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Very interesting point. A couple days ago, Thiel debated one of the earliest Occupy members, David Graeber. On that very subject you mention. (http://www.thebaf

Very interesting point. A couple days ago, Thiel debated one of the earliest Occupy members, David Graeber. On that very subject you mention. (http://www.thebaffler.com/live?u=social http://www.thebaffler.com/live?u=social) The radical left (like Graeber and Chomsky) points out one factor since the 70's is the financialization of the economy. (Financial institutions prefer short-term profits to long-term development.) Also, there's the rise of "neoliberalism", which Graeber argues prefers to destroy capitalism just to achieve one success: getting people to believe there's no alternative to capitalism. If all that capitalist propaganda's been successful in beating imagination out of people, that they can do far better than the status quo, maybe that explains why people are so depoliticized. Fewer people have passionate visions for a better world.

api 12y ago
I'm gonna have to check that one out. I'm a big fan of Thiel even when I don't agree with him (e.g. on politics to some extent) -- he's one of those people who makes you think even when you think he's wrong. Getting back to the pragmatic, I think environmentalism is an exception among the movements listed above. I'm not saying it has no good points -- it has many good points. Yet it's a movement that seems to embody the problem I'm talking about in a number of ways. Not coincidentally IMHO it came of age as a movement in the 70s. (Maybe we should just strike all thought from the 70s from the intellectual record and make the calendar go 1969, 1980, 1981...?) Case in point: Nobody can seem to explain to me how simultaneously ditching fossil fuels and nuclear power without replacements is going to do anything other than impoverish the majority of humanity. I'm all for renewable energy, but it's not ready yet and won't be until the storage problem is well and truly solved. If you talk to greens on this issue you get denial or cognitive dissonance. If you dig deeper, I personally have found that you run into what seems to be a quiet belief that losing most of humanity would be a good thing... especially if the loss occurred mostly among the poor. I'm not saying all greens hold this view, but it's in the milieu. Don't believe me? Head over to Reddit and read the comments to any article about the Ebola epidemic. I've also personally heard greens express this view verbally to me, like one anti-vaccination dude who told me that "there's too many people anyway" implying that we need more disease. He said that people with "a strong immune system and good nutrition" don't need vaccines -- in other words the wealthy and the genetic ubermenschen. A century ago that would have been considered a radical right wing social Darwinist opinion and would have put you in the same camp as all the budding European fascists obsessed with the arguments of Oswald Spengler. Yet today it's a "left wing" viewpoint. Blech. What bullshit. IMHO there is no left today. There are reactionaries of the right and reactionaries of the "new left." Among the greens who don't hold this view, you nevertheless get total cognitive blank-out on this issue. Either they remain committed to the idea that we could just swap out solar and wind for fossil fuels and nuclear despite the copious math that says otherwise, or they just flat out refuse to think about it in any depth. You also see a lot of marketing of poverty as a good thing. "Back to nature," some forms of minimalism, permaculture which was called land-serfdom in the 1500s, etc. These things are poverty, folks, and you're not going to like it once the novelty of it wears off. I'm very much for solar and wind energy-- I just think there's a long hard R&D slog between now and dirt cheap gigawatt-hour-scale energy storage. Meanwhile we need to get off fossil fuels yesterday. I can't help but at least suspect that the movement is co-opted and manipulated by the fossil fuel industry behind the scenes with the goal of using green ideology to prevent the emergence of any real competition. I also can't help but see the Malthusian elements of green ideology as a pressure valve permitting the release of latent economic/cultural elitism and racism that are no longer politically correct to state explicitly and openly. It's a perfect example of the kind of large scale systematic deception by social movement that I'm talking about -- the actual goals are not the stated goals and are hidden behind ideological and symbolic blinds.
- pmoriarty 12y ago
  "I'm very much for solar and wind energy-- I just think there's a long hard R&D slog between now and dirt cheap gigawatt-hour-scale energy storage." You might be interested in reading "Solar is Ready Now"[1] ("now" being 2011) [1] - http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/06/09/241120/solar-is-ready-now-%E2%80%9Cferocious-cost-reductions-make-solar-pv-competitive/ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/06/09/241120/solar-is-...

api 12y ago

I'm gonna have to check that one out. I'm a big fan of Thiel even when I don't agree with him (e.g. on politics to some extent) -- he's one of those people who makes you think even when you think he's wrong. Getting back to the pragmatic, I think environmentalism is an exception among the movements listed above. I'm not saying it has no good points -- it has many good points. Yet it's a movement that seems to embody the problem I'm talking about in a number of ways. Not coincidentally IMHO it came of age as a movement in the 70s. (Maybe we should just strike all thought from the 70s from the intellectual record and make the calendar go 1969, 1980, 1981...?) Case in point: Nobody can seem to explain to me how simultaneously ditching fossil fuels and nuclear power without replacements is going to do anything other than impoverish the majority of humanity. I'm all for renewable energy, but it's not ready yet and won't be until the storage problem is well and truly solved. If you talk to greens on this issue you get denial or cognitive dissonance. If you dig deeper, I personally have found that you run into what seems to be a quiet belief that losing most of humanity would be a good thing... especially if the loss occurred mostly among the poor. I'm not saying all greens hold this view, but it's in the milieu. Don't believe me? Head over to Reddit and read the comments to any article about the Ebola epidemic. I've also personally heard greens express this view verbally to me, like one anti-vaccination dude who told me that "there's too many people anyway" implying that we need more disease. He said that people with "a strong immune system and good nutrition" don't need vaccines -- in other words the wealthy and the genetic ubermenschen. A century ago that would have been considered a radical right wing social Darwinist opinion and would have put you in the same camp as all the budding European fascists obsessed with the arguments of Oswald Spengler. Yet today it's a "left wing" viewpoint. Blech. What bullshit. IMHO there is no left today. There are reactionaries of the right and reactionaries of the "new left." Among the greens who don't hold this view, you nevertheless get total cognitive blank-out on this issue. Either they remain committed to the idea that we could just swap out solar and wind for fossil fuels and nuclear despite the copious math that says otherwise, or they just flat out refuse to think about it in any depth. You also see a lot of marketing of poverty as a good thing. "Back to nature," some forms of minimalism, permaculture which was called land-serfdom in the 1500s, etc. These things are poverty, folks, and you're not going to like it once the novelty of it wears off. I'm very much for solar and wind energy-- I just think there's a long hard R&D slog between now and dirt cheap gigawatt-hour-scale energy storage. Meanwhile we need to get off fossil fuels yesterday. I can't help but at least suspect that the movement is co-opted and manipulated by the fossil fuel industry behind the scenes with the goal of using green ideology to prevent the emergence of any real competition. I also can't help but see the Malthusian elements of green ideology as a pressure valve permitting the release of latent economic/cultural elitism and racism that are no longer politically correct to state explicitly and openly. It's a perfect example of the kind of large scale systematic deception by social movement that I'm talking about -- the actual goals are not the stated goals and are hidden behind ideological and symbolic blinds.

pmoriarty 12y ago
"I'm very much for solar and wind energy-- I just think there's a long hard R&D slog between now and dirt cheap gigawatt-hour-scale energy storage." You might be interested in reading "Solar is Ready Now"[1] ("now" being 2011) [1] - http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/06/09/241120/solar-is-ready-now-%E2%80%9Cferocious-cost-reductions-make-solar-pv-competitive/ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/06/09/241120/solar-is-...