[evilgenius]

Good job pointing Greer's latest post out Mos. I read it and recognized not only many of the people here, but many I know in my personal life as well. The self-indulgent nihilism Greer refers to is in many ways what happens when a society decides that it is not to blame for its own failures. I get tired of telling people that they were grown ups and should not have borrowed money they could not pay back. I get tired of telling them that if the Federal Reserve disbanded tomorrow they would all go to their ATMs the next day expecting to get money out and not find anything there.

[mos6507]

'Peak oil doomers are just dumb conspiracy nuts who would rather externalize our fears rather than locate them within our own social milieu.' Your opinion. Where is the proof?

I'm not saying ALL peak oil doomers are dumb conspiracy nuts. I think that a lot of dumb conspiracy nuts latch onto peak oil as a way to peddle their CTs (witness the 911 thread here that is years old and hundreds of pages long, let alone the defunct out of this world forum), and a lot of peak oilers who brush up against this crap wind up eventually wind up going down the rabbit hole. I'm actually having problems with my sister on this front lately, the osmosis effect of her becoming exposed to all this loony baggage that accompanies talk of limits to growth. This feeds into my "it's all about trust" post, because it's the common thread in all this. Once you lose trust in the dominant paradigm, you become kind of adrift on the sea not knowing what to believe in, and so your biases and the influence of whatever is the most compelling propaganda around you takes over. There are clear psychological drivers to going in that direction. The reason this is so important is that the entire doomer manifesto presumes to be about handing out red pills to people who are supposedly ignorant of "the truth". So we better damn well have a good handle on what that truth is, otherwise we're just hypocrites who are exchanging one lie with another. It's just that the new lie somehow comforts us better than the old, because it neatly classifies the world as a series of black hats and white hats, and obviously we're all in the white-hat category even if we eat our 3,000 mile salads, shop at wal-mart, drive a monster truck, or vote for the Tea Party global warming deniers. None of that matters because, you know, the Fed is evil and Obama bowed before the Saudi king. Political theater, whether of the partisan kind, or the libertarian/revolutionary kind, is just another sideshow distraction from what ultimately needs to be a universal cultural shift.

I am impressed by political analysis here. I find it curious, decisive, and quite nuanced.

What message board have you been reading all this time? ...because I'd love to go there.

whatever.

If "whatever" is the best you can do, why don't you just not respond?

For all your chest-beating about your ecological credentials, you waste a lot of bandwidth spewing useless posts. A long time ago you said you were only here for "sh*ts and giggles". If that's the case, just cop to it instead of trying to convince us to take your input seriously.

all the work you went to extract Greer's sub-text is pointless and only serves to highlight you own paranoia.

It isn't a sub-text. It's his main thesis. If you don't like it, respond to it instead of trying to attack the messenger.

You are so locked into your own narrative. It's fanatical the way you brush aside any sort of devil's advocacy. There's no debating with you because every response you make is dismissive. I brought Greer's thread here because nobody can qualify him as an idiot. I don't always agree with him, and I certainly think the timeline for catabolic collapse is more compressed than his, but one thing he's pretty good at is sizing up other doomers and causing them to second guess their own convictions. That's something everyone should do if they presume to be after "The truth". An unexamined life isn't worth living.

[Loki]

I don't deny most Americans want BAU to continue. Clearly this is the case.

What I find objectionable about your post Mos is the dismissive attitude towards the power elite (to use C. Wright Mill's term). The wealthiest Americans have been waging open class warfare on the middle class and poor since at least Reagan. And they've been winning, big time. The data on wealth distribution in this country in the past 30+ years is clear on this.

I reject the notion that there is no power elite, and that they aren't using the political system to advance their interests. I also reject the notion that the political and economic system that we have is a pure reflection of what the masses want. It's patently absurd. Did the masses clamor for war in Libya? Did they march en masse demanding “free trade” agreements with Colombia? Why is that most Americans want the rich to be taxed more, yet Obama et al. are slashing their taxes? Where was the mass movement demanding that we bail out Wall Street? The examples are endless.

As for Greer, I find his concept of catabolic collapse to be far more insightful and interesting than the rather pedestrian political stuff you quoted here.

[Keith_McClary]

Here are the key phrases that Greer uses which are exactly what I've been trying to say all this time:

...nearly all the people who accept the notions I have in mind are convinced that they’re rebelling against conformity by conforming to a belief system shared by nearly everybody else in the country.

Yet another thread preaching to everyone (except you, of course) about groupthink?

I ask you for the 4th time, how you "KNOW" about Qaddafi's fighter jets strafing peaceful demonstrators?

Groupthink is not caring where your "facts" originate.

[nobodypanic]

obviously greer is completely out of his area of competency when dealing with this aspect of the socio-political register.

it wouldn't be the first time an expert in one field made a fool out of himself in another. it happens to all of us.

[Ibon]

I acknowledge that it might be valuable to understand the psychological inner workings of the doomer mind. On the other hand it is of little consequence to understand this because this subset of humanity is lacking any real influence on the landscape when you put them side by side with the vast population of emerging consumers and the still quite resilient status quo.

There is not a very fine line between self examination that looks critically at ones motives and over examination that is more indulgence than enlightening.

I follow Greer's writing which is often insightful and just as often tediously examining the inner workings of the inconsequential. Like a while back when he went to great lengths examining the subtle nuanced differences between his Green Wizardry and the Transition Town movement.

Splitting hairs to what end?

All this dissection leads to insights that ultimately serve what purpose?

What is presented as deep insightful analysis of all the different subsets of the "peak oil" or "transition" or "green wizardry" or whatever you want to call it ironically at the end of the day often reveals itself as narcissism.

Pointless sand box narcissism.

[careinke]

Pointless sand box narcissism.

+1

[Plantagenet]

Pointless sand box narcissism.

+1

++1 yup

+++1.

[sparky]

.
Not a bad reflexion on conventional attitudes even amongst a radical group

For sure some of the bloggers here can be colorful
they can be ignorant
they can be obsessive
they can be stereotyped
they can be ill mannered
but that's quite OK ,
after all one get the politicians and blogs one deserve

I'll go looking for ashes and sackcloth now and read some Pat Buchanan

[mos6507]

Pointless sand box narcissism.

What doesn't qualify as sand box narcissism? The fact of the matter is that we're still in the battle-of-ideas phase and nowhere is that more pronounced than within doomers themselves. If we can't even find common ground here, how can we ever hope to actually accomplish anything meaningful?

You can't just pretend these differences don't exist or that they don't matter. They matter a great deal in people formulating some sort of plan. If that plan amounts to nothing more than storming Washington with knives and pitch-forks, I'd argue we're never going to get anywhere.

[mos6507]

obviously greer is completely out of his area of competency when dealing with this aspect of the socio-political register.

Then why don't you go over there and challenge him instead of taking potshots from afar? He loves to respond to the comments there.

[sparky]

.
This site is pretty much open to anyone ,some , a small minority to be sure ,even care about peak oil

the gamut of political and social outlooks go from barely dented Bolsheviks,
hard Republicans ,back to the farm survivalists ,libertarian left and right handed , individualist , white supremacists , rubberneckers , to urban tree huggers

That's cool , but any action requite a common purpose and vision ,
This site is to discuss and inform on Peak Oil , this is now an accepted fact , with casual references in the mainstream media ,
the only substantial disagreement is about the timing and the term of reference of what "Oil" is

[mos6507]

I don't even remember what Greer's message was in that post (and I did read the entire painful thing along with the comments) Something about him, Greer, being smarter than everyone?)

If you're too lazy to read it, then don't comment.

[rangerone314]

Fancy finding MOS on a neo-pagan's blog site.

I've read some of his writings before; never met him before--did meet a different archdruid once.

[Ibon]

Pointless sand box narcissism.

What doesn't qualify as sand box narcissism?

Good question. If I myself spend too much time dissecting this question than of course I will be guilty of the same, right? So shall we all sit around in a circle and first admit and take ownership of our own narcissism? I love to re read my posts and imagine the impact my brilliant words will have on those who read them. So dare not cast the first stone if you are not ready to look in the reflection of the pond and not only see like Narcissus your brilliance but your pettiness as well.

It's a sandbox because it is a closed community. A subculture of like minded folks who are all preaching to the same choir. There is no real pollination here with the greater society at large. That is why we don't see a real growing dynamic of spreading information. Being inconsequential the discourse gets stale after 5 or 6 or 7 years and has to dig down into the tiring minutia of dissecting all the nuanced and subtle differences within this closed community.

We all know that the denial of the greater society to overshoot only helps to further insulate and isolate this closed community that only then further reinforces the narcissism and ultimately its irrelevance. And the irony is that all along they believe they represent the birth of a new paradigm or era or age or whatever it is named.

Most all of these movements ultimately go from grandiosity to spiraling down to irrelevance. They prevail because there is a lot of disenfranchised souls out there ready to be led by those that want to be the priests and politicians of transition.

Most important to remember though is that .........while those that want to lead and those that want to be led are doing this dance there are a hell of a lot of folks out there quietly going about their own transitions without the need of defining this as some community movement.