Ill get my coat!

[Silas]

I stumbled upon this very recent batch of interviews and found it very Very sobering stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUmwy0VT ... ature=fvwp

But the following thread gets a bit side tracked

[JavaScriptDonkey]

I got 30 seconds in before it was blindingly apparent that this video was only going to present one side of a multifaceted problem.

I figure that's about 20 minutes saved then

[UndercoverElephant]

I got 30 seconds in before it was blindingly apparent that this video was only going to present one side of a multifaceted problem.

What a surprise. So you listen to the first part of the introduction and that was enough to make "blindingly apparent" to you that the whole video was going to be one-dimensional.

There is a repeating pattern here, I think. As soon as somebody exposes you to information you don't want to hear, you stop listening. You and about 6 billion other humans.

[Silas]

[UndercoverElephant]

I got 30 seconds in before it was blindingly apparent that this video was only going to present one side of a multifaceted problem.

I figure that's about 20 minutes saved then

Ok You lost me, its a synopsis of interviews of 'Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, Thom Hartman, Richard Heinberg, Jim Howard Kunstler, Dimitry Orlov, Jean Laharrere, Nicole Foss and Greg Palast linked to the full interviews that comment on the spectrom of Peak oil, Economic collapse, and climate change, How is that not multifacited enough?

No climate change and peak oil deniers, of course...

[UndercoverElephant]

I dont normally start topics, but I stumbled upon this very recent batch of interviews and found it very Very sobering stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUmwy0VT ... ature=fvwp

World government can do nothing for fear of tripping up the markets and the solid belief (faith) in (blind shortermist) economic growth...so it's dont worry we have nuclear wind and solar...we will be fine.

I do try to be optimistic and have faith in the system, its ingrained it's the only world all of us alive now have ever known, power at the flick of a switch, money in the bank, the everyday world, we take it for granted any notion that it will erode away is the stuff of nightmare.

When will we wake up?...Already too late probably!

I'm not sure people will ever really wake up. Most of them will just get angry and confused.

What came through most clearly to me when listening to that excellent selection of views was that in order to grasp the true scale of the problems the human race is currently facing it is absolutely necessary to see bigger pictures. You have to think holistically. It's no good just understanding that oil production is going to decline. You also have to understand how this relates to the other ecological problems (and there are lots of them), to politics and economics, human psychology and the state of our societies, and also the history of human civilisations - how they rise and why they collapse. The more integrated and comprehensive a person's knowledge about these things becomes, the bleaker becomes the prognosis.

But...even when the collapse is in progress - when oil production is in free fall, economic chaos has become the new normal and large parts of Africa have effectively disappeared from the map - there is no reason to expect that a large proportion of the population are suddenly going to get a grasp of the interplay between ecology, peak oil, politics, economics and all the rest of it. They will be too busy trying to survive and they will do what humans always do in situations like this, which is find somebody to blame. Top of the list will be bankers and politicians, both of whom deserve quite a lot of blame. But even if we hang all the bankers and replace all the politicians, it won't make any real difference to where we are headed, because it is already too late and most of the problems don't have any ethically/politically-acceptable solutions anyway.

Why try to be optimistic? What's the point? The only sort of optimism I can manage is the hope that Gaia will fight back and the main burst of human dieoff will be swift.

[biffvernon]

I dont normally start topics, but I stumbled upon this very recent batch of interviews and found it very Very sobering stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUmwy0VT ... ature=fvwp

Excellent stuff. Thanks. (Just ignore JSD. He doesn't get it.)

[PS_RalphW]

, because it is already too late and most of the problems don't have any ethically/politically-acceptable solutions anyway.
.[/quote]

When there are no ethically acceptiible solutions to a problem, people change their ethics, usually for the worse.

In ancient Rome, watching people torn limb from limb was wildly popular public entertainment.

When food becomes expensive, life will be cheap.

[UndercoverElephant]

...because it is already too late and most of the problems don't have any ethically/politically-acceptable solutions anyway.
.

When there are no ethically acceptiible solutions to a problem, people change their ethics, usually for the worse.

Indeed. Sooner or later people will be forced to choose between options where right now they'd only agree to "none of the above." This was stated right at the start of the film - almost nobody is discussing the real issues. Instead, we are having big debates about how best to get the economy growing or whether or not to build a new runway at Heathrow because we're worried about other European airports taking over as the busiest airport in the world. Almost nobody is even asking the really difficult questions - the ones which will really test our ethics when we are eventually forced to answer them.

[Ludwig]

The ethical question is very disturbing. Would I kill a person weaker than me in order to survive?

I've said this before, but what depresses me most is not so much the prospect of dying, as the fact that while the going was good, my life was so shit.

[UndercoverElephant]

RE: Sooner or later people will be forced to choose between options where right now they'd only agree to "none of the above."

Look at Greece right now. The people are revolting, but the only thing they can say is "No more austerity!" If you ask them what they actually want their government to do about the situation then they don't know. They don't want the austerity plan, but if they understand the consequences of a default and a departure from the Euro then they don't want that either. What they want is for their standard of living to be preserved, and that's one thing they simply can't have.

No sign of any great "waking up."

[UndercoverElephant]

I've said this before, but what depresses me most is not so much the prospect of dying, as the fact that while the going was good, my life was so shit.

You have to try to see the funny side of it, Ludwig. Yes, it is unbelievably depressing and rather lonely if you've got a clear picture of what is likely to happen in the coming years, but don't you at times look at it all and just laugh at sheer insanity of the thing?

Take this release of 60m barrels of strategic reserves. What is actually happening here? Looks to me like the US is dipping into a reserve of oil which is supposed to be for serious national emergencies, but what for? So Americans can afford to go out and spend money at monster truck rallies in order to boost the economy a bit, that's what for. Surely you can see there is a funny side to this. It's so unbelievably stupid that it could have been lifted from the plot of a Monty Python film.

[Ludwig]

When there are no ethically acceptiible solutions to a problem, people change their ethics, usually for the worse.

In ancient Rome, watching people torn limb from limb was wildly popular public entertainment.

When food becomes expensive, life will be cheap.

I wonder if anyone here has read about the Ik people of Uganda? -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ik_people

Owing to political factors, they found themselves severely resource-constrained, and their society degenerated to the point of complete atomisation: no co-operation (they became every-man-for-himself foragers), no laughter, no trust, no love. Between anyone, including sexual partners and parents and children. Children were abandoned as soon as they had a hope of fending for themselves.

Any kind of misfortune or injury was laughed at.

This seems to be a feature of collapsed societies - the few survivors of the Easter Island disaster were reported by Westerners to have a similar depressed, uncooperative, mistrustful attitude.

The cost of survival may be the abandonment of every value and activity that makes life remotely pleasant.

I've got that Friday feeling... Another week nearer collapse.

[DominicJ]

Not unusual

Hansel and Gretel, ie, children taken into the woods and left to die, has its basis in reality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315-1317

You occaisionaly pick up hints from diaries of concentration camp survivors or bad PoW camps, it doesnt take long for "good" people to steal food from the weak, injured or sick.

[emordnilap]

what depresses me most is not so much the prospect of dying, as the fact that while the going was good, my life was so shit.

You're in the wrong business.



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