ennui2 wrote:http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-04-30/the-death-of-the-internet-a-pre-mortem
"If you’re like most Americans in 2065, you live in Third World conditions without regular access to electricity or running water,"
In Greer's the Long Descent, he envisioned a multi-century play-out of limits to growth that roughly paralleled the fall of the Roman Empire. In his blog he tended to downplay the impact of AGW. Now he is envisioning 3rd world conditions will settle into the US is only 50 years.
I used to think he was one of the most measured thinkers on the subject but I think he just blew his credibility out of the water by shifting the goalposts like this. His whole schtick is that he writes reams and reams of paragraphs to defend his positions, but then to shift them on a dime like this proves that all his talking points are really just intellectual filler and he's just making a wild guess like everyone else.
Ibon wrote:Correcting imbalances is a nice neutral way to view the consequences coming up. What spells doom for some may be opportunity for others, particularly if you are member of an oppressed species.
The term doom is far too human centric.
Pops wrote:There are only a limited number of the direction prognostications can go aren't there?
Either forecasts become ever more dire to continue eliciting the same amount of attention (Simmons, Rupert, probably Greer)
Or the forecasters simply disappear as previous forecast fail to materialize (Lots and Lots of early BBS "Doomers", Y2k'ers, militia-survivalist types)
Or they just keep making the same prediction and moving the due date or criteria (GoldBugs, Wing-Nut-Reactionaries, Civil Libertarians, Luddites, Eco-Warriors, Peakers, Doom-Of-The-Month Clubers)
ennui2 wrote:Greer still advertises his Long Descent book. If he now thinks the timeline is off, he should somehow fess up to it. Again, if someone can cite him where he specifically addresses his conscious shift from a long-descent narrative of centuries to more of a medium-descent of decades, I'd like to see it. He writes so voluminously that for all I know, it's buried in there.
ennui2 wrote:
My problem in this thread is with JMG. He delivered his "long descent" narrative with a sense of absolute certainty that he was correct, and he would bitch-slap dissenters in the blog comments to the point of censorship if they tried to explain how maybe it won't turn out that way.
jesus_of_suburbia wrote:I understand that, however, trying to repackage it in that matter is just kind of silly. It's irritating to hear someone try to put a positive spin on it. I personally don't care if it's a boon to other species, nor do I think the people who may suffer as a result of it in the future.
Montequest, on the other hand, was kind of emotionally repressed. He found it almost impossible to express himself in the first person. He hid behind boilerplate quotes from Catton and Bartlett. So he just seemed more like a bot than a real person. He would reveal what he did for a living or some of his pet projects like making raised beds, but he NEVER admitted to any emotional anguish over doom. Only when he was boxed into a corner and had to cop to some situation with his ailing mom, and then he disappeared for like a year because it got too personal.
I don't necessarily expect this site to be a support network, and at times it actually has served the opposite purpose, brushing up with people who were keyed into doom but seemingly wired the totally opposite way that I am, but I just want to know they're human.
ennui2 wrote:... make people hate Obama ....
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