Pops wrote:aside from that, pretty well nothing that would justify your newly discovered confidence in BAU.
I attribute more importance to your "aside from that" than you do, as far as how far the can has now been kicked down the road. I do see a potential bubble pop in tech again. However, I see a lot more potential in unconventional fossil fuels than doomers once predicted. I've heard all the arguments about gas having a cliff-like depletion rate, etc... Nevertheless, I still think there's enough out there to keep the lights on for a the short to mid-term.
Also, I am not expecting geopolitical flash-points with Russia, China, NK, etc... to explode. I don't think things will be a cakewalk, by any means. But I do not see any sort of WWIII megadoom out of these. Just a lot of saber rattling and some low-level proxy warfare here and there.
I'm totally cool with people disagreeing on these points, because the nature of prediction is that you can only chalk up a win or loss in the rear view mirror. It's highly entertaining for two people to fight over a prediction. That's why gambling exists. Prediction runs to the core of the human condition, our need to crunch the numbers and try to find the optimal path, like a rat through a maze. It's why sports, reality-shows, or soap-operas are popular. But time and again I am reminded of the fallibility of predictions, that predictions that seem to be based on hard data, devoid of tinfoil, can turn out to be false.
So usually what I do when I evaluate the doomerverse (like Greer) is to try to figure out if the writer is clouded by a bias of some kind. And usually that bias is ideological. If someone hates some aspect of TPTB, then to predict that the walls will come down is in some way wish-fulfillment. The more a doomer seems to be drooling over the end of american hegemony(TM), etc..., the more I feel that their predictions are more about what they want to happen than what is most likely to happen.
For instance, take someone like Catton. I remember one of his interviews where he actually let humanity off the hook by saying he "understood" why we went the way we did. And then you have Lovelock who said the UK should prepare to accept climate refugees and build lots of nukes. There ARE doomers who aren't oozing with anti-establishment rhetoric, and these are the ones I tend to want to listen to the most. But they get crowded out by the ideologues and nutjobs.
However, on any given day when you come here, there are a bunch of news articles cherry-picked and reposted, with NO REGARD for source, including propaganda outlets like RussiaToday or tinfoil like InfoWars. If all anyone does is go seeking out doom, you'll find plenty of it, and it will give you a skewed perspective on how close to the edge of this or that cataclysm we are.
What I normally do (or what I used to do) is just hit up news.google.com. What I see bubble up through the MSM most often is environmental doom. And I'm talking about just regular news like National Geographic or Newsweek or whatever. Kinda like this one.
When doom starts bubbling through into the generic news feed on Google, then I treat this as serious sh*t. Paul B Farrel issuing his usual editorial screeds on Marketwatch is not. There's news and there's opinion. Two different things.
This is after many years of being a news junkie. I've figured out how to kind of sit back and evaluate the signal to noise, because there is so much damn noise out there and everyone on the internet is screaming for attention via any shock tactic imaginable.
So, if anyone wants to criticize my doom-o-meter, go right ahead, but I went through a period where I ate drank and breathed this stuff and I've got my own sixth sense about where we are and where we're going and I stand by it.