06 March 2010

realism abounds politics

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Something must be mentioned. The stock response to me from "activists" when I mention that they are not active, or when I mention that they are dwelling on completely beside-the-point folderol, or when I mention that we do not have decades, generations, to fix this stuff, is that there are political realities that simply cannot be ignored, that whether I like it or not, my idealism is only maniacal because these political realities ARE reality, that "realists" put their noses to the grindstone and never look up until the job is finally done.

This is COMPLETE horseshit.

And they can get away with saying it to me because there is so much agreement on this, a consensus, a veritable infinitude of citations from impressive named sources to bludgeon me with.

THEY ARE WRONG.

Reality does not give a fig for consensus. Oblivious to this fact, the culture wars are purely humans warring over what is most pleasing to CALL reality, to agree is reality, even if there's a huge population that doesn't agree. Once it is settled one way or the other, we can call the losing camp all kinds of names, completely secure in the idea that they are lesser beings for holding outlier views, while continuing to be vexed by how this did not solve the original problems. And once it is seen these original problems were not solved, the pendulum of public opinion is quite likely to devolve into some form of what we would by then have agreed was nothing more than brute ignorance out of which we thought we had already so manfully struggled. Demoralized thus, we will wonder again if wars are human nature, if racism is human nature, if feudalism isn't after all the only way humans can organize themselves... all sorts of things.

It isn't going to occur to us that we continue to have these lethal problems because we NEVER deal with the real... ONLY with establishing a ruling consensus that we find agreeable.

In one of my fabled vacations from legalese I was an innkeeper. I ran a very fancy bed and breakfast inn for an absent owner. He was, alas, not absent enough. He would show up fairly regularly because he had a girlfriend near the inn. This woman was a twit, a fairly attractive one. She thought very highly of herself, confessed to me once that she had fantasies of having a best friend servant who worshipped the ground she walked on. Her ideas about how to make this fancy inn cuter made me want to puke, but she would articulate these ideas to her boyfriend, who wished to be as accommodating as possible. Never mind that his contract with me stated that I was in charge. He would wheedle constantly for gewgahs his girlfriend was dreaming up. I developed such a hatred for her it's a wonder she's still alive.

It struck me some weeks into this roiling hatred that there was no reason on earth that such an idiot should merit this much loathing from me. WHAT was my problem that I was so obsessed by it that I could rarely even speak of something else, and even could rarely ever dream of anything else? I stepped outside myself to have a look.

She was not the problem. He was. It was completely unacceptable to me to be that angry with him because that meant I could no longer work for him. So I'd transferred all that feeling over onto her, a far safer to my happy position object for my ire.

Of course, upon seeing this, it meant I had to quit. It meant I would not keep living in my blissful situation and doing something I really enjoyed, spending a great deal of my time so angry and full of hate that it would peel off my freckles. It meant that I had preëmpted living a quantum of wasted years thinking up ways to call whatever deserved decapitating the owner by some more acceptable name... like calling them his girlfriend's bottomlessly perfidious tricks... or, I'm sure, a whole cosmos of other excuses. Instead, I just left. I realized my idyl would never truly be any such thing and the best I could ever do was to keep repainting it as one, wasting my life and talents on CALLING reality something else.

Take the immigration wars. The right is righteously angry about this huge influx of people and all the social costs, and the left is righteously angry about the right's xenophobia, and generally wanting to treat the starving hordes pouring in something akin to how we treat stray dogs. The ire is always pointed either at the immigrants themselves or at those in the opposing political camp. The ENTIRETY of the problem lies with the plutocrats starving them out at home, and exploiting them here, but NONE of us ever do ANYTHING to fix that. Fucking with those guys can make one VERY sorry. So we pick on someone more our own size. WE DON'T DEAL WITH THE REAL. We figure out what is safer and can seem to address the problem, and then throw all our weight behind THAT... just CALLING it dealing with the immigration problem.

At the image link is a discussion that shows the weakness of the IPCC, the mistakes, the wobbly basis for what is the most solid science we have... and it puts on display this human tendency to shift attention from the actual to a less threatening to our comfort theoretical basis over which to fight to the not actual death. [Ignoring, of course, that there may be no way our deaths from this won't be actual this time....]

It is true that climate science can only give us best guesses. It is true that what we fear might not actually happen, that some mechanism of which we are still ignorant might kick in and save the day. It is true that we don't 100% know, and even truer that the whole thing has been turned into something that cannot be settled lucidly since it is not lucid now.

The big boys, the plutocrats, the apocalyptically powerful do not want to lose the cash cows that would have to be killed in order to act in accord with what our science tells us. What in the hell would make them deny this stuff? If nothing else, it is already abundantly clear that we have turned our planet into a sewer and living things are being harmed by it egregiously. We wonder how in the hell they could ignore this, ignore that their kids will sicken and die from it exactly as ours will. Being as how I know these guys are NOT as stupid as to ignore the threat to their own existence, I'm pretty sure the truth is something akin to my original sardonic take on it... that they plan to obviate the climate catastrophe—which might only be the manmade toxicity catastrophe—by drastic population reduction. Do the math. That keeps them in the driver's seat, makes the world more livable AND leaves them in control. Game. Set. Match.

THEY are dealing with the real.

WE are finding ways to fight them that are safer than fighting them... which... by the way... is Obama's approach to "fighting" them on our behalf... and they heavily approve of this. They also heavily approve all media outlets—INCLUDING BLOGSSNAP THE FUCK OUT OF IT—that keep the polemics and the distractions front and center. You are SO unlikely to wake up from it and point your ire at the true problem, move with the speed and accuracy that is mandatory to save the whole world, as long as you're so heavily engaged in the culture wars and the prurient interest distractions are coming so hard and fast that it is kaleidoscopic.

You are showing them that you will stay safely on your consensual acid trip, sparing yourself the exposure of dispositive action—the kind of stuff likely to get them REALLY mad—and their approach to averting the mass extinction event will be the dispositive action that really IS mandatory to a healthy planet with any people on it.

If you can't tear yourself away from yourself long enough to see this, then their solution truly is the best one open to us, and it will, IN FACT, be a good—albeit extremely unfair, extremely harsh—thing.

Chew on that.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The most perfidious fucks ever born might actually save Planet Earth because you're too self-absorbed, too obsessed with safer polemics, to get it done. They have taken this to the bank, and it has made them fabulously wealthy. I don't care what your EXCUSE is. Even if it's perfect, even if it's the most understandable and even laudable excuse ever conceived, it's an excuse.

And it is insufficient in the face of reality.

In fact, this is SO ultimately irrefutable, this explains how they can all still consider themselves good people while so cruelly treating their brothers and sisters. THEY don't want to think of this global herd of clever but useless consensual hallucination junkies and abjectly destitute progenitors of mud cookie eaters as kin. In a sense, that isn't even nice. If none of us can rise up out of the herd to FORCE kinder solutions, theirs is cosmically, if not karmically, beautiful.

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[Completely ON topic: The straight answer is they are raising their rates so outrageously to force the vote to mandate healthcare insurance. This makes pressure to pass it, even if it's wrong, and it IS, much more intense, AND signals what they can do to any bill that tries to put in any competition or any other impediments to maximum profitability. I mean... duh... and don't think for a moment Obama needs straight answers. He knows them all by heart.]
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6 comments:

  1. Whether anthropogenic or not, I think it's too late to reverse. Governments the world over should start planning for mass re-locations of people from coastal areas. I'd bet the overlords have already quietly begun buying high ground near coastal cities.

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  2. Well a little nation has just said NO to the overlords, Iceland just said stuff it to investors and the IMF! My new heroes for sure and wish the citizens of the world will take it upon themselves and follow suit. Tell the banksters of the world take it and shove it. I can dream can’t I?
    jo6pac

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  3. Well, they better have figured a way to reverse the utter unacceptability of the contents of the oceans their property will shortly front or they will not like the smell of stagnant seas very much....

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  4. I'll dream with you Jo. ICELAND ROCKS!

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  5. They're not buying it for a place to live. Rents will rise with the tides.

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  6. Well, either way they won't like it. And I don't think all they are planning to do about this is get more rent money. That assumes they are all suicidal and sociopaths... on TOP of stupid. I think it's much more realistic to assume they are quite intelligent for the most part, and feel the requisite emissions reductions are more profitably achieved by massively reducing the global population. The alternative is to cede their carbon-based cash cows, to either risk huge investments in energy alternatives that may or may not make them the same trillions, or let others do it, and neither of those alternatives is as solid as the first. If we were only two billion instead of nearly seven billion, all our current technologies would be more than sufficient and they would still be at the very top of the heap, still be the 1%... in a MUCH happier world.

    They don't really need to even conspire to accomplish this, as long as there are enough people like Henry Kissinger around to see to it that the planet's best interests are served. Go back and listen to Aaron Russo on his conversations with Nicholas Rockefeller and that gives a flavor of how they think....

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