the right to fuck the world
From livestock to sea bass to virtually every conceivable transportation, American pugnacity is no exception throughout the first world.
George Monbiot (drastically edited):
This is understood by almost everyone. But has no impact on their behaviour. I challenge friends about their weekend in Rome or holiday in Florida, they respond with a strange, distant smile and avert their eyes. They just want to enjoy themselves. Who am I to spoil their fun? The moral dissonance is deafening.
Treehugger | What I Burned on My Summer Vacation (drastically edited):
a great number of reasonable people are expressing the view, which even a year ago was considered pretty flakey, that cheap and widely available air travel is a big part of this. We have entered the age of the toxic vacation.
George Monbiot (drastically edited):
Despite claims for democratizing cheap travel, 75% of budget airlines are social classes A, B and C. People with second homes abroad average six return flights a year, while people in classes D and E hardly fly; can't afford holidays, responsible for just 6% of flights. Most growth among the wealthiest 10%. But people hit first and hardest by climate change are among the poorest on earth. Already droughts in Ethiopia putting millions at risk of starvation are being linked to warming the Indian Ocean. Some 92 million Bangladeshis could be driven out of their homes this century in order that we can still go shopping in New York.
aviation the world’s fastest growing emissions. burning aircraft fuel is 2.7 times the effect of carbon dioxide alone. water vapour clouds trap heat. if you added the two effects, aviation would exceed the target for entire output by around 134%…excludes international emissions.
hydrogen would replace carbon dioxide with a threefold increase in water vapour. Biofuels would need more arable land than the planet possesses.
Salon | After the oil is gone (drastically edited):
I regard hypercar as a stupid distraction, tends to promote the idea we can continue being a car-dependent society. Clearly we can’t, no matter how good the mileage is.
Suburbia is not going to run on biodiesel. The easy-motoring tourist industry is not going to run on biodiesel, wind power and solar fuel. The point I would repeat is this: We don’t know whether we can fabricate the components for these things absent a fossil-fuel economy.
the Jiminy Cricket syndrome—the idea that when you wish upon a star your dreams come true. This is largely a product of the technological achievements of the last century, which were themselves a product of cheap energy: things like our trip to the moon, combined with the effects of advertising, Hollywood and pop culture.
The very notion of America as melting pot land of opportunity has incented wanton, reckless, and truly profligate breeding because either your kids will make a way for themselves in this land of boundless plenty, or they had to be duds anyway.
We have now become a people who believe that wishing for things makes them happen. Unfortunately, the world just doesn’t work that way. The truth is that no combination of alternative fuels or so-called renewables will allow us to run the U.S.A.—or even a substantial fraction of it—the way that we’re running it now.
It’s really what’s called “an outside context problem.” It’s so far from our normal realm of experience that we are collectively having a hard time processing it. In fact, we can’t process it. Talking about these things tends to induce waves of denial, fear, ridicule.
Compare how women freak out at an uncut male, and about “gay” sex. What we’re dealing with is getting while the getting’s good, sort of how that a lot of women seem to believe that an uncut male can never be prevailed upon and so circumcision must occur. To admit that there’s even a problem, with the oil bubble or cutting up male “babies”, is for many to face their own irrelevance.
George Monbiot (drastically edited):
The government admits “there is no viable alternative currently visible to kerosene as aviation fuel.”
fuel consumption for fast ships and ultra-high-speed trains comparable to planes.
People harbor the belief that the knowledge of how to fuck nature is somehow proof of being able to survive and overcome it (compare pregnancy’s proving parental fitness, along with license to act like they own “their” “child”). The exact opposite is, of course, being (ahem) borne out. But the arrogant, smug, self-righteous presumption that anyone disenfranchised enough to be flooded from their home by an invisible vapor trail off what whisks us anywhere on the globe must be of inferior prospects for the human race is the same capitalist/consumerist/essentialist, supposedly “Darwinian” equivocation giving rise to such an unjust civilization in the first place, and seems the egoist chauvinism animating the stubborn invincibility of the West’s excuse for a conscience. Evidently we learned nothing from 9/11.
Salon | After the oil is gone (drastically edited):
even the educated minority in the U.S. is clueless about its role in geopolitical problems, family had a sign in their yard, “War Is Not the Answer,” and two SUVs in the garage.
there’s such a disconnect…Because we haven’t been challenged for such a long time. The last challenge we experienced was the OPEC oil disturbances of the 1970s, which thundered through our economy and caused a lot of problems. But they were short-lived and the cheap oil fiesta was able to continue because the final great discoveries of the oil age came online in the 1980s, namely the North Sea and the Alaska North Slope. And that allowed us to go back to sleep for another two decades.
Amory Lovins may have some interesting solutions but the problem of overconsumption(/population), its cultural hegemony, and the absolute limits of material accomodation on Earth (and of material generally) remain, to say nothing of fostering individual independence, autonomy, liberty, fulfillment, empowerment, the priority to thrive as human beings, not just comfortably shunt ourselves within society’s and our civilization’s bounds.
The country still gives refugees a home, but leaves them stranded.
there had been a market for handmade goods, but stores full of cheap imports
eventually figured out the American system. borrowed from a friend, opened a storefront, and began importing watchbands from Hong Kong.
And because of democratic, populist, so-called free-market capitalism’s personal rewards and punishments, no one is willing to say that the empire makes no clothes. They’re all preoccupied with the reality-porn payoff of ownership, property, and perceived authority.
License to kill
How long until we wake up from the masochistic hangover scripturally mandating that we “subdue the earth”?
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
Not that there’ll be any once the slaveringly devout Christians like Bush are finished with having their way. It’s just human nature to defy anything predictive, but defying its existence seems to have taken precedence over simply ignoring it and doing what makes sense, secular and pious alike. It has fundamentally (excuse the pun) nothing to do with religion, text, or dogma, but laziness, eliciting wrong predictions in order to launder the results of one’s own will, behavior, and actions. That you would have lived at all defying expectations most people seem to think earns them some kind of medal, some right to life—by whatever means and to whatever ends, and no matter what happens to anyone and anything else. A civilization of children playing peekaboo with the future, chicken with doom, jack-in-the-box with suffering. All this under the auspices of righteously tarring the edifice of their own liberty by their own behavior in the supposed interests of dismantling its trappings’ wholly imaginary authority, all the while documenting the limitations of, their power over, evil. They seem to feel as much darkness as possible to be, well, their calling in life, because defeating a society which contained the most virulent possible assemblage of individuals would have to supposedly require any “victor” be so powerful and right that all will have been worth it, and since it’ll have to come from “somewhere”, beating the hell out of every conceivable “bush” comes out as not just virtuous but humanity’s damned destiny!
The Bush administration’s trying to initiate Armaggedon and bring Christ back to earth. I'm serious.
Compare Seth Godin’s having to declaim sarcasm that global warming’s the wrong name for the gravest-yet threat to any reasonable future for humanity on Earth.
The Smirking Chimp | The Day That Changed Everything Wasn't 9/11 (via TomDispatch, Dugg)(drastically edited):
“It is enough to know that evil, like goodness, exists.” Goodness exists here in the good old USA. How do we know? Because evil itself attacked us and we are so firmly committed to fighting it.
Compare homosexuality being impossible with anyone of the opposite gender. How could anyone entheusiastically fucking a girl be gay? How could anyone’s life revolving around a boy not prove they love him?
As long as we were fighting evil, we had to be the good guys. If we weren’t so good, why would we be so determined to fight terrorism?
Of course, it worked the other way around, too: The only way to prove that we were good was by hunting out and fighting evil.
And how can we do that if we’re not around? And the best way to make sure we will is in numbers. Compare the battle over diet and civilization:
Jared Diamond | The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (drastically edited):
a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter.
How could food matter more than its effects on social consensus in growing it? How could the kind of person someone is matter more than the fact they exist?
Ira Chernus | Ideology Is Key to Corporate Imperialism in Iraq (drastically edited):
liberals dispute with conservatives about the details of the “rebuilding” process. But every word of this mainstream debate reinforces the basic view both sides share: the Iraqis must choose between order, American-style, and the endless misery of chaotic savagery. A dark legacy of backwardnesss, religious obscurantism, and totalitarian terror are coming to an end in Iraq, according to the mainstream ideology. After a transitional phase of chaos, Iraqis will eventually enjoy a shining new order—an endless vista of individual freedom, prosperity, and progress that only our modern Western civilization can offer. Our job is to teach them how to do it.
For them, it’s the system that made America great. And they are as sure as conservatives that the U.S. wants to be a wise loving parent, doing the right thing.
The American corporate empire depends on this whole condescending, paternalistic ideology, viewing the U.S. as the force of order and people of color as inherently disordered. It’s the way white people in America have been talking about “the natives” for the last four centuries. They have never heard anything else. As long as it goes unquestioned, the corporate empire is free to spread as far as its guns and bombs will take it.
Across the mainstream political spectrum, the U.S. is seen as a well-meaning parent challenged by an unruly child. Good Iraqis will behave like good children, we are told.
The Smirking Chimp | The Day That Changed Everything Wasn't 9/11 (via TomDispatch, Dugg)(drastically edited):
each apocalyptic warning of war to the death by the Bush administration only hastens another kind of loss—the loss of the American imperial power they so prize.
Ira Chernus | Ideology Is Key to Corporate Imperialism in Iraq (drastically edited):
A recent cartoon summed up the Iraq war. Next to a toppled Saddam statue stood a sign: “Coming soon on this site, Starbucks.” Corporate America is salivating to “rebuild” Iraq and reap the profits. It is an outrageous scam.
The child-like Iraqis “need a firm hand guiding them. … ‘Shock and awe’ is not just for war-making. It's an everyday tool for running this place.”
The Smirking Chimp | The Day That Changed Everything Wasn't 9/11 (via TomDispatch, Dugg)(drastically edited):
As Cheney put it, “There’s not going to be an end date when we’re going to say, ‘There, it’s all over with.’” And he classically summed things up this way: “Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will become permanent in American life. … I think of it as the new normalcy.”
Meghan Daum | Crowding out a right to choose (drastically edited):
For too many parents and wannabes, raising a child seems to be as much about acquiring the accessories of family life as it is about committing to the fundamental work of raising another human. Whether it’s a teenage mom anticipating her baby shower as though it were the prom or an affluent couple spending nearly $1,000 on a Bugaboo Cameleon stroller, baby love isn’t just the stuff of dreams, it’s the stuff of stuff.
Although no one says it out loud, surely the reason most middle-class people in this country don’t feel accountable for our ballooning population is that we believe we’re duty bound to replace our elite, red-blooded, all-American selves.
Perhaps the way Monbiot’s friends simply avert their eyes when confronted with the consequences of their leisure jet-setting. Compare the idiocy of presuming babies feel no pain because not all make noise or other demonstrable protestation during circumcision (so, they “grow” capacity for sensation between birth and...quite just exactly when?! Does any biological system just “switch on” the ability to feel pain? Or are we to presume that increasing awareness of pleasure through puberty somehow mandates increasing awareness of pain?).
Salon | Are we doomed? (drastically edited):
One frequently hears it said, particularly among those opposed to family planning, “We in the United States should not prevent those people in the Third World from having as many babies as they want.” We have this fantasy that people in the Third World don’t care about population issues and would like to have lots of babies, when in fact my experience, from countries such as Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, Kenya and Tanzania, is that people in the Third World understand the dangers of overpopulation much better than people in the United States. They know about contraceptives but they can’t afford the contraceptives. And the American government is making it difficult for them to get the contraceptives.
Bangladesh is the seventh most populous country in the world, and it’s perhaps the most densely populated, with 170 million people crammed into an area of a few tens of thousands of square miles. But Bangladesh has instituted population planning in a low-key, nonforced way and it has something like halved its population growth rate in recent decades. If Bangladesh can do it, any country can.
The current administration forbids government funding going to family planning efforts elsewhere in the world, and yet overpopulation is disastrous for the countries that are overpopulated. And it’s also bad for the world as a whole.
The same mentality that genocide is fine as long as it’s within national governmental sovereign state bounds, or that genital mutilation is fine if the decision is made within a family, religion, or “professional” situation. We seem to have no trouble wreaking havoc to destroy the world with pollution, yet loath to sew towards quality of life. File under murder punished less than drugs, sex worse than violence, war better than peace, hate loved, encryption a munition, “piracy” worse than child pornography, and ignorance as “innocence” valued over intellect as “power”.
what’s going to replace consumerism will be the recognition that we have to live within our means, that we’re part of the whole world, and that consumerism simply is no longer viable if we want a world that’s going to make sense
The Guardian | No one is willing to address the accelerating growth in the world's population (Dugg) (drastically edited):
even if reducing the world's population is unlikely or distasteful, it is incredible there is not even debate about reversing growth.
fear of misrepresentation, offence or failure are not good enough reasons to ignore half the world's biggest problem: the population effect on climate change.
It is not surprising that green groups and politicians, worried about offending supporters, stay silent.
Meghan Daum (drastically edited):
two-thirds of the world’s growth comes not from birthrates (which are actually down worldwide) but from people living longer. However, despite those reduced birthrates, roughly 10 million people around the world die of hunger every year, and millions of Americans lack affordable healthcare.
Not that those numbers don’t reinforce the need to lower them all, and not that most of the healthcare troubles aren’t entirely caused by our own behavior. Reasons to curb population are, well, abundant. Knowing the details just adds to the incentive and responsibility, but the real key is to break the back of the underdog mentality which believes any pressure against breeding must be tyrannical, purgative oppression.
the right to fuck the world
Monday, March 6, 2006
