The post I dashed off yesterday, about the Van Gogh action, has had some pick-up. Thank you to those folks who retweeted it, especially to those who did not necessarily agree with all/most/much of it, but saw it as a useful contribution. It has meant some good conversations with people I already knew, and also... Continue Reading →
Gormless “individual action!” vs “system change!” #climate “activists” talking past each other, as usual. My declaration of irrelevance, sorry, independence
Uggh. a) I have COVID b) I have had enough of climate "activists" and their gormless miss-the-point-"debates" about individual versus "top-down" action. The love-and-light brigade tell us our individual footprints matter, that we need to "be the change we want to see". They ignore the corporates (indeed, blah blah BP invented carbon footprints blah blah)... Continue Reading →
On incredible (literally) elite incompetence
I am re-reading the extraordinary World War 2 memoir "The Other Side of Time" by Brendan Phibbs. It is at least as good as I have remembered and said to various people. Easily among the top ten books I have ever read. This excerpt below comes after some American soldiers have died needlessly in a... Continue Reading →
It isn’t *just* the media. It really isn’t. Monbiot, #climate catastrophe etc.
Whose fault is the mess we are in? Good question, and it's more of a Murder on the Orient Express type thing that some would have you believe. It's also - and this is ironic given how much certain people bang on about systems, and system collapse - about synergies and mutually-reinforcing loops. Very quickly.... Continue Reading →
Riding the Rocket Ship to Mars – the surprisingly old elite dream of escape from climate change
"The common man (sic) "must not come to see nature as a mine and his future salvation as a rocket ride to Mars..." So came the warning in 1968, in an issue of Nebraska Law Review The Necessity to Change Man's Traditional View of Nature" by Earl Finbar Murphy, 1968 I don't know what particular... Continue Reading →
Dolphins want you to do capitalism better
You read it here first. Or second, if you get the FT Weekend and say the advert in "FT Money" on August 27th. (It may be one they have been running for a while). Got your sickbag ready? No, seriously, this is your first and last trigger warning. I could insert something here about how... Continue Reading →
Reddit and weep – of #climatewhiplash and how things are going…
Someone pointed me at a reddit group where people swap links about the pending ecological debacle (no longer pending, actually, has solidly arrived). In it was this heart-breaker of a comment, entirely accurate. https://www.reddit.com/r/environment/comments/wb41zu/comment/ii6gczm/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 "We are solidly on the RCP 8 path and I have to work hard to not freak out about it often.... Continue Reading →
Planet of the planet-trashing apes, and I am scared af
I read this tweet. https://twitter.com/MrMatthewTodd/status/1557288961135067137 And I think about how worse-than-useless our education system and media systems are (for lots of reasons, some of them probably pretty intractable, not that we ever really tried to tract them). And how we are not joining the dots between the energy and food crises and just how bad... Continue Reading →
Of “Oil Goggles” and the veil drawn back. Proust etc
I just put up a post on "All Our Yesterdays" about beer goggles and "oil goggles." A few things a) a good friend pointed to the wording that would allow people to reasonably infer sexism/misogyny (I used the term "arm-chewer" - I had worded things to be equal opportunity offensive, but the term itself skews... Continue Reading →
Smart but so very very stupid at the same time: Dunning-Kruger among would-be leaders
I've just read Melissa Benn's excellent novel of "New Labour" - "One of Us" (more soon). That - combined with Rishi Sunak's response in the "leadership" "debate" to what he would do about climate change (recycling, wasting less, innovation) has got me to thinking about the question of, well, how our "leaders" are so catastrophically... Continue Reading →
marchudson.net 