Those who know me will put two and two together, but the rest of you can wonder why and what. This. There's a story about the beginnings of Operations Research, I think from De Landa's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, which goes like this: trying to figure out what bits of bombers required... Continue Reading →
Oh god, how hard IS IT, really? Meetings that don’t suck. #oldfartclimateadvice
Hi everyone, there's a lot of us in this room, and the tables aren't really helping. I know it is gonna take a minute, and the "Elf and Safety" types may be upset, but I want to spend one of our precious 57 remaining minutes stacking the tables against the wall and making a circle... Continue Reading →
Sucking on the hopium pipe
In 2002 I got some weird-ass bug, probably from having been in Cambodia. I ended up in a lot of pain (probably as much as in my life) and on a hospital gurney. And then they gave me some morphine. Holy mother of God that stuff is the shit. You just... the pain just... you... Continue Reading →
What next for XR? Gazing dimly into my crystal balls #oldfartclimateadvice
Tl:dr Hard to see radical granular climate action in the UK continuing beyond early 2021 at the latest. But I could be wrong. Firstly the disclaimers: Disclaimer the first: Who the hell knows? Who the hell knows anything anymore? Disclaimer the second: In cosmic scheme of things it doesn’t matter- we are a dead species... Continue Reading →
This time it’s different? Of #climatebreakdown, issue attention cycles, social movements and other natural disasters….
Lunch with a smart friend with whom I often disagree (politiely). This time it is different, maybe, he says (in response to my point that we've known about the essential unsustainability of techno-accelerationist consumerism since the late 1960s - Earth Day, The Limits to Growth, Blueprint for Survival in 1970, 1972 and 1972: I can... Continue Reading →
Of cargo cults, social movements and accelerating transitions. #magicalthinking
Imagine tribespeople in the South Pacific. Sure, lots of trading, and contact with Europeans (good and bad). But what happened in 1942 and 1943 must have blown their minds. Giant white men who could fly arrived in big metal birds, with chewing gum and coca cola. And then, as quickly as they came (with the... Continue Reading →
Desolation angels
She had been asked to attend a shit meeting, at which one of the blithely ignorant assholes the electorate seems to love was talking among his friends. She was sent on an intelligence-gathering effort, for an environmental pressure group. And she told me, fighting back the tears, that it had been a truly awful, traumatising... Continue Reading →
The need for/inevitability of magical thinking
We can laugh at the people buying their Make America Great Again hats (made in China) and chanting at Trump rallies for the return of a mis-remembered past. It’s easy to see that they want something that is difficult (impossible) to deliver and that they want it with no particular effort on their part, beyond... Continue Reading →
Expect (lots) more magical thinking, from eco-types as well as reactionaries
Easy it is to see the dynamics playing out in people we don't like. Easy it is to see how the complexities, ambiguities and downright extra-messiness of Modern Life can lead people to reach for simple(minded) "solutions" and slogans like "Make America Great Again" and "Take Back Control." Not so easy to spot it, or... Continue Reading →
Two simple questions, zero bloody ideas. wtaf we’re toast
Asides from other frustrations ("250, 150, 100, 65 and oblivious" is all I will say right now) there are a couple of deeper ones. Or rather, one beast, two heads: what is the actual point of academics and think-tankers? Seriously? What is the point of them, for progressive social movements? Yesterday I asked a simple... Continue Reading →
marchudson.net 