Mark Blyth, Riots Full Of Radicals & Watered-Down Marxism-Some Links

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The idea of the ‘Splinternet’, being discussed in many quarters, is interesting.  Networks of global online collaboration, personally and professionally, are easily overshadowed by larger divergent and conflicting political, national and legal interests (China, The EU, America).

Here’s a refreshing jolt of Scottish insight and depressive realism for you (don’t know if I know enough to know about how much I think is true).  A lot of the problems in the tail need to be analyzed.

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Dear Reader, if you’re thinking belief doesn’t matter, please check out what can happen to people when they come in and out of hope, attached to deeper system of belief, even if that system is generally an ideology with debatable epistemological roots.

Of course there are always violent knuckleheads at such events, but it’s remarkable how many people find themselves sharing common intellectual ground:

What you personally think is true, and what you know, can profoundly affect your experiences and the decisions you make.  This bleeds into the thousands of daily judgments your make, moral and otherwise.

Rod Dreher (formerly Catholic, currently Orthodox, religiously conservative but often writing for a liberal mainstream) brings up a former piece of his on Ta Nehisi Coates’ popularized racial identity separatism:  ‘Amy Cooper, Race, And Mercy’

‘He [Coates] set himself up to be disillusioned because he expected of liberalism something it couldn’t deliver. (“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.” — Flannery O’Connor). He really seems to have thought that we were moving inexorably to the elimination of that particular evil in this world.’ And we are!

Jason Hill’s open letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates here. Theodore Dalrymple’s review of Coates.

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To some extent, a Marxist or post-Marxist framework, has won many minds including those viewing the world primarily through the ‘-Isms’ (feminism, environmentalism, racism, liberation theology, a politics prioritizing collective identity, constant radical overthrow of anything established).

Change becomes an immediate necessity, and any injustice, or perceived injustice, becomes an actionable reality.  Any established tradition, practice, responsibility someone else has decided to pick up and carry becomes oppressive.

Unfortunately, such a view, become mainstream in many quaraters, never really condemns violence in pursuit of its aims.

 

If identity politics is a watered-down form of Marxism, then some Leftists are advocating a return to more pure Marxism, in the face of institutional weakness and capture (‘woke’ elites, competitive globalism and flabby, high liberal institutionalism, ‘neo-liberals’ etc.).  A lot of the industrial utopianism Marx advocated (dependent upon and reactive to Hegelian (H)istoricism, ridiculously reductive materialism), is easily transferable to computing technology and (S)cience.

In America, personally, I believe a more religious, more traditional civil fabric is being eroded in favor of…something else (freedom of speech and religious liberty perhaps no longer enjoying a popular majority).

As for my thinking, the Platonic model found in the Republic (one of many models I’m using), keeps me up at night:  Benjamin Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Republic can be found here.

On this site, see:

From The Liberal Bastions-James Baldwin, Often…Jason Hill’s open letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates here. Theodore Dalrymple’s review of Coates:

James Baldwin’s works are there to be read and thought about, his words and ideas echoing in your mind; your words formed in response.

Take or leave those words and ideas. You can write a paper, and forget them. They may deeply move and stir your moral imagination, or not.

Such is freedom.

Related On This Site: What about black people held in bondage by the laws..the liberation theology of Rev Wright…the progressive vision and the folks over at the Nation gathered piously around John Brown’s body?: Milton Friedman Via Youtube: ‘Responsibility To The Poor’……Robert George And Cornel West At Bloggingheads: “The Scandal Of The Cross”…

As to politics and social institutions, sent in by a reader, here’s a talk given by John McWhorter about his views in ‘Losing The Race‘, a man who strikes me as politically amorphous, unsatisfyingly moderate for some, and often very sensible. As has been the case for a while, there [are] a whole range of views out there

Race And Free Speech-From Volokh: ‘Philadelphia Mayor Suggests Magazine Article on Race Relations Isn’t Protected by the First Amendment’

Repost-Eugene Volokh At The National Review: ‘Multiculturalism: For or Against?

Thursday Poem-Robert Pinksy

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A Long Branch Song

Some days in May, little stars
Winked all over the ocean. The blue
Barely changed all morning and afternoon:

The chimes of the bank’s bronze clock;
The hoarse voice of Cookie, hawking
The Daily Record for thirty-five years

–Robert Pinsky

That’s Long Branch, New Jersey. I think I got this one posted with a few days left, here, in May.

Bat-Flu Blues, Street Life & Some Utopians Are Seemingly Quite Happy With New Authority Even If Utopia Hasn’t Arrived-Some Links

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Via Darwinian Conservatism on the COVID-19: ‘The CDC Lowers Its Estimate of the COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate‘:

‘The general lesson from all of this is that when people understand what kind of pandemic they are facing, their behavioral immune system will motivate them to spontaneously change their behavior in adaptive ways to mitigate the health costs of the pandemic through social distancing, while also securing the social benefits of freedom of movement.’

I’m as much concerned about many ideas afoot in the Republic, the people we’ve elected, and the incentives those people are receiving, as I am about the disease.  We’ve been rewarding many weak, often incorrect, and sometimes, hysterical voices in our current institutional landscape.

We also have a lot of large, semi-functional bureaucracies out there, full of people who haven’t been elected making decisions.

I try and get information from many sources.

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Speaking of information, Youtube appears to be mainstreaming and monetizing itself apace, while Twitter still seems to be amplifying LI=Loudest ignorance and selecting for LAB=Loud Activist Bias.

As many readers know, I have full trust and absolute confidence in the Twitter Trust & Safety Council.   In an attempt to be as fair as I can, however, I suspect some Twitter problems are all-too-human.  This could merely include the sentimental soft spots and biases of a few people scaled-out across the network, now involving lots of money and influence.   If you’re building something other people use, perhaps it’s best not to scale-out your own biases and sentimental soft spots and tell users it’s raining.

Dear reader, this is why I write a blog with a few thousand followers.

Enjoy the rain!

As for the tendency in engineering types towards techno-utopianism which I’d argue could do with a good humanities, history or legal education (not necessarily the kinds of education available these days with so much bad institutional stewardship and capture):  Today’s well-designed new software platform (if it’s lucky enough to gain traction), could well become tomorrow’s flea-market or center of online blight, with pockets of prostitution, drug-running and the occassional murder.

Do you want the online cops to run another dragnet for wrongthink while they unroll a new murderer-friendly outreach program?

Incentives matter.

It’s always worth a reminder:  If you choose play the activist game, don’t be surprised if your partners suddenly flip-over the board, start throwing pieces around and claiming you are the new oppressor.  The logic was there all along, after all.

Change, but at what cost?

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As for my sentimental soft spots, here are a few things a reader points out (I’m into more classical guitar music, blues-based rock, some folk and a little jazz).

I had never thought to put these two together, so thank you.  There’s a message in here, but you’ll have to dig it out yourself:

We Real Cool

The Pool Players.  Seven At The Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We
left school.  We

lurk late.  We
strike straight. We

sing sin. We
thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
die soon.

–Gwendolyn Brooks

Repost-Neither Commerce Nor Contemplation, Exactly?

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Perhaps aestheticizing a city isn’t necessarily good for long-term prospects, at least not at the cost of actual jobs. Maybe it’s at best a second- or third- order priority.

Perhaps aestheticization can bring good to a city if there are already enough people providing goods in the city. Curating and criticizing art can be valuable, of course, but both seem second- or third-order priorities to actually making art (citizens, be wary of leaving arts in the hands of many enbalment-oriented Arts Councils, public radio and college professors, docents, Mayor’s Offices…they [often] have other interests and incentives aside from the art).

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There are some things (bullshittery) which don’t sit right with me about the below video, this packaging of chocolate with high middle-brow tastes and vague Self-oriented hipster collectivism.

It strikes me as the kind of thing people from smaller towns and suburbs might imagine an ideal city to be on a visit, which is to say, potentially imbued with a lot of high middle-brow tastes these days (creative, urban, vibrant etc).

Such is my read, anyways, which probably says quite a bit about me.

The Mast Brothers invite customers into their process. They’re giving you bits of their individual Selves to mix with your individual Self as you band together towards the future that awaits. Come to the glittering Brooklyn upon the horizon.

Few chocolate-makers take pains to mention Mark Twain & Ralph Waldo Emerson in their promo videos:

From The American Conversative: ‘The Gentrification Trade-Off In Buffalo:’

‘Hidden away in the far western corner of New York State and straddling the Canadian border, Buffalo sometimes feels like the city that time forgot. Many of its storefronts, bars, and bowling alleys look like they haven’t been updated since the 1970s.’

Vincent Gallo has Italian roots and comes from an industrial, hard-working city full of Catholic immigrants and is also interested in the Arts. He was a visual artist who went to NYC, then L.A., and turned to film as a means to self-expression and potential financial success. Did he want Celebrity? Money? Fame?

This, apparently, is one aspect of ‘culture’ that’s been created: The pursuit Self through celebrity, money and fame, as a thing that many, many people all share as an artifact of ‘culture.’

Probably all of the above in addition to self-expression and the pursuit of beauty and saying true things by creating images.

I can say it’s rare to find a tradition-defending aesthete and iconoclastic supporter of the Republican party. Maybe it’s the Buffalo roots.

It makes for great T.V. taking on the critics in a USA track-suit while defending the vision behind ‘Buffalo 66‘, even though he seems like, potentially, quite an asshole:

American cities relying on industries such as textiles, furniture, various light and heavy manufacturing, railroads, steel, coal, oil, automobiles etc. have seen good times come and go.

Sometimes the good times came and went one generation ago, sometimes three. Buffalo is certainly among those cities.

Will the good times come again?

It’s certainly making for ‘interesting’ politics.

The arts can be one lens with which to look at these problems and places…

Repost-Ah, Look At All The Lonely People-‘Jeff Koons Is Back’ Via Vanity Fair

-Banksy’s website here. Newsweek’s piece: ‘See You Banksy, Hello Invader.‘

I’d argue that it’s possible, especially with the constant cries of modernism to ‘make it new,‘ I think this is one way we’ve arrived at pop art, and the desire to blend conceptual art and popular music together. This is in evidence from The Talking Heads to Lady Gaga to Jay Z promoting his new album alongside Marina Abramovic at MOMA.

Another lens to understand the world as a citizen is the social sciences, and this blog favors the contrarians amongst what is increasingly monolithic and received opinion:

Here’s a fine example of how to exchange ideas. Two people gather in a forum to present and dispute the data used, the methodologies applied, the empirical evidence offered, and the conclusions and conjectures both might draw from their own thinking. There’s some light moderation and Q & A from the audience:

Maybe vocation, purpose and meaning have A LOT to do with our current issues. How to live and what to do?

Happy Memorial Day 2020

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For [the memory] of those who have died for our country.

Addition:  From Maverick Philosopher:  The Difference Between Patriotism And Jingoism.

From a collection of Civil War Letters:

“I took some tobacco down with me the other day but I found out when I got there communication had been stopped. As I was sitting on the banks, one of the Yankees from the other side called to me to know if I had any tobacco. I told him I had. He said that he had a good knife to trade for it. I told him that trading was prohibited. He said “Your officers won’t see you, come over, I want a chew of tobacco very bad.” I asked some of them who they were going to vote for President. One of them said “Old Abe” but most of them said they were for McLellan.”

If A Carefully Balanced Rock Cairn Topples In The Woods, Does It Make A Sound? Alas, the New Yorker

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Our sacred National Parks and EPA regions, uniting all races, classes, genders, and species in a non-corporate, environmental utopia, are being despoiled by the dirty masses:

Does anybody remember Andy Goldsworthy?

Land Art is often about removing the monetary value, commodification and fungibility of a piece of art and making something big enough, weird enough, useless enough; maybe making a beautiful/ugly enough imitation of Nature or man’s design within Nature.

Here’s Wikipedia, keeping it simpler:

‘Land art, earthworks (coined by Robert Smithson), or Earth art is an art movement in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked.’

That’s right, you Instagram stone-stacker, it’s all been done before, and now, you’re harming our Romantically Primitive, wild Nature:

‘John Hourston, the head of a small volunteer-run environmental organization called the Blue Planet Society, said. He first noticed the boom when he visited remote beaches in Orkney, Scotland, and found them littered with rock piles. He said, “It struck me as a real shame, because there are very few places where you can still find solitude and seclusion, and here they were absolutely covered by the footprint of man.”

Personally, I’m thinking if I join the right church, and support the right politico-moral thinking, I can become purified:

Aside from passionate crazies, however, there are certainly not people who’ve turned global warming into a gnawing, apocryphal certainty; certain enough to offload their own fears of death into abstract ideals which might live beyond them.

Some poets have done so, even, and there’s certainly not any postmodern mysticism, anti-science rationalism and irrationalism to be found around and about:

A reader sends a link to a SF Gate review of poet Jorie Graham’s ‘Sea Change:‘

‘In “Sea Change,” Graham becomes Prospero, casting spells by spelling out her thoughts to merge with ours, and with the voices of the elements. The result is a mingling of perceptions rather than a broadcasting of opinions. Instead of analysis, the poems encourage emotional involvement with the drastic changes overwhelming us, overwhelm- ing the planet.’

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For those who didn’t ask!:

Moving along, a reader links to W.S. Merwin’s ‘Tergvinder’s Stone,’ where you get some weird metaphysical notions of space/non-space, subjectivity/objectivity going on.

Abstract Modernism? Mid-Century Modernism? Relentlessly rhythmic, ambitious and (P)rophetic pieces looking to reshape not Nature, but how readers should think about Nature?

(addition: Plymouth Rock? Uh-oh…what is the poem being asked to do? What about the reader?):

‘One time my friend Tergvinder brought a large round boulder into his living room. He rolled it up the steps with the help of some two-by-fours, and when he got it out into the middle of the room, where some people have coffee tables (though he had never had one there himself) he left it. He said that was where it belonged.

It is really a plain-looking stone. Not as large as Plymouth Rock by a great deal, but then it does not have all the claims of a big shaky promotion campaign to support. That was one of the things Tergvinder said about it. He made no claims at all for it, he said. It was other people who called it Tergvinder’s Stone. All he said was that according to him it belonged there.’

 

As this blog sees things, the modernist project is not explicitly ideological, but it is extremely ambitious: Make it new. Start from the ground up, or go back to the foundations and take a really good look, and have the individual genius start building his own, new foundations (alone or in contact with others, such as the Bloomsbury Group).

It takes really talented individuals to pull this off; often individuals with previous exposure to tradition; young practitioners with enough talent and perseverance, as well as enough of a pedagogy to inherit and rebel against should they choose.

As this blog has noted, it’s not hard to witness a string of causation between high modernist aims and a lot of the modern and postmodern aimlessness we see all around us. There sure are a lot of poseurs and would-be artists bobbing in the postmodern stew, left to sort out the entire world and their relation to it alone, or upon a stage (as alone and not alone as one can be).

They write these f**king art blurbs before they have any art! What the f**k is this lady doing?:

From the comments on this piece:

‘The most useful definition of modernist fiction I’ve encountered comes from Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction. He says modernist fiction tends to “foreground epistemological questions” such as “How can I interpret the world I’m part of? What is there to be known? Who knows it? What are the limits of that knowledge?” In contrast, postmodernist fiction tends to “foreground ontological questions” such as “What is a world? What kinds of worlds are there and how are they constituted? What happens when…boundaries between worlds are violated?’

The above can invite all manner of despair and isolation, and perhaps a deeper cynicism we see in this generation’s rather pervasive desire for fame and recognition.

Friday Poem-Pearl By Pearl Of Light

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Flying Over The Nebraska Of My Life

So much of our lives dissolves.
What did I do the day before
I met you? You remember
what I was wearing that holiday.
What did I wear the next morning?
What did I write the day my mother died?

I fly at night over the plains.
There is a cluster of lights,
a starfish shape glittering. Then
darkness and darkness.
Then another clump bearing
long daisy petals of roadway.

Then nothing again. How much
of my living has fled like water
into sand. The sand is not
even damp to the hand.
Tears and wine and sparkling
water all vanish the same.

I know looking out the plane’s
dirty window that there are houses,
barns, roads, trees, stores
distinct in that darkness I once
drove through. I knew them and will
never know them again.

The plane is flying from lighted
place to lighted place, but
our arc is from the dark into
brightness then back into darkness.
I want to possess my own life like a
necklace, pearl by pearl of light.

–Marge Piercy

A repost-For a special friend, you know who you are.

Are You Liberated? A Link To Carlo Lancellotti-Still Looking For Contrary Thinkers But Also Good Luck With Your Prognostications

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Carlo Lancellotti, on the works of Italian political thinker, Augusto Del Noce.

Full piece here, which could have some explanatory insight:

Del Noce’s emphasis on the role of Marxism in what I called the “anti-Platonic turn” in Western culture is original, and opens up an unconventional perspective on recent cultural history. It calls into question the widespread narrative that views bourgeois liberalism, rooted in the empiricist and individualist thought of early modern Europe, as the lone triumphant protagonist of late modernity. While Del Noce fully recognizes the ideological and political defeat of Marxism in the twentieth century, he argues that Marxist thought left a lasting mark on the culture, so much so that we should actually speak of a “simultaneous success and failure” of Marxism. Whereas it failed to overthrow capitalism and put an end to alienation, its critique of human nature carried the day and catalyzed a radical transformation of liberalism itself. In Del Noce’s view, the proclaimed liberalism of the affluent society is radically different from its nineteenth-century antecedent precisely because it fully absorbed the Marxist metaphysical negations and used them to transition from a “Christian bourgeois” (Kantian, typically) worldview to a “pure bourgeois” one. In the process, it tamed the Marxist revolutionary utopia and turned it into a bourgeois narrative of individualistic liberation (primarily sexual).’

From where I stand: Many people can be seen clamoring towards (S)cience these days (or at least claiming some of its authority), but the people doing science are, well, doing science.  They might be informed by their political beliefs, but their political beliefs shouldn’t be present in their work.  Natural philosophy, mathematics, statistical modeling, empirical research etc. go on in the public and private sector, despite potentially serious supply/demand and other structural issues.

Institutional capture, however, also continues, and incentives within institutions.  Many Arts & Humanities departments have been over-run by the ‘studies’ types, especially within administrations.

Activist sexual, moral and political liberationists could be said to be the driving force behind much in American life right now.  Such movements tend to attract true believers who punish their enemies, seeking administrative/bureaucratic control of our institutions and political life.

The postmodern roots are pretty deep.  Good luck with your prognostications:

When it comes to the arts, do you know what’s coming next?:

It’s not so much that change is occuring, but in pointing out the change agents, and many ideas driving change, and questioning many such ideas opens one up to the mob.

Other critiques and criticisms along the same vein, gathered on this blog over the years:

-The Englightenment/Romantic tension…the horror of rationalist systems which claimed knowledge of man’s ends, but also a defense of both positive and negative liberties-Appeasement Won’t Do-Via A Reader, ‘Michael Ignatieff Interview With Isaiah Berlin’…A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”

Clive James revisits many quite original, quite accomplished works of Joseph Conrad.

This one’s stuck with me over the last few months:

‘They are, in fact, idealists: and idealism is a cast of mind that Conrad questions even more than he questions radicalism. The logical end of radicalism, in his view, is terrorism; but idealism is the mental aberration that allows terrorism to be brought about. Conrad’s originality was to see that a new tyranny could be generated by people who thought that their rebellion against the old tyranny was rational. Thus his writings seem prescient about what was to happen in the Soviet Union. He didn’t predict the Nazi tyranny because he had underestimated the power of the irrational to organise itself into a state. But then, nobody predicted that except its perpetrators; and anyway, mere prediction was not his business. His business was the psychological analysis made possible by an acute historical awareness. Under Western Eyes is valuable not because it came true but because it rang true even at the time, only now we can better hear the deep, sad note.’

John O’ Sullivan at The New Criterion remembers Robert Conquest:

“Those teach who can’t do” runs the dictum,

But for some even that’s out of reach:

They can’t even teach—so they’ve picked ’em

To teach other people to teach.

Then alas for the next generation,

For the pots fairly crackle with thorn.

Where psychology meets education

A terrible bullshit is born.’

Ken Minogue:

‘Olympianism is the characteristic belief system of today’s secularist, and it has itself many of the features of a religion. For one thing, the fusion of political conviction and moral superiority into a single package resembles the way in which religions (outside liberal states) constitute comprehensive ways of life supplying all that is necessary (in the eyes of believers) for salvation. Again, the religions with which we are familiar are monotheistic and refer everything to a single center. In traditional religions, this is usually God; with Olympianism, it is society, understood ultimately as including the whole of humanity. And Olympianism, like many religions, is keen to proselytize. Its characteristic mode of missionary activity is journalism and the media.’

And:

‘Progress, Communism, and Olympianism: these are three versions of the grand Western project. The first rumbles along in the background of our thought, the second is obviously a complete failure, but Olympianism is not only alive but a positively vibrant force in the way we think now. Above all, it determines the Western moral posture towards the rest of the world. It affirms democracy as an ideal, but carefully manipulates attitudes in a nervous attempt to control opinions hostile to Olympianism, such as beliefs in capital or corporal punishment, racial, and otherforms of prejudice, national self-assertion—and indeed, religion‘

Not entirely unrelated:

John Gray begins a discussion of his book ‘The Silence Of Animals‘ with a quote from Conrad:

————————————-

Added bonus if you act now in the face of no possible objective knowledge.

Part of Bryan Magee’s series:

=========================

Nietzsche directed his thought against Christian morality, secular morality (Kantian and utilitarian), was quite anti-democratic, and anti-Socratic.

Related On This Site: From The NY Times Book Review-Thomas Nagel On John Gray’s New ‘Silence Of Animals’.

A Few Thoughts On The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy Entry: Nietzsche’s Moral And Political Philosophy..

From Edward Feser: ‘Nagel And His Critics Part IV’…A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”…

John Gray Reviews Jonathan Haidt’s New Book At The New Republic: ‘The Knowns And The Unknowns’

-Are we really progressing…can we be more clear about means and ends? Via Youtube-Samuel Huntington On ‘The Clash Of Civilizations’…Repost-Classical Liberalism Via Friesian.Com-‘Exchange with Tomaz Castello Branco on John Gray’

–Sunday Quotation: From Jonathan Bennett On Kant…Link To An Ayn Rand Paper By George Walsh: The Objectivist Attack On Kant…From Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On Youtube: Geoffrey Warnock On Kant

Wasn’t judge Napolitano a Catholic libertarian?: Youtube Via Reason TV-Judge Napolitano ‘Why Taxation is Theft, Abortion is Murder, & Government is Dangerous’

This blog seems to be drifting along deeper currents, leaving many issues unresolved.

 

Wednesday Sonnet

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CXXIII

No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change:
Thy pyramids built up with newer might
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;
They are but dressings of a former sight.
Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire
What thou dost foist upon us that is old;
And rather make them born to our desire
Than think that we before have heard them told.
Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wondering at the present nor the past,
For thy records and what we see doth lie,
Made more or less by thy continual haste.
This I do vow and this shall ever be;
I will be true despite thy scythe and thee.

-William Shakespeare

Repost-Radical Academics Jumping Turnstiles, Decadence & Tilting At Windmills

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From the NY Post:

‘A New York University professor is one of the masterminds behind the anarchist group that organized the rampage through the subways last month, destroying turnstiles, stranding thousands of commuters and spray-painting “F–k Cops” on station walls.’

Spring 2020 tuition at the NYU Gallatin School of Individual Study seems a little high. Can’t I just show up at the next rampage for free? With a mask and a bat?

On that note, Peter Thiel reviews Ross Douthat’s new book.

Sexual, moral and political liberation movements (the ’68ers) have a lot of downside costs. There’s been lots of talk of freedom, the (S)elf, and intentions, but little talk of responsibilities, other-directed loyalty, and results.

I don’t expect folks caught up in liberation movements to accept that they may, in fact, be responsible for their own behavior as well as the political economy they’re helping to create:

Are we making progress? Not so much, Douthat answers. Baby boomers will wince at his title, since “decadence” sounds to them like the complaint of an old curmudgeon. They cannot stand to think of themselves as old, nor can they bear to think of the society they dominate as dysfunctional. But this is a young man’s book. Douthat can see our sclerotic institutions clearly because his vision is not distorted by out-of-date memories from a more functional era.’

Are you convinced? Kirkus review here.

Hmmmm…

Mike Shellenberger leaves the environmental reservation.

Would you like more people staying warm, being able to read at night, and eating food without parasites? Hopefully, yes. You can still care about the natural world, genuinely sensitive ecosystems, remarkable creatures and, you know, other people.

But wherever you go, there you are. This probably means living in a place, (alas, a Nation), stuck with yourself, your family, your friends, your responsibilities, your duties and your own boredom.

What does scale?

Globally, nuclear energy produces nearly twice as much electricity at half the cost. And nuclear-heavy France pays little more than half as much for electricity that produces one-tenth of the carbon emissions as renewables-heavy, anti-nuclear Germany.

Whatever you may think about conservation and your relationship with the natural world, the environmental movement has become big business, big politics, and big money.

I have never really been a member of what I see as rather Romantically Primitive, collectivist utopian groups, overlapping with Left causes and producing much economy-regulating techno-bureacracy in practice.

It’s good to see some reasonable discussion.