“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, March 21, 2011

Beautiful Soul Steps down from Cynicism into Hypocrisy


Come on in Mr. Monbiot the water's lovely:

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.
Here's the deal. We should address global warming, in the same way that we should put out a burning cigarette stub in a Sequoia forest. So, what to do?

Wait for a perfect machine that will reverse entropy (deep green and the right meet on this)
Use coal (two words: feedback loop; one more: non-linear)
Use solar and wind: yes indeedy
Use nuclear: until there's enough solar and wind

Every choice here involves pain and suffering. We are now all hypocrites because there is no meta-position, no point extrinsic to the problem. We are inside the hyperobject global warming. That means everything we do is totally sincere. Including doing nothing and feeling righteous about it. The hypocrisy fish eats the cynicism fish. The sincerity fish eats the irony fish.

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