a new climate change movement. Will that be in two weeks, or do you think its farther off?
8/24/16, 10:17 PM
Tony Rasmussen said...
8/24/16, 10:25 PM
Nancy Sutton said...
8/24/16, 10:36 PM
Jean Smith said...
It strikes me as implausible that every movement for every sort of social liberalization in every Western country has adopted effective tactics while almost every movement for every sort of economic liberalism has adopted ineffective tactics in every Western country.
What I see is that the western world is shifting ever more to commercial values, following the trajectory that Plato set out in 'The Republic'. The primary commercial value is simply 'more'. Social restraints get in the way of 'more', so do economic ones. Thus, they are all getting swept aside and the activists are no more controlling this then a piece of floating wood controls the tides. One piece of wood washes ashore, another is swept out to sea and history rolls onward.
8/24/16, 10:52 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Cherokee, glad to hear about the tree! That action has already removed more carbon from the atmosphere than all the antics of Al Gore ever will. As for the greenies, yes, I know -- the number of people who are fixated on the notion that some technogimmick will allow them to have their planet and eat it too is pretty impressive, all things considered.
Eric, it would offend the radical left because it implies that there's something positive to be said about masculinity; it would offend the radical right because it's offering men an affirmative image of masculinity that doesn't require men to be douchebags toward women, people of color, etc. You'd get outrage in stereo -- and it would all sound pretty much the same from both sides.
Bill, all in good time. ;-)
Patricia, I'm guessing it was in the 1970s, which was about when identity politics and the rescue game started to elbow aside the more robust and effective models of social change organization that led the civil rights movement to victory, got us the Endangered Species Act, etc., etc., etc.
Bill, well, we'll just have to see. I certainly won't argue about the "interesting" nature of the next four years -- as I see it, we're approaching an inflection point from which all possible routes lead down hard.
John, there's a difference between piggybacking and deliberate strategic alliances. If trans people chose to throw their support to the campaign for same sex marriage rights in the hope that they could call in favors later, that was a viable move -- not least because the opposition is the same, and the enemy of my enemy is usually my friend. It's when it becomes de rigueur, and involves diffusion of focus, that it's a problem.
Helix, yep. So the strategy of trying to appeal to the affluent dooms itself twice over.
Carl, I've encountered that also. As I'm an obligate omnitarian -- my body doesn't handle vegetable proteins well, so modest amounts of animal protein are essential to my health -- I'm used to self-righteous tirades from vegans who insist that I must hate the earth because I don't share their dietary opinions. I'll have to do a post one of these days about that habit -- one shared with fundamentalists and the like -- which, it seems to me, is about alienating as many people as possible so you never run out of people to feel superior to. More on this later!
Jessi, good. A nice application of ternary logic!
Robert, my take is certainly that the screaming is louder and the terror more intense. I haven't fielded any death threats for my comments about Clinton, but no doubt that's because I'm not important enough to attract them.
Shane, well, there you are -- never having been to Kentucky, I don't know the local geography at all well.
8/24/16, 11:05 PM
William Hays said...
8/24/16, 11:07 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Charles, punchline issues are exactly what we don't need. Focused activism on a flurry of different fronts, each one tackling some specific issue that needs to be addressed, can certainly mitigate the situation -- and at this point mitigation is the best that can be hoped for. As for "get[ting] out a small group of people intact and re-establish[ing] sane community", that's not my project at all -- and I'm far from sure that any such project can work. More on this later.
Tokyo, have no fear; I see no reason to change my overall thesis, which is that industrial civilization is falling and we're headed toward a long and bitter dark age. What I'm talking about now is how to mitigate some of the uglier features of the transition there, and lay some groundwork for things that might make the dark age just a little less grim than it will otherwise be.
Donald, that's a good point -- and I've been told that a fair number of NRA members have gotten irate at attempts by other causes to piggyback on their organization, so they're aware of that particular trap.
Joel, I think this is the post you're looking for. The next post on politics will probably be four weeks from now.
Tony, are you looking for differences in order to figure out how to emulate the success of the same-sex marriage rights movement, or are you looking for differences in order to excuse the failure of the climate change movement?
Nancy, thank you. I well recall the same sort of thing back when I was briefly involved in antiwar activism, in the early 1980s.
Jean, as I asked Tony, are you looking for differences in order to figure out how to emulate the success of the same-sex marriage rights movement, or are you looking for differences in order to excuse the failure of the climate change movement?
8/24/16, 11:18 PM
John Michael Greer said...
8/24/16, 11:19 PM
thenoteswhichdonotfit said...
As a vegan, I've also been discouraged from joining certain pro-animal activist groups because of hostility to vegans.
I forget what the group was pitching (something to improve the living conditions of some animals), but at the very beginning of the spiel, the woman essentially said 'I am not one of those awful vegans, I love eating meat just like you do, etc. etc.' and I was thinking 'uh, if you're going to treat vegans like me as pariahs, then maybe I should find some other way to help animals'. And then she had the gall to end the spiel by saying 'whether you are a vegan or a carnivore, you should work with me.' That's right, after she said a bunch of things degrading vegans, she expects us to join her simply because she's helping animals!
This is just one example - I've encountered many other examples of non-vegans who are trying to help animals who say such horrible things about vegans that I don't want to work with them.
I do sometimes work with non-vegans to help animals because I am more interested in helping animals than ideological purity. However, I do insist they at least respect my choice to be vegan.
8/24/16, 11:28 PM
Urban Harvester said...
That was classic!
I very much look forward to reading your sketch for a successful climate change movement. I can attest to how true and seductive the trap is of thinking that to solve A one has to solve problems B to Z. That trap tends to lead one to think there is some critical factor which if only it were removed (I.e. the belief in the triumph of technic progress, or corporate personhood) then A to Z would just naturally solve themselves. Fortunately our country is, I've come to realize, too wonderfully diverse for such golden bullet fantasies to have any actual effect. Retrotopia is a wonderful cure to that trap, but it would be nice if we could get a head start without the imperative of the aftermath of a second civil war! So... can't wait to read it!
8/24/16, 11:37 PM
RogerCO said...
8/25/16, 12:22 AM
Scotlyn said...
I would like to say that I knocked on doors duting the recent Irish referendum for marriage equality (which in my rural, conservative constituency was won by a nail-biting 33 votes).
Knocking on doors revealed that (around here) if there were small children in the house they were goimg to vote in favour, because "I don't know what my children will be/do when they grow up, but I don't want them treated less than equally."
Meanwhile (and to the chagrin & horror of affluent liberals) the highest positive vote counts (up to 70-80% in favour) were in urban working class areas, with affluent urban areas only voting in favour at around 60%.
Yet the affluent urban liberal types still want to call the working class ones "stupid" for entertaining the kind of doubts about technocracy that wd lead you to vote out of the EU, or doubt that vaccinations are good for health, etc.
If you really looked for 100% agreement about everything before working on anything, you'd have a committee of exactly one.
And even then, you might be of two minds...
Learning HOW to disagree productively is actually an important part of getting things done, and this comment section continually bears witness to how that can be achieved.
8/25/16, 12:32 AM
Helix said...
Undoubtedly correct about renewable resources replacing fossil fuels. Being a math geek, I ran the numbers long ago and concluded that a renewable energy future was going to be far different from what goes on now. I think this lies behind the verbal attacks and the cornucopian belief (desperate hope, actually) that "they'll come up with *something* -- they always do!" Most people in developed countries just have no idea how they would live at that level, although their ancestors managed to pull it off little more than 100 years ago. I think this causes people great anxiety -- they don't know how to survive in that kind of world. Thus they must insist that life can go on as it does now.
Plant a garden, install a wood stove, equip your house for passive solar heat. Teach your children well. They are the future...
8/25/16, 12:58 AM
Compound F said...
8/25/16, 1:27 AM
Matthias Gralle said...
1. In Germany, the Green party, which had started out as a very anti-establishment movement, saw the possibility of achieving a share of power in the federal election in 1998. Still, at the party convention in June 1998, the majority of the delegates, against the will of some top officials, voted to implement a CO2 tax that would have increased e.g. the price of a liter of gasoline to 5 German marks (almost triple the price it was). The increased taxation would be used to reduce labor costs (exactly one of your Retrotopia proposals!). I heard live coverage of the convention on radio and witnessed the outrage this proposal caused. Polling numbers for the Greens dropped sharply; nevertheless, they managed to remain in parliament and were included as a very minor partner in the new government formed in the fall of 1998. Their tax proposal was passed in a somewhat watered-down form and with many exemptions for CO2-intensive industries. The other goal they achieved was a long-term plan to shut down all nuclear plants, which was revoked in 2005, but re-implemented after Fukushima.
By the way, the more recent developments in Germany (wind energy, PV) have not been implemented by the Green party. Nowadays, the Greens have lost a lot of their street credibility because many former office holders have taken golden parachutes of the ugliest variety (including nuclear industry!), but belief in climate change is consensus in Germany. That example from 1998 still seems to be relevant.
2. In Brazil, Marina Silva, the daughter of an extremely poor rubber extractor from the Amazon, who learnt to read at 16 while working as a maid and then put herself through university, became federal minister of the environment in 2002. She especially fought to reduce the impact of new hydroelectric dams in the Amazon, but resigned from office and left the Workers’ Party when she felt she was having too little effect. In 2010, as Green party candidate for president, she received more than 20% of the votes. Marina said during the entire “pre-salt” petroleum boom that it was both wrong and foolish to gamble Brazil’s future on petroleum, and that generating hydroelectric power should not trump environmental and social concerns. Since she is visibly not of pure European descent and also member of a pentecostal church, which in Brazil is a marker of low social class, she has attracted very heterogeneous voters, not only the “ecologically correct” upper middle class. In 2014, she suddenly emerged in the middle of the most polarised campaign in recent Brazilian history and was briefly frontrunner in the polls, before being demolished by the incumbent’s campaign (who is now being impeached). Marina continues to be one of the top-polling candidates for a future election.
I think both examples show political strategies for placing the reduction of energy consumption at the heart of a government program. Both took place in a political reality different from the American one with its first-past-the-post system and party duopoly, but might still teach a lesson. Both have had some success, but not nearly as much as will be necessary.
8/25/16, 1:43 AM
Fred said...
I had an insight myself the other day I wanted your reaction on. Pondering the 18 primary candidates we could have had instead of Trump, none of them were really outstanding. How could a party loose control of its own nominating process by starting with 18 egotists? Usually the party has already self selected an approved slate of no more than six they allow us to pick from. Then it hit me that there really is no power that matters to the elites in the presidency. The power is in the congress who approves funding for military projects, bail outs, and loosening of laws to get out of corporations way. The lobbists work their influence so corporations and the rich get what they want, and the president just signs it. The republican clown car of candidates was a distraction, and Trump and Hillary even more so, so congress can go on raping and pillaging America uninterrupted by answering to the people.
Trump points to this in his speeches. His biggest applause lines are about the corrupt media. People know they are being lied to and left behind. They haven't throw the people a bone in a long time.
8/25/16, 3:40 AM
Laura Orabone said...
8/25/16, 3:51 AM
Kim Arntsen said...
As one of the commenters who didn't get it last time (but hopefully not one of the "furious" or "hostile" ones), thank you for elaborating on the comparison between the two movements. I can see your point more clearly now, and those are definitely some good pointers for any attempt to "reboot" the climate/environmental movement.
I'm looking forward to seeing what your practical suggestions for change will look like at this very late stage in the game, considering what you've said in the past about how the Hirsch report shows we're basically twenty plus years past the point where we could've done anything meaningful about climate change. Note: that doesn't mean I'm saying we should keep on with business as usual by any means, and of course it'd be a very good idea to stop treating the atmosphere as an aerial sewer and at least try to mitigate some of the damage. In any case, I have a sneaking suspicion your suggestions won't be altogether unrelated to some of the policies we've seen in action in the Lakeland Republic...:)
I'd also just like to say that your introductory paragraphs about the presidential candidates were great. I've never thought about it that way, but it does make a lot of sense.
@W.B. Jorgenson
That's an interesting way of looking at it, regarding Trump and walking way from Empire. Coincidentally, I heard our (Conservative) Foreign Affairs Minister here in Norway denouncing Trump in the media earlier this month, and those were the exact reasons he was so opposed to a Trump presidency in the US. I haven't been following the "debate" all that closely, but I get the impression the left around here supports Hillary by default more because of the "Trump is a horrible racist" meme.
@Shane W.
Even though your question about progressive politics isn't really directed at me, I hope you don't mind if I take a stab at it anyway. In addition to what you've said, I'd guess some would point to things like the success of the same-sex marriage movement (and the LGBT movement in general) as a sign that social progress is still happening, even if economic progress isn't doing so well these days. Then there's the good old "only the evil Republicans/rich people/corporations are standing the way of economic progress" view, even if that probably isn't too common among ADR readers. And of course, some people seem to be using "progressive" as a general-purpose synonym for "left-wing" or even "green" rather than in the more narrow "Religion of Progress" sense.
8/25/16, 3:56 AM
Kim Arntsen said...
8/25/16, 4:01 AM
fudoshindotcom said...
I guess I was thinking that efforts would be better spent on unifying, rather than divisive, strategy. Heavy handed demonization of the corporate profiteers runs the risk of alienating that portion of the affluent who may otherwise be supportive, simply because you've openly attacked their friends.
8/25/16, 4:25 AM
Shane W said...
8/25/16, 4:33 AM
Damaris Zehner said...
You're right about the inconsistencies, even hypocrisies, that all reformers display -- that all people display, for that matter. Part of the problem is how hard it is to erase or even recognize our most deeply ingrained assumptions -- so the Viet Name War activists really scorned the working class, not because they'd thought it through and decided that working class people were anathema, but just because they'd grown up with a visceral elitist view. This was perfected illustrated to my mother some years ago. We were living in South Africa in the early 70s, at the height of apartheid. (My dad was a US diplomat.) My mother and I attended an integrated Quaker meeting in Johannesburg, which was filled with people willing to face persecution and arrest for what they believed, although they had never experienced the equality they longed for. There was once a meeting called that my mother attended. Five white people, including my mother, and one black man stood looking over the room. One white woman saw that there were five chairs and said, "Ah, we have enough for all of us to sit down" -- and then shrank in horror at what had come out of her mouth. Despite her genuine views on racial equality, her upbringing -- that a black man would not sit in the presence of white people -- was still pulling her puppet strings.
How can we perceive the invisible strings that are pulling all of us? I suppose cross-cultural experience is good, as is reading books from other times and places. Being willing to get out of the echo chamber would also help. I would pray that we would all be revealed to ourselves as what we really are, but I'm not sure I could handle it!
This blog is very good for me, as it combines beliefs I accept and those I don't, expressed by people of good will and intelligence. Thank you for having the courage to maintain it in spite of some unpleasantness.
8/25/16, 4:41 AM
Bob said...
8/25/16, 4:49 AM
PatOrmsby said...
35.640078, 139.277085
Click the “walking” button. A balloon will pop up with 浅川金刀比羅宮
There is enough detail currently to find the main route up through the small community of Hatsuzawa-machi (初沢町) east-southeast of Takao Station, but I will also try to post a map at the Green Wizards website.
If you come by Keio Line, be careful not to overshoot or you'll wind up at Takao-sanguchi Station, popular with weekend hikers.
Anyone is welcome. A potluck picnic is normally held here on the first Sunday of each month, and the people who attend these are very like-minded with Green Wizardry. People normally being arriving about 11:00 a.m. and stay for the afternoon.
8/25/16, 5:20 AM
Shane W said...
actually the trans community provided an excellent example of same-sex marriage before it was legal--trans people pointed out that we already had legally married same-sex couples in spite of the laws and amendments against it--when a married person transitions and undergoes gender reassignment, they're still legally married, but now a same-sex marriage. Now, of course, the Baptists mentioned in JMG's article would argue that there no such thing as a transgender person, just a male or female w/bodily and genital mutilation, but that's a discussion for somewhere else.
@Joel,
regarding right leaning local organic food supporters--look among the prepper community--many of them are very peak oil aware, are homesteading, raising livestock, growing organic food, and are as suspicious of large corporations like Monsanto as they are of the government. Go out in the sticks, look for the Gadsden flags, and go a knocking on their doors.
JMG has mentioned this, and I wanted to second it based on my experiences. Most left-leaning, "progressives" I have encountered have their heads firmly stuck in the clouds, fully divorced from reality. Any attempt to bring them down into the practical world is met with an immediate retreat back into the clouds of cluelessness.
8/25/16, 5:27 AM
Scotlyn said...
This notion was discussed at length in Martin Luther King Jr's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (which became "Why we Can't Wait")
He writes:
"I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation."
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
8/25/16, 5:32 AM
Shane W said...
8/25/16, 5:34 AM
donalfagan said...
8/25/16, 5:57 AM
Martin McDuffy said...
I have been involved in much activism at many levels, and i agree strongly that many activist campaigns seem bent on destroying themselves from within via the pathways you have described. Whether via piggybacking or purity politics, it would seem that many activist projects want to fail. Hmmm, why? Perhaps the magnitude of certain issues, like climate change, can be so overwhelming that success seems impossible from the outset, and trying becomes the goal in and of itself. Winning would require immense work and sacrifice, and might take entire lifetimes. By inserting trapdoors to failure, people can claim righteousness without actually having to carry the cross all the way to the hill, as it were.
Also, I would add that activism falls prey to the overall capitalist economic structure just like anything else that exists within it. Activists need fo pay rent, buy food, etc. and thus they need to somehow find currency. They achieve this primarily by solicting donations, and there is a certain subset of people who donate money to such causes: comfortable liberals. Thus activists become careerists whose job is to perform for comfortable liberals without actually upsetting the comfort of those liberals. This means no radical activity, no suggesting an end to capitalism, no highlighting the need to drastically cut back on consumption, and always maintaining a narrative of happy, clean progress once those dunderheaded conservatives get out of the way.
8/25/16, 6:12 AM
David, by the lake said...
My modest hypothesis re the future of our political parties is that 1) the coalition comprising the modern GOP is essentially gone and the party will meet the same fate as the Whigs whom it replaced; 2) the corporate business interests, needing a new home, will migrate to the Democratic party, where the establishment successfully fended off a challenge, and a new corporate-establishment coalition will form within the structure of what we know as the Democratic party today; 3) said establishment party will be internationalist in outlook and corporate in economics, mutually reinforcing each other in the desire to maintain/extend the US empire; 4) an opposition party, something wholly new, will form out of the remnants of the further left (now explicitly cut loose) and the working class folks of left and right; 5) said opposition party will take some time to form, as there would be internal differences (e.g. racial attitudes) which would have to be bridged; and 6) the opposition party, in a reaction to the establishment party, would tend to have a nationalistic character. All of this taking place over the next few cycles, perhaps an outline of the new system forming by the 2024 elections?
More generally, one of the most interesting type of response I've fielded when I've aired my plan for backing the US away from its empire and developing a self-reliant, sustainable economy for itself is one or another variant of how the world will descend into chaos and war if the US hegemony isn't there to prevent it and/or that domination by the US is soooo much preferable to that by anyone else. Sigh.
8/25/16, 6:12 AM
Jo said...
What I bring away from this post is a sense of relief that maybe I am not the only one who has found the whole environmental movement ultimately unsatisfying. In commodifying and globalising it has lost its immediacy and its relevancy to local communities.
I think that it is local groups passionate about their own communities who affect real change. It is people who band together to clean up a river, or the mad, eccentric band of enthusiastic old blokes who want to bring back electric trams to my town, and who have lovingly restored a few and take townspeople for rides on Sundays on the five hundred feet of track which is all that remains.. it's amateur birdwatchers who campaign to save wetlands, or dedicated community gardeners or the people re-opening a two-hundred-year-old stone-ground flour mill.
People like these have real skills and passion and big hearts and are changing little corners of their own neighbourhoods for the better, and everyone in the community can see the benefits.
'Environmentalist' on the other hand, has become a dirty word. It is a term generally applied to someone who is against something - jobs, industry, 'progress'. It is not generally clear to the community what the benefit of this might be..
So maybe if environmentalists want to be taken seriously, we need to upskill, roll up our sleeves and do some serious work on a positive project dear to our hearts in our local communities. Then the general public might start listening to what we have to say.
8/25/16, 6:23 AM
trippticket said...
For example, after two years of living in a big tent and hauling around propane tanks to fire our stove, gas light, and space heater, we built a little cabin and opted for a more standard propane service with a tank outside the house, requiring delivery of gas by a big truck.
My grandmother - the poster child of the affluent liberal left - then asked us "how does that fit with your ethics?"
Well, um, how does it not? Our ethic is conservation. By buying a larger amount of propane at a pop we are getting a better rate, conserving our limited funds. Versus other options, propane is a very dense, high-energy resource, conserving space, time, and effort. The only thing left really is to conserve how much of it we use via behavioral innovation, e.g. firing up the wood stove for heat and cooking instead of being lazy and using the propane.
I know what she was fishing for with her question. She was asking why we weren't embracing solar power, or wind, or whatever the affluent left was currently deeming worthy of attention. Conservation most certainly wasn't the right answer. That we haven't added more than 100W of PV capacity since then hasn't helped her opinion much. We don't need anymore right now! Why is the only correct answer to install a full-blown and incredibly expensive PV system??
And now I know. Our actions were making a statement she could get behind...at first. But our consistent refusal to follow the affluent liberal script, and employ all the appropriate shiny lefty technologies, was extremely annoying to her. By insisting through our actions that the only real solution was to use LESS, we marginalized ourselves from the party base, and have since been more or less exiled from that part of the family.
Meanwhile, we've made up a lot of ground with our more conservative family members. Go figure. Thanks for enumerating the basic principles behind all this. It's very useful.
8/25/16, 6:27 AM
Mark Rice said...
1) Those who have first hand experience with a country going insane. One experienced Pol Pot's Cambodia and the other experienced Hitler's Germany. For both Trump is deju vu all over again. But they had not seen this level ob buffoonery.
2) Those stuck in the old paradigms and narratives. These people are stubbornly sticking to the notion that what had been politics as usual can actually arrive at reasonable governance.
8/25/16, 6:42 AM
Tidlösa said...
But yes, the election *is* weird. The Republican Party really has been hijacked by a liberal who does his best to sound like a cross between Ronald Reagan and Pat Buchanan, while the Democrats have been hijacked by a "Neo-Con" who occasionally tries to sound like the socialist Sanders!
I think The Donald is right when he calls himself "Mr Brexit". The only thing that could stop him would be *massive* election fraud. What he will do once in office is another matter entirely. Like you predicted, he has already put out feelers to the GOP establishment, for instance by endorsing Ryan and McCain for re-election. The problem (or opportunity - depending on what side you´re on) is that the issues Trump raised during his populist campaign won´t just quietly go away. Once the genie is out of the bottle...
Eagerly awaiting your article on climate change - I´m one of the pessimists when it comes to building a mass movement for something as radical as a sustainable society, so it will be interesting to read your thoughts on the matter (even if tentative).
8/25/16, 6:49 AM
SamuraiArtGuy said...
Absolutely true. At this moment, the Trump campaign seems to be imploding, but that could be tenuous. Both parties have embraced imperial and "enemy-making" neocon foreign policy and unapologetic neoliberal economic policies that have been devastating to the wage class. The Democratic Party, and with Sec. Clinton as their figurehead, still has the power to alienate their base with their abandonment of actual Democratic principles and progressive ideas. Not only have they largely written of the wage class to hew to the liberal privileged, they've also abandoned the educated young people facing tremendous economic challenges that flocked to Sen. Sanders, who they treated as an unwanted outsider, and did everything in their power to supress.
Over the last eight years, they've done everything possible to elbow any appealing potential candidate of the varsity bench in their haste to pre-coronate Sec. Clinton. This has tainted the DNC with an air of fraud, corruption and election rigging. Not that the RNC is doing much better, despite their fiery rhetoric, in office, the GOP votes the same neocon and neoliberal policies for the elites and their owners, while giving their working-class base a Brooklyn Salute. This has kicked the barn door open for the ascendancy of Mr Trump. And their thinly veiled racist hate for the President leaves many Americans repelled, but energizes others nursing their social grievances and perceived loss of privilege and standing, fueled by economic hardship.
I have not forgotten your New Year projection of a Trump victory... and why. But the continued oppression of such a large portion of the population can very easily lead to torches and pitchforks... if not AR-15s. Nick Hanuaer, a "proud and unapologetic capitalist", who earned the ire of the upper-class TED organizers for speaking anti-capitalist blasphemy, agrees...
"If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when."
– Nick Hanauer, The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats, Politico, Jul-Aug 2014
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014
8/25/16, 6:51 AM
Lynnet said...
yes; probably six years ago I decided to bail on all the multitudinous "environmental" organizations I belonged to, getting sick and tired of receiving a dozen calendars, a drawerful of unwanted greeting cards, offers of tote bags, etc etc etc. I saw they were self-perpetuating, with a little veneer of actually helping the planet. Certainly printing and sending all those full-color calendars doesn't help the planet. Anyway, I removed myself from ALL the mailing lists. Gradually over the years, the incoming flood of unwanted items has diminished to a trickle of address labels. So, it can be done. I kept two "social" NGOs, until they started calling me incessantly to dun for donations. I dropped them too. What do they think? People just LOVE to be badgered incessantly on the phone for donations? Kamikaze behavior.
@ShaneW
I'm in perfect agreement with your point about the implications of the word "progressive", and the word "liberal" has been thoroughly tarred and feathered ("liberal" nowadays implying the prefix "limousine"). What do I call myself? To the general public, "moderate" (a word that has not yet been blackened beyond use). BTW I'm reading an excellent book on this subject now: Steve Fraser, "The Limousine Liberal: how an incendiary image united the Right and fragmented America." This is certainly not the first time that the U.S. has been in this situation. The threads of it run all the way back through the history of our nation.
8/25/16, 6:51 AM
Lawfish1964 said...
Sure, $4.00 per gallon gas would sting at first, but it's been priced around there in Europe for decades. That's why you see lots of people riding vespas and driving small, fuel-efficient cars. $4.00 per gallon gas would force people to quit driving the monstrous SUV's and show-horse pickup trucks (I would wager about 10% of people who drive pickup trucks actually use them for work - much like the metro-sexual lumberjack folks) and drive smaller, more fuel-efficient cars.
The problem with that solution is that it is politically unpalatable. Neither side would propose such a thing in its right mind. At least, conventional wisdom has it that such a platform would be tantamount to political suicide. However, I recall from your post a few weeks ago that not all successful movements involve promises of unicorns and rainbows. Didn't Churchill muster the British by appealing to their shared need to sacrifice? In my humble opinion, there are people capable of appealing to the masses to actually make a sacrifice to reduce carbon emissions. Who that might be, I have no idea, but I suspect in the next four years, we will see someone emerge along those lines. The times they are a changing.
8/25/16, 7:18 AM
Ien in the Kootenays said...
8/25/16, 7:31 AM
drhooves said...
Looking forward to your thoughts on how a climate-change movement can succeed. For now, safely inside my glass-is-half-empty view of the world, I'll stick to my guns and say the complexities of the science, the costs, the shared sacrifice required, and the propaganda from the deniers are significant obstacles to hurdle. It's easy to be a doomer. I'll be looking for your insight and positive spin to help balance that out.
8/25/16, 8:20 AM
thymia10 said...
I agree both with the single-issue strategy working, and that movements that don't require sacrifice while those that do often do not. I used to live in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where my husband observed there was no lack of people who prescribed what everyone else should be doing - "but I'm going on co-op in Europe/vacation/etc." (so I don't have to change)
8/25/16, 8:23 AM
Eric S. said...
I'm becoming far less sure that Trump has anything like the chance he did for a while, he's started to adopt way too many of Clinton's attack tactics, and is losing track of the one facet of his narrative that actually gives him appeal and separates him from the other candidates... so it does look like we're likely to wind up with a Clinton administration (though there are plenty of wrenches that can be tossed in at this point for either side). The thing I'm most worried about though, is the way that the narrative against Trump's supporters, as well as Trump's ideas (including the concept of decline), that has begun to couch it in terms of national security, with its own set of heavily xenophobic undertones (i.e. the "vote for Trump is a vote for Russia" line), which may lead the next administration to follow through on Trump and Sanders' attempts to resurrect various elements of the 1950s, by reviving the specter of McCarthyism, which in the face of the Trumpistas channeling the passion of a lost election into a domestic insurgency movement, would be ugly... I just can't help but think about situations like Egypt and Turkey in recent history. (And, of course, I can't help but think that it's a situation that would provide a golden opportunity for a foreign power looking to give America a taste of its own foreign policy. It's looking like an ugly and exhausting few years no matter what happens.)...
8/25/16, 8:26 AM
Eric S. said...
8/25/16, 8:27 AM
onething said...
I had heard that Clinton had a couple of health glitches, but not a diagnosis. So it's for sure that she's had a stroke and DVTs?
I try not to be too judgmental toward those voting Hillary, but I consider it shockingly morally bankrupt to do so. What evil and illegal deed would ever get their attention? How low could she sink before it would finally be low enough to disbar the knee jerk Democratism? And I throw Bernie in that camp as well.
You can put all of Trump's odiousness on one side of the scale and it weighs a feather compared to starting WWIII.
8/25/16, 8:39 AM
onething said...
The cheap attacks on the part of some democrats against the Bernie or Bust people or calling white males who vote for Trump racists and so on mean to me that perhaps people are not able to handle a democracy after all.
8/25/16, 8:45 AM
Nicholas Carter said...
8/25/16, 9:15 AM
Grim said...
I'd recognized some years ago that the Republicans where using the anti-abortion crowd. I think the Republican higher-ups are terrified at what's happening on the state level because the states will eventually ban abortion which will make their faithful lose interest and make the "left" wake up and become united (assuming the cause doesn't get piggy-backed to death like occupy did).
That the Democrats are using environmentalists the same way makes perfect sense. I should have seen it years ago.
8/25/16, 9:25 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...
I had to stop reading this essay for a few minutes while I recalled the many such incidents I experienced when I was in college. The worst experience with piggybacking I ever had was during my very last semester, during finals week. The California uni system was hit pretty badly by budget cuts due to the '08 crisis. The leftists were in an uproar and kept up two years of marching and protesting, getting nothing accomplished. Finally, during my last semester all the leftists groups came together to stage sit-ins. They released a list of demands targeted at the dean and university administration that included, but was by no means limited to - reduced fees for students, pay cuts for the dean and admin, fully employment for part time teachers, ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine, ending the wars in iraq and Afghanistan, prosecuting Bush administration officials for war crimes, and yeah it went on like that.
Needless to say the student body was not amused by the sit-ins that disrupted our finals week, and the absurd list of demands.
What I still don't get is the psychology behind endlessly trying the same dysfunctional strategies. At some point one would think people would figure it out and do something different. What gives?
Scotlyn,
In response to your last comment on last weeks post. I agree that BLM isn't an organization, it's a movement. I tried to highlight that repeatedly in my article series which I finished yesterday. However, if you head over to the BLM website it's pretty clear there is some group out there claiming to be the center of this movement. I'm not sure how they've structured themselves but there's probably someone there collecting funds under the BLM moniker. Head over to the website and compare it to this weeks ADR essay, and you'll see my points about their movement.
Regards,
VArun
8/25/16, 9:29 AM
Alan Harfield said...
Alan
8/25/16, 9:34 AM
nephilimsd said...
As if any self-respecting hipster would be caught dead in a Starbucks.
All kidding aside, I have found Scott Adams' (author of Dilbert) blog posts (http://blog.dilbert.com/post/149321013966/the-direct-democracy-president) about how Mr. Trump's politics appear to be more libertarian and how Ms. Clinton's appears to be more neo-conservative to be very interesting. He's been writing about this since roughly the time that Trump had been the front-runner in the Republican primaries, and as a registered Democrat, I have to admit that his analysis (along with the Archdruid Report) have swayed me to become a Drumpf supporter (much to the dismay of my family). I have had no shortage of vocal denouncement for my position, but very little in the way of substance when I ask friends and family to support their stance for Clinton. About the best I get is, "At least she's not Trump!"
8/25/16, 9:41 AM
SamuraiArtGuy said...
To truly mitigate Climate Change and address Sustainability issues, would require nearly the entire planet to change how it goes about damn near everything. However it has at the movement shaken out that– it's been asking the wage class to make the most, and most material sacrifices, the salaried class to make mostly symbolic ones, (Bring your own bag groceries, buy a Prius), the privileged class hardly any at all, and the poor as screwed over as ever. But the cold hard reality of the numbers and the physics, is that everyone would have to do with LESS, for Americans, a LOT less, like 75% less - of EVERYTHING we've been binging on for nearly two centuries.
Not the most appealing sell. Good luck with that.
8/25/16, 9:47 AM
Ol' Bab said...
"a question to pose to professed progressives on the ADR: if progress is the civil religion of our time, and we're no longer progressing, and progress has ended sometime well in the past (...), why continue with "progressive" politics?"
NOW this is fascinating! Two kinds of progressive. Apparently I'm very much a social(?) progressive, deeply appreciative of the sweet and lovely things we have achieved in feminism, sexual freedom from the rules of misogynist fundamentalists, decrease in local AND worldwide violence, increasing intolerance for, well, intolerance. And so much more...
So, did I miss something? Is progressive now solely a descriptor for a person in favor of burning oil?
Maybe we need another word? "Professed" progressives just sounds so like, uh, me.
Ol' Bab, who is not in favor of progress.
8/25/16, 10:02 AM
blackwingsblackheart said...
8/25/16, 10:13 AM
Grebulocities said...
8/25/16, 10:21 AM
SLClaire said...
http://livinglowinthelou.blogspot.com/2016/08/how-we-went-on-energy-diet-and-what-we.html
It has long seemed to me that one effective strategy the climate change movement could have adopted was to make it a goal to seal air leaks and add attic insulation to every dwelling in the US that needs it. If it could be made free for everyone, I'd go for that, but if not, it should be on a very generous sliding scale so that anyone below the upper middle class doesn't pay anything for the work. Poorer folks, who often live in older houses that leak badly, leading to very high energy bills that really strain their budgets, would benefit financially in a big way, and feel more comfortable besides. But even rich folks who don't care about energy bills but live in leaky houses might like having that uncomfortable cold draft on their feet reduced, so there is something in it for them. If our savings by reducing air leaks and adding insulation translate broadly, by adopting and achieving this goal we could reduce energy use in dwellings by almost half, which would also reduce carbon emissions.
8/25/16, 10:24 AM
pygmycory said...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/black-lives-matter-toronto-pride-parade-1.3663659
8/25/16, 10:53 AM
Cathy McGuire said...
I haven’t been following all the discussion on climate change recently. I can read the post, but the amazing, awesome number of comments overwhelm me, what with my writing deadlines and the harvest coming early this year. So I’ll just jump in - the concept of piggybacking is a good point, and I agree that social discourse is getting strangled by the requirement that each person agree with the speaker in all particulars. Some of that, I believe, comes from having our traditional “tribes” shredded and looking for new ones – there’s such a rush of hope when finding someone sharing our POV, and then – they say something outrageous on another subject, and the hope dies. And I’ve often been dismayed by my well-off friends who are “into” ecology issues, but really uncomfortable around the poor – it seems very clear that the poor are getting the brunt of the climate disaster (among other things) and that social justice and climate justice are inextricably linked.
Thanks for lots to think about!! Now I’ve got to go make many quarts of applesauce…
8/25/16, 10:58 AM
Unknown said...
I was one of the people finding reason for the failure of the climate change movement. In retrospect I realize that we were talking past each other. I have no experience with social movements, I was never an activist. On top of that, I didn't grow up here and it took me a long time to begin to understand the US culture.
My doubts are simply about the ability of humans (i.e. me) to take on this challenge. Don't get me wrong, I have done huge changes in my life. I drive a 25 year old car that I only use rarely, I live in a small town-home that is 15C in the winter, I don't buy clothes or electronics anymore etc. I also convinced my neighbor (it's a duplex) not to water the lawn in the summer. That being said, I cannot even imagine how what I do can be scaled up. Every relationship I was in I had to make big concessions in order to keep the peace. There is a big incompatibility between people that are eco conscious and proselytizing. If you do what you suggest - just show neighbors the good modest life, chances are they won't see it because they don't want to. Plus every barrel of oil I save will be used by somebody else.
I am waiting hopeful for your next post on this topic!
On a totally different topic, I have become very interested in reading about roman empire. The weird part is, all the books that I found stick to superficial reasons for collapse. For example (http://www.ancient.eu/article/835/) or wikipedia never bother to ask why, they just give a laundry list of things that happened. In other word they just present the proximate reasons for fall. I would have guess by now Tainter's view and works in ecological economics would have settled the issue.
I wonder if the reason is because we identify so much with the Roman empire?
Thanks,
8/25/16, 11:27 AM
JoAnna said...
However, as Tony and Jean have pointed out, with the case of same-sex marriage issue, people's complacency and expectations of comfort weren't impacted. No-one had to forgo their plane trip to Acapulco, for example. I'm just concerned that people's overall intelligence (along with their willpower, ethics, pattern recognition, etc.) isn't up to the task of real change. Plus, our educational system has really succeeded in training people to accept massive cognitive dissonance all around them. (I thank the Gods I was homeschooled/unschooled.) I'm reading "Dumbing Us Down" by John Taylor Gatto right now, and it's certainly both depressing and in accordance with a lot of what I've seen from people these days... (Boiling the frog, as they say?)
8/25/16, 11:36 AM
L said...
At the moment I suppose that what I need to do is identify a small number of issues that I can attempt to work on- I'm somewhat easily distracted so if left to my own devices I rarely finish longer projects. I'm going to train to be a teacher, so once I figure out what kind of education I think is best for developing future citizens to have the qualities they will actually need in the long decline, maybe I can make a difference there...
On the topic of planting trees, I like the idea of planting a tree, but I am perpetually confused about where to get good quality trees to plant in a free or inexpensive manner, and also where exactly I could get away with planting them (certainly not in my back garden, the one I have access to at the moment isn't big enough for that).
Thanks again for the continued thought-provoking blog posts,
L.
8/25/16, 11:57 AM
Shane W said...
Hillary's health. We don't really know, and won't really know. Hillary could either die before the election, or be the first president in a long time to die in office. A good reference is FDR's '44 campaign, when he was deathly ill, yet propped up for reelection. Everyone close to him knew he was unfit for office/reelection and how grim his health was, but it was hidden from everyone else--even Truman had no idea how bad off FDR was until FDR passed. The establishment has ways of hiding these things, and Hillary is protected by layer upon layer of establishment from the outside world. We really don't & won't know about her health.
8/25/16, 11:57 AM
M Smith said...
The women's movement has alienated me with their assumptions that all women are mommies and therefore that mommies' problems are my problems because of my plumbing. Not a good idea for the feminists to whine to me that there's a "day-care crisis" or for the left to shrill that there's a "war on women" because parents who are not or cannot be home with their kids don't want to pay what day care costs. That's a problem for working parents, not for (all) women (and no men).
Tangentially, I tire of hearing how every social phenomenon must be tested against the immediate gratification (rather than the long-term benefits) of ThePoor. Where is it written that they go to the head of the line every time, but if someone who knows how not to be poor suggests that they limit the size of their families so they won't be as poor, then begin the shrieks of "SO you think only the rich should be allowed to reproduce!!!" along with the armband and jackboot references. The ACA is a good example of this. Today I read that ThePoor, whose 0bamacare is subsidized by strangers, are discovering that they can't buy Epi-Pens for their peanut-allergic kids because of the high deductibles. So the SJWs who wanted the govt to give "free" everything to ThePoor without strings, now want the govt to establish price controls on the manufacturer, if not outright force the manufacturer to give its product away because it "shouldn't" cost that much. For TheChildren!
8/25/16, 12:14 PM
Mary in Montco said...
I look forward to reading your suggestions next time. Personally, I find your writings to be really insightful, especially for long-term overviews of the long descent we are experiencing every day.
But I think your nearer-term ideas for how to make real social/political/economic/climate change for justice and survival could be far more helpful if you would include in your readings a fairly new book called "This Is an Uprising -- How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century," by Mark Engler and Paul Engler, published by Nation Books.
The authors put successful movements, such as for marriage equality and environmental activism, into a context from Ghandi's Salt March to MLK's March on Birmingham, Occupy, and many other movements, as well as an overview of some major theorists on strategic social change... Their whole intent is to explore in real-life terms -- not just ideology -- why some movements have succeeded, and identify through compelling storytelling and perceptive analysis successful strategies for using our social power strategically and wisely going forward. No magic bullets. No 12-step simplicity.
Good enough to receive high praise from the likes of Naomi Klein, Michelle Alexander, Bill McKibben, Erica Chenoweth, Frances Fox Piven, and many more impressive champions of social justice... The publisher is into their second printing after only 6 months, and has arranged to get it translated into Spanish and Korean (so far...), It's that good. Please read and incorporate it into your broader (and narrower) insights. As an historian of ideas, you're very likely to find it well worth your time.
This is my first post -- can we include links? see: http://thisisanuprising.org/
8/25/16, 12:35 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
Only thing I am pretty sure of is that I am not voting for either of them, a luxury I have by virtue of living in Tennessee. If Trump loses TN then he has lost 90% of the other states as well, so there is no strategic voting to be done here.
8/25/16, 12:36 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
The crash is coming, and whoever wins, it will be on her or his watch. For which she or he will not be forgiven, and their entire faction and ideology will be dragged down right along with them. Which may clear the way for....
....oops. I can hear the shouts of "Ave, Caesar" in the distance as I type this. Sigh. Remember, in his day, the alternatives were Pompey ("Kid Butcher") and Crassus. With the rational moderate Cicero standing by helplessly, and the hard-right fanatic Cato (the younger) ready to naysay the entire system right into the ground. And then we have that quintessential frat rat Marc Antony ....
"Everything old is new again in the same way, in a different way..."
8/25/16, 12:40 PM
Roy Smith said...
Here is my blog post on how to start one of these groups: Host your own Cascadia Guild meeting. As far as your other questions ("What, precisely, does your Green Wizards meeting look like? What does it ask of your members and officers? What does it do?"), we in the Cascadia Guild are holding meetings with the goal of figuring out how our organization(s) will answer those questions.
8/25/16, 12:41 PM
[email protected] said...
You make some very perceptive comments on the green/climate change movement and why it has failed over the last few decades. I have always thought that if the climate activists focused on one big bipartisan campaign, "dig for victory" and encouraged local people and governments to push for small scale farming across the country, that would make a big difference.
As you say, it is not too late.
Regarding the US presidential elections, I agree with you up to a point. The traditional Republican base are uncomfortable with Trump as much as the traditional democratic base are clearly unenthused with Clinton.
I would add that many ordinary Republican voters (outside the country club bubble) felt totally distant from the Republican party elite in previous election cycles. How many ordinary registered Republican voters had any real enthusiasm for voting for Mitt Romney? Not many, I suspect. Romney couldn't get above 25% of the primaries throughout most of the 2012 election cycle because he appealed to the financially comfortable and even 4 years ago, the majority of Republican voters were looking for something else.
Trump, in his political genius, sensed this opportunity, which has only worsened under the Obama business as usual politics, and swept to power. Trump may not appeal to country club Republicans of the old school type, but he does appeal to blue collar voters, security mums and so on who do form part of the Republican electoral coalition. What will likely make Trump next president is his appeal to the Trump Democratic voters in the Rust Belt states.
My sense is that things are going Trumps way and that he is on course to defeat Hilary Clinton in November.
I also wonder just how many Trump supporters are out there who don't want to admit that they are going to vote for him. I personally know 2 people who would vote for him (if they were American) but have no intention of ever admitting it to anybody. I suspect that there are millions of Shy Trump supporters who will go out on election day and get that secret thrill of rebellion by ticking the Trump box in the secrecy of the ballot box.
If you wish to read more on my thoughts on the US election, check out and follow my blog:
https://forecastingintelligence.wordpress.com/
8/25/16, 12:44 PM
pygmycory said...
On the other hand, I still value very highly things like a safety net for the poor, a public healthcare system, a healthy environment, a low level of economic inequality, peace, and justice regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation and so on. So many would label me a progressive, even if I avoid using the term myself these days.
8/25/16, 12:52 PM
sharon vile said...
I have literally never heard Trump's origins in NYC mentioned by anyone.
No sensible person regards bankruptcy as an issue. (Our local business people and small farmers are all too familiar with it--as are many other working-class people.)
As for vulgarity, here in flyover country, you have to realize that vulgarity is viewed in much the same way as colloquial speech versus the King's English: It is many-tiered. Vulgarity is not done at church, at meetings of the Historical Society, or at the Library Book Club. Elsewhere it is rather relished. Nor, when it comes to serial polygamy and illegitimacy, is anyone around here wont to call the kettle black; they can ill afford to. And despite the often-professed horror of "gays, lesbians, transexuals, and the like," there are too many who have openly gay children or other relatives--and many of these are openly supportive of our gay brothers and sisters, merely objecting to the distortion of gay rights issues to encompass matters that infringe on the rights of others. We also have quite a few grannies with black grandchildren, and they are quite displeased when their grandchildren are slighted. Do they support BLM? Well.... If their black grandchildren behaved in this manner, there would be rejoicing in the presence of the angels, if you get my drift.
Your unfamiliarity with those of us who count ourselves among the unwashed is showing.
8/25/16, 12:53 PM
Matte Gray said...
That said, one tiny quibble with today's post: I was shocked to read your statement that GOP opposition to same-sex marriage has collapsed when an entire paragraph in their 2016 platform is titled "Defending Marriage Against an Activist Judiciary" and explicitly denounces same-sex marriage.
8/25/16, 1:11 PM
Don Plummer said...
Thank you for saying what needs to be said. I won't be holding my nose either.
8/25/16, 1:34 PM
Eric Backos said...
@Bill Pulliam – Hi! Yeah… the practicalities of recruiting urban lumberjacks intrude… And I failed to recap the remarks that led to suggesting the Man UP! campaign – that urban life is so lacking in psychological and spiritual satisfaction that hipsters would jump at the chance to clean up toxic waste. Well, oops. My sides still hurt from discovering that trendy stores sell premium brand axes as accessories. Maybe I should load up at the hardware store where I live and sell axes out of my trunk in town where I work?
8/25/16, 1:39 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
I think it's what makes the most sense here in Canada. I don't know about the rest of the empire, but in the Province of Canada, we've always bemoaned the American Empire. It's led to quite a few odd things in the past, whenever our dislike and discomfort with empire meets the reality we like the perks and privileges it gives us...
It's especially the case because we share such a long border with the Hegemon, and share a language, media, and have quite a lot of people cross between the two countries, the effect of which is we are fairly familiar with issues they have. So it wouldn't surprise me to hear that other vassal states populations aren't as troubled as ours is. I would, however, keep an eye on it if I were you, in case the relation gets messy as time passes.
8/25/16, 1:54 PM
sgage said...
"I try not to be too judgmental toward those voting Hillary, but I consider it shockingly morally bankrupt to do so."
Way to not be too judgemental! ;)
8/25/16, 1:58 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
8/25/16, 2:02 PM
MichaelK said...
What we seem to be seeing now in the United States, though not just here exclusively, is symbolic and cultural lines in the sand being drawn, that remind one of the complex social, political, economic, and not leat cultural; polarisations that happen before mass social unrest or even civil war breaking out.
My American family is deeply divided along these partisn, or even sectarian lines, to an extraordinary degree that I find both puzzling and incredibly frightening at the same time. From my own perspective I don't really see that much significant or substantial difference between the two groups, the Republicans and Democrats. My family is rather well off financially and both sides have benifitted substantially from the economic bailouts heaped on them by the Obama adminstration, which to me looked like massive welfare payments to people who'd gambled and lost on Wall Street, often losing millions of dollars, and now received huge subsidies from Washington to cover their loses in gilded halls of Casino Kapital. I thought this was strange and grotesque. The state stepping in to save my relations from going bust and then these same people, the Republican wing or our clan, criticise Obama as president, when his incredibly generous policies save both them and the Republican Party from meltdown. Talk about 'aristocrats' being ungrateful and conceited.
The Democrats in the family despise Trump and the people who support him, and when I say, 'That includes most of the Republican establishment too then.' They aren't amused. They take all of it way too seriously. For me the two parties, and the higher up the ladder own goes, look like two factions of the same party. Kinda like when they were called Whigs and Tories. The differences are far, far, smaller than they appear, especially in elections when everyone seems to go quite mad in the US. I choose to stay away during these periods because otherwise sane and normal people I like, admire and get on with, start acting like their zombies marching to the sound of a very different drum.
Only this time I think it's different. The drum is beating towards something really unpleasant. There'a a venom and hatred in the air that I haven't seen before: It's not just the usual political theatre of the absurd, but something worse. If one looks at the years leading up to the American Civil War, the polarisation and cultural conflicts and changes, there are lot of similarities to the period we live in, with deep, structural, economic shifts, underneath the surface, leading to lurches in power relationships in society that pushes polarisation and conflict from top to the bottom in society and even within families at the micro level.
Whoops! This is getting way too long, sorry. Perhaps an outsiders view of the empire isn't what's needed? Anyway, I don't think the comparison between the gay marriage/rights thing, and the environmental movement's failures to gain political traction in relation to climate change, isn't really apt. I can see why one might choose to make the comparison, only I don't think it stands up to scrutiny.
8/25/16, 2:41 PM
Clay Dennis said...
You have been gone from Oregon for too long. No one in a hip neighborhood in Portland would be caught dead in a Starbucks. These are exclusivly the domain of tourists, suburbanites and the limo liberals on the West Side. In fact the hippest neighborhoods ( Boise Eliot, Sabin, Buckman) have no Starbucks within their borders. This is partially because most of these neighborhoods were still too grungy for Starbucks back when they made their big push in the 2000's and the small local roaster based shops that sprung up to fill the gap make much better coffee so Starbucks stays away to avoid embaressment. Also in these neighborhoods people are still clinging to Bernie, and have not made the psychosis inducing pivot to Hillary yet.
8/25/16, 3:15 PM
Helix said...
In my opinion, very little. The bottom line is that people like the lights coming on when they flip the switch, and people aren't giving up their cars. So what's going to happen is that every square inch of the earth is going to be turned over looking for more coal and oil to burn, and this is going to continue until no more economically viable deposits remain. That or something like fusion is worked out and replaces it. I don't have a crystal ball, but if I were a betting person, I'd put my money down on the former. So my guess is that our children and grandchildren are just going to live with the consequences.
Having said that, I still think there are effective courses of action. Weatherizing existing houses and places of business is a no-brainer. I also think we need to protect domestic manufacturers from foreign competitors who pollute with impunity and/or maintain unsafe or unhealthy working conditions. Two ways to do that are to write environmental/workplace regulations into WTO agreements, or to place tariffs on products originating in such countries in order to level up the playing field. The hope is that those foreign competitors would start cleaning up after themselves. Barring that, at least the playing field would be somewhat more level.
While this last proposal might not address climate change directly, it does help to address environmental degradation, which I view as a related issue. Or am I piggybacking here? ;)
8/25/16, 3:31 PM
onething said...
8/25/16, 3:36 PM
Brian Kaller said...
Your piece made me remember a few years in my life when I saw all the things you describe.
As much as I write for Christian and conservative publications, I’ve also been interested in ecological issues, and disagreed with the government invasion of Iraq, so I’ve been well acquainted with liberal groups. I volunteered for the Greens in the early 2000s, and I canvassed for various candidates, spoke at gatherings and wrote most of the newsletter.
I knew some of the earliest Greens, including homesteaders in the Ozark Mountains, and they tried to reach out to a variety of religious groups over single issues like replanting forests or recycling food waste. They spoke to, and corresponded with, various evangelical, Quaker and Jewish groups in the 1970s, 80s and 90s --- I’ve read some of their old papers, and they present a religious and political history of what might-have-been.
When I started volunteering with the Greens around 2000, they included quite a diversity of people; one of the regional leaders was an evangelical Christian, the co-editor of our newspaper was pro-life, and one of our candidates was a leader in the black community. They included former Libertarians, some farmers, and devout Catholics, Mennonites, and Quakers, among others. (Sorry to reduce these people to one-word descriptions, but I’m pressed for space.) We elected several people in rural areas to city and county councils, and some still hold office to this day.
Despite all this, it felt like the Greens – and any burgeoning group accomplishing something – were quickly invaded by a hard core of (for lack of a better word) middle-aged hippie leftist activists, who tended to bully other people at meetings and make gatherings sufficiently rancorous that they drove away anyone but themselves. An old leftists' club set themselves up as Green candidates, interrupted and talked over people who had been Greens far longer than they, and began presiding over meetings as though they had authority.
I spoke at gatherings about how, if we stuck to one single issue – say, replanting clear-cut woods, or building railroads -- and acted like a disciplined organisation, we could use our single-digit percentage on Election Day to threaten or reward the major parties. The loudest voices, though, could only talk about their dreams of winning power and taking revenge on their perceived opponents, and seemed driven more by psychological issues than by strategy.
I proposed that the Greens create home-schooling networks to teach kids traditional skills, and one leftist member responded that we should only teach from “party-approved” books. Some of the more hard-core leftists kept threatening to excommunicate members who voted for major parties in certain strategic elections. I had people explode in anger at me when I suggested that most of what the Greens believed was inherently conservative – hence my presence.
Eventually I was booted from a campaign after I tried to steer the campaign stops to mostly hunting and evangelical groups – which, I thought, would stave off the usual accusations that we were “stealing” votes from Democrats, and would build much-needed bridges. I even called the Promise Keepers to see if we could get a booth at their gatherings. The campaign manager, an animal-rights activist, said that it was either her or me.
My version wouldn’t be everyone’s, of course, but I keep in touch with a lot of activists from those days, people with whom I knocked on doors, walked through farmland, camped out in strangers’ living rooms, and sat through meeting after meeting of rancour, bullying and threats. They were mostly regular working people, struggling at low-paying jobs but willing to put a lot of time in for a worthwhile cause. It took a lot of work for the leftists to drive them away.
8/25/16, 3:36 PM
Lisa Mullin said...
I have been making the exact same point in other places (like Ian Welsh's blog) for awhile now and urging others to follow the tactics of the LGBTI movement if they want to get anything done.
Some other points to add:
(1) We police 'sell outs', and we have had some, those who did are quickly brought into line, even a couple of our most senior people in the US got hammered when they started to sell out, one in particular (long a fighter for gay rights) essentially got the boot.
(2) The mitochondrial of the movement is the large number of local groups, plugged into their communities. While that can (and does) cause issues with coordination, it is far harder for them to be co-opted.
(3) Having our own media. With mainstream media being long hostile to us (though not quite so much now) we built our own media.
(4) Passion. A lot of really dedicated and smart people put a huge amount of work into this (and, of course, other LGBTI issues) all totally unpaid, because things like this matter a heck of a lot to us. These are our lives we are fighting for.
(5) Volume. Something would appear on the media, or a blog, or twitter, or whatever. The usual right wing 'christian' homophobic and transphobic comments would come out, and there would always be responses from LGBTI people setting the record straight for the uncommitted to see. We didn't let the haters run unopposed.
(6) Playing the ‘long game’. Despite tactical set backs (and there were many) we kept on track.
(7) Marginalise the bigots. This is partially generational. When some LGBTI hating politician, priest, pastor, (etc) spouts off, becoming ever more extreme, they lose people, especially those younger. Sure those things play to the older hard core, but they are dying off. Those religious organisation that are the most anti-LGBTI are the same ones losing people, and surveys show that it is their opposition (heck say it as it is, hatred) of LGBTI that is driving away the younger people.
This creates a positive feedback mechanism, where those left are the most extreme, therefore their rhetoric becomes ever more extreme, which drives away more moderate and especially younger people.
Eventually they marginalise themselves.
(8) Unity. Despite our diversity we know with 100% certainty that there is a lage and powerful minority that want us all dead. Every single last LGBTI person. It tends to concentrate the mind. Naturally we have internal fights, spats, fall outs and all the rest, but we try to keep it within the family and usually it gets sorted out fairly quickly. Those who go public with internal fights get, see (1), put in their place real fast.
(9) The intangible, the opposition is motivated by hate, we are not, we fight for positive things. So (using Boyd’s model) we have the Moral high ground, we know we are fighting for good things. Which in the end are very simple, just that we are treated like everyone else so we can have reasonable lives.
Are we 100% successful, of course not and we never can be, we still have many fights (transgender rights being at the forefront right now) to go. But we just knuckle down and get into it. Dust ourselves off when we get a set back and get back into it again.
8/25/16, 3:45 PM
Fred said...
The most vivid example that comes immediately to mind is school desegregation in the 1960's. Federal government said it must be done, and armed troops had to go in to enforce it. People are still fighting desegregation of schools. I think this is the source of white supremacy too - once told you have to be friends with a person of another race, then all the hate comes out.
And I think of this some of the source of the climate change failure. The public is told "the science says there is global warming, bad things will happen, but we have the solution, you must stop living the lifestyle you are used too". Of course people deny the scientific findings or ignore it, and (as you say) put the pedal to the medal and burn through resources as fast as possible - "you can't take what I worked for from me!!!!".
There's no involvement with people on creating or crafting solutions, or even on understanding the science. The media shoves information into our ears and eyes the minute you expose yourself to it. The graphics on 24 hour news now is totally laughable if you catch any of it.
If the way it was approached was more of "there is something strange here going on, what do you think it could be" and more openness to a range of solutions and approaches depending on geography and population density, and setting out some good old fashion contests and showing off what people have come up with.....well then you'd have a public engaged and united in creating a different future. Instead its just people complaining how the world is horrible, people suck, our leaders are idiots and all the words physically manifests itself as these waddling at least double their weight people committing slow suicide. Death by cheetos.
8/25/16, 4:19 PM
Cortes said...
Thanks once more.
"Piggybacking!"
Superb! I admire your writing skills and your patience.
8/25/16, 4:25 PM
Myriad said...
8/25/16, 4:46 PM
Golocyte Golo said...
But I have a point of disagreement: it appears that the goals of gay marriage and climate activism are irreducibly different. Gay marriage had a clear, achievable, measurable end-state: gay marriage. Climate activism's goals (not subgoals, but goals) can't even be measured on accessible time scales---if all humans died tomorrow of heart attacks and the environment went on without us, it would take a century even for human-initiated warming to stop.
Even the more measurable goal of vastly reducing CO2 emission (excluding human-created land albedo effects, species extinction, damming of rivers, overfishing, .....), the project is on a similar scale as the Soviet goal of abolishing private property---which was deeply humanitarian in impulse though not in execution---and which the Soviet's totalizing authoritarian government only partially realized after decades of trying.
I am *not* arguing that the environmental movement will lead to anything like THAT. I argue *only* that the projects are roughly similar in scale. Both necessitate a total reconstruction of our social and economic systems, and a re-ordering of how each person lives individual life.
I understand the counter-argument is that we can focus just on short-term, clearly achievable goals with widely-distributed benefits. I counter that there aren't any such goals that are meaningful.
Eg. Eliminating private air travel is neither short-term nor realistically achievable. Even its cessation by authoritarian fiat would create large changes to human life everywhere on the planet, but have only minor effects on climate.
Something actually achievable is doubling or quadrupling the USA stock of affordable rail-lines. But I'd argue this would have virtually no impact on climate. Yes, the USA would consume less petroleum----but be swamped by global economic growth and continuing sharp rises in automobile ownership in East Asia, India, and Africa.
The challenge is simply too big. If you flush a toilet, you're using a gigantic hydrological infrastructure, connected to a national electrical system, intricate governance systems, computer systems, financial systems, and a global chemical-industrial complex. If you think sustainable, non-polluting sewage systems are possible without all that... well I'd encourage you to imagine the details of such a system for a town of 1000. Then ask how it could scale up, say, to New York City. If you say "but we won't be living in places like New York City" then I'd say Yes Exactly. You're not talking about limited goals, but radical transformations.
The predicament, ultimately, is that sustainable systems can't support our billions of people, and our billions of people can't be reduced in any humanitarian way on time-scales that matter.
I look forward to being convinced I am wrong.
8/25/16, 4:51 PM
Joy said...
This reminds me of an article I read quite awhile ago where someone advocated going out and living in a lifestyle that supports a healthier, earth friendly life. Many of the comments were very condemning, along the lines of "you are selfish and only thinking of yourself, not changing the world, etc". I can't remember the link to that article, however you and any of your readers can google "lifestyle activism" or "lifestyle politics" and find a slew of posts written by people who would find your viewpoints quite upsetting. Most of those people would claim the title "progressive". One article I found that is a perfect example: "Lifestyle politics, good intentions, and the road to hell."
"A great deal of energy goes into individual organic gardening and other alternative lifestyles. It bleeds away the energy it takes to organize against police brutality, improve working conditions, defend civil rights, and build for revolutionary changes. The more that people simply try to modify their styles of life and monitor their carbon footprint, the more time Wall Street has to grow its gold bars — as icecaps melt away, imperialist wars escalate, and the majority of human beings become poorer".
http://www.socialism.com/drupal-6.8/articles/lifestyle-politics-good-intentions-and-road-hell
Great, change your lifestyle for the better, go to hell. So I suppose if you fly around the world to march in multiple protest movements or attend progressive conferences, you're on the road to heaven. No wonder I've become an agnostic.
8/25/16, 5:13 PM
Lisa Mullin said...
That may (or may not be) a valid criticism of some groups, but not for us.
When you have people screaming for our deaths, or to be legislated out of existence...trust me 'lifestyle' is the last thing we are worried about.
8/25/16, 6:07 PM
onething said...
Why do you call her Sec. Clinton? Didn't she quit/get fired?
Lawfish,
The problem with a large tax on gas is that it would again disproportionately affect the poor, who can hardly afford to get to work as it is. Europe tends to be a bit different, with smaller and more compact communities. To be sure, it would reduce gasoline use but I suspect there would be some serious pushback. Also, surprisingly, it might not make that much of a dent. I understand that agriculture uses quite a lot. what did youmean that the money would be used to make labor more affordable?
M Smith,
You might want to look into the corruption in medicine, pharmaceutical prices, the monopolies they hold so that competition isn't allowed, not to mention price gouging by hospitals and clinics who refuse to divulge their prices to incoming patients, etc. An epi pen, I have been told, costs about 20 bucks in Mexico and something like 200 here. I wish people would stop harping on insurance and begin to look hard at what has happened to pricing in medicine.
8/25/16, 6:23 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Scotlyn, fascinating -- if urban working class Irish people voted strongly in favor of same-sex marriage rights, it seems to me that strategies catering to the affluent are even more out of place in your country than in mine (which is saying something).
Compound F, it's very late in the day. That's why it's essential to try every option that might work, even politics.
Matthias, good. In both cases, it's worth learning from their successes and their failures, and trying to figure out how to emulate the former and avoid the latter. I'm not sure how well either example will play in this country, politics being different from nation to nation -- but in that case, Germans and Brazilians who want to make change happen have something to work with.
Fred, it's a little more complex than that. The GOP is in terminal disarray, split between quarreling factions -- that's why it wasn't able to come up with a short list of consensus candidates, and why Trump was able to elbow his way in. The Dems are still more cohesive, which is why they were able to cheat their way out of a Sanders nomination. Both party establishments are owned body and soul by an assortment of power centers and pressure groups who profit from the status quo and haven't noticed that the policies that profit them are wrecking the country -- a common occurrence in the life of democracies, and one that normally ends either in an insurgent candidacy (say, Lincoln), a dictatorship (say, Mussolini), or some mixture of the two. Stay tuned!
Laura, exactly! And that's exactly why any movement to do something about climate change, or any other aspect of our ecological predicament, has to start by getting outside of the affluent-liberal bubble and doing something different for a change.
Kim, no, you were one of the thoughtful ones, for which thank you. What I have in mind has less to do with policies and more to do with strategies, but yes, the reframing of climate change activism I have in mind will have certain things in common with the reframing of progress I've tried to carry out in Retrotopia.
Fudoshin, if you worry about the tender feelings of the affluent, as we've already seen, you're going to lose. The problem with demonization as an exclusive strategy, to my mind, is that it feeds into the self-defeating negativity of the movement as a whole -- the insistence that saying "No!" is enough all by itself. More on this as we proceed.
Shane, I'm sure Bowling Green is a lovely town, despite its most famous opthalmologist. I suspect you could still find a very nice Southern Baptist church social there, where the sort of opinions I cited would be heard.
Damaris, thank you for sharing that story. Affluent liberals in the US have attitudes toward the wage-earning class indistinguishable from those that Afrikaaners had toward black people in South Africa at that time -- but oh bright gods, don't mention that to them, or you'll see a world-class meltdown!
Bob, exactly. Simplistic models are a bad idea if you're trying to convince people who aren't already part of the choir -- and if you'll glance back through the archives here, you'll find that I criticized the bell-shaped curve model of peak oil early and often.
Shane, that's certainly my take. If the Left knuckles under and votes for Clinton, it has no leverage left at all -- she'll know perfectly well that she could bomb Canada, sell the national parks for strip mining, and legalize slavery, and they'll still line up meekly to vote for her four years from now -- and the DNC will know with equal satisfaction that they could nominate the rotting corpse of Ronald Reagan in 2024, and they'll vote for him too. If having the Democratic brand name is the only thing that matters, the Left is completely spent as a political force.
8/25/16, 6:38 PM
David, by the lake said...
Just my perspective, but I've (finally) come to the realization that we aren't going to solve the problem, but we can make the results less bad, if only slightly, than they would otherwise be.
8/25/16, 6:46 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Martin, little as though I want to, I think you're right: at least some activists want to fail heroically, rather than running the tremendous risks of victory.
David, that seems quite plausible to me. As for the objection, that needs to be confronted fast and hard. I'll see about figuring out ways to do it.
Jo, excellent! Yes, yes, and yes again. There are some other strategies worth including in the mix, but that's unquestionably one of them. The term "environmentalist" also needs to be dropped, hard -- but we'll talk about that in a later post.
Trippticket, oh man. That is so typical. The image matters more than the reality...
Mark, interesting. Where do you live?
Tidlösa, one way or another, it's going to be a wild ride. You're quite right, of course, that even if Trump loses -- with or without election fraud -- the genie's out of the bottle, and the wage-earning classes are going to make their voices heard whether or not the affluent like it.
Samura, I haven't forgotten Hanauer's essay. If the wealthy had the brains the gods gave geese, they'd be looking for an FDR-figure to rally behind, somebody who would upend the existing order of things and allow a moderate redistribution of wealth while still leaving today's rich in possession of their skins and a fraction of their fortunes, because the alternative is car bombs if not jackboots.
Lawfish, the fixation on sacrifice is one of the framing problems I'll be discussing. Yes, that's one of the things that will be required, but it's not the only thing -- and the fixation on sacrifice as the only alternative to business as usual is a hangover from Puritanism that we can well do without. More on this as we proceed.
Ien, please do your best to get copies to Green Party members! I think they might benefit from reading it.
Drhooves, of course there are significant obstacles. There always are. That's what makes politics such an exciting challenge!
Thymia10, I've seen the same things, of course. Stay tuned!
8/25/16, 6:48 PM
inohuri said...
I understand that people want to get married because of tradition and for legal access to one another and to receive "benefits" from employers and the state.
I have read a little about the history of marriage and understand it has not always been important or even available especially to the poor.
I read that the major reason the state got into marriage licensing was to prevent marriages such as mixed race or same sex.
I also read that marriage is going out of fashion in some areas in spite of the "benefits" on offer, France for example.
Why is there this push to force the state to allow marriage instead of getting the state out of the marriage business? If people want a marriage contract why don't they just make one up? Oops, then we are back to "benefits" and legal access.
I have also read that in Tibet there were a few different marriage contracts and one person could be in several at once.
That could have been attempted. A few standard Federal contracts that could also allow marriages of more than one man and one woman as some people prefer, isn't it odd they aren't mentioned here in this hotbed of equality? A woman,in love with two guys wants to marry them in either one or two contracts - why is there anything wrong with that if it is honest and upfront? "Bigamy" laws are about a particular type of fraud and are really unnecessary. Polygamy laws....
Oh, well. Back to the dihydrogen monoxide website. I do better there. It's all true but a bit biased. Well proven science, not like this social stuff.
8/25/16, 6:57 PM
John Michael Greer said...
As for how much can be done at this point -- we're already screwed. The question now is purely how bad it gets -- and that's still a question that matters. More on this as we proceed.
Onething, the frantic accusations being flung at Sanders voters show just how desperate the political elite is to hang onto its power at all costs. It's not the people who are responsible for those!
Grim, exactly. Thank you for getting it.
Varun, it's a basic rule of psychology that if people persist in a dysfunctional habit, it's because they're getting some kind of emotional payoff from it that, to them, outweighs the practical disadvantages of failure. Think back to the radical activists you've known, and I think you can probably figure out what the emotional payoff was (and is).
Alan, and a climate change movement that wanted to win would make room for people like you and direct some of its outreach toward your point of view. If the climate is already variable due to solar flux, do we really want to pile on increased variability by dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere? Of course not! The fact that a sleeping grizzly might have its own reasons to wake up in a bad mood is no reason to poke it with sharp stick, after all...
Nephilimsd, "At least she's better than Trump" is actually very promising. Ask them "Oh, really? In what way?" -- and be prepared to point out all the ways that she's much, much worse than Trump. Her rallies are nearly empty, while Trump's are overflowing; that says to me that her support is very shallow, and could break tolerably easily.
Grebulocities, that's a good example of one of the core mistakes of contemporary activism. What are they proposing instead of the pipeline? Anything? Anyone who knows the least thing about strategy knows that if all you do is respond to your opponent's moves, you're going to lose. To win you have to take the initiative, and that means you have to have a positive goal to offer people. More on this as we proceed!
SLClaire, excellent. Yes, that would be one good approach -- and notice that it would actually help people, by lowering their energy bills. Insisting that the climate change conundrum can only be framed as a call to suffering is one of the bad habits I'll be discussing at length as we proceed, and as you've pointed out, there are ways around it.
Pygmycory, a classic example. Sigh.
8/25/16, 7:12 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Unknown, understood. The thing is, human beings have found it possible to set aside immediate gratification and devote their time and energy to a difficult task many, many times in the past. World War II was won because people in all the allied countries put up with shortages, rationing, and the deaths of a lot of young men in order to overthrow the Axis powers; the same spirit could be evoked again, given the right circumstances. Yes, I'll be talking about that as we proceed.
With regard to the Roman Empire, that's a very good point, and I think you're quite right -- we avoid asking why because we're afraid of the answer...
JoAnna, so? If you're interested in winning, rather than in making excuses, you look toward the example of same-sex marriage rights and say, "Okay, there are differences. How can I minimize them by reframing the climate change narrative? What lessons can I learn despite the differences?" It's the unwillingness to do this, and the repeated insistence that...
Oh bright gods. It just sank in. You and everyone else who's brought up this same endlessly repeated thoughtstopper -- what are you saying?
"IT'S DIFFERENT THIS TIME!"
8/25/16, 7:14 PM
John Michael Greer said...
One thing, though: from this point on, if anybody tries to post a comment that just reiterates the claim that I can't compare the campaign for same-sex marriage rights with the campaign against climate change because (insert canned reason), I'm simply going to delete it. I already addressed that. If you can't be bothered to deal with what I said about it, I can't be bothered to approve your comment. 'Nuf said.
L, good. I encourage you to keep searching, and don't accept anyone's ideas just because they belong to this or that or the other label. The next politics, which is what needs to be built just now, will throw all current categories into a blender; that's what happens when a nation enters the kind of political stasis ours is now in, where the only set of policies that are acceptable to the political class are policies that are running the country into the ground.
Shane, granted. Like everything else about this election, Clinton's health is going to be surrounded by a fog of partisan nastiness from all sides until long after it's all over.
M Smith, there's more than one side to the EpiPen business, as I think you know; it's not just the poor who can't afford them, and the sheer profiteering involved in a 500% price boost is also an issue.
Mary, this really reads like a sales pitch, you know; if you're being paid to promote the book, you need to learn how to do it a little more subtly. As for endorsements by Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, et al., er, have you noticed that under their leadership the various movements for social change have basically gone nowhere? If they've recommended the book, that actually makes me less likely to buy and read it, since the endorsement suggests that the book embodies the same kind of professional-activist thinking that's run the current left into the ground.
Patricia, oh, granted. I tend to think of Clinton as Pompey and Trump as Crassus -- does that work for you?
Lordberia3, I suspect there are a lot of Trump supporters who have never mentioned that fact to anyone, just as there were a lot of Brexit supporters who only expressed their support in the voting booth. We'll see whether that's enough to swing the election.
Sharon, a spirited response! I based my comments on what I've heard from dyed-in-the-wool Republicans I know. For what it works, I hope you're right; the kind of attitudes you've sketched out would make for a far more constructive approach to the world's problems than the sort of thing I discussed, and lightly parodied, in my essay.
8/25/16, 7:36 PM
Candace said...
You do know that this exists http://energy.gov/eere/wipo/where-apply-weatherization-assistance. Each state has weatherization programs. That's how I got help paying to insulate my attic. You should check with your utility provider to see if they have a Neighborhood Energy Challenge.
@ Shane. I have usually described myself as a tree hugging vegetarian liberal. I don't actually know what progressive means. I thought it was tapping back into the turn of the century (1900s) religious movements for social change. Since I'm not part of an organized religion, I don't identify with it.
8/25/16, 7:38 PM
NJGuy73 said...
The movement against anthropogenic climate change had Captain Planet.
Enough said.
8/25/16, 8:00 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Eric, yep. I think I remember a Philip Glass piece that sounded a lot like it.
MichaelK, I'm not arguing. If you ever have the chance, read Bruce Catton's book The Coming Fury, which is a history of the runup to the Civil War; the atmosphere of poisonous partisan hatred Catton discusses is uncomfortably like what we see around us in the US right now.
Clay, funny. Okay, make it a West Side Starbucks full of people who have made the turn to Clinton!
Brian, I know. I've seen the same thing. One thing that any movement for social change at this point has to embody, if it's going to accomplish anything, is some way to screen out the privileged Baby Boomer radicals who have been driving movements for social change into the ground since the 1970s. I'm working on options; several suggest themselves.
Lisa, thank you for this! The LGBTI movement has really provided a stellar example of how to make social change happen; it would be helpful if more people who claim to want change would learn from it, rather than insisting at the top of their lungs that this or that or the other difference means that they can't possibly learn anything from your successes.
Fred, good. Among the real problems with the climate change movement, as I noted in the earlier post, are its reliance on the rapidly waning prestige of science, and its fond and fatuous belief that if somebody in a white lab coat got up behind a podium and said "X is true," everyone would forget all the countless times scientists have been wrong in the past, and take their words on faith. It really was clumsily handled, and something less dogmatic and more open-ended, as you've suggested, would have done a lot better.
Cortes, thank you.
Golocyte, it sounds to me as though you're arguing that climate change activism is a waste of time, because there's no conceivable way that it can accomplish anything useful. Is that really what you believe?
Joy, and of course one millimeter behind all of the yelling is the frantic terror on the part of affluent liberals that they can't possibly give up any of the tiys and trinkets for which they've bartered their souls. There's a story about a guy named Faust that comes to mind here...
Inohuri, some people like to be married. (I'm one of them.) Our culture traditionally grants certain legal benefits to married couples. To my mind, that's reason enough to expand those benefits to other people who like to be married but, for reasons rooted in a particular set of religious beliefs, haven't been able to marry until recently. It really is that simple!
8/25/16, 8:07 PM
Justin said...
Too much of our politics in the West revolves around "doesn't affect me, lol".
8/25/16, 8:16 PM
Ozark Chinquapin said...
One thing that I personally always like to point out about climate change is the massive subsidies that go into fossil fuel intensive areas. Take your example of the airline industry, if it wasn't for massive government subsidies it wouldn't have ever become the behemoth that it is, this link shows some of the ways that tax money has supported the aviation industry over the years, which completely dwarfs the money the government has put into Amtrak (and yet Republicans criticise amtrak and turn a blind eye to airline and road subsidies).
http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/columnist/mcgee/2015/09/02/how-much-do-taxpayers-support-airlines/71568226/
I don't get the obsession with schemes that would expand an already bloated bureaucracy even further that seem to permeate the climate change movement, focusing energy on stopping subsidizing the fossil fuel intensive industries could have a much broader appeal and bring in support from small government conservatives and libertarians. Many of the conservative climate change deniers seem to think that climate change was a myth invented by the elites to increase their power and authority and screw ordinary people over, so reframing political approaches to climate change to focus on things that don't involve any new bureaucracies and saves taxpayers money seems a much better strategy. Some of the climate change skeptics would be in favor of ending the subsidies to airlines for reasons unrelated to climate impacts.
I also wonder if business interests that may benefit from those changes could end up being allies too, as seems to be happening in a major way in the marijuana legalization movement, which I think is on the road to success. It's a double edged sword for sure as they will try to tweak the cause to their agendas (A blatant example of this from the marijuana legalization scene is the (defeated) ballot measure in Ohio that would have legalized marijuana growing only on ten farms in the state, which were owned by those rich investors who got the measure on the ballot) Still, having business interests with money that may benefit there to counter the opposition could get the cause on the national stage. For example, if airlines lost their subsidies, bus and train would be much more competitive and be growth industries. If, as is the case with marijuana, some powerful interests saw the potential for a new era of growth in bus lines if the playing field were leveled, they could back that cause with gusto.
8/25/16, 8:53 PM
inohuri said...
The disruption that I would like to see would end the state's monopoly on who marries whom and how they choose to go about it.
This would need to be standardized somehow but it wouldn't be necessary to seek permission from a bureaucrat. It would be more like a will - a form, some witnesses and signatures.
I suspect some of my neighbors are continuing polygamous relations quietly. It would seem that some of them were forced to break marriages in order to immigrate to this sometimes unforgiving USA. Of course they don't dare to try to do anything about it and I'm not quite a dumb enough infidel to ask.
8/25/16, 9:01 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
And Bill Clinton as an overaged Marc Antony?
8/25/16, 9:11 PM
Bike Club Vest Prez said...
8/25/16, 9:43 PM
nuku said...
Re your comment “Varun, it's a basic rule of psychology that if people persist in a dysfunctional habit, it's because they're getting some kind of emotional payoff from it that, to them, outweighs the practical disadvantages of failure. Think back to the radical activists you've known, and I think you can probably figure out what the emotional payoff was (and is)“.
Some psychological theories call this “secondary gain”. One example is the formerly slim, single, and very promiscuous woman who, now happily married to a traveling salesman, allows herself to become moderately obese so she won’t be “hit on” by men while her husband is away and be tempted to betray her marriage vows. She doesn’t like being fat and is always going on and off diets, but for her the secondary gain of this behavior is an honest and secure relationship.
8/25/16, 10:34 PM
team10tim said...
RE: The USA can't withdraw from its empire because we're the world police and everything would go to hell if we stopped. (paraphrased)
From Noam Chomsky:
"To mention only one obvious example, polls of international opinion by the leading US polling agency (WIN/Gallup) show that the US is regarded as the greatest threat to world peace by a huge margin, Pakistan far behind in second place (presumably inflated by the Indian vote). Polls taken in Egypt on the eve of the Arab spring revealed considerable support for Iranian nuclear weapons to counterbalance Israeli and US power. Public opinion often favors social reform of the kind that would harm US-based multinationals. And much else. These are hardly policies that the US government would like to see instituted, but authentic democracy would give a significant voice to public opinion. For similar reasons, democracy is feared at home."
Link: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33519-the-empire-of-chaos-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky
Thanks,
Tim
8/25/16, 10:59 PM
jbucks said...
Here's what I would do differently I was doing it now (which relates to your post):
1 - I would identify the single concrete thing that could be changed which would have the greatest effect. With fishing, that would be to create no-fish zones where fish populations and their habitat could recover, and do this with the cooperation of local small fishers.
2 - I would then look for 'bright spots' - find campaigns or initiatives which have succeeded to learn from them. For example, there was a region in New Zealand (I forget where) which introduced a no-fish zone, and once fish stocks replenished a few years later, local fisher's catches increased, because fish don't stay in no-fish zones. So the protected area ended up being supported by local fishers. Win-win!
3 - I wouldn't then make a campaign to 'introduce nationwide no-fish zones!', I would instead make a campaign for a much smaller, defined area, like a town. It's much more concrete to say 'Establish a 30 square kilometer no-fish zone in the Bay of X!'. After that, it's years of hard work to actually run the campaign.
I don't think you can effectively campaign to change the behavior of people who won't give something up. You instead campaign to change the behavior of people who sit somewhere in the middle, who would do things differently if given a simple, concrete plan with clearly defined benefits. If you have convinced enough people, you get critical mass, and the resisters either change their minds or they are too small of a group to care about.
In the face of an overwhelmingly large, 'impossible-to-change' problem, break it down into smaller issues, and continue to break the issues down until they are achievable. You'll know you are on the right track when you can explain your campaign in a sentence.
8/25/16, 11:10 PM
jbucks said...
8/25/16, 11:15 PM
Joel Caris said...
I was mulling earlier this week the idea that free trade agreements support the American empire, which also brings excess wealth and resources into the country, but that free trade agreements seem to also be wreaking a lot of economic havoc on this country. They've destroyed a lot of good, working- and wage-class jobs in this country. It's my opinion that the country would be quite a bit better off economically if we were to back out of the free trade agreements we're currently in. Granted, it might create some initial chaos, but I expect it would be a long term benefit. On the other hand, I was having some trouble squaring that with the idea that these agreements ultimately serve as wealth pumps, bringing extra treasure to America.
Add into this W.B.'s insightful comment above about Trump's agenda being, in many ways, an anti-empire agenda--even if he doesn't pitch it that way and, I would guess, doesn't view it that way himself. Furthermore, I imagine there are plenty of people in this country who are anti-free trade agreements but wouldn't necessarily agree that they would like America to take a cut in the share of wealth and resources it currently receives. How do you square all this?
And then it hit me that--and you've more or less written this, but I guess it sometimes takes time to all fall into place--you could engage in an anti-empire agenda (though not labeled as such) that would enrich and improve the lives of a good number of people in this country even while reducing the overall national wealth and consumption. Crafted appropriately, what you would do is raise the standard of living of a large portion of the population that have been getting a boot to their neck for the last few decades by creating economic arrangements that would bring back a number of good wage-earning jobs while crashing a good chunk of the wealth and prosperity of the affluent. It seems to me that, at its root, this would be a movement to rearrange the U.S. economy to focus on actual physical goods and services (the secondary economy), complete with tariffs and other forms of protectionism, while penalizing the money (tertiary) economy.
This could quite easily be a positive campaign, too, as you would actually be working to improve the lives of more people than you would be hurting. Your focus wouldn't be on the affluent, it would be on the many different ways you would revive the secondary economy and return well-paying jobs to this country that are rooted in actual physical goods and services. Meanwhile, you could have the secondary benefit of reducing overall consumption and emissions while beginning the process of re-building the sort of real-world physical economy that is going to be absolutely necessary to cope to whatever degree we can with climate change, resource depletion, and ecosystem collapse. Finally, new projects that don't currently feel feasible (say, a national high speed rail system) may suddenly become much more so if you have a functioning economy that assures a good deal of people that they'll actually get built to the benefit of workers and the country and won't simply turn into pet projects that run billions over their budgets and primarily enrich consultants and engineers.
Hmm. There may be holes in this, but it feels like there's a real idea here.
8/25/16, 11:48 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Justin, and unfortunately that will change when CEOs discover that they do, indeed, need to care. That could be done via federal racketeering charges; it could also be done in less legal ways. I'd much prefer the former.
Ozark, excellent! We'll be talking about those subsidies, and ways to use them politically, as we proceed. We'll also be talking about finding allies among industries that benefit from climate change remediation, and why making new bureaucracies is just another favor to the affluent -- who gets hired by those, do you think?
Inohuri, personally I have nothing against polygamy among consenting adults, and if anyone wants to insist that it violates the Bible, (a) that book has no legal force in our republic and (b) perhaps they can explain to me why all the good guys in the Old Testament have multiple wives. If polygamists want to petition for the right to multiple marriages, they have the example of the same-sex marriage rights movement to show them how to go about it.
Patricia, too funny. All we need now are Catiline and Caesar.
Prez, exactly. When people want to win, you get the kind of stalemate we have now. When people want to take home some benefit from the negotiations, you have the basis for constructive compromise. Do you remember how many people responded to my post offering a Burkean conservative argument for same-sex marriage by insisting that no, we couldn't make any allowances for people with religious objections, they had to be forced into obedience? That's the kind of arrogance that makes constructive compromise impossible in today's America.
Nuku, exactly. There are a million different examples. Gregory Bateson's work on double-binds covers this in useful detail.
Tim, and the thing is, they're right. The US long ago stopped being anything but a predatory empire outside its borders, and the blowback from that is building to hurricane force around us.
Jbucks, excellent. That's a very good example -- and a very good idea in its own right. Notice also how the no-fish zone functions as a managed commons, which benefits everybody so long as everybody has to follow the same rules.
8/25/16, 11:53 PM
ed boyle said...
Gay politics not my thing. I usually try to figure out where it came from. Is it civilizational, historical anomaly, evolutionary? Bored straight male objectivism. If it reduces population surplus while simultaneously making many happy, as opposed to nun or monk surpluses of middle ages, I can see advantage biologically as adaptation to the current global situation. Sexual partnership used to be about having someone to look after you in old age, religious imperative. Deviation in small communities destroyed inner cohesion. Urban anonymity eliminated this problem. When cities die out so will sexual deviation from norm. This is my difference of opinion with largely rural, smallish towns lakeland. But this has been argued 1000s of times on PO blogs. Women's, minorities rights don't have to disappear in a low energy, PO world. Human brain, emotions are infinitely malleable. Any sexual behavior if encouraged could become mass phenomenon, if sustainable in the society.
great post btw. If hillary gets to destroy America this would allow a better transition than discrediting anti-imperialist Trump. Whoever gets in will preside over inevitable decline, have little influence even from the top.
8/26/16, 12:32 AM
j8sun said...
Their advice is relevant in a long descent, and might be easier to buy into for a person who refuses to see they’re in descent. And if the money disappears anyway, at least they learned to live on LESS. I expect a renewed interest with the next recession, so I’m making sure everyone around me knows about them now. And besides ERE has a link to The Archdruid Report, when they are ready to explore. Like I did. Also, Green Wizardry is a great book which seems to have avoided the four horsepersons well!
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/
8/26/16, 1:02 AM
donalfagan said...
8/26/16, 2:25 AM
Fred said...
Any adult who lives in reality as defined by our current laws knows that a lot in a town has a property owner and the owner of the property was making the decision for the parking lot. Zoning laws dictate what property owners can do, and any improvement or building on a lot goes before a zoning board for review and approval and then to the town itself. The government didn't decide willy nilly to just pave a lot!
So I said it - well not all that - but I did say, "Did you go into the borough office and ask from a place of curiosity what the status of the lot is? And your idea for a garden and where that could be located and who to work with to get it done?"
Faces turned red in anger. I was told I just didn't get it and conversation was the last thing required. Six years later these former friends still don't talk with me, still protest and complain about the system and how the system is ruining everything. They are just so fixated that the problem is "out there with them" and therefore unsolvable. Its amusing to watch their comments on Facebook or other online formats. I doubt they are reading this one - ha-ha.
So a real climate change movement needs to push all those career protestors out, or maybe just ignore their existence? How do we do that? I mean the minute these people have an opportunity to display self-righteous indignation, they just show up chanting and marching. That was the crack-up about the protestors in Philly for the DNC - it was all career protestors and each person had their "thing".
8/26/16, 2:45 AM
Fred said...
Her daughter who visits her daily is an emergency room nurse and totally missed the signs of dehydration in her mom. So what I got from this is we have lost what it looks like when people are suffering, and our knowledge of health and what it takes to maintain it, is also not sufficient.
8/26/16, 2:59 AM
Fred said...
Warm Regards is a podcast about the warming planet. The show is hosted by meteorologist Eric Holthaus. Co-hosts are Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine, and Andy Revkin, a veteran journalist at the New York Times. The show is produced by Stephen Lacey.
They are looking for guests JMG!
Last show they commented about how they get skewered by those in the climate change movement if they step outside of what the allowed discussion is. They've been shocked that those in the movement respond that way to people who are trying to share the science of climate.
8/26/16, 3:07 AM
NJGuy73 said...
Social change does not come from Supreme Court opinions or marches down the DC mall. That is where we see the flowering of social change. The seeds are planted when it is decided that one generation will be taught differently, and that generation grows up while previous ones die out.
Now, I'll spell out what activism can learn from the difference is this:
When teaching little kids your message, don't be ham-handed. Don't make it out to be a white hat/black hat matter. Little kids see these cartoon characters doing stuff they could never do, led by a supernatural figure. That makes cleaning up the planet look like something only super-powered people can do, and kids know quite well that they don't have magic rings. They'll get the message that it's up to someone else to make good things happen.
So instead, make being environmentally-conscious look normal. Show ordinary kids turning over mulch piles in permaculture sites, and make it seem like fun. Show them running windmills and make it seem more fun than any video game. Write a book that shows your vision of what the world should look like, and make it seem like any other vision isn't even conceivable.
8/26/16, 4:07 AM
Shane W said...
I'm fond of JMG's theory that it was the end of progress in the 70s, when we hit national peak oil and first encountered limits to growth, that allowed misogyny, sex-phobia, including sexism & homophobia, and racism to begin to die. So equality, the kind that's come about in the last 40 years, is not progressive, it's post-progressive.
RE: Global warming:
I had a conversation with an affluent, salary class liberal who thought he was intelligent b/c he listens to NPR. Of course, climate change deniers were idiots and morons--how stupid could you be to deny global warming, right? As I began to tick off the consequences of global warming (coastal flooding, abandonment of low lying cities, 50 meter rise in sea level, collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic sheets, etc.), I got all kinds of pushback as to why that won't happen (tech fix, not happening, we don't really know the consequences of global warming, can't be proven). So, according to him, people who reject the overwhelming evidence for global warming are morons/idiots, yet he stands there and rejects or denies every possible consequence of global warming? It boggles the mind...
8/26/16, 5:14 AM
Shane W said...
8/26/16, 5:22 AM
Shane W said...
8/26/16, 5:34 AM
Shane W said...
8/26/16, 5:38 AM
nuku said...
1)carefully select a no-fish zone area that will actually work in practice for the resident species of fish and that can be policed easily.
2)identify the largest possible number of communities of interest (commercial and recreational fisherman, divers and snorklers, people concerned with promoting biodiversity, and nature lovers in general).
3)educate these folks about how the zone will help each community to reach its particular goal. More fish for the fisherman, nice place to dive and watch fish for the divers, etc.
4)provide a way for all these folks to influence the people who make the enabling legislation.
5)get the locals behind the project so they help identify the inevitable poachers.
6)provide stiff penalties for poaching.
7)Once the zone is established, do follow-up research to monitor how the project is going, publish the results in the local press, and continue to raise public awareness about the zone’s advantages.
In short, chose your battle ground wisely, have a coherent battle plan, muster the troops, and be in for the long haul.
The establishment of small coastal no-fish zones has worked well in NZ. I’ve seen a Tongan attempt to establish a no-fish zone for giant clams fail because the locals didn’t fully understand the long-term advantages to themselves (giant clams live for up to 50 years). They saw it as something that was being set up and forced upon them by environmentalists from outside the country.
8/26/16, 5:42 AM
Lawfish1964 said...
I didn't say anything about the tax revenues being used to reduce labor costs. I said the revenue could be used to pay down our national debt (which in reality is unpayable absent hyper-inflation). To me, any measure which forces people to use less petroleum is good. I'd be happy to ride my bike to work if I didn't work in a stuffy office where being dressed in bike pants doesn't pass the dress code. Perhaps very expensive gas would change that mindset.
8/26/16, 5:47 AM
Shane W said...
when she said "lifestyle", she meant eco-friendly, low carbon, organic, not LGBT
8/26/16, 5:54 AM
Shane W said...
when I was going to the Faerie Short Mountain Sanctuary, I got lost, took a wrong turn, and ended up on a prepper homestead. Oddly enough, I think probably both the peppers and the faeries were doing a lot of the same things (making food from scratch, growing food, making things by hand, etc.)
8/26/16, 5:59 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
What will fill this void? Whatever gets a strong foothold first may well be The Future.
8/26/16, 6:18 AM
David, by the lake said...
My teenage daughter (who has, as I've previous mentioned, help guide me through the maze of the gender and gender-identity spectrum) has asked me what I think the "next" marriage issue would be. I answered without hesitation: "plural marriage." The fundamental logic which supports the argument for allowing same-sex marriage (contract theory, legal relationship between consenting adults, no-harm principle, separation of civil law and religious law) applies equally to parties seeking a plural marriage relationship and legal recognition of the same rights and responsibilities.
@Joel
The broad concept you describe sounds much like the approach I've advocated (and which has drawn the responses I mentioned to John above) -- relinquish the empire and its associated costs, "win" the resource conflicts by not fighting in them, develop a self-reliant economy within the long-term sustainable capabilities of our nations resources, reorient/resize our military for a strong defense (but only defense) to protect those resources, and reduce/restrict trade as needed to protect the self-reliant economy from outside predation. We can't prevent the world from falling into a fight over the remaining scraps of resources, but we don't have to participate and we can certainly bloody the nose of anyone who comes poking around our territory.
@JMG
Re the argument for/against empire, I have been largely staying away from the moral argument in my discussions "outside". I acknowledge that I consider empires to be de-humanizing, but then proceed to base the argument for my plan of retrenchment on purely pragmatic grounds -- the US empire, whether one deems is a good thing or a bad thing, is in decline; rather than fight that decline, end up losing everything anyway, and winding up in an end-state for which we are totally unprepared, I argue that we ought to pro-actively give up the global power currently have and reposition ourselves as I've described, taking advantage of the fact that we would at least have some control over the process and be moving to that end-state in a prepared fashion. And the responses generally are the ones I mentioned earlier, peppered with arguments against isolationalism, turning our back on the world, etc, etc. Or "we aren't an empire, the empire isn't in decline, and we're obligated to maintain it in order to protect the world from itself anyway." It is humorous, in a resigned, cynical sort of way.
8/26/16, 6:53 AM
donalfagan said...
[[[The head of the Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland is asking the governor to intervene in the awarding of medical cannabis licenses because the selected companies lack diversity, denying minorities the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an emerging industry.
"I am completely disappointed with the medical marijuana commission and the decision that they have made in terms of awarding licenses," said Del. Cheryl D. Glenn, chairwoman of the black caucus. "Clearly, there was no effort at all to factor in minority participation and make sure that it's inclusive of everybody in the state of Maryland."
Members of the black caucus and others have raised concerns that the 15 preliminary licenses for growing medical cannabis and the 15 licenses for processing the drug, which were awarded this month, mostly went to companies led by white men. Lawmakers and some losing applicants are mulling legal action.
According to the Maryland Cannabis Industry Association, one license went to an African-American-led company and two went to companies led by women. Some critics note that African-Americans are disproportionately prosecuted for marijuana use and now are being shut out of profiting from the legalized industry.]]]
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-cannabis-complaints-20160822-story.html
In short, it seems clear that MD and PA will be limiting medical marijuana production to an approved list of growers and processors. Being able to get medical cannabis would be good for my sick relative, but having to buy from a limited group of providers seems like less of a cause for celebration.
8/26/16, 6:55 AM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
I'm almost certain Trump doesn't view his policies as anti-empire. If he did, he'd also want to cut military spending down to more reasonable levels, and wouldn't be anti-China. If he put those two in place, I'm pretty sure he'd hit all the steps necessary for the end of the American Empire, in a reasonably peaceful way too. It wouldn't be perfect, but it beats holding on to it until it drags the country down with it.
8/26/16, 7:13 AM
MindfulEcologist said...
This is the kind of post that helps clarify my thinking and for that there really is no way to say thank you enough. I am always amazed how powerful it is to call a spade a spade - and how difficult it can be to get to that point when what is involved is so intimately hooked up to powerful emotions such as our hope and fear, love and hate.
Yesterday's mail delivered Dark Age America. I am savoring the read but even so far I really must say your accuracy of message and clarity of delivery has reached a new level. Nice work in the great work.
Though this might be more relevant to your other blog I wanted to share that I recently completed a set of two posts dealing with the difference between dogmatic and non-dogmatic faith. As the true believers carry on their destructive ways into the days of the crumbling empire it seemed a useful addition to the cognitive tool belt for those working hard on thinking for themselves and not being swept up by the collective. The post is called Kindness is Powerful.
I also wanted to share a title from '96 you might want to look into if you have not already (I know your get-to-it pile is probably already higher than your roof but isn't that the way it always is?) Anyway the title is Under the Influence; The Destructive Effects of Group Dynamics by John Goldhammer. As your posts attention turns towards activist groups and what they can or cannot accomplish, this might be timely.
All the best to you and to all participating on the comment threads.
8/26/16, 7:20 AM
SamuraiArtGuy said...
SamuraiArtGuy, Why do you call her Sec. Clinton? Didn't she quit/get fired?
Just a semi-journalistic affection/hornorific, as it was her last Public Office. Not that I am particularly impressed with her conspicuously hawkish tenure as SOS. In the current rancorous political discourse, I try to refer to the candidates somewhat neutrally and respectfully and avoid the unproductive name calling that become the defacto standard. Conversely, I try to refer to Mr Trump as Mr Trump, and not one of his many nicknames.
Of course this all could be a conceit on my part, but it suits me to indulge it.
8/26/16, 7:32 AM
SamuraiArtGuy said...
I'll stick my tongue firmly into my cheek and take the contrary view. It's Different This Time because the Republic as we've known it might not survive this one, or be damaged beyond restoration by any conceivable coalition of the sane. The forces leading to decline are too well established and have too much momentum – and both candidates will have ample opportunities (tho' not necessarily by design or intent) to accelerate them through their self-indulgent or corrupt (or both) choices of policies.
Say what you might about the unfolding century, it's certainly not going to be BORING.
8/26/16, 7:40 AM
Sven Eriksen said...
"All we need now are Catiline and Caesar."
I'm sure they will put in an appearance in due time...
8/26/16, 8:08 AM
Josh said...
I think the success of the same-sex marriage movement, compared with the impotence of the climate/environment movement, can be attributed at least in part to the fact that a successful outcome is not threatening in the least to the personal and professional lives and lifestyles of affluent liberals. (Perhaps you have noted this in previous posts?)
Socially progressive affluent liberals get an emotional "high" from publicly displaying ideological generosity towards ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual identity minorities. Supporting these groups is a tremendous opportunity for virtue signaling, especially in the social media age. What's more, a "win" policy-wise leaves everything intact for privileged affluent liberals, and they can celebrate a victory and congratulate themselves for their nobility and compassion. A "loss" policy-wise is almost as nice, since the neanderthal, bigoted Republicans and conservative Christians can be vilified to the extreme. Some folks probably get even more of a kick out of vilifying their enemies than celebrating with their comrades.
I believe these issues of identity politics around gender, race, religion, etc. have swollen to occupy so much of our national discourse precisely because affluent liberals can support the progressive agenda as vociferously as they like - while gaining opportunity for virtue signaling among one's friends and the chance to denounce and denigrate one's opponents - without any real threat to the status quo. If identity groups win policy victories, it doesn't cost affluent liberals anything.
However, on environmental/climate issues, these same progressives turn reactionary, in my opinion. As you have often noted, when the discussion turns to the types of fundamental economic changes necessary for human society to operate within the constraints of a livable planet, progressive affluent liberals take the position of "yeah but...iPhones!...Tesla cars!...solar-PV and wind!...robots to do our farming!" and other variations on the common sort of grasping denialism.
The reality is that a "win" policy-wise for the environment/climate (granted, unimaginable with the current politics) would spell the end of the status quo socio-economic status, privileges, and comforts of affluent liberals...all the way down to deeply held personal and professional identities (existential crisis). At some level, maybe subconsciously, many affluent liberal progressives sense this, and it disturbs them. I think the cognitive dissonance around this partially explains the intensity with which some progressives now insist that former Bernie supporters *have* to vote for Hillary. If Hillary wins, it means the status quo is safe (for a little while). Trump obviously is a huge X-factor, much more likely to threaten the current order. When affluent liberals denounce Trump, on the surface it can be about his attitude towards minorities and identity groups - beneath the surface it could reflect affluent liberals' fear of substantive change.
If you think about it, affluent liberals’ support for identity groups is grossly self-serving in a lot of ways.
[continued…]
8/26/16, 8:21 AM
Josh said...
[…continued]
Your thesis that all either party has to do is wave the scary other party in front of their constituents in order to get enough support to eek out elections is right on, in my opinion. Wedge issues are really helpful to the parties for crystalizing this sort of polarization. However, in my view, most "regular Americans" (Democrats or Republicans, even many or most conservative Christians) share a live-and-let-live attitude on most things - I see this as being a characteristic part of our culture. From time to time, fervor and polarization can be stoked up by the parties and media (manifest as the latest outrage in the "culture war") to the point that "live-and-let-live" gets over-rided on some wedge issue in time for an election. My sense is that "live-and-let-live" finally won out on same sex marriage, and correspondingly its utility to the parties as a wedge driver dissipated. I suspect that successful campaigning by marriage equality activists helped the process, but in the end I think it was mainly just the prevailing "live-and-let-live" ethos of our culture.
If this explanation is sound, then it suggests that politicians are dis-incentivized to really do anything (make change) on polarizing issues. It is more valuable to the parties to have us divided into neat constituencies and fighting each other - in other words, *not* to resolve these issues, but to maintain active tumult.
Social issues work well for this purpose, since they are mostly emotional/psychological in nature. They are about things that people have strong feelings about, like abortion, which don’t necessarily have a “right answer” in the sense of some scientifically demonstrable fact, but come down to folks’ beliefs. But when it comes to physical issues of environment, energy, economics, stoking the culture war doesn’t really work. Could this be why we spend 99% of our time arguing over gender identity, etc., and 1% or less talking seriously about unsustainability and overshoot?
8/26/16, 8:21 AM
onething said...
"On the other hand, I was having some trouble squaring that with the idea that these agreements ultimately serve as wealth pumps, bringing extra treasure to America."
It isn't exactly the case that eliminating the free trade agreements would bring less wealth to the U.S. Rather, there is an international corporate wealthy elite who bring this wealth to themselves and their offshore accounts. That they often live in the U.S. is almost irrelevant. In other words, its a concentration of wealth to the detriment of a more sound economy.
8/26/16, 9:11 AM
234567 said...
But climate change is not 'in your face', so it doesn't come up often, and gets pushed to the back burner. What mitigating it entails is not BAU, so politicians ignore it until they cannot, because business wants BAU. What is required is changing personal habits, and for some reason people in the world rely on .gov to pass laws to force them into change. That never works - whatever the issue is seems to squeeze into black or gray markets and persist.
I think what is needed is actually a change in lifestyles, and to accomplish that, one has to bring out the big guns and make people desire to dial it back.
Sci-fi breeds the future - just read some of the old stuff, which we are living in shades of today. I have solar powered satellite internet at my farm. Solar powered fuel and water pumps, lots of little things are solar. We use a hand washer and do our work clothes daily - hang to dry overnight. We switched from AC only to AC only in Jun-Sept, and let attic fan doe the spring and fall months. Even with the greenhouse fans and aquaponics pumps running in summer, our electric bill is only $150/month. Every time we add a solar panel and a 12V battery, another decrement in the bill occurs.
You cannot do this in apartments or offices - they are not designed for it like they were in the 1930's. And there are so many laws against things like vegetables gardens and such, or permits (sorry, isn't that a form of tax?) that requires some know-nothing to check your work.
I am having a difficult time seeing how these entities of .gov will ever let go of their slice of pie (taxes/permits/regulations/etc.). They add them constantly - and the real purpose is graft. The load is very high now, high enough that many of us are going the guerilla way.
So waiting for .gov to help with climate change is waiting for more permits/taxes/regs and less financial resources to tackle it.
I think what is needed is a religion almost, something grassroots and not astroturfed. It means lowering your expectations and looking around you at the world, and there are many people who refuse to do this, much less actively seek it.
Just some thoughts...
8/26/16, 9:18 AM
Jasmine said...
Good post. There were a number of things I was thinking of saying but they have already been covered. I know that this is a little off topic, but I have been thinking about recent attempts that have been made to highlight peak oil and why it is difficult to get people to understand the subject. One of the problems is that all previous oil shortages have come about as a result of political events, like the Arab oil embargo, world war 2 etc and this has shaped our perception of what peak oil will be like. While there are lessons to be learnt from these events, we can easily forget that peak oil is driven by geology and not politics and geology acts on a different time scale from politics. As Harold Wilson said “In politics a week is a long time” and previous oil shortage came about over a very short time scale. Peak oil however is a process that will take place over decades. This is something we forget at our peril as when oil shortages do not happen overnight like they did during the Arab oil embargo, we can easily assume that there is no problems. Peak oil is more likely to manifest itself in decreasing EROI, demand destruction, stagnating economies, financial crisis etc. With all this other stuff going on it will be easy to miss the underlying cause.
8/26/16, 9:32 AM
234567 said...
I'm proud of him...
8/26/16, 9:37 AM
Wendy Crim said...
8/26/16, 9:44 AM
JoAnna said...
I completely agree with you that the environmental movement has been guilty of all 4 of the points you mentioned. In my opinion, it has also paralyzed people by shaming and yelling at them, reinforcing the mistaken notion that the only way to "save" nature is to remove oneself from it. (As if we could...) That whatever humans do, we'll probably just screw things up even more. As my friend and permaculture mentor Ben Falk likes to point out, the logical conclusion to those types of arguments is really just suicide -- if you really want to "leave no trace" that's pretty much your only option, since we are all a part of nature and can't get outside of it, no matter what technological progress tells us.
This is where I feel the main flaw of the environmental movement has been, as you've pointed out: activists use a bizarre guilt complex to shame (and often, exclude) people who aren't vegan/green/whatever enough, which causes many to stick their fingers in their ears and ignore whatever inward knowledge they might have that their lifestyle is unhealthy or hypocritical. The only way to address this is to meet people where they are, and give them direct, simple, participatory goals to accomplish. To help them feel connected to nature, and not to believe the "leave no trace" B.S. To own their own footprint and attempt to actually do some GOOD with it, to the best of their knowledge and abilities. (I loved the idea someone here tossed out of getting hipster-lumberjack-dressed guys from the cities to go out and get some real work done.) This focus on positive impact is what drew me to permaculture years ago, and which I think is missing from the environmental movement today. It sounds to me like that's what you are driving at in this series as well. Focusing the movement on simple, concrete (and VERY specific) steps, paired with campaigning for the curtailment of subsidies to fossil fuel industries, could provide positive direction for the movement, and hopefully arrest the drift of negativity and vagueness it has fallen in to.
It's just that on less positive days, I see how easily distracted people are, by TV and Facebook, or by the promise that someone else (government, technology, etc.) will fix everything for them. When that happens, understandably I think, it leads me to wonder whether we really have it in us to change, hence the concerns I expressed in my earlier post. I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts on what we can do!
8/26/16, 9:48 AM
Karl said...
Yep, our elites are still senile but they are coordinated enough to spit out nearly identical headlines/copy.
And it's not just Trump, I saw a complaints by Green party supporters about the wave of articles about "anti-science" "vaccine-denier" Jill Stein which were obviously coordinated.
I also watched Hillary's speech yesterday. Another attempt at what you termed the "rescue game".
8/26/16, 9:54 AM
Ed-M said...
Crikey, 151 comments already!
You've given a short rundown of the four peculiar habits of left-wing movements since the 1980s that have stymied these movements from going forward; and I have to tell you, those habits really are peculiar to the left.
But I believe there's something or some things additional that contribute to the hindrance of the anti-anthropogenic-climate-change movement.
The first of course, is the gross hypocrisy of some of the leading lights campaigning for the reduction of Carbon Emissions while hardly doing anything themselves, the prime example being Al Gore and his 36-room mansion in Tennessee. When one of these guys says to Joe Grabasandwich, "You HAVE to reduce your carbon footprint, drastically!" while all they've done was change to Fluorescent Lightbulbs, bought a Prius, or even had an expansive and expensive Solar PV System to show off their (faux) green bona fides and don't give the guy any ideas on how to shrink the impact in a way that won't cost him a bundle -- probably because the things he CAN do, like the things SLClare did, is SO 70s, which make these pseudo-greenies cringe. Now what does that say to you?
The second, I think, is a lot more formidable, and that's about future reward for present sacrifice. People would gladly sacrifice for the time being so that they, or their kids, can live better lives somewhere down the road. At least I hope the American people would but I'm not too keen on them doing so these days.
One of the other commenters just said, and I forgot which, that we in the United States would have to reduce our fossil fuel consumption by 75 PERCENT. That's a heck of a lot to ask for, particularly since our built landscape literally mandates automobility and incessant driving. I mean, are you going to tell the average American that they are going to have to crowd into the inner cities and stay there for the rest of their lives, since living carbon-free in the typical US suburb bascially means a daily Bataan Death March (hat tip to JHK) or a bicycle trip in a hot wet blanket, just to get to school, to work, to get groceries, to do errands and so on; and their children, grandchildren, etc., will have to live in the same place essentially for ever, so that we can trade in Near Term Extinction -- which is what the IPCC's Business As Usual scenario implies -- for a lesser Hell On Earth? I don't think so.
Which is why Climate Change Activists instead are trying to compel governments to force businesses to decarbonise their cultures, practices and products. Which means, of course, that the financial and investment sector must divest in fossil fuel companies, which the Rockefeller Foundation and other concerns have proceeded to do. Now there's a $13Tln pool of money pulling for renewables and decarbonisation. But I don't think the Activists have thought this through, nor thought out the implications for the people at large, including their wealthy and upper middle class donor base.
Jess sayin'
8/26/16, 10:12 AM
Steve Thomas said...
On Clinton-Trump Hysteria, thank you. I've been saying the same thing about people on the Left (hadn't thought about the Right) in so many words. If you went back in time to 10 years ago and told people that if you can just be patient, in a decade we'll have a major candidate who openly calls George Bush a liar and pledges to re-negotiate NAFTA, they would jump for joy. Fast forward ten years... Well, it turns out we have to vote for the neocon that supported every foreign war and free trade deal of the last 2 decades because Hitler or something.
On the failure of the climate change movement... One of the lessons I draw from the success of the gay marriage movement is that the message that worked is "We are just like you." This was pushed at every level-- gay people are just people who happen to have a different preference in one particular area. I know for a fact that there were voices within the movement pushing against this-- I remember about 15 years ago reading an article in a far-left joining which cited approvingly an action in which "Radical Queer" activists had plastered their campus with images of hardcore gay porn with the caption "We Are Not Just Like You." From this vantage point it's easy to see which message works, and which doesn't.
The environmental movement I think has completely failed in this regard. On the one hand you have radical groups like Earth First which deliberately flout every social convention they can-- as though dreadlocks, dumpster diving, polyamory and never bathing had anything to do with protecting forests. Then you have the middle-class prius-drivers who flout their eco-piety and look down their noses at others. Finally, you have the name brand activists who come out of the Democratic Party or, worse, Hollywood and don't even bother trying to relate to the proles. I'm very much including myself here. When I was involved in radical politics I made it my business to alienate people, and couldn't see past the delusion bubble I had surrounded myself in.
I wonder how to get past this? To be "openly environmentalist" (I hate that word) but also be "just like anyone else"? It would surely require personal action and also mixing with others of all walks of life, without the usual self-righteousness. What else? I don't know.
8/26/16, 10:31 AM
Stacey Neanderthal said...
1) Brian Kaller said:
Despite all this, it felt like the Greens – and any burgeoning group accomplishing something – were quickly invaded by a hard core of (for lack of a better word) middle-aged hippie leftist activists, who tended to bully other people at meetings and make gatherings sufficiently rancorous that they drove away anyone but themselves. An old leftists' club set themselves up as Green candidates, interrupted and talked over people who had been Greens far longer than they, and began presiding over meetings as though they had authority.
I spoke at gatherings about how, if we stuck to one single issue – say, replanting clear-cut woods, or building railroads -- and acted like a disciplined organisation, we could use our single-digit percentage on Election Day to threaten or reward the major parties. The loudest voices, though, could only talk about their dreams of winning power and taking revenge on their perceived opponents, and seemed driven more by psychological issues than by strategy.
2) Lisa Mullin said:
(1) We police 'sell outs', and we have had some, those who did are quickly brought into line, even a couple of our most senior people in the US got hammered when they started to sell out, one in particular (long a fighter for gay rights) essentially got the boot.
...
(8) Unity. Despite our diversity we know with 100% certainty that there is a lage and powerful minority that want us all dead. Every single last LGBTI person. It tends to concentrate the mind. Naturally we have internal fights, spats, fall outs and all the rest, but we try to keep it within the family and usually it gets sorted out fairly quickly. Those who go public with internal fights get, see (1), put in their place real fast.
My perception is that Brian is pointing out a real thing that exists and that Lisa is showing us how the psychology works.
As a newly-out-of-denial bisexual man, I have to say that I'm ambivalent at best about having anything at all to do with this Liberal-Army-Co-opted LGBT{Q,2S,I,A,whatever} community that works along those lines. I don't do HERDS!! They're stifling. Original thinking is clearly not welcome. That's all bad enough by itself, but what qualifies as "selling out"? For example, I think that persecuting Christian bakers because they won't make wedding cakes for us is nonsense. There's no reason to interfere with the way another person centers their soul just because they're making you find a new baker. So I guess if I want to be out, then I have to hide that belief, lest I be "corrected" and brought back into line, right? Yeah, good luck with that!!
8/26/16, 10:37 AM
Dan said...
I myself see a closer parallel to Caesar than to Crassus. Caesar had a bit of a playboy youth. He was highly endebted and the entire Gallic operation was a means to establish a power basis via populist outreach. Consider that Caesar was then abandoned by the Roman political establishment, and in fact directly threatened after he did secure his power basis via the Gallic wars. The march on Rome was his bold response to that threat.
8/26/16, 10:42 AM
pygmycory said...
As you can see from this, there's a financial disincentive to marrying if you are likely to depend heavily on government supports in BC. The 'marriage-like relationship' status is determined by the agency doling out money, so there is a danger of them deciding you are married to your roommate if you share bills, a bank account, and/or live with the same person for more than 9 months at a stretch. Given that roommates are near-essential for making ends meet if you don't happen to luck in to a VERY low-rent apartment, or are able to work a significant amount, this can easily lead to major problems for people who aren't even married.
8/26/16, 11:07 AM
pygmycory said...
Don't take my word for it, but now's probably NOT a good time to buy housing in any of those markets.
8/26/16, 11:12 AM
[email protected] said...
Agreed that the shy Brexit voter had an impact on the eventual result.
I would say that living overseas, it seems that the social stigma of being a open Trump supporter is far worse than being a Brexit support if you mix among educated, middle class and salaried folk (like I do).
Indeed, I would not admit to a soul that I was thinking of supporting Trump as the social reaction would be extreme. I don't know if the same levels of stigmatization are the same in the States but certainly on online forums the hatred towards openly Trump supporters (racist, bigot, fascist, Nazi) is frightening.
My hunch, and it is only that, is that among American voters who mix with liberal, college educated professional circles, the natural reaction will be to keep quiet about their intentions to vote for Trump and take their revenge in the ballot box. And their percentage number of the electorate are probably much higher than even in the UK during the Brexit referendum.
There was a very interesting UK programme on the rise of Trump recently which discussed this issue.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/trump-campaign-manager-were-actually-winning-right-now-because-of-undercover-trump-voters/
The most startling bit was at the end. A Trump impersonator was asked, based on peoples reaction to him (as Trump), how he would do at the polls. His answer - Trump would win by a landslide.
Regarding Europe, the rise of the populist/far right continues to grow. I would be interested to know your thoughts on whether Western Europe may enter some kind of civil war in the future.
8/26/16, 12:15 PM
Bob Patterson said...
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/08/26/a-typo-and-a-bag-of-kitty-litter-might-cost-us-taxpayers-billion/21459575/?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl2%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D1331883647_htmlws-main-bb
8/26/16, 12:35 PM
Juhana said...
Here in Finland we have working railroad system. Railroads are HEAVILY subsidized from taxes, as are small, local peat power plants and that kind of stuff. We have something called "luxury tax" attached to private cars. Portion of this luxury tax is half of car's price. So, if manufacture's price for car is 150 000 euros, it costs here 300 000 euros. You also pay very hefty car tax every year, just for owning automobile. Gasoline has also over 100 % tax attached to it. If oil company sells gasoline with x price, it is x times x here. You are instructed to be very stingy when using gasoline, because it truly hurts your wallet even now, when oil prices are down. One litre of gasoline costs some 1,3 euros at pump even now, if it is "biodiesel". Purer oil products cost even more.
All this environmental "guidance" is done by pragmatic mainstream parties. Loony Left fanatics have only negligible part in all this stifling of private car ownership.
If fanatics such as described by Stacey Neanderthal in his comment would have say here, there would be heavy resistance against their policies. Not now, because all this stifling and taxing of car ownership is done only for pragmatic reasons, by pragmatic parties. They never talk about Loony Left subjects, but boring subjects such as deficits when they raise car taxes even more.
Actually, Loony Left is active here is one field of Social Change For Better Future (tm). It is immigration. And oh boy they have stirred Finns into resistance mode so dangerous it has not been seen here in orderly North for generations.
If they had been active also in private car field, I could enjoy cheap, happy motoring in our country for decades to come.
8/26/16, 12:50 PM
dex3703 said...
While I partially disagree with your premise on why the climate change/environmental movements have failed, you hit the nail on the head in terms of the piling-on, circular-firing-squad for intellectual purity means of failure.
I-732 is a Washington State ballot initiative to establish a state carbon tax. It was designed by an economist to solve two unrelated problems, but in a way that yokes them in what I find a constructive way. Money raised by the carbon tax is rebated to citizens via a 1% reduction in the sales tax and the elimination of the onerous B&O tax leveled on businesses (WA has no corporate tax per se; the B&O tax is a blunt instrument that clobbers small businesses but lets bigger concerns off).
Yes, this mixes two things, but it's straightforward enough, and takes advantage of the fact that 1) people are concerned about climate change and will do a little something for it, and 2) it's well acknowledged that the WA tax system is an unfair mess hated by everybody. I think it's smart to link "cutting taxes" with a carbon tax.
Your observation is trenchant in that the usual suspects are not supporting and trying to hobble this initiative. A competing initiative went nowhere because everybody's pet cause had to be addressed, argued about over and over, and made ideologically pure. This competing initiative tried to get I-732 to join it; in other words, to give up its signatures. When I-732 wouldn't do it (after a long comment and discussion period), the losers are being sore. The "progressive" voter guides do not endorse I-732 exactly because it focuses on only one (or two conjoined) issues.
This past year has made me see why those on the right hate "liberals".
8/26/16, 1:01 PM
Joel Caris said...
Oh yes, I've met the preppers, homesteaders, and survivalists--more on line than in person, but some of the former, too. I certainly got linked to by them fairly regularly back when I ran my old blog, Of The Hands, as well as the evangelical Christians I mentioned before. Granted, I would say I tapped into that audience more than the preppers--maybe because of the tone of my writing, maybe not. But there's a whole contingent of people also tied into the Weston A. Price foundation and who are big fans of Sally Fallon and her Nourishing Traditions cookbook (I'm also a fan, but not nearly so hardcore about it as some) and that's the audience with which I seemed to be most popular.
My favorite, though, was always having conversations in person, and I've had a number of them with conservatives, libertarians, and people on the rightward political end of things. There's a lot surrounding food, skills, homesteading, connection to the land, and so on that you can connect on regardless of political differences--and having those conversations actually helps to open up broader political conversation some of the time. It also helps each of you understand that the other is a human being with their own beliefs and motivations and particular ways of viewing the world, rather than just some enemy who must be defeated.
One of my favorite aspects of farming and the local food movement is the way it's served to expose me to people outside my typical cultural confines and how it provides a bridge across those cultural differences. It does that in a way I don't see very often.
8/26/16, 1:21 PM
Golocyte Golo said...
Yes, that is what I believe.
I think climate activism will, at best, push the needle a bit in Western countries, but the slack this frees up (which won't be much) will only make more fossil fuels available to E. Asia, SE Asia, Indian, and African economies, where climate change activism (a luxury of the comfortable) won't catch on anytime soon. Keep in mind that China emits twice, yes twice the CO2 that the USA does, and in 10-15 years it will likely emit 3 times what we do, and India will likely overtake us for the no. 2 spot.
That's right. In 10-15 years, China and India will add about 2 additional USAs worth of carbon dioxide emissions. Anybody still want to say that flying a little less is going to do anything?
Contrary to this fatalism of mine, I'd opine that the larger environmentalist movement has immense possibilities for the kind of limited, immediately beneficial action we're talking about. Preservation of endangered species, protection of wilderness, halting of deforestation, protection of fisheries, etc are GREAT ideas, the legacies of which may be some of the few gifts our society can send forward to the peoples of the far future.
Actually it might be great if we can CAUSE a few extinctions too, like eliminating as many infectious diseases we can (though the ship may have sailed on that one), and eliminating as many human-borne parasites as possible. Guinea Worm may be permanently gone soon, which must surely be one of modernity's great legacies assuming we actually pull it off.
What I think most likely is that the CO2 emission problem will be automatically eliminated in 30 years, give-or-take a decade or two, when all the slow forces we talk about on this blog (energy depletion, political dissensus, military overconfidence, decreasing marginal returns on technological complexity, stupidity of leaders) finally cause a serious break, and major violence returns. I believe our economic systems are substantially more vulnerable than they were prior to the 1914 war.... partly because of so much more wealth is hallucinated now, partly because interconnectivity and specialization leads to vulnerability, and partly just because the tower is so much higher now.
On the other side of that crisis, we will find----like the Confederates and Texans in the story----that a great deal of our infrastructure is cost-effective to maintain but not cost-effective to rebuild. We will resume civilization on a lower level, and CO2 emissions will be much lower automatically.
8/26/16, 2:49 PM
M Smith said...
0bamacare is a prime example of stupid law written when everything is measured by whether it benefits ThePoor. Before ACA, ThePoor went to the ER, got treated, and may or may not have paid the bill. Post ACA, the middle class has for the most part bought outrageously priced "insurance" that they can't afford to use, and ThePoor (wait for it) go to the ER, get treated, and may or may not pay the bill. Nope, that's for law-abiding suckers whose traceable assets can be seized by collectors, or the IRS. ThePoor don't have to worry about that. The middle class, however, can't sleep at night.
And it didn't help ThePoor. No one in the US was "denied access" to medical care in the first place, and Medicaid programs had already existed in every State for decades. (In the US, a hospital ER must treat anyone regardless of their ability to pay, so that was always a lie.) But they surely made criminals out of some people who refused to capitulate to the Ruler's decree, did not buy insurance as commanded, and did not pay the fine/penalty/whatever it had to be called.
0bamacare isn't even a good example of my point, really, because it was never intended to help ThePoor, it was a blatant gift to Big Medicine. donalfagan's posts about medical MJ sum it up much better:
"...MD is doing the same thing. It made the Baltimore news because they are planning blind awards of licenses (to dodge charges of favoritism), and critics complain that minorities may be excluded from receiving licenses."
"The head of the Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland is asking the governor to intervene in the awarding of medical cannabis licenses because the selected companies lack diversity, denying minorities the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an emerging industry."
It's got all the SJW buzzwords: diversity, denying, minorities, and complain.
I couldn't find the reference to the blind awards, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the SJWs could manage to find a blind/lottery "racist".
Once again, the chorus rises: ThePoor (whether they're called minorities, diversities, of color, families, or women) are "hardest hit". Once again, ThePoor should go right to the head of the line, even though they didn't measure up. When someone is forcibly included for a COMPLETELY irrelevant reason, even though s/he couldn't meet the same criteria that 15 others met, uh, don't you kind of worry that they're incompetent? Might wanna think twice before you light up...
If history is any gauge, MD will be tied up in lawsuits while people go without MMJ, the crybabies will eventually be given licenses, and will promptly go out of business NOT because of racism, NOT because of "white privilege", NOT because of the Evil Rich who stole all their money/stole their land/enslaved their ancestors, but because they didn't measure up in the first place.
Quo vadis?
8/26/16, 2:56 PM
Roy Smith said...
8/26/16, 2:57 PM
Golocyte Golo said...
I would like to add to JMG's comments, and state that, despite a façade of strength, the GOP knows that demographic and religious changes will make it a minority party in 2 decades or less, unable to win any kind of national majority.
So they are undergoing an identity crisis now, and are internally split over their direction. There are several internal factions pushing it in interesting new ways, and I think there's a chance they will actually grope their way to the some portion of the "unoccupied middle" that JMG talks about. If they manage to do this, we will all be the beneficiaries, even those of us who dislike the Repubs.
That "middle" is easy to see, as JMG has pointed out: the Dems are increasingly the party of the elite liberals and the dependency class. They claim to represent wage-class Americans though they do not. If the Repubs can somehow feel their way to representing actual wage-class interests, they might survive. If they retrench and pander, Ted Cruz-like, to their traditional base---or worse, succumb to Right Wing versions of identity politics: the alt-right, the Ayn Rand-esque libertarians, etc---they are doomed, and probably so are we. For Caesar cometh.
8/26/16, 3:34 PM
sahsah said...
8/26/16, 3:47 PM
Jo said...
@Ed.M
"I mean, are you going to tell the average American that they are going to have to crowd into the inner cities and stay there for the rest of their lives, since living carbon-free in the typical US suburb bascially means a daily Bataan Death March (hat tip to JHK) or a bicycle trip in a hot wet blanket, just to get to school, to work, to get groceries, to do errands and so on; and their children, grandchildren, etc., will have to live in the same place essentially for ever, so that we can trade in Near Term Extinction -- which is what the IPCC's Business As Usual scenario implies -- for a lesser Hell On Earth? I don't think so."
You know, I think we all get our knickers in a knot about things that are so easy to fix - suburban sprawl without walkable schools, shops, services? That is solved by one stroke of an urban planner's pen - all it requires is rezoning. We have so much real estate, spare space and abandoned lots all over suburbia which could easily be turned into commercial zones, with public services and community gardens and all sorts of good things. Two blocks away from my house a Steiner school is operating out of an old nurse's home. I think they pay the council a dollar a year or so to rent it, and have turned an abandoned eyesore into a beautiful asset in our neighbourhood. My daughters have had dancing lessons in two separate church halls and a beautiful Georgian house transformed into a dance studio. Libraries can operate out of vans, medical practices operate out of premises that were once private homes, and last night I bought dinner from a selection of adorable hipster food trucks and caravans that congregate at a local park several nights a week. In times past many businesses have operated out of people's homes, and the one good thing you can say about a McMansion is that it generally has plenty of space for multi-use occupancy!
I think that we tell ourselves stories based on our current experience - ie, this or that is a complete impossibility because this is what we have always known. I think this is where JMG's philosophy of 'look to history for answers' is brilliant, because history certainly shows us that the future we are facing has been lived before with great verve and success. If we change our story from 'this can't be done' to one of 'this MUST be done, so how can we get from where we are to where we need to be, without blaming, shaming or excluding anyone, and with as much good will as possible?' then we will begin to create an excellent future indeed..
8/26/16, 4:25 PM
Mark Rice said...
JMG
You asked where I live that has less vitriol in political discussion. I live in the "Silicon Valley"-- San Jose CA. I will describe the silicon valley:
This is a rather unhip suburban sprawl. Compared to San Francisco or Santa Cruz or Berkely or Oakland or just about anywhere else nearby we are uncool. We are also almost "Conservative" compared to the surrounding towns.
However we have fantastic ethnic diversity here. We have Aseans, Europeans, Africans and people from the Americas in profusion. People from India, China, Germany, Argentina, Vietnam, Russia, etc. etc Working here is like being on the bridge of the Enteprise. This is not due to "do gooders" thinking we have to "help our little brown brothers" or anything at all like that. The employers brought many of the immigrants here on H1B visas to lower labor costs. It was "greedy capitalists" who gave us this multi-ethnic paradise.
I like the mutli-ethnic envirement. It is worth the price. The workplace is more stimulating. I have friends from around the world. We have all sorts of ethnic restaraunts that are not part of national chains. The food is good and diverse.
The main industry -- the electronics industry is inherently unstable. A company is only as good as it's last product. The industries are fiercely competative. I have worked for companies that were successfull for a whie and now do not exist. Usually companies that go from success to failure in solid industry fail due declines in the internal culture. The comic strip Dilbert is a documentary describing what happens to large companies. But sometimes the whole business changes and people just are not buying much of what a company makes any more.
Most of the people I know are well educated, somewhat affluent and allege themselves to be "envirenmentalists". They are somewhat "pro - business". Everyone here realises a business is always a tenuous operation always subject to the whims of changing world.
Layoffs are always a fact of life here. Often companies get into trouble and need to cut costs. Sometimes companies are doing well and cut costs.
The executives are not the most trusted or liked people in the world. Even some of the more respected executives are seen as jerks. Sometimes politicians or newspapers talk to the these executive with the idea that they actually represent us. The newspapers and politicians just seem clueless.
I see more talk of politics but not much vitriol. We are looking on in horid fascination. The unstable industries makes us a little more excepting of imperminance. We are always having to change how we think about things.
Those of us who swing more in the Democratic direction see we did not get what we voted for with Obama. And it is a bit more obvious what Hillary is. Somesome supporting Trump almost understandable. The Democratic party is like the good company you used to work for that has descended into Dilbertian (rhymes with Dickensian) ineptitude.
I do have a friend who can not see how a Bernie supporter could vote for Trump. But he is not at all comfortable with leaving old the standard narratives even when they are this borken.
I know people who -- at least in the past -- swallowed the Fox News cool-aid hook, line and sinker. Those people had vitriol. I have been curious about what they think now but have been afraid to ask. However they have not been volunteering their opinions as much as in the past. These people used to have the opinion that everything done by Government is Bad while everything done by Business is holy and pure. Maybe this view is fading. The use of immigrants for pay suppression is if anything getting worse. The companies here are morphing into swetshops. Trump has given "Conservatives" permission to see that some actions by Business is not all holy and pure. He is clearly off the Republican Reservation.
8/26/16, 4:35 PM
Donnie said...
In one respect I view Hilliary as the Ceaser in this story. Her (and the Clinton machine) hold on real power might be the only thing preventing criminal prosecution. I'm sure Bill's tarmac meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch was about the grandkids...
I see this as analogous to the legal immunity Caesar enjoyed as a Roman Govonor and how the ending of that immunity was the reason he took an army home with him. When you are checkmated flipping over the chessboard Might be a viable strategy.
Also JMG, let me save you the bourbon (or split it with you) when it comes to people's inability to recognize value in seeing useful similarities between different things. I don't think you have to look any further then the schooling system.
10-15,000 hours of training where the only discriminating ability you need is to determine the one "right" answer from a multiple choice list of options determined by the book/ teacher/a uthority.
Seeing grey areas and subtleties doesn't help you succeed in that world. It is a system designed to create a workforce that would not be a threat to vested interests.
The fact that it's taken the wage class 30-40 years to notice how badly they have been treated before they became politically active shows just how powerfull and successful that system is.
I think the salary class is just as much a victim of that system, only the damage was not economic. The effects of that damage on the salary class is why you had to ban an entire class of comments from this discussion (somethjng I don't remember you ever doing before).
It's fascinating to me how interrelated all of these topics are.
I'm a becoming big fan of the 4th turning thesis. Everything is SO intertwined it make sense why a crisis/ winter/ blender moment is the only thing that can undo 80 years of intended and unintended consequences. I was wondering if you have read the book and what your thoughts were?
8/26/16, 5:00 PM
Peggy Anderson said...
If you were on the mountain for Beltane 2016, I was there too (and most other years as well), this year in buckskin loincloth with a 7 letter description of my paternity written across my back
8/26/16, 5:11 PM
Lisa Mullin said...
It was based on 'humanising' LGBTI people and based on some great hard research.
The right wing and the so called 'christians' went off the planet at this. The vilifying comments about LGBTI (especially transgender) kids. Outright hate speech and the usual homophobic claptrap, that heterosexuality is so fragile that even knowing that LGBTI people exist will turn them gay or trans…. As if.
Now a few LGBTI people in public positions actually agreed with this and they got hammered by the vast majority of LGBTI people (who remember being bullied as kids) and especially parents of LGBTI kids (whose kids are the ones suffering).
We are approaching a vote on marriage equality and a huge hate campaign is brewing up, it’s ugly and again :LGBTI kids are the biggest target (these people are despicable). Now the Govt wants to do a non-binding plebecite, but parents of LGBTI have convinced the vast majority of LGBTI people (and all their supporters) that the cost to LGBTI kids (and kids with LGBTI parents) of such a hate campaign is just too much, that some kids will get damaged and even kill themselves over it. That violence against them and LGBTI adults will increase greatly.
So the consensus is that the better tactic is to not have the plebecite, but wait until a new Govt gets elected in a couple of years, because the price will be too high on our kids. We agree we can wait a bit for marriage equality.
A gay Liberal (our conservative party here) MP has been supporting the plebecite …and again he is getting hammered.
----------------------------
This is not ‘group think’, in both of those examples there was tremendous internal debate (we all talk a lot) before a consensus was reached and by and large the majority of LGBTI people stick to that.
Those people ‘policed’ were contacted by many people and the issues were discussed with them (I tried to convince one of them based on actual facts).
Only when they publicly, in the mainstream media, pushed those points of view did LGBTI people react against them, if they had kept it ‘within the family’ they would have been fine, disagreed with of course, but accepted.
Another little secret of the LGBTI movement, we are very fact driven, we use surveys and scientific evidence to argue many of our points (we have a lot of scientists amongst us). Every new piece of research that comes out is eagerly absorbed and discussed. Our ‘Safe Schools initiative came from a lot of hard research into the impacts of exclusion, prejudice and bullying on LGBTI school kids.
And our internal discussions are really good, lively, passionate, respectful, based on facts, people arguing their points, humorous and all the rest. ‘Group think’ is the last thing that happens. But on big issues we try to get a consensus that we present publicly.
8/26/16, 5:32 PM
Bob said...
8/26/16, 5:54 PM
Iuval Clejan said...
8/26/16, 6:30 PM
Armata said...
Talk about an own goal!
8/26/16, 7:41 PM
Armata said...
I love your blog. You have some great insights and I look forward to checking back periodically to see your take on current events.
8/26/16, 7:43 PM
Shane W said...
I wanted to second Bill, the local GOP had a booth at the festival my small town had recently, and there was a noticeable absence of Trump signs. Rand Paul signs, Barr (House) signs, and state legislature signs, but no Trump.
JMG, actually, Rand Paul probably gets a lot of his support from your Baptists. Remember the post about Satanism, Ayn Rand, the GOP, and evangelicals? So they're really Rand Paul supporting, Ayn Rand spouting, Levayan Satanists. Does that make Rand Paul the antichrist? ;)
8/26/16, 7:49 PM
Shane W said...
8/26/16, 8:02 PM
Tidlösa said...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/25/the-broken-chessboard-brzezinski-gives-up-on-empire/
When Brzezinski, of all people, sounds more like Trump than Clinton, things have changed. (Weirdly, I was just going to read his old book "The Grand Chessboard". Synchronicity?)
8/26/16, 8:06 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
8/26/16, 8:31 PM
John D. Wheeler said...
8/26/16, 8:37 PM
Armata said...
Of course, this only the tip of the iceberg and there are growing concerns we could be seeing the same problems here in the US. Even in the case of Sweden, Pat Condell has been talking and writing for years about the escalating disaster in Sweden and warning that Sweden is only the tip of the iceberg...
8/26/16, 8:50 PM
Leo Santilli said...
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/22/beware-systemic-change/
And a good quote "“We think you’re wrong and stupid, come join our movement” makes a really crappy recruiting pitch." Mostly towards the open borders idea, but I think it has broader applications.
And the Greens here have definitely shifted away from environmental issues. All there ads in the center of Melbourne where about a "compassionate approach" to refugees (read let more in). An issue which has negligible impact on sustainability (strictly speaking it's actually bad due to increasing a first world population via third world populations).
Social issues (e.g. equality, income, rights etc) are generally irrelevant to environmental issues. I can't remember who said this, but "Genghis Khan's mongols were ecologically sustainable but a highly unequal and violent society".
8/26/16, 8:51 PM
inohuri said...
Another aspect of young men not having women is that homosexuality is supposedly forbidden in many such societies. In "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" Lawrence describes gay relationships as being common as a compensation to the lack of women.
Dowry has other problems. In India it seems some fellows are in the business of accepting a dowry and then their wife just happens to die. Then another wife....
<<<>>>
For those who think high speed rail is a good idea look here:
URBAN & TRANSPORTATION ARCHIVES of the Progressive Review
http://prorev.com/transport.htm
In Seattle we get expensive inflexible trolleys to nowhere and a sometimes under construction and sometimes not waterfront tunnel that might never pay for itself especially seeing as it will soon enough be under water. A lot of industrial Seattle is filled mud flats. King County International Airport / Boeing Field has an official altitude of 18 feet/6 meters. The port may have problems...
I voted for the monorail 3 or 4 times and each time it passed in spite of resistance from higher up that kept demanding we vote right. After millions had been spent on the project it was discovered that the tax to fund it wasn't enough so they unwound the project and no one was to blame. I believe that tax continued and was used arbitrarily elsewhere, I'm not even going to try to look for the details. JMG's description of my town as "fetid" seems about right.
We did get light rail/subway. It passes aaaalllll the way under Capitol Hill with one stop. I believe they gave up on the First Hill stop because the glacial till didn't have the right composition. Funny, they build big hospitals there. This area is basically a sand and gravel pile but above ground stuff gets built..
8/26/16, 9:04 PM
NJGuy73 said...
Josh FTW
8/26/16, 9:55 PM
nuku said...
Respectfully, it might help the many of us here who are “acronym challenged“, if you would at least have the common curtesy to SPELL IT OUT IN FULL the first time you use one of these 3 letter mysteries in your comments. Not all of us live in the USA, and not all of us are conversant with the thousands of possible 3 letter combinations and what they might possibly stand for. Speaking for myself, as soon as I see a comment full of acronyms, I just tune out and keep scrolling. Maybe you just don’t give a hoot if you’re communicating or not....
8/27/16, 12:13 AM
ed boyle said...
8/27/16, 1:12 AM
Kfish said...
8/27/16, 1:57 AM
Sylvia Rissell said...
There are two possible patterns of change in resource use.
First, a tiny, fervent "In-group" might make great sacrifices to signal great virtue. Two examples of this are monks who fast for religious reasons, and vegans who strenuously and publicly avoid meat. Persuading a person to join the group is relatively difficult, as the person needs to make large changes.
Second, a large number of people might make small changes. Compare rates of smoking from 1950s to 2010, for example. Fur coats are no longer fashionable. Modern cars go further on a tank of gas. Persuading a person to make a small change is easier, as you are not involving their identity or asking them to reject social groups.
Mathematically, teaching 25 families an animal-free recipe that they will enjoy and cook once a week will reduce the amount of meat consumed as much as converting one person to vegan.
This process can be even further sugar coated: publish a cheerful, illustrated book titled "Easy, Healthy, Exotic Tastes From Around the World" that just happens to be full of beans and vegetables. Sure, some people are going to end up adding bacon bits to the dahl, but overall the average behavior will move.
(Personally I'm not a vegan, but my meat consumption varies with my budget.)
Advocating reduction in resource use is fine, but don't shut out the people who make reductions for different reasons, or in lesser amounts!
8/27/16, 3:40 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
I haven't quite gotten my head around a thought that I had today whilst travelling on the train to and from Melbourne for the Green Wizards meet up. Incidentally the event was a delightful, enjoyable and very polite discussion.
Anyway, I was reading the comments to this essay which I had stored on my dumb phone for that purpose and I couldn't quite help shaking the feeling from within my brain that when I stepped back from the comments and viewed them as a mass from afar, two common threads emerged in the comments.
The first common thread was that people by and large, when they thought about the future, they kind of believed that it would be much like today but perhaps a little bit - but not too much – poorer. And usually other people would be affected by that decline worse than them. And this is despite the commenters claims to the contrary.
The second thread is that by and large most of the commenters are waiting for someone to be elected that will do something different from what has occurred in the past few years and decades. This belief is strongly held, despite evidence to the contrary, and it all seems rather strange to me. The thing that few people have grasped about relocalisation is that as things become more local in the future we as individuals have to become more actively involved in local affairs. There are other ways for this to occur, but they are generally less pleasant and involve over lords and war lords.
Me, personally, I’m not hanging around waiting and I just sort out my own local backyard.
I wouldn't have twigged to that understanding (about waiting for some to be elected that will do something different), except that I have to provide most of my infrastructure which most people in developed countries take for granted, and one of my water systems went completely wrong this week. And I have to find the problem, and repair - or rectify - the matter and it is a needle in a haystack problem. Most people are busy outsourcing their responsibilities and perhaps that is another reason they are so whingey about current politics, despite the evidence that things are going slightly off the rails. Perhaps there is a deep fear that the days of outsourcing that responsibility are coming to a close? Just sayin...
I blame it on the trains really! ;-)!
What do you reckon? I certainly see a huge amount of faith invested and displayed in your political system.
Cheers
Chris
8/27/16, 4:22 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
I have no particular issue with anyones dietary choices and I reckon that veganism is a very tough school. I applaud you and as a disclosure, I pursue a mostly vegetarian diet myself and only consume meat when off the farm.
However, I take a minor issue with the last sentence of yours where you wrote: "However, I do insist they at least respect my choice to be vegan."
The questions I have for you is: "Why should we all do so?" and "What is in it for us to do so?"
I've noticed that the word "Respect" is often thrown around usually in verbal conversations to denote that the person speaking it is demanding unearned wealth. To my mind, if the person intends you physical and/or emotional harm and there is a likelihood that they may be able to achieve their aim, then perhaps "respect" is the right word to use to deflate the emotions in the situation.
However, I have seen that word used to demand cultural perquisites that are not based on any other form of reality other than status. And it is not warranted because in that situation respect is an earned thing, so I advise you to be very careful of using that particular word in future.
Cheers
Chris
8/27/16, 4:32 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Thanks! All of those are good things to do. But we are also the future, right now, wherever you are.
Cheers
Chris
8/27/16, 4:34 AM
David, by the lake said...
I think, though, that the "harm to society" argument against plural marriage founders on the same shoals that it did against interracial and same-sex marriage. When you've got consenting adults desiring to enter into a formal relationship and seeking access to the legal rights/responsibilities available to paired marriage couples, I don't see how state can deny them, given the principles we've embraced.
8/27/16, 5:52 AM
Shane W said...
8/27/16, 6:34 AM
Shane W said...
8/27/16, 6:34 AM
Shane W said...
oh, I know what a beehive of activity it is on Short Mountain. I went to a striptease/pool party/fundraiser at the distillery owners home, and a weekly potluck @ another home the weekend I was down.
8/27/16, 6:36 AM
Shane W said...
I was wondering what your opinion of organized labor is, and it's role in creating and sustaining the wage class, and its demise and the implosion of the wage class over the last 40 years. Certainly, labor is now as impotent and incompetent as any of the American left today, and in the back pocket of Hillary Clinton save a few outlying unions. Still, I wonder if you see a reformed labor movement having any role in restoring the wage class, and what role labor should play?
8/27/16, 6:41 AM
Shane W said...
8/27/16, 6:48 AM
Shane W said...
8/27/16, 7:02 AM
onething said...
I do advocate for polyandry. Especially for those living any kind of labor intensive homesteading lifestyle. You really need two men.
Jo,
I agree with you that the suburbs are not a lost cause at all but might be quite ideal once remade. There's lots of land available for gardening and other crops and trees, and can easily be made into walkable communities with businesses, schools, churches and so on worked in.
8/27/16, 7:39 AM
william fairchild said...
Boy howdy, you got a bunch of comments this time.
I look forward to your insights on where climate activism can go, however tentative they may be. Two specific suggestions that I saw in the comments, public transit, and passenger rail make a lot of sense.
I think rail may be easier than transit. Public transit is perceived as being for "those folks", the poor, and is not used by middle class suburban types. Driving your 40,000 dollar pickup truck (whose bed has never been used for cargo) or crossover is a status thing.
But if it could be reframed somehow, a good transit system would be a godsend, particularly for the wage class.
Passenger rail on the other hand, people love it. At least in central IL they do. The route that is gaining traction fastest is CHI-STL. From where I live, it costs about $50 to go to Chicago and only $15 to go to STL. That is dirt cheap. Even though I had airline pass benefits, we used it several times. There is no TSA nonsense, and thunderstorms don't muck up the works.
I think that it must begin on a state or regional level. Routes like CHI-STL or Evansville, Indianapolis, Chicago or Billings-Sheridan-Casper-Cheyenne-Denver. In time, the improved regional systems can be linked for a continental service when that becomes necessary.
We have "high speed" rail. I put it in quotes, 'cause it ain't, really. But they did upgrade the lines with concrete ties and such. Now the standard Amtrak diesel electric can run up to 110mph. A similar deal could be done elsewhere.
Here is the thing, this has taken 5-10 years to do. Fullscale consolidation on the 10th street corridor with a multimodal train depot is another 5-10 years away. Time, man, time. We do not have much.
As far as aviation, here I know of what I speak. As a 20 year vet of the airlines, I think they will go away eventually. When I began there were many major airlines. Just before I started, Eastern, Western, Pan Am, and the original Frontier died. Since then, Northwest, TWA, US Air, Continental, Aloha, America West, Western Pacific all ceased operation or merged. Now we are left with the big 3. Delta, American, United, and the outlier Southwest.
The system is a disaster. TSA, though their mission is noble, is slow and bureaucratic. The ATC system is overwhelmed and outdated. Airports are obsolete. (O'Hare is a nightmare). The hub and spoke system is failing- only 3 airlines mean the number of hubs have shrunk. And routes that should rightfully be 737 routes (ORD-DSM) are now relegated to regional jets. The only reason the majors are profitable is temporarily low oil prices, and the concessions they wrung out of the unions.
Give it time. A restored regional rail system, plus an inevitable oil price spike, plus public disgust may be that nail in their coffin.
As to me, I gave up traditional activism some time ago. I am just worn out by it, and embittered. So I work on my own deal. If someone is curious,I talk to them. Otherwise, I just try to be nice. I can't convince my tea party neighbor to take the train, nor get my ex-airline friends to quit their jobs, so I refuse to get bent out of shape.
We, as a society, left the barn door open...
8/27/16, 9:45 AM
william fairchild said...
Re- pot growers
Buckle your seatbelts, it appears MD and PA have chosen a model similar to IL on cannabis. The results so far in my state, graft, corruption, and endless litigation. Meanwhile needful clients (whether medical or recreational) are effectively cut out of a legal market.
We have a 6 bn dollar deficit and a 120 bn dollar pension shortfall, but the pols and their cronies are happy. Meanwhile, CO enjoys a budget surplus. Go figure.
8/27/16, 11:05 AM
Ol' Bab said...
Amen to that! BUT... Not going to happen, (Repub OR Dem) because who pays the pols election/re-election costs? Not the wage class, for sure. Oligarchy, all the way. One nation, by the corporation, for the corporation.
You have to stretch a bit to figure a way around this. The pol (either party) would have to be convinced he could still get funding while supporting policies that would be (or be perceived as) harming corporate interests. (Or rich people, near same thing).
FDR pulled this off, with the help of the Great Depression. Scared the hell out of enough of the rich, plus politics (I think) was more rational back then.
Ol' Bab -from Babcock, not Barbara. Still against Progress.
8/27/16, 11:12 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
The only people I have seen flockind towards conventional 1+1 marriage lately are the same sex couples. I am wondering if in just a few more years young people will view marriage as a "gay thing" that the straights don't bother with.
8/27/16, 12:05 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
8/27/16, 12:11 PM
Varun Bhaskar said...
In other words they're addicted to the rage, self-righteousness, and self-pity? That actually makes perfect sense, no addict in the world would take an action that stopped them from getting their fix. I think I can coin a term for it too - Dark Soma. All of the properties of Soma, none of the enlightenment or liberation.
Fred,
Heh, yup. That's a good way to get yourself kicked out of plenty of faux-liberal circles.
Regards,
VArun
8/27/16, 12:15 PM
Lisa Mullin said...
Here in Australia we are approaching a vote on marriage equality and a huge hate campaign is brewing up, it’s ugly and again LGBTI kids are the biggest target (these people are despicable).
Now the Govt wants to do a non-binding plebecite, but parents of LGBTI kids have convinced the vast majority of LGBTI people (and all their supporters) that the cost to LGBTI kids (and kids with LGBTI parents) of such a hate campaign is just too much, that some kids will get damaged and even kill themselves over it. That violence against them will increase greatly.
So the consensus is that the better tactic is to not have the plebecite, but wait until a new Govt gets elected in a couple of years, because the price will be too high on our kids. We adults can wait a bit for marriage equality, our kids matter too much.
Another lesson for others to learn from the LGBTI community, "never let short term goals get in the way doing the right damn thing".
8/27/16, 3:05 PM
donalfagan said...
[[[The state hired Towson University's Regional Economic Studies Institute to evaluate applications to grow process and dispense the medicine. They scored 146 applications for 15 grower licenses. There were 811 applications for 94 dispensary licenses, and 124 applications for 15 processing licenses.]]]
http://www.wbaltv.com/health/maryland-to-name-of-top-medical-marijuana-applicants/41205640
BTW, my relative has ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis, and prefers cannabis for dealing with the pain. He got in a great deal of trouble for growing his own, though, so we're hoping he will be able to get it legally. I've never used cannabis, myself, though I'm sure I got some secondhand buzz watching Friday night movies in college lecture halls.
@ Polyamory, someone should write fanfiction with Peter and Melanie, and insert themselves as the Mary Sue (or Marty Stu) in a threesome.
8/27/16, 3:28 PM
Scotlyn said...
8/27/16, 4:24 PM
Scotlyn said...
PS. Anyone interested in the politics of fisheries should take a look at the map of the sea fishery areas Brexit will remove from EU control. The next biggest chunk of fishing grounds are those that Ireland brought into the EU. Irexit, anyone?
8/27/16, 4:39 PM
Scotlyn said...
8/27/16, 4:40 PM
Kevin Warner said...
Hard choices will no longer be able to be kicked down the road - it ended in a cul-de-sac. As an example, what happens when with declining resources that it is announced that through sea level rising that southern Florida will be abandoned in order to save New York city? That's going to go down really well. As for Americans fleeing coastal regions, if you want to know how how they will be treated, then I recommend that you read Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath"!
Internationally the Greens should have been at the forefront of reform but seem to have become mired in their own politics. Just a small data point is what is happening here in Oz with gay marriage as it came up in the essay(http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/greens-gamble-could-see-samesex-marriage-progress-delayed-20160826-gr2755.html). The Greens in Germany have their own problems too going by a page I read recently at https://newleftreview.org/II/81/joachim-jachnow-what-s-become-of-the-german-greens and shows how a progressive movement can be hijacked and go to the dark side.
I regret to say that things are going to get a whole lot worse before they start to get better. I hope that we enjoyed the ride.
8/27/16, 4:44 PM
Michael Reid said...
8/27/16, 4:54 PM
Jeff Balvanz said...
I wonder, though, how will the people who don't want a pipeline crossing their property and potentially contaminating their water supply feel about a railroad right-of-way crossing their land instead?
8/27/16, 6:32 PM
M Smith said...
I've noticed that that word is often not so much tossed around as flung, not far short of a slap in the face. It's hard to misuse a word that no longer means anything because it was hijacked long ago and now means whatever the speaker wants it to mean, however, I agree that the speaker should contemplate his true intent before uttering it.
@nuku,
If you'd care to say what you really want to say, I'll address it. I don't believe you're that angry because I used acronyms, each of whose definitions is at the top of the first page of the respective google results.
8/27/16, 7:35 PM
nuku said...
What I wanted to say to you re acronyms is exactly what I said; it had absolutely nothing to do with the content of your comments, and there’s no hidden angry agenda. I’m simply expressing my frustration at having to guess, or having to take my time to google, the meaning of various non-word groups of 3 letters with which you, and others, pepper your comments.
My comment was meant in the way of feedback to you, letting you know that for me, and maybe others here, the use of acronyms, which aren’t spelled out in full at least once per comment by the writer, is a block to my comprehension and to you getting your point across to me. It really is that simple.
8/27/16, 10:43 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Ed, indeed I do; if you reread the text on top of the comment box, the words "concise" and "relevant to the topic of the current week's post" are to be found there, and not by accident, either. You might keep those in mind. ;-)
J8sun, I don't know that I'd consider them activism at all, since their focus seems to be on helping people who have money hold onto it and helping people who want money to get it. Those are reasonable goals, if they can be done without harm to others, but they don't have a lot to do with changing the world -- which is after all what activists are supposed to be about.
Donalfagan, yes, I noted that. Typical; with any luck, when it goes from medical marijuana to out-and-out legalization, something closer to the Colorado system will come in.
Fred, that's a great story, and painfully typical. Obviously they wanted to protest rather than to succeed. Thanks also for the warning about dehydration, which is a real issue, and also for the tip regarding the podcast. One thing -- I'm not on social media, and the podcast has no way for people to contact it other than via social media. Could you, or some other reader who's plugged into Twitter et al., let them know that I'd be happy to appear at some point, so long as they can handle communicating via email and doing an interview over a nice clean land line?
NJguy, excellent. Readers interested in climate change activism, please listen up!
Shane, oh my. Now there's an idea -- insist that those who don't take the consequences of climate change seriously are engaging in "a new form of denialism," and watch the squirmings! As for Starbucks, coffee gives me migraines, and the feeble excuse for tea they serve at those places is better used to dye cheap cotton, so I haven't been to a Starbucks or anything like one in decades. (Funny story: according to persistent Seattle rumor, the hippies who started Starbucks were originally in the business of smuggling cocaine, using big sacks of coffee beans with little bags of cocaine in the middle to evade the drug dogs. They discovered to their surprise that they could make more money selling the coffee, and got out of the cocaine business. And that, as they say, was history...)
Bill, that may be a local thing. Here in Cumberland, Trump signs are appearing all over town; there was a Bernie sign, a big one, on a building in the rich part of town, but that's gone now, and it's all Trump all the time. His local campaign headquarters is about three blocks from my house, in the poor part of town -- by the way, it's very much a mixed-race neighborhood, and not all the houses with Trump signs have white people sitting on the porches. Trump bumper stickers are showing up more and more often...and I have yet to see a single Hillary sign, bumper sticker, or button. This is a blue town in a red county, but it seems to be gearing up to vote blood red in November.
David, good. Moral arguments are the weakest possible arguments in politics: they amount to saying "You should do this because I think you should." You have to give people something better than that. I've found that talking about the way that the pursuit of empire is running this country into the ground is a good tactic in many cases.
Donalfagan, true enough, and it's pretty clearly going to be handled on the basis of who shouts loudest.
8/27/16, 11:14 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Samurai, funny. Of course that's happened before, too. What restored the United States after 1860 and 1929 was not a coalition of the sane, but cataclysmic violence on the one hand and the near-dictatorial rule of a charismatic leader who completely redefined the political calculus of the country on the other. No doubt something of the sort will happen this time, too.
Sven, no doubt.
Josh, that is to say, you can't build a mass movement for change if you appeal solely to an affluent minority that has no interest in any change that would put their perks and privileges at risk. I find that entirely plausible; the question then becomes whether there are any other ways to build a mass movement for change that don't involve that self-defeating strategy. I'd like to suggest that there are, and we'll be covering those as we proceed.
234567, good. Of course government isn't going to solve the problem, and neither are the affluent. "Let's change the system but keep all our existing privileges" reliably adds up to "Let's not change the system." That shows us that a different tack will be needed.
Jasmine, those are definitely issues, and point up the need to reframe the issue in ways that make intuitive sense to the prospective audience. Can that be done? I think so, and will be discussing whys and wherefores as we proceed.
234567, you've got a smart son. Yes, you can tell him I said so.
Wendy, many of us can't see which comment you're referring to, so please do put in a sentence or so of the comment you're referencing to give us context!
JoAnna, thank you for a thoughtful response -- and I'll have to try those whiskeys if I ever have the chance to get up to Vermont! Your comment about holier-than-thou environmentalists loading guilt trips onto others is dead on, and points up a class issue -- how many of the signs of virtue they demand are only available to those who have a salary class income? Quite a few. To get past that sort of self-defeating trip, it's going to be necessary, as you've said, to look at constructive steps that can be taken by most Americans, not just by the privileged few -- and it's also going to be necessary to be willing to call the privileged few on their hypocrisy from time to time. Also, "negativity and vagueness' -- exactly. Exactly. How often do you see environmental activists speaking in favor of some specific policy, rather than against this or that vague generality? More on all this as we proceed!
Karl, Paul Krugman can convince himself that everything's fine in America because he lives in a cozy self-referential bubble where everyone he meets either shares his income level or is sufficiently deferential that he never has to think about how they live when they're not busy serving him his meals and the like. I'd like him, just once, to go to one of the "flyover states," drive out into small town America, get out of his air-conditioned car, and find out what life is actually like for the other 80%. Not that he ever will!
Ed-M, except that that's not necessarily the case. There are plenty of things that can be done right now, and in the years ahead, to make life for most Americans in a warming world better than it would otherwise be -- and in quite a few cases, better than it is now. One of the many problems with looking at climate change only through the eyes of the privileged is that all they can see is what they stand to lose. Will the more stupidly designed suburbs and their already moldering McMansions have to be abandoned? Sure, but it's only the affluent who live in them. Stay tuned as we proceed...
8/27/16, 11:36 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Stacy, what you dismiss as a herd is the organized movement that makes it possible for you to be bisexual without risking jail time. Gay sex used to be a felony, you know, and it was organized political activism -- kept on track by the tactics that Lisa Mullin has outlined -- that got those laws off the books. I'd encourage you to reflect on that.
Dan, of course the metaphor can be fitted differently. I simply found it funny to conpare the personalities of our two contenders to Pompey and Crassus.
Pygmycory, that's standard on this side of the border, too. It's one of the ways the welfare state keeps people dependent and vulnerable so they don't make their way back into the work force. As for the housing bubble, it seems to be leaking air in a big way everywhere. I'm starting to wonder if the Saudi government had big real estate holdings via shell corporations, and is liquidating them in order to raise money to keep the country from going broke.
Lordberia3, we'll see, but I think that's a very real possibility. As for civil war in Europe, that's one of several real possibilities. Unless the mainstream parties back off their project of flooding the continent with immigrants to break the labor unions and drive down wages to US levels, you're likely to see many countries in the hands of the far right within not that many years, and a lot depends on whether the various rightist governments can figure out how to cooperate with one another in a post-EU Europe, or whether international tensions spin out of control and result in war. One way or another, it's going to be lively.
Bob, funny. Thanks; that's a classic.
Juhana, okay, that's something to keep in mind while raising car taxes here.
Dex3703, yes, that's the Washington State politics I knew and loathed. I hope the initiative passes -- and I suspect one of the reasons the soi-disant progressives hate it is that it shows that responding to climate change can actually benefit people. No, no, it's got to be phrased as pure hair-shirt suffering, so we can wallow in our moral superiority when the masses vote it down!
8/28/16, 12:01 AM
ed boyle said...
my commenting problems are not purposefully disruptive but rather of the pisces kind, excessively defocussed, emotional. I think writing a lot which you just delete gets me understanding what I think, believe. I don't take this personally. If I were an author the editor would have a nightmare job keeping md on topic. My wife has a Leo laser sharp mind but unkind, very unkind. You are polite, thank God. If we were a physical discussion group I would be in the corner muttering to myself half irrelevant comments most of the time being ignored, smiled at but I think it is better being involved somewhere, though perenially incompetent, than isolated, lonely. I am sure I can contribute to the conversation occasionally in a productive manner when I get a shimmer of lucidity. This why spiritual masters, artistic geniuses often are misunderstood(ha)
8/28/16, 12:04 AM
John Michael Greer said...
M Smith, and you can tighten your analysis even more if you ask, "who are these people who count as 'the poor'?" It's certainly not everyone who doesn't make enough to cover the basics. It consists of specific, relatively organized groups who make their votes available to factions of the Democratic Party in exchange for access to an assortment of government handouts and privileges. Trust me, I know a fair number of people who are genuinely poor, and don't get access to those benefits, because they don't belong to the right (well-organized) categories.
Roy, I know a number of polygamous families, and none of them are one guy and a bunch of women. In fact, by count of numbers, polygyny is less common than polyandry, and polymorphous perversity seems to be the most popular option of all. ;-) Thus I don't think the issue you raise is likely to be problematic at all.
Sahsah, exactly. It's all a matter of wanting to feel superior, rather than wanting to make actual change.
8/28/16, 12:05 AM
nuku said...
I can’t count myself very knowledgeable about New Zealand’s fishing regulations. I only have first hand knowledge about the small 6km square coastal “Marine Reserve“ which lies just in front of my house. This area was mostly fished by recreational fishermen in private craft, so its not relevant to your question which seems to concern commercial fishing.
With regard to New Zealand’s commercial fishing, a good start might be
http://www.fish.govt.nz/en-nz/Commercial/default.htm
I think you’ll find that in NZ there‘s a lot of paperwork, a fair amount of poaching, a fair amount of cheating on the regulations, etc. Its a valuable resource, and that means there will always be those who want more than their fair share (whatever that is). There will also always be tension between overzealous officious regulators (no shortage of them here!) and those who want more freedom to exploit the resource. In practice, there seems to be a reasonable balance here between govt. regulations based on scientific research into fish stocks and “sustainable” fishing technology, and the fisher folk who do the hard dirty work out on the rolling sea.
Right now there is a political controversy concerning the Govt’s plan to establish a large no-fish marine reserve around the Kermadec Islands located about 150km north of NZ, and within NZ’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). This url will take you to the “pro” side of the debate. Some Maori organizations are protesting the proposed reserve based on their claim to ancestral fishing rights in the area.
I can sympathise with your frustration at having your fisheries controlled from afar by the EU. On the other hand, it may not be any better “after the revolution” when the local idiots get to stick their fingers in the pie. In any case good luck, its an important resource which deserves to be managed for the good of all including the fish!
8/28/16, 1:25 AM
nuku said...
You said:
“In other words they're addicted to the rage, self-righteousness, and self-pity?
No, not what I said. In my comment on “secondary gain” and why people persist in dysfunctional behavior, my point was that people keep doing dysfunctional behaviours because, for them in their world, there is a positive payoff or consequence of some sort that makes the harmful behavior worth doing.
Addiciton may or may not be involved.
In the example I gave, the woman made herself fat (a behavior she didn’t enjoy and wasn’t healthy for her), because it resulted in her not being attractive to men, thus not getting “hit on“ when her husband was out of town, thus not being tempted to having sex with strangers (which she’d done in her past), and resulting in the payoff, the “secondary gain” of not putting her marriage in jeopardy. In her case, over-eating and getting fat might have looked like an eating addiction, but it was not. It was harmful behavior in the service of a particular, largely unconscious, goal.
On the other hand, if feeling rage, self-righteousness, and self-pity was a goal or outcome that someone wanted, and indeed might even be addicted to, they could come up with a behavior which put them in the position of being, in their eyes, the undeserving victim of some oppressor. Then as a response, they could justifiably indulge their goal of feeling rage, self-righteousness, and self-pity.
8/28/16, 3:12 AM
j8sun said...
8/28/16, 3:57 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
" This fascinating article by David Sloan Wilson calls it: “the WEIRD People problem.(Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) Researchers often think they’re studying “Homo sapiens“, but actually they’re studying a particularly peculiar form of cultural psychology. This is because, until recently, most studies have been done with WEIRD undergraduates. But, it turns out when placed in cross-cultural perspective WEIRD undergraduates are psychologically rather unusual and a really poor model for our species psychology.
But it gets… weirder. Wilson interviews Joseph Henrich, who says, “Not only do we find that the Homo economicus predictions fail in every society (24 societies, multiple communities per society), but instructively, we find that it fails in different ways in different societies. Nevertheless, after our paper “In search of Homo economicus” in 2001 in the American Economic Review, we continued to search for him. Eventually, we did find him. He turned out to be a chimpanzee.
"The canonical predictions of the Homo economicus model have proved remarkably successful in predicting chimpanzee behavior in simple experiments. So, all theoretical work was not wasted, it was just applied to the wrong species.”
8/28/16, 5:44 AM
[email protected] said...
John - I agree that it is a real possibility. My thoughts are that there are certain countries in Western Europe (France, Benelux, Netherlands, Germany and Sweden) which are vulnerable due to changing demographics of major urban civil unrest/insurgency by radicalized young Muslims based in the major cities in the future. Already, major cities have "no go" areas where it is dangerous for the police or even military go to in uniform.
The percentage of Muslims is growing as a population and in France around a quarter of young people are of Muslim origin. Of course, the majority of Muslims are not extremists, but polling suggests that a significant minority are.
As we enter the era of Scarcity Industrialism, the appeal of Europe (which is based on our wealth) will decline as Europe starts to crumble under the huge pressures of the Limits to Growth meta-trend. I suspect that as the materialistic charms of Europe die, the appeal of the alternative vision propagated by radical Islam will grow among an alienated and un-integrated Muslim youth.
At the same time, as you correctly point out, populist right-wing parties will be coming to power across Europe and the potential for a potentially huge and violent clash will be obvious.
My feeling is that you will get to serious civil unrest at some point in the future in Europe and we will certainly come close to a urban civil war before authoritarian right-wing governments move on to crush it. Whilst there is room for intra-European warfare in Eastern Europe among different nationalistic governments, in Western Europe, I see a greater likelihood of the various right-wing governments joining together in a post-EU club unified by the overwhelming need to crush militant Islam.
8/28/16, 6:53 AM
Shane W said...
JMG, you haven't mentioned them yet in Retrotopia, but isn't part of going back to what worked a strong labor movement w/a strict management(salary class)/labor (wage class) separation? Wouldn't the workers making the streetcars @ Mikkelson belong to the machinists union (or maybe steelworkers? some other union?) If Retrotopia goes back to society and being "joiners" (Fraternal orgs, etc.), wouldn't they also join unions and bargain collectively?
8/28/16, 7:12 AM
Shane W said...
8/28/16, 7:15 AM
Shane W said...
8/28/16, 7:20 AM
Matt and Jess said...
And who's the person who put Star's Reach on hold at the Madison Public Library? Now I've got to read it today so I don't accrue fines. How dare you!
8/28/16, 7:26 AM
Anselmo said...
The politics is the art for the fight for the power, and for the politics no scientific theory is important.
8/28/16, 7:52 AM
patriciaormsby said...
8/28/16, 8:32 AM
Mary in Montco said...
I am no where near paid to sell this book. I simply find that it offers extremely useful insights for how change actually gets made by humans in both the short and long term. My honest opinion, fwiw, is that your evaluation of the "success" or "failure" of Klein, McKibben, et al., is short sighted and misses how their work, with its hits and misses, is helping drive the change you want.
Similarly, Bernie's campaign has more than met my personal definition of success, by massively building broader American understanding of how our elections and government actually work, building action, and exposing just how mainstream his/our values and policy desires are. He came much closer to winning than I ever expected, but that was never my definition of his success. His frame about millions of people coming together was also on target. So I was dismayed at your earlier broad brush dismissal of Bernie supporters. You were right about many; but that's also how those people are learning. A lot of us already have more insight than you gave us credit for, and we're not done.
Likewise, all our current environmental organizations have obviously not reversed the power of the huge fossil fuel profiteers, nor have they broken the institutional corruption of our government by said corporations. So glad we got Obama to veto the KXL pipeline, but that's one skirmish, not the whole enchilada. But we really need to examine what it takes to actually save our human habitat Earth. On the ground. In real time. With real humans. In the real situations we find ourselves in. Your Collapse Early and Avoid the Rush is one powerful component for individual action. But we also desperately need the social power of communities, if we can muster it.
Every article on your other blog site, Resilience.com, where I first found you (and you're the one author I follow every week), is evidence of thoughtful people working diligently, as individuals and as communities, to have an impact on how we think and act about climate change. None of them has yet "succeeded" in the ways you fault our current environmental organizations. But they are growing the phoenix that will rise from the ashes. (LOVE your "Star's Reach" as one vision of how that might go.)
I love your writings on our long descent in it's many forms, both your nonfiction and fiction. But I find your characterizations of current efforts of your fellow humans to find ways to ameliorate and reverse the worst of our society to be disappointingly broad brush. True about some of us, but blind to much else that is going on. There are many of us out here who are doing good work, as best as we can, learning all the time from how it goes,and working against time. That's essential for how the necessary understandings and undertakings are growing and spreading.
I expect that your next writing will include many helpful prescriptions... I only want your writings and guidance for effective change to be as insightful -- and useful -- as they can be.
IMHO, "This Is an Uprising" would help fill in some of what look to me like blind-ish spots in your writings. I offer it only in friendly hopes of expanding your and all our ability to save our planet for all of us as best we can.
OTOH, it's only one book. The ideas will spread whether you personally read it or not.
My two cents.
Mary
8/28/16, 8:43 AM
Jim Irwin said...
8/28/16, 9:22 AM
Philip Hardy said...
The failure of green activism I place very firmly in the character of many of the activists themselves. I joined the UK green party in 1989 after their success in the European election. I found my local party to be a small clique best defined by who they hated, with their activism centred on animal rights action directed at upper class fox hunters. Their other major activity was infighting among themselves and with other environmental groups. They were not a likeable lot. Dispirited I did not renew my membership the following year. In the same year I joined the Sealed Knot (SK), an English civil war re-enactment society, yes, a bit incongruous for a green, but if you wish to have some experience of living in a pre-industrial society I recommend re-enactment societies. I found a very diverse group of people who were very welcoming, and quickly accepted you into their society, as long as you returned in kind. Many have great skill in hand making items, from a gun smith in our regiment who made many of our muskets, to a knitting circle that made the soldiers socks. Others had great knowledge of the lifeways of common folk in the 17th Century, used to great effect in living history pageants (quite an eye opener, especially in manners compared to today!). Any group of people will have some level of politics (and the SK’s Field Officers were notorious for it!), but that I stayed nineteen years in the SK only leaving due to ill health, says a lot about the people. I still stay in touch with a couple members of my own regiment who live locally to me. I cannot say that about any environmental group I have known.
Best regards
Philip Hardy
8/28/16, 9:45 AM
Fred said...
8/28/16, 10:38 AM
Fred said...
On Day One they teach the distinction Racket which is a fixed way of being accompanied by a persistent complaint. Rackets are those things we say about another person or group of people. Some rackets I have had are: my mother-in-law is selfish and crazy; the people in this town are unfriendly; no one wants to work on peak oil issues.
I could dig up and show anyone a great amount of evidence proving that what I think about my mother-in-law, the town and people in general is right. Friends would agree with me. In an online forum, I could find allies who also find that people don't want to work on issues.
When I'm running a Racket on someone, my whole focus is on being right and making the other person wrong. Everything I do an say is about dominating that person or avoiding being dominated by them. I justify my words and actions, and invalidate each thing they say and do. I win; they lose.
And in all of that......I avoid responsibility.
When I could speak up, take an action, or have a conversation, I can avoid it because well other people are (fill in the blank) and so I don't have to do anything.
I miss any opportunity of satisfaction, vitality and love because I've pushed people away and sorted them out. I end up not standing out and working on the things that matter because Rackets.
To drop the Racket and give it up completely and be truly open is not a once and done realization. For me its got to done over and over and over again. Noticing when I am pointing out there at something "wrong" and using it as a reason to not do something here. Rackets occur to me as culturally encouraged. The meme "avoid toxic people so you can be happy" comes to mind.
In the course after this distinction is introduced to a room of 75-150 people, it takes the group about six hours to accept that it could be possible that they are running Rackets on the people in their life. Their constant complaining about their spouse, children, work colleagues and on and on isn't getting them anywhere and allows them to just stay where they are justified in not doing anything. Its fascinating to watch what happens as people give them up and are just open to seeing people anew.
8/28/16, 11:06 AM
John Roth said...
That viral e-mail was current in 2007, according to Snopes and a few others. As of 2013, the Gore mansion had been retrofitted to more energy efficient standards, is running on geo-thermal and solar power and a lot of other improvements. It’s even got LEED certification (I don’t know what level).
Bush moved into a new 8,000-square-foot-home in 2009 - double the size of the Crawford ranch, and keeps the old ranch as a weekend getaway. (That’s essentially what it was when he was President anyway.)
It may help someone feel morally superior to keep circulating outdated information when accurate information is just a Google search away, but feeling smug usually doesn’t cook the rice.
@Lisa Mullin
My observation on why the LGBT crowd has maintained enough cohesion to fend off the parasites and the turncoats is that it was founded in blood. Seriously. I don’t know the situation in Australia, but here in the US the gay rights part got its start in the Stonewall riots. And the trans part of the community has a Day of Remembrance for the transgendered dead. Someone is murdered simply for being trans every other week or so.
I think it was Benjamin Franklin who quipped on signing the presentation copy of the Declaration of Independence: “We must all hang together, or we will most assuredly hang separately.”
When the climate change movement can get that level of motivation, maybe it’ll start doing something.
8/28/16, 12:21 PM
Fred said...
8/28/16, 12:38 PM
Ed-M said...
Judging by your choice of words, "Georgian house", "caravan," and "Steiner school", you must come from that part of the Anglosphere that is *not* on the North American Continent, and living in suburbs where the street layout is conducive to adapting buildings to different uses. Here in the United States, most suburbs, i.e., those built after the Second World War, automobile suburbs are built to automobile scale and are not especially adaptable to different uses due to the size and required travel distances involved. This misfeasance in the construction and layout of living arrangements, particularly in those areas built since the mid 1970s, is not conducive to reintegration and repurposing into more functional, close-knit communities. In your more recently built USA suburban commercial strips, the big boxe stores are set back so far from the highway you'd think you can't see one on the otherside of the higway from the one you're at due to the curvature of the Earth!
OTOH, the prewar suburbs are far more adaptable because their layout and construction are more similar to those of the suburbs of the UK. However, most of these suburbs are now *inside* of the central city limits, which is why I made reference to people crowding into the cities....
8/28/16, 2:11 PM
Robert Carran said...
8/28/16, 4:00 PM
inohuri said...
The industry may have no longer needed the large investment. Their workarounds (other pipes repurposed and rail) were better than the cost and perhaps they could see they would not be making much, if any, profit from bitumen until oil prices rise considerably.
Pumping tar must be difficult. I believe it is liquefied with toxic solvents which would make a leak that much worse. For rail it would also need to be diluted or the cars would need to be heated to get it out.
They may have requested the veto which was set up to make Mr. Obama look good.
8/28/16, 5:54 PM
j8sun said...
I didn’t really make a very good case for that, did I? I’ll try and do better. I’d describe their type of activism as collapse now and avoid the rush, under the cloak of early retirement.
The ERE author was a successful physicist, “retired” around 30, to write his blog. He later became a hedge fund manager, and the blog is now running reposts of his work. But he claims to continue to live on $7K per year/per person in his household, and has done so for more than a decade. He lives in the SF area, in an RV, no car. The MMM author is a retired software engineer that claims to live on ~$24K a year for a family of 3, doing so for about a decade also “retired” around 30 to raise his kid and “save the world”. Both saved in the neighborhood of 70% of their income while “working”. And their blogs are about the skills (such as DIY repairs, gardening, cooking, and home brewing), attitudes (philosophies like Stoicism, Buddhism) and practices (low cost housing in walk-able/bike-able areas, with minimal to no driving) needed to do that. Neither is what most people would really call retired, but they could be. With their frugal lifestyles the amount of money required for their type of active “retirement” shrinks proportionately.
It may not be a path open to everyone, unfortunately, and it has its risks. But if every affluent and want-to-be affluent person in America were living this way, what would happen to fossil fuel usage, CO2 emissions, and general sustainability? I see it as at least a step in the direction of sustainability. And it’s quite subversive if the reactions I’ve seen are any indication. On a scale of good versus harm, I think they are doing some good, and doing it among people who may not normally ascribe to the idea of sustainable living. I should have sent these two posts as examples of their activism rather than their home pages:
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/connection-between-ere-and-peak-oil.html
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/guest-post-the-quest-of-financial-bloggers-to-save-the-world.html
8/28/16, 6:34 PM
Ozark Chinquapin said...
In fact I've noticed a disturbing trend in the last ten years pushing these groups further apart, and again it's largely come from the climate change side. Ten years ago, it seemed like critiques of industrial agriculture were getting into the mainstream, particularly in the leftward end of it. Since then, there's been a lot of propaganda out there saying the industrial agricultural system is on the side of "science" (with the same thing happening with regards to medicine too), based on very selective science that's riddled with conflicts of interest. I don't think that's hurt the sustainable food movement too much, it keeps on expanding despite increased opposition, but it does seem to have distanced the mainstream left from criticizing industrial farming, since they don't want to be seen as on the wrong side of science. The climate activists are especially prone to this way of thinking about science, and that's put a wedge between them and the food activists.
8/28/16, 8:03 PM
Caryn said...
"Bataan Death March"! I laughed so hard when I read that, I spit water all over my keyboard! Because I've done that schlepp! I still occasionally do to get to my job here in rural Wyoming. I'm going to be thinking of that every step I take now.
Hysterical, Thank You for that!
8/28/16, 9:50 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Donnie, thanks, but I enjoy bourbon. I think current habits of education certainly feed into it, but I think there's more to it than that. Still cogitating...
Bob, I'll consider that. You may be right.
Iuval, hmm. It seems to me that they're trying to foster networking among different activist groups, which could facilitate piggybacking and purity politics -- though it might also help the groups grow past that. I'll be interested to see if anything comes of it.
Armata, I noticed that. The Clinton campaign really does have a genius for that.
Shane, I'd like to think that the Antichrist would have more class than Rand Paul!
Tidlösa, if he really means that, and isn't just spouting protective ink like an irate cuttlefish, that's a huge change. We'll have to see what happens.
Bill, now you've disappointed me. I'm sufficiently old-fashioned to find the notion of a festival where women go around wearing nothing but loincloths and body paint an appealing thought. ;-)
John, it can be implemented starting one household at a time. I encourage you to give it a try!
Armata, the habit elites have of isolating themselves in self-referential bubbles is a major factor in sudden social change. The situation in Europe is a classic example -- and the change may arrive very suddenly, and messily, indeed.
Leo, thank you for the link! Once a movement for social change buys into the systemic change line, you can pretty much assume that their policies will start sliding over toward those that support the status quo, such as flooding the job market with immigrants to force down wages and thus prop up salary class lifestyles.
Inohuri, I voted for the monorail the first two times too, then fled Seattle never to return. I'm not surprised that things have remained just as idiotic there as they were!
NJGuy, "probably"? Certainly.
Ed, no, polyandry is tolerably common; as I mentioned, I know people in not-legally-recognized polygamous marriages and polyandry is as common as polygyny. You may need to get out more!
8/28/16, 11:28 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Sylvia, exactly. It's not about hosting the Austerity Olympics -- "I can parade my renunciation of this, that, or the other more dramatically than you can!" but encouraging broad shifts in consumption and lifestyle, which can take place a little at a time.
Cherokee, oh, granted. The civil religion of Americanism still has a certain amount of clout in our collective psyche, and the notion that somebody or other really can fix everything if we just put him or her into office runs very deep. Of course it's also a good way to evade changing one's own life...
Shane, I've been saying for a while that somebody needs to create a dating site for Green Wizards. I've heard from a fair number of people who would like to have relationships, serious or otherwise, with others who have gotten out from under the religion of progress and no longer feel any need to recite its credos at the drop of a hat!
With regard to organized labor, that's a complex issue and one I'll have to mull over.
William, I think public transit could be made to work if it was approached in the right way, but you're certainly right that regional rail is an obvious place to start. I'll have some suggestions about that as we proceed.
Bill, I do know a fair number of mixed-gender couples getting married, but other than that, no argument at all. Polygynandrous relationships, to use your term, by far outweigh either polygynous or polyandrous relationships among the more-than-one-partner people I know.
Varun, I don't know that I'd label it an addiction -- that term is massively overused these days -- but they're certainly into the rush. "Dark Soma" is an elegant coinage, by the way.
Lisa, I can think of one. The Jewish community here in the US is very good about organizing enforcing consensus on issues that matter to it, even when that requires postponing something a lot of members would like. Here again, I suspect it's because memories of violent persecution are not that far back in anyone's mind.
Donalfagan, if people want to do slash in the privacy of their own keyboards, that's their business, but please don't encourage them; the characters in my stories are more or less personal friends by the time I finish writing a book, and I'd really rather not see them deployed as inflatable dolls in somebody's masturbation fantasies.
Kevin, I ain't arguing. The question is whether it's going to be possible to minimize how much worse we make it, and mitigate some of the consequences.
Michael, you're welcome and thank you.
Jeff, good -- you're starting to ask the right questions. The question to my mind is whether there's something we should be proposing instead of fracking at all.
8/28/16, 11:44 PM
John Michael Greer said...
J8sun, I couldn't access it so can't tell you.
Patricia, oh my. So Homo economicus is actually Chimpus economicus! (Yes, I know, the proper scientific name is Pan troglodytes, but Pan economicus sounds like an aspect of a Greek deity worshipped by merchants.) That really is delicious.
Lordberia, I doubt that the Islamization of Europe will get that far. The backlash is already building so forcefully that I expect to see far right parties in power in several major European countries within a decade, and forced expatriation of Muslim immigrants promptly thereafter.
Shane, as noted, I'm considering that. With regard to Morehead and Rowan Counties, I wish 'em a great Pride Festival! I'm not sure what you mean by "sexual possession;" I don't own my wife and she doesn't own me, you know, we just happen to prefer monogamy. I know, it's sick and wrong! ;-)
Matt and Jess, a lot of poor white people have no access to post-public school education because the affirmative action programs are set up only to take ethnicity into account, not class disparities. That's an example of what I mean.
Anselmo, I was speaking specifically of the climate change movement here within the US. Yes, it's also been deployed overseas by the US government in the attempt to maintain American hegemony, of course.
Mary, as a professional writer, I'm fairly well up on current trends in marketing books, and your initial comment really did come across like a publisher's press release -- the sort of thing that a viral marketing staffer would dump onto a blog if he or she wasn't very well trained. You may want to revisit the way you wrote of the book to try to avoid coming across that way elsewhere in the future. With regard to the book, you've certainly convinced me to wait until I can find and read a relatively objective review of its strengths and weaknesses before shelling out money for it. Movements for social change have been spinning their wheels in the same ruts for forty years now -- just for example, can you name a single major piece of environmental legislation that has been gotten through during that period comparable to the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts? -- and to my mind, the Sanders campaign means nothing until it actually affects legislation and public policy, which it has not yet done. (I hope it will, but I'm not holding my breath.) If the book simply rings changes on current overfamiliar and underperforming radical strategies, it's a waste of good trees.
The steps I will be proposing in upcoming posts require a lot of the conventional wisdom on the left to be chucked into the dumpster; I expect the Naomi Kleins and Bill McKibbens of the celebrity-radical class to ignore or denounce what I have to say if they ever hear about it, which isn't likely; the audience I'm aiming for is the rising generations, who are inheriting the half-wrecked planet that's being left to them by the failure of today's headline-seeking activists to have any impact on the environmental crises of our time, and may be motivated to try something different for a change -- the kind of change you don't have to believe in but can actually make happen.
8/29/16, 12:19 AM
John Michael Greer said...
Philip, I hope every radical activist in the western world reads what you have to say and thinks, very hard, about the implications. For what it's worth, I know people in reenactment groups focused on our Civil War, and by and large they seem to be just as pleasant and mutually supportive, and just as skilled in old-fashioned crafts.
Fred, thank you for passing on the word! What you're calling a Racket seems parallel to one variety of what transactional analysts call a script -- a canned story line that people act out in their lives, assigning other people whatever roles the script requires, as a way of not facing their actual relationships and actions.
Robert, I gather it stung! Still, if you don't want to learn the lessons of forty years of failure, then you don't.
Inohuri, check out the rate at which fracked oil is being produced. It's down very sharply, iirc. That in itself suggests a reason...
J8sun, thank you for the further explanation! I certainly don't think that they're doing anything harmful, quite the opposite; anyone who collapses now and avoids the rush is part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
Ozark, good. Very good. One of the ways you can tell when an activist movement is in the process of selling out is that they start buying into corporate sales pitches of various kinds. The climate change movement has certainly done so -- look at the way they're basically shilling for the wind turbine and solar industries, while neglecting a lot of other things (like carbon sequestration in the soil) that could do a lot of good.
8/29/16, 12:30 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
"Polygynandrous" was coined to describe the mating system of the Dunnock, a common European songbird. Group marriages, shared child rearing, multiple males and females in one big happy family.
8/29/16, 3:05 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
8/29/16, 4:21 AM
Shane W said...
that sounds like a lot of people on this blog: salary class people who've saved money, bought land, collapsed early and avoided the rush, and live a very modest, low impact lifestyle. The people you describe could be our very own Cherokee Chris, Tripp in GA, Cathy in Ore., and many other frequent posters to this blog.
8/29/16, 5:12 AM
Shane W said...
it seems the Morehead/Rowan Co. pride tests were a hit, based on the paper (kentucky.com) They had a discussion about being the impact of being queer in rural areas.
8/29/16, 5:15 AM
Shane W said...
8/29/16, 5:40 AM
Shane W said...
8/29/16, 5:44 AM
Golocyte Golo said...
Perhaps, but if the goal is "doing something about climate change," or mitigation, then I'm not sure what the clear, measurable aim is. It seems like anything can be declared "success" whether there are any measurable effects on climate change at all. If we aim for clearly measurable change, then.....
neither you nor anyone else knows whether the economic climate will permit all those Chinese power plants to be built. Yes, we are in perfect agreement. The economic climate determines a GREAT deal, like whether several more USAs worth of emissions will come online in *one decade* or not. Our mitigation efforts will never determine so much. Never come close.
What we are doing is sweeping the floors and tidying up a burning house. Maybe the winds and rain will extinguish the flames, or maybe the fire will rage higher. We don't and can't know, but whatever the case, our tidying efforts are unimportant to the outcome.
I suspect that what we're really discussing is the aim of being in a society with the kinds of people who want a tidy house. That is, I think many (perhaps most) have the goal, in fact, to live in a society which is conscientious of the natural world. The real aim is social change.... not climate change. Whether or not the evidence points to actual effectiveness in treating changing climate, we want a society that cares.
8/29/16, 5:51 AM
Shane W said...
8/29/16, 6:07 AM
Helix said...
Exactly. At this point the issues have been talked through to the satisfaction of anyone who cares. Time now for planning and action.
8/29/16, 7:28 AM
onething said...
8/29/16, 8:30 AM
pygmycory said...
8/29/16, 9:03 AM
unfrozencavemanguitarplayer said...
But generally, I appreciate your insights and will share this post with my lefty comrades. Thanks for your weekly salvos of wisdom.
8/29/16, 9:57 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
Pat, who prefers robes for a reason!
8/29/16, 10:05 AM
Ed-M said...
There are plenty of things that can be done right now, and in the years ahead, to make life for most Americans in a warming world better than it would otherwise be -- and in quite a few cases, better than it is now.
Except the “Progressive” climate change activists dismiss them all out of hand because these solutions aren’t fashionable, or don’t cost a bundle, or most importantly, don’t make them feel morally superior. So what it boils down to, is that the only solution that passes their muster, other than the fashionable purchases and retrofits, is sustained political action by the majority of the people.
One of the many problems with looking at climate change only through the eyes of the privileged is that all they can see is what they stand to lose.
Well that explains their few meaningful actions (if any) in light of their rhetoric of dire worst-case scenarios. I read climate change blogs, too, and there the même of Near Term Extinction is slowly creeping in like a camel nosing his way into a tent; while at the same time, that other même of They’ll Think of Something is holding its own (e.g., Tesla Cars, Tesla Power Walls, and now Nikolai Motors’ Flexfuel Diesel-Electric semi tractors being trotted out as The Latest Thing That Will Save Us All), so long as we get our politics in order and our politicians in line.
Will the more stupidly designed suburbs and their already moldering McMansions have to be abandoned? Sure, but it's only the affluent who live in them.
Well where will the poor, the wage class and most of the salary class live? Right now it appears that the cities are becoming enclaves for the affluent, despite real estate bubbles beginning to break all over… except here in the City of New Orleans! Right now we have a median household income of either $35- or 44-thousand per annum depending on who's doing the statistics and a median price of all houses and condos on the market at about 350 Grand.
8/29/16, 11:44 AM
Ed-M said...
Glad you like it! I lifted it off of James Howard Kunstler's Home from Nowhere and his TED Talk on the abominations of modern architecture, highway engineering and (sub)urban planning and zoning.
8/29/16, 11:48 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...
Sorry, didn't mean to put words in your mouth. I was drawing a conclusion from what you and the archdruid said. I'm curious, how did they identified the secondary gain?
Archdruid,
You're right. Basically any habit is called an addiction nowdays. This particular phenomenon isn't quite the same thing as a drug addiction, but it sure mimics some of the characteristics. I think this calls for a full essay about Dark Soma to clarify the difference between an addiction and this particular phenomenon.
Regards,
Varun
8/29/16, 2:13 PM
M Smith said...
Writing me an angry, ugly post showing anything but "respect" therein is not the way to get me to do what you want. You could have googled each of the 3 acronyms in the time it took you to write that spite.
I see things written which strip my gears too: text-speak, lack of caps, the last sentence deliberately left unpunctuated, sometimes all sentences left unpunctuated. I don't get in a froth and scold the poster. I skip the post.
8/29/16, 3:09 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
8/29/16, 5:17 PM
Robert Carran said...
8/29/16, 6:10 PM
Shane W said...
8/29/16, 7:47 PM
Shane W said...
there was a quite large older lesbian showering outdoors @ Short Mountain when I went. Nothing left to the imagination. As far as the pool party, I still have to work at not being intimidated by nekkid women...
8/29/16, 7:58 PM
beneaththesurface said...
8/29/16, 8:38 PM
HalFiore said...
As someone who was involved with many, mostly environmental efforts during the 70s through 90s, I can attest to having seen rock solid examples of all of the 4 traps you list, between members of the activist LGBT community and the environmental movement, the Democratic Party, and all mostly within the milieu of appealing to the professional class.
I have the feeling that the fact that marriage equality became an attainable goal in such a remarkably brief period over the last few years has surprised activists more than anyone. I'm frankly not sure where to credit it. In some ways, I fear it may end up being an eternally divisive booby prize in much the same way that affirmative action was for the supposed victory of the civil rights movement, that is to say, something that helps the upper middle class without really doing much for the bigger picture.
8/29/16, 9:40 PM
nuku said...
Regarding the “secondary gain” in my example, the psychologist interviewed the overweight lady, and determined that her weight gain was not a physiological problem, had been slim in the past, and had been able to lose weight by going a various diets but always fell off the wagon and started binge eating again. In the process of exploring her life history, it emerged that she’d been very promiscuous in her younger days, basically went to bed with any guy who showed interest in her. Finally she’d met her husband, highly valued her marriage, but when her husband was away on selling trips, she said she was worried she might revert to her previous behavior. It was the psychologist who identified the secondary gain of being fat as a way to dealing with her fear of cheating on her husband. The lady acknowledged the connection and developed other ways of dealing with her fears. When that was done, she stopped binge eating and regained her normal weight.
8/29/16, 11:32 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Shane, from my side of the thing, it's simply a matter of keeping an agreement that was mutually and freely made by both participants. Still, your mileage may of course vary, and monogamy certainly isn't for everyone!
Golocyte, the issue of clear and measurable aims is important, and I'll be discussing that in an upcoming post. I don't think it's just a matter of sweeping the floor while the house is on fire: it's a matter of facing a brush fire and deciding which areas you can effectively soak with the hoses and water you've got so they don't burn up. More on this as we proceed.
Unfrozen(etc.), and that's a choice you have the right to make. The difficulty is when every movement is expected to address all the world's problems at once.
Patricia, my wife is 55 years old and decidedly Rubenesque in figure, and I find her very attractive indeed with her clothes off. One advantage of ignoring the mass media is that I appreciate the fact that women look like women and not like oversized Barbie dolls, say.
Ed-M, yep and yep. As for the housing prices in New Orleans, well, I know of cities in flyover country where houses are even cheaper...
Varun, I look forward to reading the essay!
Robert, you say you want on the ground solutions. My post suggested four of them -- it identified four serious problems that have hamstrung activism for the last forty years, and pointed out how the same sex marriage rights movement got out from under those and won. I also explained in some detail why the criticisms of the comparison between the same sex marriage rights movement and the climate change movement missed the central point of my post. If I get dismissive of some of my critics now and then, it's because so many of them seem to be much too busy pounding their fists and yelling in outrage to deal with the points I try to raise. You might try addressing those points next time, instead of just reaching for the nearest available insult.
Shane, nope. Your logic is square on; as I've noticed before, the Democrats are the conservative party in today's America, trying to keep things the way they are.
Beneaththesurface, dead on target, as far as I can tell.
HalFiore, to my mind, what happened with marriage equality was simply that a large section of activists in the LGBTI movement all focused on a single readily definable goal, out of the many possible goals that would advance their position, and pursued it with the kind of focus (and avoidance of the boobytraps I mentioned in my post) that gets results. Now they've moved on to other goals, and if they can repeat the same process, there's very little limit to what they might achieve. Now imagine the climate change movement doing exactly the same thing -- focusing a great deal of its energy on some specific, readily definable, positive goal, and throwing all its considerable resources into that goal until it's won, then moving to the next goal. Wouldn't that get a lot further than the current approach?
8/30/16, 12:06 AM
Shane W said...
8/30/16, 5:20 AM
Shane W said...
8/30/16, 5:26 AM
Shane W said...
8/30/16, 5:31 AM
Degringolade said...
In honor of "Stars Reach", I present this hopeful note.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/08/seti-has-observed-a-strong-signal-that-may-originate-from-a-sun-like-star/
8/30/16, 5:48 AM
Shane W said...
8/30/16, 5:50 AM
Scotlyn said...
They say:
"#BlackLivesMatter is a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society."
They also say:
"#BlackLivesMatter is working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. We affirm our contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression. We have put our sweat equity and love for Black people into creating a political project–taking the hashtag off of social media and into the streets."
In this last, you can almost hear the way the words "Black Lives Matter" serve as a counter-spell to reduce the power of the daily reinforcements of the idea that "Black Lives do not Matter even a little bit."
These women are pretty specific about the nature of the situation they are responding to, and their firm intention to stop being erased, to stop raising children to be incarcerated and killed.
They do not claim to "own" the movement, and clearly hope to have started a larger conversation and to have spurred action on a larger stage than their own. On the other hand, they do claim that full acknowledgement of their own role in originating the term, and full recognition of the conditions in which they did so, is due from anyone making use of it.
And, they point out, as all our destinies are entwined, they believe that achieving black freedom will benefit everyone else, including me, too.
For myself, I accept this. If it is the case that the state can kill black citizens with impunity, then it can kill citizens with impunity - and that includes me. For me to live in a state that does not kill citizens with impunity requires (among other things) that I join calls for the state to stop doing so, wherever I see this happening.
Otherwise, the police state is already here, and that with the complicity of a significant part of its citizenry.
If you have some interesting points to make rebutting this, I'd be interested in reading them, and responding to them elsewhere. Please post a link, and I will take this conversation there (with apologies to JMG).
8/30/16, 6:05 AM
Scotlyn said...
We are like you - or at least, are not unlike you. Is there any reason for you not to work with us on X?
Whereas, stressing all the ways in which "we" are completely unlike [and also, coincidentally, superior to] "you" is guaranteed neither to win friends or influence people.
In these unsettled times, I can only conclude that there must be a huge payoff for the "Superior Sneer Stratagem" that now dominates activism and polarises debate.
PS (I don't grant this stratagem is only found on the leftward end of activism, though it is definitely far from immune.)
8/30/16, 6:15 AM
Shane W said...
8/30/16, 6:18 AM
Scotlyn said...
you are mulling over Keystone & similar as follows:
"how the focus on shutting down the Keystone pipeline was a wrong strategy. I seem to agree with you, and I was reflecting why. It seems to me that a lot of climate activism has been focused on supply/extraction-side industries: stopping pipelines, fracking, Arctic drilling, etc."
I think these actions are much more straightforward to understand - they originate from those with direct ties to the land being crossed or fracked or drilled. That is to say, there is a very immediate motive of self-defense of home and hearth involved. I find these actions are likeliest to bring together people of disparate ideological stances, as the immediacy of protecting one's own land, water, air, biodiversity, quality of life, etc takes precedence over "left" "right" "green" "red" etc.
I am in the cross-border northwestern part of Ireland which is considered suitable for fracking, and the local, non-partisan determination to stop this happening is visceral and not ideological.
8/30/16, 7:53 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
8/30/16, 8:17 AM
O. Hinds said...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/65-year-old-woman-takes-out-drone-over-her-virginia-property-with-one-shot/
8/30/16, 8:37 AM
Scotlyn said...
But if "the environment" means anything motivational, it is that each of us is connected to a specific place, whose land, water, air & biota feed us and give us life.
It would be very strange indeed if it were not those living at the dirty end of the oil industry, and directly paying its costs in terms of degradation of *their* land, water, air, biota, were not the first to mount a resistance... as they have everywhere extraction takes place.
It is not at all surprising that people at the "clean" beneficial and technologically-served end of that industry are slow to do likewise.
Joining the two ends together by facilitating communication between activists in either might have a stronger effect than might otherwise be thought.
8/30/16, 9:05 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
From A MURDER IS ANNOUNCED, published 1950, therefore written around 1949 or so ...
"You know the Fuel Office won't even let us have the little bit [of coal] that's due to us each week --not unless we can say definitely that we haven't got any other means of cooking."
"I suppose there was once heaps of coke and coal for everybody?" said Julia, with the interest of one hearing about an unknown country.
"Yes, and cheap, too."
"....There was lots of it there?"
"All kinds and qualities---and not all stones and slates like what we get nowadays."
"It must have been a wonderful world," said Julia, with awe in her voice.
8/30/16, 10:02 AM
Glenn said...
For whatever it is worth, I found this essay much more usefull than your July Post-Mortem discussion of the Failures of Climate Change Activism. I was one of many who found the comparison in your previous essay to be one of apples and oranges; mostly on the basis that a difference of scale is important ("Quantity has a quality of it's own." Frequently attributed to Joseph Stalin regarding WWII).
The current essay does a better job of paring away the aspects related to scale and addressing the difference in tactics.
On other topics. A banner year for fruit here. An early and warm spring gave us quite a start. All the cherries did well except pie cherries (which are usually prolific), and we've got over a hundred pounds off our three dwarf pear trees (D'Anjou, Red Clap and Bartlett).
Thank You,
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
8/30/16, 10:51 AM
LewisLucanBooks said...
By the by. Before Short Mountain, before Wolf Creek, before Elwa ... there was a collective in Seattle. I didn't live there, but close by and hung out with those folks from time to time. I see RFD is still being published. Boy. That's longevity. Lew
8/30/16, 12:01 PM
Eric S. said...
8/30/16, 1:55 PM
Varun Bhaskar said...
We can carry on this conversation either at my blog: Bones of Our Empire, or on the green wizards boards.
However, before we do I would urge you to look at this section http://blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles/, and this section http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/
I see Gender issues, globalism, nuclear family structure, and sexual identity issues all rolled into a single package.
Nuku,
Thanks for the information, it'll help greatly with the essay!
Archdruid,
Also sorry about carrying on the BLM discussion here, we'll move it else where so as not to be off topic.
Regards,
Varun
8/30/16, 4:37 PM
Shane W said...
none other than our very own Retrotopia characters...
8/30/16, 8:33 PM
Scotlyn said...
As best I understand them, they are saying something like "IF you use these words "Black Lives Matter" please respect our experience in raising this cry, please don't erase our experience while using our words."
One might say that too many strands dilutes the message, or that there is a proper etiquette for this kind if thing, but really, how politely should we exoect people to deliver a message as succinct and urgent as "stop killing us"...
And if they add nuances and say: "stop killing us because we're black, also stop killing us because we are female and black, stop killing us because we are queer and black, stop killing us because we are poor or foreign and black, stop killing us because of all the ways we appear to be people who don't matter". Does that really dilute *that* message too much?
Marriage Equality campaigns have been run everywhere by LGBTQ groups (ie - multistranded ones). And so, although these successful campaigns have a character and focus all their own, their history *directly* links them to the Stonewall Riots, which most credit with the beginning of visibility and increasing acceptability of queerness. The riots themselves, a reaction to police brutality, were very much driven by the specific experience black transgender and black queer people had acquired through lifelong dealings with the police. It was one of those "Enough" moments that happen.
If Black Lives Matters has a goal it is more like that of the Stonewall Rioters - to say, to themselves and others "enough is enough, we matter and you no longer can convince us we don't".
This is not so much a campaign as a necessary precursor to one, or perhaps to many, concievable effective campaign(s) which could arise in the future. When it might even circle around and join the voices of those crying "stop killing our home earth" - in a future effective climate action campaign.
8/31/16, 12:22 AM
Glenn said...
"Before Short Mountain, before Wolf Creek, before Elwa"
Wolf Creek, Oregon; in Josephine County? The first place I lived in Oregon was the side of a mountain above Graves Creek in upper Sunny Valley. Small world.
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
8/31/16, 12:30 PM
Ed-M said...
And until the recent floods, Baton Rouge used to be one of them! :^(
8/31/16, 12:38 PM
Ed-M said...
Soeaking of Trump, here in New Orleans I have not seen one political sign for *anyone* since Bernie folded his campaign.
Zero, zip, nada, none.
Apparently both Hillary and The Donald are hated down here.
8/31/16, 12:40 PM
jessi thompson said...
8/31/16, 2:01 PM
NZ said...
The whole notion of cognitive dissonance explains much that is plaguing working people today. Such a condition creates a psychic barrier that precludes undertaking effective action that would make ones life better. It is distressing to consider that our leadership actually promotes this state of being for it's own survival and interests. It is the exact opposite of a sane and healthy society.
The trouble is the current culture seems to be operating similar to a black hole. It is sucking everything into the universal abyss.
Competition, selfishness, and greed being the underlying forces driving the whole system. It is a system that promotes death not life, and as time goes on, that observation is undeniable. The panic level is rising because people instinctively feel this reality and are not prepared for the consequences. They are busy making excuses for a failed system.
Choosing to promote life over death is the principle that crosses over all social barriers- except for the sociopaths currently calling the shots. The question then becomes, can a different culture and society be built? We are really in the first stages of this development. The pull of selfish interest seems to win out though.
9/3/16, 6:54 AM
Debra Johnson said...
9/5/16, 8:01 AM
ronanpeter said...
9/19/16, 2:38 AM
Vic Postnikov said...
thoroughly enjoyed your post. The philosophy of Retrovation is totally consistent with my theory of "elegant symplicity", an artistic approach to simple but wholesome life. The retrovation of technology could be paralleled by retrofitting the old stuff into the new pieces of art. This would bring additional joy to those who refuse to consume mass production items and have an artistic vision.
Also, I think that "co-creation with nature' is a powerful way that could spare human efforts and relieve nature as well.
I would gladly translate your books (as I do sometimes your articles) into Russian. I think you will find a rewarding auditorium.
Again, many thanks.
Yours, Victor
9/22/16, 10:54 AM