[SeaGypsy]

Lol I have a slight advantage, having read his posts for nearly a decade & my memory is pretty acute. He basically begs for it really, that's what Carinke was posting about.

[SumYunGai]

Lol I have a slight advantage, having read his posts for nearly a decade & my memory is pretty acute. He basically begs for it really, that's what Carinke was posting about.

Yes, I agree you would definitely be favored to win. But even in my short time here, I have found ample material and I am a pretty fast learner. But perhaps ennui is too soft a target. I doubt he would survive such a thread.

[ennui2]

My memory is acute as well. My advantage is that I don't feel compelled to defend all my past positions on the basis that I can admit I've made bad calls and adjusted my narratives. That's called learning, rather than just digging your heels in and doubling-down.

[SeaGypsy]

My recollection is that the Insta-doom posters are almost all gone, with the very few remaining having given up on picking dates. The rest of us are basically kicking back, having a long chat. Of the few hard core doomers left, the most schizoid by far is Mosennui, cockroach uber doomer, mocker of the more moderate, nature lovers & believers, worshipper at the altar of MSM modernity. Weirdo, imo.

[ennui2]

My recollection is that the Insta-doom posters are almost all gone

You obviously haven't been paying attention to all the discussions.

ETP predicts economic collapse and empty store shelves within 4 years. That's effectively insta-doom.

[Rod_Cloutier]

I started here in 2004, and I still come here to read daily. Although I do not post regularly anymore. Most of the stuff about peak oil, catastrophic climate change, collapse of civilization has been put out, rehashed, and debated over 12 years to the point that there is almost nothing new to add.

There is the fast crash and the slow decline memes both equally represented here; it comes down to definitions. Does personal collapse count, or is collapse the realization of the mad max movies. The path of our civilization is ultimately unknowable, If I had a crystal ball I would have loaded up on Microsoft stock in the 1980s and I would be sipping tequilas in some tropical local with my spare time. No one has a crystal ball to say for sure what will happen next.

I went looking for truth and I found it. Society is at its maximum, the peak of western society for income distribution and social well being probably was around 1970 or so, and it has slowly been falling since. The future is bleak, the 7 + Billion people on Earth right now will all be dead within the next 120 years, it all has an air of impermanence to it.

I have moved most of my time and energies to new age spirituality, away from doom and gloom, and I am actively planning my next life on a higher spiritual plane of existence. (I do not think I would want to reincarnate back on Earth) Few if any people here have moved in the same direction I have gone, anyone here want to discuss the ultimate nature of non-duality spirituality.

[SeaGypsy]

I'm not far off Rod. Had another visit with Dimitry recently which went really well, have since quit the ganga, gotten back into more deep Hindu studies & meditation.

I hope your boys are well & your family is being what works for your journey, best wishes from me & mine. Sending you a brotherly gig on the astral plane

[AgentR11]

I'm not far off Rod. Had another visit with Dimitry recently which went really well, have since quit the ganga, gotten back into more deep Hindu studies & meditation.

Interesting... reading some Hindu stuff, I've recently come to the conclusion that while my physical pacifism is rational and well founded, it is flawed to consider it true without also rejecting the use of words to inflict harm; a habit I'm all to comfortable with.

bah.

Probably take me the rest of my life to get that one right.

[Rod_Cloutier]

Thanks seagypsy- I have all girls coming up though. (Two daughters 15 & 18) I am at wits end for awhile.

I practice my spirituality with channel higher self mostly. If anyone is interested, he has over 1800 spiritual self help videos on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/user/ChannelHigherSelf

[Hawkcreek]

Much as I hate to seem to be defending Ennui, he did make me start thinking about some of the topics and comments from the early days. I don't consider the title of this thread accurate, but I do seem to remember a LOT of fights about the fast crash-slow crash topic.
I was usually a slow-crasher, mainly because I thought, and still think, that most of the energy we use is wasted. I have been know to flip-flop, however, depending on how much alcohol I had consumed before posting.
Anyway, just wanted to say thanks to everyone for the conversations over the years. I don't really care what your beliefs are, as long you can argue well enough to make me challenge my own. This is still a valuable forum, in my opinion.

[evilgenius]

Personally, I was way more of a doomer before I found PeakOil.com. The level of it here through the years has moderated me. I'm kind of glad of that. I've speculated upon a lot of political events since I've been here. I've been wildly doomerish. I predicted that we would go through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, for instance. I did, but it wasn't wholly based upon the set of circumstances which actually brought it about. I don't believe in the Illuminati, or any other world dominating group. I do guard myself against human nature. I still think the US is headed for trouble in the Middle East because of peak oil, only now I think it can be headed off if the world adopts a basket of alternatives and the necessary investment is made by somebody to bring along all of the technologies. I am very worried about global warming, checking the Arctic Ice extent daily, or every few days. I don't think that global warming is going to kill all of us off anymore. It's just going to be bad for those of us who have too much exposure and can't relocate. My worst mistake with doom was to let myself get carried away when the Deep Water Horizon blew. I thought that was going to be a whole lot worse disaster. I figured there was going to be a suction dredge (as in gold prospecting) style removal of a layer or layers of underlying sediment, and that the area would collapse into a crater.

[ennui2]

Back in the old days we actually had a few female posters here. I think the lack of female perspective now is a real deficiency. The image of the world portrayed too often reflects masculine Sun Tzu art-of-war us vs. them. Cooperation doesn't even come up. This is why someone like M_B_S rubs me the wrong way since he seems to only see the world as one faction fighting a war with another faction. But it also plays out in the overall level of discourse of issues in general. The swiftness with which some posters resort to bullying language like alluding that somebody has no friends and lives in mommy's basement or has small hands.

In a big enough discussion it can feel more like a town hall discussion I think that's the problem with a group discussion devolves to the point where there's so few active posters anymore. It starts to feel like you're literally living in the same room with certain people and you get way too intimate with their character-flaws and why they harbor this or that ideological grudge.

Doom has a way of bringing people together who really have very little in common other than negative attitudes about the status-quo. It's shocking to see so much AGW denial in 2016. At one point KJ got run off on a rail for his AGW denial, but then he slinked back again. Then you have SL who really has nothing coherent to contribute at all, just his boiler-plate refrain that everything's a ponzi scheme. Or Cog with his confederate flag and allusions to lynching Obama from a tree. We're supposed to have a civil and productive debate with people like this???

[Hawkcreek]

Back in the old days we actually had a few female posters here. I think the lack of female perspective now is a real deficiency. The image of the world portrayed too often reflects masculine Sun Tzu art-of-war us vs. them. Cooperation doesn't even come up. This is why someone like M_B_S rubs me the wrong way since he seems to only see the world as one faction fighting a war with another faction. But it also plays out in the overall level of discourse of issues in general. The swiftness with which some posters resort to bullying language like alluding that somebody has no friends and lives in mommy's basement or has small hands.

In a big enough discussion it can feel more like a town hall discussion I think that's the problem with a group discussion devolves to the point where there's so few active posters anymore. It starts to feel like you're literally living in the same room with certain people and you get way too intimate with their character-flaws and why they harbor this or that ideological grudge.

Doom has a way of bringing people together who really have very little in common other than negative attitudes about the status-quo. It's shocking to see so much AGW denial in 2016. At one point KJ got run off on a rail for his AGW denial, but then he slinked back again. Then you have SL who really has nothing coherent to contribute at all, just his boiler-plate refrain that everything's a ponzi scheme. Or Cog with his confederate flag and allusions to lynching Obama from a tree. We're supposed to have a civil and productive debate with people like this???

Brings up some good points. We are kind of inbred a bit, I think. And probably our attacks on some posters prevent some of the lurkers from ever posting a word.
It really doesn't matter who started it. If you kids don't shut up - NO ICE CREAM!!!
It is difficult (sometimes impossible) to ignore comments that push our buttons, but we should keep trying. Just so we don't end up with only morons to talk to.
You gotta admit, this site doesn't have too many dumb people posting - maybe misinformed, but not dumb.

[Ibon]

As I mentioned on another thread the other week I had a long discussion with two dudes who came up to visit us and were explaining their project of selling acre lots as secure doomsteads close to the Costa Rican border. Having had 10 years experience of dialogue here at peakoil.com we went deep into the topic of collapse and global crisis. We disagreed on a number of points, agreed on quite a bit as well.

It was one of the first times that I went deep into this material face to face with folks who are equally obsessed with the bigger macro picture of human overshoot, economic fragility, global conflicts, etc. Very interesting, very humane, very civil and quite a nice bonding moment even where we did not agree.

There is a huge difference in the nature of debate when you are doing this face to face vs the anonymity of the internet. Our discussion got lively about where we disagreed but you are looking into the eyes of folks while discussing, you are relating to flesh and blood. On internet forums like this, behind the veil of your screen in your own private little kingdom of narcissism, you can freely be an absolute asshole. And many people are.

I have shared with my daughters a few of my favorite threads here where discussion went deep into the material. My older daughter said that she respected the intellectual depth of the topic but found it painful how snarky and combative the posters were.

Carbon footprint aside if I could gather all you guys around our lounge here at Mount Totumas; Ennui, Pstarr, Sea-Gypsy, Newfie, Plantagent, Hawkcreek, Tanada, Agent and all the rest, and we would discuss this or any other topic, how much more cordial and civil would we be when looking at each other instead of behind the wall of a digital screen?

[Hawkcreek]

Carbon footprint aside if I could gather all you guys around our lounge here at Mount Totumas; Ennui, Pstarr, Sea-Gypsy, Newfie, Plantagent, Hawkcreek, Tanada, Agent and all the rest, and we would discuss this or any other topic, how much more cordial and civil would we be when looking at each other instead of behind the wall of a digital screen?

All my ex-wives say I'm pretty much the same asshole in person, or on-line.
But I like your idea. Set up the conference date, and I will buy my plane ticket and the whiskey for all.

[ennui2]

how much more cordial and civil would we be when looking at each other instead of behind the wall of a digital screen?

Not very. The fact is that we all come from different places and there are prejudices because of it. That comes raging out in a string of comma-delimited labels. Yuppie, suburbanite, blue-state, New Englander, spoiled, white brat, nerd on one hand and right-wing, redneck, bigot, ignoramous on the other.

How that expresses itself in the debates is that a person's position is invalidated if they don't come from the same exact background you do. But the issues here are broad. Someone from a rural background who may have a super luddite anti-tech bias is simply not as equipped to judge what's going on with EVs as a techno-nerd. And yet everyone thinks of themselves as having an infallible grasp of all facets of doom.

There's this identity-politics resistance to listen to people from different backgrounds and this reflects sort of the lifeboat ethics thing well in advance. Someone who has already chosen to bugout into the woods and wait for the end of industrial civilization is going to bristle at the idea that they might need to keep twiddling their thumbs while suburbia plows on with EVs and self-driving cars and solar-panels. They've made a very strong INVESTMENT in going down a pathway and they need to defend their investment. If it feels as if maybe they miscalculated and they're somehow missing out, well, it's a threat to self-esteem.

I think this is a very strong undercurrent in all of the hostility these days. 10 years ago everyone seemed to be more on the same page as far as waiting for the other shoe to drop. It was a unifying force. But the center seeming to hold has caused people to be really touchy and sensitive about their life-choices.

And it goes both ways. There's the "Oh, 'mos', look at you. You wimped out on the doomstead. But when doom comes, I'll be eating hot buttered popcorn and you'll be burning the furniture. If you didn't prepare, then doom...on...YOU! Doom...on...YOU!"

You see what I mean? The issues get lost and it devolves into monkeys beating their chest to try to prove that their lifestyle choice was the right call and everyone else is blindly walking over a cliff.

And I think this sort of ego-baiting, this jockying for social status is a real macho bullshit thing, which is one of my pet peeves.

So I'm not really sure sometimes whether people are here to really get a better objective look on things or they are just trying to continually validate their lifestyle choices through bullying others--where the more extreme those choices might be perceived, the more sensitive they feel about it and the more they need to denigrate others who haven't followed suit to make them feel better.

There's simply no way to read people's postings day in and day out without piecing together this sort of subtext. It is not imaginary and it's not paranoia. It's all there in how rude and callous people are here.

[SeaGypsy]

More self contradictory crapola & you wonder why people give you the she!tz. Listing your pet peeves about labels you get bandied with, then basically calling everyone chest thumping monkeys & lemmings. If you are going to keep dishing it out, you are going to keep copping it.

[Plantagenet]

Carbon footprint aside if I could gather all you guys around our lounge here at Mount Totumas; Ennui, Pstarr, Sea-Gypsy, Newfie, Plantagent, Hawkcreek, Tanada, Agent and all the rest, and we would discuss this or any other topic, how much more cordial and civil would we be when looking at each other instead of behind the wall of a digital screen?

All my ex-wives say I'm pretty much the same asshole in person, or on-line.
But I like your idea. Set up the conference date, and I will buy my plane ticket and the whiskey for all.

What a great idea. Book me in as well. Please pick a date way in advance...maybe a year away....so we can all schedule it in well in advance. If you are going to pick a date please note I'm already booked up for October 2016 (Yellowstone) November 2016 (Costa Rica) December 2016-Jan 2017 (Italy) Feb 2017 (Egypt) and April 2017 (Greece), July 2017 (Copper River Alaska float trip--source to sea) and August 2017 (Oregon Shakespeare festival).

How about in early November 2017? If I'm going to the tropics I like to go at a time when it isn't so hot you turn into a puddle of sweat.

Why don't you pick a date, Ibon, and start a thread to talk about it. You might get half a dozen of us or so, I'll bet.

GREAT IDEA!


Yea HAH! Load up that CO2 belching Doomer express plane!!! Panama here we come!