Always good to be stirred by Alastair's words. I too have felt pretty stuck these past few weeks. I have written nothing online or in a newspaper or in this forum for some weeks. My students were on demos last semester being beaten up protesting privatisation of the universities - the same students who attend events I attend about climate change in the university. Next in line for privatisation - in England at least - is the NHS. And secondary schools, and then primary schools, and so on. The state will pretend it no longer exists and let business do it all while in reality still funnelling our lands, sovereignty and oh yes our money into these businesses through artificial user 'markets', statist audits and regulations and ponzi schemes like PFI all the while ramping up invasive state 'security', invading our institutions looking for, or trying to stir up from the inside, the next nonviolent resistors so they can be violently goaded into violent resistance. And all these services will become more expensive, less accountable, and no longer in a position to demonstrate an alternative to big business. Already the CBI are rubbing their hands with glee as they can't wait to get their hands on school and university curricula and stop them teaching people about how endless growth, and debt, might be bad for the environment. The future for universities is that 'productive' activities - such as genetically modifying chickens so they can be kept in a cage in their own shit while being shat on and pecked by others without succumbing to a bird virus (of the kind generated by such factories - not by wild birds - though that was not on the BBC TV news story on this I watched for the first time in three weeks tonight) will still be publicly funded. 'Cultural activities' - such as teaching people about the environmental and other causes of the collapse of civilisation - past and future - will not. Meanwhile all that came out of Cancun was an affirmation of more of the same neoliberal nonsense - REDD, Chinese engagement in carbon emissions trading and so on. We will have vouchers for schools, vouchers for universities, vouchers for hospitals. All will be businesses responding to consumer choice. And oh yes REDD vouchers for rainforests and peat bogs and EUETS vouchers for renewable electricity. I try to inspire people when I speak that an alternative is possible. But it is becoming clear to me that the neoliberal state in Australia, Britain, Brussells and the USA will do all it can - with big business and the banks - to use the peoples' earning and voting power to continue to prop up the existing system until the methane pours out of Siberia, the methyl hydrates start melting in the deep ocean channels, and runaway Arctic melt is upon us. And yes I know. It is like ice in a gin and tonic. It continues to cool things until it melts completely and then they warm up much faster.
So I guess what I am saying is that despite having written a 300 page tirade in 2007 against neoliberalism and how it more than anything else can explain why it is the world could act together in 1987 to stop CFCs but is now unable to act together to stop CO2 and carried on being hopeful that people would get the message - all the more so after the banking collapse in 2008-9 - I now realise we are in a worse state than ever.
For me Murdoch is key. He has the White House in his craw - Pailin is his own personal candidate and the tea party the invention of Murdoch and his friends. He has No 10 in his craw. Cameron's business is PR. His right hand man, his PR man, is a Murdoch employee from NoW. He has nobbled virtually all the Australian media for decades. He has Fox, Sky, much of the UK press - Torygraph is now run by an ex newscorp man - and as the BBC fights back it fights him on his own turf and any idea of educating people about science has to go out of the window in that case.
So I am now in apocalyptic mode. I see no prospect of change. The end is clear and it is just a question of time - 20 years or 30. Then they will try the geoengineering they say for now they won't because there will be no other option. And it will likely go disastrously wrong. Murdoch by then will have turned to genetic modification and cloned himself or replicated himself with software since he trusts no one with his legacy.
And am I also in denial as Alastair suggests, compromised by my lifestyle. Well yes. I went skiing three days in Scotland last week and I drove me and my kids there in a car. I am doing a research trip and lectures - on consumption, climate change etc - in Australia and Indonesia in March/April. It's research on 'religion and ecology'. I am paid to do it and publish it and someone will be on those planes anyway.... So hell yes. I feel compromised but in the past I have managed to keep a bit more hopeful amidst my compromises, and the larger mix. But seeing Britain taken apart bit by bit and sold off to the lowest bidder while thousands are made forcibly unemployed - seeing Chilean and Russian shock therapy applied here in a way even Thatcher never dared while the BBC, not even the Guardian, really names it like it is - that is what has really got me stuck. And all this from a government that had - and has - one of Teddy Goldsmith's children preaching how green it was going to be before it was elected. The only green thing in this government is the puke on the streets from the violence of those street demos. Watching and hearing that violence on you tube was sick-making even for those of us who were not there.
Through a glass - an Apple Mac screen not a whisky glass - darkly.
Michael
On 13 Jan 2011, at 22:58, P Mac wrote:
> Nothing heard also in Spain.
>
> I think they are afraid we can react, compared with Americans?.
>
> Regards.
>
> 2011/1/13, Alastair McIntosh <[log in to unmask]>:
>> David ... just picked this up ... trapped in my spam box, otherwise I'd have
>> responded in my previous message.
>>
>> I have been struck recently by how quiet this forum has been. It's not that
>> there's not some interesting people on it or that, for a "crisis forum",
>> there's not interesting stuff to discuss.
>>
>> My sense is that a helluva lot of us are stuck as to what we can
>> meaningfully say that doesn't just sound like the virtual equivalent of
>> speaking into the wastepaper bin. I've been working quite a bit recently in
>> writing stuff for a forthcoming Ashgrove book on human ecology about
>> postmodernism, and it does seem to me that during the 20th C we've seen a
>> progressive drift away from grounding, at various levels - both physical and
>> psychological (I would add spiritual, but we can leave that aside for now) -
>> in reality.
>>
>> The people who form and moderate opinion are all living so comfortably,
>> relatively speaking, that they don't want to lift the lid. I had a
>> disturbing exchange recently with a good friend of mine and his wife. He's a
>> serving army general. We expect to disagree, but not as much as you'd think,
>> on war. What really surprised me was how animated he became about climate
>> change, his wife too, playing out all the Christopher Brooker type of
>> arguments and basically, a very intelligent scientifically literate man just
>> not wanting to know.
>>
>> My sense in both this exchange and others similar is that most people can't
>> face the contradiction of their lives. Festinger summed it all up in the
>> 1950s with his study of cults ("When Prophecy Fails") - and how, the more
>> that the cult failed the more the believers believed. You'll be familiar
>> with his whole cognitive dissonance theory that came out of that. My sense
>> is that we have to create space for people to live with their
>> contradictions. The poet Alice Walker says, and I quote from memory, "take
>> the contradictions of your life/ to wrap around you like a shawl/ to parry
>> stones/ and keep you warm."
>>
>> If we can't do this with ourselves and others we force denial, and the
>> problem with denial is that it's worse than hypocrisy because it blind
>> people to truth. At least if you're not blinded to the truth you have the
>> possibility of getting your bearings.
>>
>> I'd better go ... my wife's just back and it's late ... but I'm concerned
>> about this stuckness - in the media, even, I sense, on this forum, and I
>> wonder if you or others have reflection on this, or is there nothing else
>> that can be done but to sit with heads in the sand? Is that where we're at
>> in the human condition?
>>
>> Alastair.
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Discussion list for the Crisis Forum
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David Cromwell
>> Sent: 13 January 2011 18:30
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Record warming isn't news
>>
>> Alastair asks of the BBC:
>>
>> " What is going on in their science journalism?"
>>
>> I'd remove the word "science" and just ask:
>>
>> "What is going on in their journalism?"
>>
>> Please forgive the plug, but see:
>>
>> http://www.medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=93&Ite
>> mid=51
>>
>> And it's not just the BBC. It's the Guardian, the Independent, C4 News and
>> all the other news media we're supposed to regard as the most responsible.
>>
>> David
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Discussion list for the Crisis Forum
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alastair McIntosh
>> Sent: 13 January 2011 18:20
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Record warming isn't news
>>
>> You beat me to it, Bob. I had been watching out and was about to make the
>> same observation. What makes it all the stranger is that early today the BBC
>> had as the lead item on its science website evidence of climate change in
>> rainfall in the English uplands -
>> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12151866 They've since
>> substituted a story about the Sun. Astonishing that they can miss out that
>> the last year was the world's warmest equal, and the world's wettest ever.
>> What is going on in their science journalism?
>>
>> A
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Discussion list for the Crisis Forum
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bob Ward
>> Sent: 13 January 2011 18:06
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Record warming isn't news
>>
>> Apart from a small brief at the bottom of page 25 of today's edition of
>> 'The Guardian', the UK media ignored the announcements yesterday by both
>> NASA and the US National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration that 2010
>> was tied with 2005 as the warmest year on record.
>>
>> But it was picked up by the media in most of the rest of the world, even
>> in the United States, where 49 of the 50 states are currently under
>> snow.
>>
>> So what's up with our media? I've had a whinge about it here:
>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/13/uk-media-ignore-climat
>> e-change
>>
>>
>> Bob Ward
>>
>> Policy and Communications Director
>> Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment
>> London School of Economics and Political Science
>> Houghton Street
>> London WC2A 2AE
>>
>> http://www.lse.ac.uk/grantham
>>
>> Tel. +44 (0) 20 7106 1236
>> Mob. +44 (0) 7811 320346
>>
>>
>> Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic
>> communications disclaimer: http://lse.ac.uk/emailDisclaimer
>>
>
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