Thinking a bit about metaphors at the moment, how they are cognitive affordances - make some ways of 'doing' easier, others harder. So, on climate change Human civilisation is in "the bus". And the wheels on the bus, as every parent knows, go round and round. And for a long time the bus didn't really,... Continue Reading →
Ayn Rand, climate change and food vulnerability
It's funny what stays with you. When I was 20 I went through a very brief Ayn Rand "phase." For those not familiar - she's a loony tunes author and "philosopher" for whom anything that wasn't competition and "free markets" was the slippery slope to the gulag. Google her if you want a laugh. In... Continue Reading →
Of Midnight Cowboy, Sea Surface Temperatures and our (didn’t need to be inevitable) doom…
There's a scene early on in the film Midnight Cowboy. Young gorgeous Jon Voight is a hick in the big city (New York), from the middle of nowhere (Texas, iirc). He sees someone (a "bum") lying unconscious on the sidewalk and instinctively strides towards him to see what help he can offer. Then he looks... Continue Reading →
The one weird thing stopping us taking action on climate change
How’s THAT for a click-bait headline, (albeit circa 2014)? You’re unlikely to read to the end of this, so I’ll spit out the tl;dr - It’s hubris, or pride, or arrogance, whatever you want to call it. Of COURSE it is also the wildly successful disinformation and delay campaigns run by the oil companies and... Continue Reading →
On the Antarctic, morbid symptoms and being court in a trap End of Days #25
It will be hard to remember what it felt like right now. There are two options, as I see it. In the first, we return to “normal” weather patterns etc(how? Why? Is this not human-centric thinking, as if the world were made for us. Of course, lots of people believe it WAS made for us)... Continue Reading →
Novels, moorhens, surgeons, gratitude – End of Days #14 and #15
Greetings. On my voice recorder there is an untranscribed apologia for no-diary-yesterday, in which I explained that I lolled around finishing off Stanley Johnson's The Commissioner (tl:dr - nice start, a few amusing observations of Brussels and the functioning of the European Union, but enough thrills to be a thriller. Nice stuff on industrial espionage,... Continue Reading →
Of cricket, calories, carbon labelling and extreme ignorance among ‘educated’ people. End of Days Diary #09
Doom diary, day nine much delayed because I was too busy having much fun in the face of the apocalypse. Namely one of my best (only) friends, who was best man at my wedding, came up and we listened to and watched a lot of cricket - the first Ashes test more of that later. ... Continue Reading →
The past, lies we tell ourselves and submarines going pop… Doom Diaries #08
The past, as well as being another country, is a slippery, slippery thing. And there's overlap with words like “history,” “custom and tradition (see Hobwbawm and Ranger’s 1977 edited volume The invention of Tradition.) Where am I going with this? There was an interesting comment on my last blog post about where and when entrenched... Continue Reading →
Of no “wake up” moments, understanding powerlessness and ruts-becoming-tunnels. End of Days Diary #07
. It seems as if there will not be any “wake up” moment, (something I have long told other activists not to expect!). I t seems to me that we have inoculated ourselves and the “boiling frog” thing, although no one ever did boil a frog, does in fact work well enough as a metaphor... Continue Reading →
End of Days Diary #06 – anger
I want to talk about anger (and perhaps self-recrimination, but especially anger). And of course anger is not “allowed.” Anger is somehow a sign that you are “maladjusted”, which is an interesting term in itself - that you should adjust yourself to the indignities, inequities and injustices of the world. And if you display anger,... Continue Reading →
marchudson.net 