(no subject)

[johnny9fingers]

Another goodie showing the pervasive evil of the late capitalist system:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,2106336,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12

If the Chinese think market forces are too strong to resist in this case, then....bye-bye oil reserves, bye-bye trying to keep a lid on climate change....The market, the market will decide. Not any moral sense we have, not any idea of enlightened self interest, nor an idea of protecting ourselves, and certainly not any rational analysis of our situation.

I notice that the marketplace can bow to China's need to control information.

I'm beginning to hope the crash takes out all of the economists, accountants, bankers and business people, and anyone who has ever parroted the insanity that the market is/was the only and absolute arbiter of change.
The unfettered marketplace has no brakes.

The runaway train ran down the tracks.....
I'm going to have such fun saying I told you so.

Comments

2p's worth

[ankh156.livejournal.com]

I've always thought that capilaism's submission to market forces introduces an nefarious element of pure (and dangerous) anarchy into human life. What happens in stock markets is that people run from one commodity to another like a herd of panicked animals. If this is the model from which we apply value to things, then where's the morality in that ? Answer : there isn't any. That's why arms dealers have the most lucrative market of all. I have my doubts about 'political control of economy' (soviet style), but this won't do either. Freedom ? Tyranny of knee-jerk-panic more like. It's my definition of 'going to hell in a handcart' - which is what's happening.

Probably best if we do all get wiped out.

Re: 2p's worth

[tripinthehead33.livejournal.com]

Probably best if we do all get wiped out.

Indeed.

[towith.livejournal.com]

This seems to be a disturbingly common trend. Not the news-story, but the grim, anger-laced, nihilistic reaction. The idea that those with a specific opposing theory must obviously be immoral, unenlightened and deserving of being taken out. It doesn't seem like much of a solution.

[towith.livejournal.com]

Do I come across as "morally outraged"? It certainly wasn't intentional, nor do I see how it would count as nihilism.

[towith.livejournal.com]

I can see your point, though the "nihilist" comment was more directed at the sense of futility.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

You have a damn good point....however for a considerable time I was pretty optimistic about all sorts of things, including our ability to rise above our idiocy and sort out the problems we face.
I no longer have any optimism. I cannot see any damage limitation mechanisms in the marketplace, and I think if the trends to development continue as they are we're looking at an unsustainable lurch to some tipping point beyond which chaos reigns.
As an example: peak oil....softside has posted digests on this stuff for more than two years: he's pretty well-informed.
Politics in the US (which are the only politics that really count - this may change when China starts to flex its muscles...but....)
Politics in the US is led by party finance (as is Politics everywhere), which in this case means the policies of the marketplace finance both sides of an otherwise one-sided debate.
The anger-laced nihilistic reaction comes from impotence. There are few mechanisms for influencing change. I don't, for example, approve of revolution, and I no longer believe that the democratic process is anything other than a cloak for oligarchical money: and I'm of the opinion that the people who achieve power, for however long, are more interested in keeping it, rather than implementing difficult policies, like road pricing. Even if road pricing happens in Blighty, it's never going to happen in the US, so why bother?
It's a nasty little malaise; deep and abiding cynicism, but this week, it's all mine (and a few other kindred souls).
I don't think that folk are immoral or unenlightened or anything until I can actually say, hopefully without too much of a sneer, I told you so. With all these things I'd rather my opinion is wrong. But even so, nothing short of a ranting passionate nihilism is going to shake folk out of their smug optimism. I don't quite know that our goose is cooked for certain, but I'm willing to give you odds that things are going to get worse, not better. Two normative words, searching for a semantic debate.

[towith.livejournal.com]

It's not really the pessimism, you could easily argue that a degree of vigilance is healthy, it's simply the rut of turmoil that catches my attention. Does it really need to follow that a sense of disempowerment, must lead to constant self-pity?

I've always held that the worst personal tragedy, would be death. I don't believe there's anything beyond death however, so being rendered a corpse can't hold any strong emotional response. It's simply an existence without consciousness. Yet death is still a frightening thought and as far as I can tell, this is because my plans, goals and relationships would be scuppered, or at least not self-realized. You can understand then, how a life of complaint without action would seem terrible to me. That said, I do very little to change the world around me, beyond turning one head at a time.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

As I said, I don't approve of revolution. However, complaint in public, however small the forum, is action of a kind, and has been so traditionally, from Classical times. We are the clamour, my dear, that's all: the chorus from the wing shaking their spears. Pure disgusting demogoguery, to counter the same I see from the folk who would, for whatever reason, like to keep things on the road I perceive to be disasterous. I don't have scruples about fighting dirty anymore: so all I want to do is craft sentences or phrases that others will echo, and pass on the whispers I hear which I'm prepared to believe (not that many, actually, but a default cycicism is sometimes useful).
Turn one head at a time. At least it's something.

Your hovercraft is full of eels

[(Anonymous)]

What arrant nonsense!

Publicly wishing for anything to “take out”, well, me is disappointing.

Further, if you think that the collapse of the global financial system, and the related economies and areas of trade, would be a big problem solver, you may want to reassess. Would people take better care of the environment if they were (in many places) starving or freezing? Would transferring a lot more power to those countries where crude oil (for example) bubbles up and lies around in puddles (e.g. Kazakhstan, Kuwait) be a whole-hearted improvement?

People are, on average, well known for being very dim. And the “market” that it is so easy to despise dispassionately is entirely composed of people, mostly demonstrating their usual level of wisdom. Getting rid of (say) foreign exchange dealers or the rather disturbing carbon-emission-trading brokers or whoever is not likely to increase overly the wisdom of humanity. And the essential problem is not rich or selfish or even wholly unpleasant people per se, but the total volume of human stupidity.

To calculate the volume of human stupidity, one need only multiply the average amount of stupidity per person by the number of living people at any given moment. 6 billion very smart people might well be perfectly sustainable alongside a planet that they like the look of (with whales, breathable air and so on), and one billion who were (on average) idiots certainly did a non-terminal level of damage to the like-ability of the planet and the numbers of species thereon – but the combination of the newly huge numbers and the expanded ability to affect the environment and the same level of daftness as we have always had causes grimness.

The problems that we have in the world of an environmental nature (like all the major problems that are of wide consequence) are complex (which necessarily means, via Poul Anderson’s maxim, that simple solutions will always be wrong), and caused by people – not by their means of exchange. And crude misanthropy is of course almost always a safe starting point, like cynicism or even nihilism, but it does not anyone very far in terms of actually doing anything.

A word on misanthropy. Neil Young sang 30-something years ago that “Even Richard Nixon has got soul”. It is fair enough to spit on Nixon’s grave, but our Neil has as usual got a point, and a way of earning admiration in his careful phraseology and thought. It is just people, like it always was, or something of the sort.

And don’t worry how the earth will cope with human over-population. The earth will do fine, even though we will get a world where the numbers that starve (as a proportion of the total at least) will stop falling and start rising fast, and even if we keep exterminating species that we rather like to have around the place. And, sooner or later, one way or another, the over-population will go away. My personal guess is that epidemics aplenty await us in the New Millennium – and, from a global perspective and a genuinely long term view, quite right too.

(Your wish etc.)

N

Much to his Mum and Dad's Dismay...

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

'Take out' in the sense of the Sopranos is probably inappropriate, but to be candid, over the past twenty years I've heard so many self-righteous capitialist wankers tell me unequivocally that the market is the only arbiter and the only measure, that I want to see many of them jobless, humiliated, and pilloried.

As you so rightly say we live in a world full of human stupidity: wherein the major indicators of success, leadership, and influence are wealth and power. It doesn't matter how the wealth or power is achieved, all that matters is...the market. When the Capitalist paradigm finally falls over (as is beginning) and the process of expansion and development reaches its logical conclusion, I hope the children and grandchildren of these capitalists are more forgiving.

Raping the world in order to fuel growth (which is what has been, and is happening under our best of all possible worlds system) is eventually unsustainable. It takes neither Popper nor Malthus to realise this.

The late 20th Century/early 21st Century struggle for resources is going to draw a good number of lines in the sand, and folk are going to sit and analyse our economic policies for some time to come. If there is a history, history will judge us all.

Of the many folk who have informed me that politics are subservient to economics, you were possibly the most reasonable. However, the view that economics drive politics will become unsustainable very soon, as it does in a Von Clauswitz Total War scenario. Capitalism is now beginning the process of, like Horace, eating itself. (Much to his Mum and Dad's dismay...)
Given the stupidity you describe in the human population, is unfettered capitalism worse for society at large than widespread herion addiction? Heroin only kills one at a time.

As an irritating aside, the same folk who once claimed that Economics ran politics are now complaining that climate change, the scrambling for resources, and emission controls are Political Problems.
And waiting for mechanisms like epidemics to 'cull' the human population to manageable numbers is profoundly more cynical than anything I've suggested. 'It doesn't matter, the extras will all eventually die off': is perhaps more callous than suggesting the high priests of capitalism, who preached the doctrine of the unfettered market should sit in the stocks and face a few rotten tomatos. But at least it's consistant and non-interventionist. And the rich can maybe afford the ameliorative treatments.

If growth is a good thing, the management of growth is surely essential. In an unfettered market (as we have now) we have financed investment by borrowing against continuing growth. We are only now adjusting to the fact the growth cannot be continuous, and if it could be, it would wipe us all out and destroy our host as completely as the Rabies virus does to those unfortunates infected. Ergo, we live high, on the fat of our grandchildren's land, knowing that they shal never be as well off as us, because by slight of hand, we've already spent their profit/excess for our needless luxuries...which have admittedly driven growth. But wastage drives growth too, and we would not consider such to be a morally good thing.

When it comes to doing something....This is a forum. I have neither money nor power. In order to have either I'd have to engage in a process that I despise, and I regard as damaging to the environment. Jansenist of me, I know, but...
Perhaps in this case I should be advocating revolution, or the violent overthrow of the present system....but I haven't quite got there yet. No doubt that will be next week.

Hope Em is well and will see the two of you sometime over the weekend.