[Paulo1]

Ghung,

I think you summed it up bang on with your analyisis. It sure was a fun read, though. I think he just gets going and gets carried away. If he wrote it a month ago, and let it perk awhile he might tone it down to more realistic levels. Who knows, the 'Market' may actually hit 6,000 this year?

[Loki]

ISIS/IS/ISIL.... whatever,, isn't an army; it's not just a group of militants or terrorists, clearly not what you seem to reduce it to.

I didn't "reduce" it to anything, I simply stated ISIS has likely reached its peak.

Arab spring, on steroids.

Doubt it. If they did away with the massacres, beheadings, rapes, etc. they might have a leg to stand on. But they've chosen medieval savagery instead. They will wear out their welcome right quick.

[KaiserJeep]

I think Kunstler said everything important he had to say in The Long Emergency. It's a pretty fair single volume summary of all the main doomer themes. His later books are mental masturbation, I gave up on them.

This pattern is all to common with authors. Most seem to have from one to two great books in them, all subsequent efforts are attempts to recoup lost glory.

My opinion about the best author hasn't changed since childhood: Samuel Langhorne Clemens. His works offer both entertainment and an education about the nature of mankind.

[Lore]

Kunstler has the tune right, just the beat wrong. I've noticed though that this year he has moderated his hard crash scenario After all, as he coined it, it is The Long Emergency.

[ROCKMAN]

Ghung/Loki – I’m not going to make a guess about the future of ISIS. But I think the point is valid: they are more an armed and proactive ideology…not a nation or an army per se. Thus no defined boundaries. Which could hinder their future or, conversely, aid their expansion. How bad could ISIS get to be? Again I won’t predict but I think back to another bloody ideology that spanned just a very small section of the world compared to the potential theater of operations for ISIS: Cambodia. Some unsettling similarities IMHO with the potential situations in the ME:

By 1962, Pol Pot had become leader of the Cambodian Communist Party. He formed an armed resistance movement that became known as the Khmer Rouge. From 1969 until 1973, the U.S. intermittently bombed North Vietnamese sanctuaries in eastern Cambodia, killing up to 150,000 Cambodian peasants. As a result, peasants fled the countryside by the hundreds of thousands and settled in Cambodia's capital city, Phnom Penh. All of these events resulted in economic and military destabilization in Cambodia and a surge of popular support for Pol Pot.

By 1975, the U.S. had withdrawn its troops from Vietnam. Cambodia's government, plagued by corruption and incompetence, also lost its American military support. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army, consisting of teenage peasant guerrillas, marched into Phnom Penh and on April 17 effectively seized control of Cambodia.

Once in power, Pol Pot began a radical experiment to create an agrarian utopia inspired in part by Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution which he had witnessed first-hand during a visit to Communist China. Ethnic groups were attacked including the three largest minorities; the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cham Muslims, along with twenty other smaller groups. In 1978, Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia seeking to end Khmer Rouge border attacks. On January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh fell and Pol Pot was deposed. The Vietnamese then installed a puppet government consisting of Khmer Rouge defectors.

Bottom line: this relatively small Cambodian band of isolated “revolutionaries”, as ISIS also claims to be, was responsible for approx. 2 MILLION DEATHS and many years of political instability. I offered that long story about how some “revolutionary movements” can develop to a rather large scale than anticipated. Also think Cuba and East Germany. But those events where restricted to defined geographic limits. It remains to be seen if ISIS can export its efforts to a significant degree outside of its current theater of operations.

[Loki]

I think Kunstler said everything important he had to say in The Long Emergency. It's a pretty fair single volume summary of all the main doomer themes. His later books are mental masturbation, I gave up on them.

His World Made By Hand novels are quite good. He's an excellent writer, and the fiction form moderates his sometimes excessive rhetoric.

[KaiserJeep]

I'll make up my own mind, I just bought an E-copy of World Made By Hand. I like apocalyptic SF. I have only read his doomer non-fiction.

[Loki]

Kunstler is much more than another entertaining scifi apocolypse author. His first important book was the "Geography of Nowhere" a seminal treatise on the New Urbanism, the prescient architectural/urban design movement for livable cities.

No shit. Tell me more

"excessive rhetoric" my ass. You whiners are all pikers compared to Kunstler. He has always walked the walk. Lived in big cities (energy-efficient) small towns (walkable, close to agriculture) and now the country (his doomstead). Kunstler has spent his life fighting for a sustainable culture. Even resorting to crappy scifi to get through our thick skulls. He failed. So sad.

LOL, whatever dude. Get a grip. More importantly, get over yourself. Would you like to have a "who's more sustainable" dick measuring contest?

If you bothered to listen to Kunstler's podcasts, you'd know he prefers writing fiction over non-fiction. He only resorted to the latter to make living.

And it's hardly "crappy scifi." I hardly ever read fiction, but I really enjoyed his World Made By Hand novels. As I said, he's an excellent writer. A yarn spinner, as he would say. And yes, yarn spinning often requires "excessive rhetoric." This bleeds over into his non-fiction, particularly his blog.

[ennui2]

Kunstler is kind of ideal for the "online hater" era. He's kind of the doomer equivalent of Denis Leary. In other words, it's a schtick. Performance-art. This is how he makes a living. If the world doesn't fit his paradigm, he will reframe it to make it look like it does. And he appeals to others who "hate" the same things he does, namely suburbia. Orlov does the same thing. he "hates" the west and so he has fans who get off on "hating" together by predicting the inevitable hard crash that the US so sorely "deserves". Orlov is kind of the Yakov Smirnov to Kunstler's Denis Leary. Anyone who keys their vision of the future on their schtick is looking to the wrong place. Even Greer follows this paradigm when he veers off into mocking the powers that be. Anytime someone appears a little too eager to flog chosen target again and again, you have to wonder whether this is clouding their objectivity.

[ralfy]

Similar warnings of crashes have been given by military, banking, insurance, and other organizations, and many were made after 2005.

[ennui2]

OK. Let's check back later and see if Kunstler's predictions ring true.

As far as I'm concerned, blogging about some short-term catastrophic event is simply a way to keep eyeballs coming back. Glenn Beck was doing it on Fox News. This isn't really any different. Just because doomers like what Kunstler's saying doesn't mean it's going to pan out his way, and there have been too many bad calls in doomer-circles for anybody to fixate on any one of them anymore.

[Sixstrings]

Orlov does the same thing. he "hates" the west and so he has fans who get off on "hating" together by predicting the inevitable hard crash that the US so sorely "deserves". Orlov is kind of the Yakov Smirnov to Kunstler's Denis Leary.

Right, right. This is why I argue on behalf of the mainstream, online "RT" / "Orlov" / "noam chomsky" rhetoric has just gone too far.

I really think it's pernicious. People have forgotten real values that actually matter, if one thinks everything is a sham or truther conspiracy then that makes one vulnerable.

It's really like anarchism; I think that's what we've got too much of lately, it's like anarchism. Look at ISIS -- they are really anarchist. Look at Russian propaganda and RT -- it's just tearing down the West while ignoring critical issues about Russia, those don't get talked about, now do they.

It's Noam Chomsky -- an actual anarchist, like, he really was an anarchist years ago. It's the Naomi Klines, and all those books people have said I should read, give me a break.

My favorite quote: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

It's not really a conspiracy, people.

As for kunstler, I looked at the linked article and saw this line:

This is simply the power of wishful thinking on display. No one — with the exception of a few “doomer” cranks — wants to believe that industrial civilization is in trouble deep.

And saw a few more lines like that, nothing is grabbing me to read the thing. When was it written, 2008?

I have liked a lot of Kunstler's critical viewpoints in the past, but, there's just too much of that now and it's too much.

[ralfy]

I don't see the point in waiting to see what will happen, especially given mainstream arguments made before 2008 that there would be no crash, and reports of "recovery" during the next few years.

[Pops]

Orlov is kind of the Yakov Smirnov to Kunstler's Denis Leary.

LOL, I like it.

Anyone who keys their vision of the future on their schtick is looking to the wrong place.

Good.

That is the thing, you gotta keep your eye moving. Which reminds me, we think our eyes can focus on everything in our field of vision at once but they can't. What they can do is refocus really fast. The thing about focusing on a single narrative, Kunstler say, is that you loose sight of the bigger picture.

Which is the reason we try to let most everyone post up their own version of reality here.

[Tanada]

Lest you wonder, not only did I not vote for Mr. Trump (or Hillary), but I relished heaping opprobrium on him during the election campaign. Just so you know, I’m not advocating for him, but I’m alarmed that the Deep State (the White House + the Intel Agency gang) now appears to be trying to hack the electoral college vote against him.

The headline deployed everywhere last week, “Russia Hacks Election,” was designed by the Deep State players to deviously lead the broadly dim public to think that Russia somehow interfered with the balloting process, which was not possible since voting machines are not hooked up to the internet. And then it was repeated endlessly by the cable news networks and the newspapers, under the number one rule of propaganda: that if you repeat something often enough, the public will swallow it.

This dishonest meme was also designed to distract the public from the substance of the emails disclosed by WikiLeaks — namely, the scamming and trickery of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and the influence-peddling of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, which had her flirting with indictment last summer, and only reinforced her already-established public image as an unscrupulous person.

The New York Times especially worked the “Russia Hacks Election” story to a fare-the-well, saying in its Sunday edition:

The Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that Moscow put its thumb on the scale for Mr. Trump through the release of hacked Democratic emails, which provided fodder for many of the most pernicious false attacks on Mrs. Clinton on social media.

False attacks? What, that Hillary’s cronies put the DNC’s “thumb on the scale” against Bernie Sanders? That Donna Brazille gave Hillary debate questions beforehand? That as Secretary of State Hillary gave more face-time to foreign supplicants based on their contributions to the Clinton Foundation, and expedited arms deals for especially big givers? That she collected millions in speaking fees for sucking up to Too-Big-To-Fail bankers? That The Times and The WashPo and CNN reporters were taking direction from Hillary’s PR operatives?

Consider, too, how the Deep State “Russia Hacks Election” meme was ramped up to top volume coincidentally the week before the electoral college vote, as a last-ditch effort was launched by the old-line media, the diehard Hillary partisans, and a bunch of Hollywood celebrities, to persuade electoral college delegates to switch their votes to deprive Trump of his election victory.

President Obama did his bit to amplify the message by coloring Russian President Vladimir Putin as being behind the so-called hacking because “not much happens in Russia without, you know, Vladimir Putin,” just like not much happened in old Puritan New England without the involvement of Old Scratch. So now we have an up-to-date Devil figure to stir the paranoid imaginations of an already divided and perturbed public.

Hillary and her supporters have vehemently asserted that “seventeen intelligence agencies” agree with the assessment that Russia hacked the election. It might be greater news to the American people to hear that there actually are seventeen such agencies out there. Perhaps Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Obama might explain exactly what they are beyond the CIA, the FBI, the DIA, the NSA, and DHS. Personally, I feel less secure knowing that there are so many additional surveillance services sifting through everybody’s digital debris trail.

There’s been some chagrin among more prudent observers that neither the various Intel gang chiefs, including James Clapper, overall Director of National Intelligence, nor the White House have provided a shred of evidence that WikiLeaks got the Hillary emails from the Russians. One might even suppose that we discovered the hack by hacking the Russians, perhaps even Mr. Putin’s personal iPhone — but, wait a minute… we don’t intrude on other nations’ business. We don’t use the internet to spy (!) on anybody.

It will be interesting to see how Mr. Trump gets along with the Intel gang when (and if) he actually makes it into the oval office. It’s nice to think that he will fire a bunch of them, and then fire a bunch more, and maybe take a good hard look at these seventeen security and surveillance agencies and maybe shut a few of them down. In the meantime, their activity begins to look like the attempted coup d’état I warned about a few months ago.

Forgive me for changing the subject so briskly, but there was another front page piece in The New York Times on Sunday that kind of said it all about where that Old Gray Lady’s collective head is at these days. Behold this quote from the story What Women Really Think of Men:

As the country prepares to revert to white male rule, our common condition for all but eight of the last 240 years, we should think harder about why we assume so little of men, including ones we may be married to. Too many men don’t prove those expectations wrong, and are rewarded anyway with prizes like the presidency.

http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/ ... e-blues-2/

[Newfie]

The more I watch the Presidents reaction to Trumps win the more I'm glad he did. Something is rotten in DC. The Syria involvement, breaking the nuclear treaty, etc.

I think my liberal friends have been dupped.