[GHung]

Revi » Tue Oct 27, 2015 1:43 pm

He talks about this site quite a lot around page 250.

“The most popular thread there, with over 45,000 comments, was “My Doom-O-Meter is jittering towards max,” ”

Excerpt From: Matthew Schneider-Mayerson. “Peak Oil.” iBooks.

I couldn't find that one, Found this:

" My Techno-Copia Meter is Jittering towards Max"
my-techno-copia-meter-is-jittering-towards-max-t59756.html

...and 45,000 comments sounds off. 45,000 views maybe? Anyway, I need to pick up a card tomorrow to load credit on my Android; buy the book. I never use credit cards or PayPal to buy digital content. Makes it too easy I guess.

[GoghGoner]

I liked his Ted talk, but I think he doesn't realize that very few people are listening. Us peak oil folks have been there, done that. Maybe there is a groundswell of people who will do something about this, but I doubt it. Business as usual until the empire falls, and then continue it in the ruins.

I can't stand TED talks. How in the heck can you do anything with complex subjects like climate change, finite resources, and capitalism in17 minutes? It is so shallow, it makes my head spin. Nothing is that black and white.

[Revi]

I really think this is a stretch:
“I argue that, for some white male participants, the peak oil movement and similar survivalist phenomena provided one means of reinscribing “traditional” (read: 1950s) gender roles and revitalizing white masculinity. ”

Excerpt From: Matthew Schneider-Mayerson. “Peak Oil.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/UA-g-.l

I think he is trying to tar us with a male chauvinist brush. I recall very little talk about traditional gender roles in any of the forums I have visited. Where does he get off with this? He may be trying to denigrate Peak Oil as a Climate Change guy. We really are the movement that was and he thinks he's in the movement that is. Little does he realize that neither of these movements has really entered the public's consciousness.

He really runs out of steam in this chapter and tells us the plots of every dumb apocalyptic show on TV as well as other books that have come out in recent years. I think he was trying to "prove his thesis", but I have to say that it has failed utterly. I think this is where he stumbled in trying to prove that most of us "peakists" are chauvinist pigs and racists.

[Revi]

He gets it back a little in the last chapter which is about conclusions:

“Less than 10 percent of those who responded had significantly questioned their dedication to peakism, and the vast majority stood firm in their convictions and life course.”

Excerpt From: Matthew Schneider-Mayerson. “Peak Oil.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/UA-g-.l

It's pretty hard to change your mind about reality.

[ROCKMAN]

"...the peak oil movement and similar survivalist phenomena provided..." IMHO that statement alone destroys his credibility. At the risk of hurting my own arm patting myself on the back I would say I understand PO better then 99.9% of the public as well as the vast majority of "survivalists" . And the Rockman a survivalist?So I'm going to stockpile food, water, batteries, etc. like the common survivalist? I don't even buy milk if the expiration date is longer then a week or two. LOL.

Most if the stories I read about survivalists indicate their fear of the govt, communists, liberal govt, comet collisions, Big Foot attacks and zombies. But PO seems very low on most of their list of fears...imaginary or otherwise

[ennui2]

Most if the stories I read about survivalists indicate their fear of the govt, communists, liberal govt, comet collisions, Big Foot attacks and zombies. But PO seems very low on most of their list of fears...imaginary or otherwise

During this site's golden days there were plenty of people here who fell into that nutty demographic bucket. Even more were hanging out on LATOC. Someone like vision-master was a preeminent quack who would bring us one ancient-alien theory after the other. And a few of those bullet-points describe characteristic of some of the few hangers-on. KJ and his ilk fear liberal govt. Just because you don't identify with that list doesn't invalidate the overall conclusions.

[careinke]

He really runs out of steam in this chapter and tells us the plots of every dumb apocalyptic show on TV as well as other books that have come out in recent years. I think he was trying to "prove his thesis", but I have to say that it has failed utterly. I think this is where he stumbled in trying to prove that most of us "peakists" are chauvinist pigs and racists.

I am right at this point in my reading, and I have to agree with you. It's like he is pissed off at the peakists for some reason, and instead of talking about that, he resorts to name calling. It is like saying Old white guys have a bias because they are old white guys. Well duh.

[Revi]

I will reserve judgement until I have read the whole book, but right now I think that he had this little idea that we are all turning from "liberals" into "libertarians" and that justified making us into racist and sexist pigs. Maybe that's where most of his college papers ended up going, so he went with it. There still remains the fact that we are watching what might be the biggest show on earth, and reality isn't going to go away.

[Loki]

I think this book has a very limited audience, and was done as a thesis or something.

I'm sure it was. Newly minted PhD doesn't write books for fun. If I hadn't already spent all day on a computer I'd look up his dissertation.

[Loki]

OK, I was bored enough I googled him. Dissertation is titled "Peak Politics: Resource Scarcity and Libertarian Political Culture in the United States," defended in 2013. Pretty fast dissertation-to-published-book for a baby PhD in American Studies (a bullshit discipline if you ask me).

He has a 17 min Youtube video here, haven't watched it yet.

Google Books has a good portion of the book online. Is it really only 164 pp of text? My MA thesis was longer than that.

[GoghGoner]

Most if the stories I read about survivalists indicate their fear of the govt, communists, liberal govt, comet collisions, Big Foot attacks and zombies. But PO seems very low on most of their list of fears...imaginary or otherwise

During this site's golden days there were plenty of people here who fell into that nutty demographic bucket. Even more were hanging out on LATOC. Someone like vision-master was a preeminent quack who would bring us one ancient-alien theory after the other. And a few of those bullet-points describe characteristic of some of the few hangers-on. KJ and his ilk fear liberal govt. Just because you don't identify with that list doesn't invalidate the overall conclusions.

Rock is spot on. Most survivalist that I have met in the real world don't believe in finite resources. They think the socialists are keeping oil from them and are trying to destroy their way of life. There are a host of other reasons, too. TOD had less survivalism than those two sites and EB was more into liberal activism. The whole environment has radically changed with global growth being cut in half since 2007 making the book about a moot point.

[ennui2]

I suggest Simmons' "Twilight in the Desert".

Simmons had tunnel-vision about SA and didn't see fracking coming. His analysis was woefully incomplete.

[Revi]

So it was a thesis. That explains a lot about this book. It was something that fulfilled the requirements of his PhD thesis. I wonder what he'll do next? It seems like he is now the acknowledged expert in us, the "Peakists". Do you recall anyone calling us that before? It seems like he should figure out what we call ourselves. Maybe in future books, which he will write because he has to publish or perish, he will find out what we actually call ourselves and delve deeper into the mysterious micro-culture called Peak Oil...

[Revi]

Here's where the movie chapter came from:

https://www.academia.edu/4211580/Disast ... in_the_U.S.

"Using two large-scale surveys, I argue that the prevalence of apocalyptic popular culture influences apocalyptic beliefs in the United States. I focus especially on Hollywood disaster movies of the 1990s and 2000s, most of which deal with environmental themes, and participants in the ‘peak oil’ movement, a quasi-religious American apocalyptic social movement organized around a vision of energy depletion and social collapse. In these surveys, ‘peakists’ reflect on their relationship with fictional narratives of disaster and destruction. I contend that disaster films influenced major aspects of the ‘peak oil’ ideology, such as the hope for regeneration (or even a better world) as a result of environmental crisis and social collapse; the tendency towards fatalism; and the imagination of social and environmental change as immediate and explosive instead of gradual." From the abstract of the paper.