Timothy Morton: Peak Nature

!? Timothy Morton:

When we flush the toilet, we imagine that the U-bend takes the waste away into some ontologically alien realm. Ecology is now beginning to tell us of something very different: a flattened world without ontological U-bends. A world in which there is no “away.” Marx was partly wrong, then, when in The Communist Manifesto he claimed that in capitalism all that is solid melts into air. He didn’t see how a kind of hypersolidity oozes back into the emptied out space of capitalism, a hypersolidity I call here hyperobjects. This oozing real comes back and can no longer be ignored, so that even when the spill is supposedly “gone and forgotten,” there, look! There it is, mile upon mile of strands of oil just below the surface, square mile upon square mile of ooze floating at the bottom of the ocean. The cosmic U-bend is no more. It can’t be gone and forgotten – even ABC News knows that now.

When I hear the word “sustainability” I reach for my sunscreen.

source:  Adbusters article (Jan/Feb 2012) – saved on archive.org

“An amazing essay by Tim Morton – I recommend listening to George Atherton’s reading for the full weight of oozing of spilt oil and worlds that don’t exist.” —Joe Flintham

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Ozzie Zehner: Green Illusions

partial transcript, a copy-paste:

Common knowledge presumes that we have a choice between fossil fuels and green energy, but alternative energy technologies rely on fossil fuels through every stage of their life cycle. Most importantly, alternative energy financing relies ultimately on the kind of economic growth that fossil fuels provide. Alternative energy technologies rely on fossil fuels for raw material extraction, for fabrication, for installation and maintenance, for back-up, as well as decommissioning and disposal. And at this point, there’s even a larger question: where will we get the energy to build the next generation of wind power and solar cells? Wind is renewable, but turbines are not. Alternative energy technologies rely on fossil fuels and are, in essence, a product of fossil fuels. They thrive within economic systems that are themselves reliant on fossil fuels.

Now, I’m no fan of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are finite and dirty, but we use them for five principal reasons. Fossil fuels are dense. Their energy is storable, portable, fungible (which means they can be easily traded), and they are transformable into other products like pesticides, fertilizers, and plastics.

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Now, these qualities cannot be measured in kilowatts, so what happens when we spend our precious fossil fuels on building alternative energy. Well then we get energy that is not dense, but diffuse. It’s not easily storable. It’s not portable. It’s not fungible. And it is non-transformable.

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Now to increase the quality of the energy, we then have to spend more fossil fuels to build batteries, to build back-up power plants, and other infrastructure. And of course this is incredibly expensive. Ultimately that expense represents the hidden fossil fuels behind the scene.

There’s an impression that clean energy can supply a growing population of high consumers. There’s an impression that alternative energy can displace fossil fuel use, but the evidence doesn’t show that.


image of back cover of Green Illusions:

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The New Yorker looking for a copy editor

Requirements:

  • two years’ experience as a copy editor
  • a flair for writing display copy that engages the reader and adheres to The New Yorker’s voice and outlook
  • experience and comfort with digital publishing and an ability to work both quickly and accurately
  • a strong interest in current affairs and culture
  • the ability to meet deadlines while handling multiple tasks simultaneously
  • the ability to work both independently and as part of a team
  • the ability to communicate and coördinate with editors, writers, fact checkers, and others, balancing needs and priorities while upholding copy standards  
  • familiarity with the history, style, and values of The New Yorker
from Google's cache of [the page the tweet links to]. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 31 Oct 2019 03:59:11 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime.


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the four stages of acceptance (J.B.S. Haldane)


bio from the goodreads author page: 
J. B. S. Haldane, in full John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (born Nov. 5, 1892, Oxford, Oxfordshire, Eng.—died Dec. 1, 1964, Bhubaneswar, India), British geneticist, biometrician, physiologist, and popularizer of science who opened new paths of research in population genetics and evolution.

Son of the noted physiologist John Scott Haldane, he began studying science as assistant to his father at the age of eight and later received formal education in the classics at Eton College and at New College, Oxford (M.A., 1914). After World War I he served as a fellow of New College and then taught at the University of Cambridge (1922–32), the University of California, Berkeley (1932), and the University of London (1933–57).

In the 1930s Haldane became a Marxist. He joined the British Communist Party and assumed editorship of the party’s London paper, the Daily Worker. Later, he became disillusioned with the official party line and with the rise of the controversial Soviet biologist Trofim D. Lysenko. In 1957 Haldane moved to India, where he took citizenship and headed the government Genetics and Biometry Laboratory in Orissa.

Haldane, R.A. Fisher, and Sewall Wright, in separate mathematical arguments based on analyses of mutation rates, population size, patterns of reproduction, and other factors, related Darwinian evolutionary theory and Gregor Mendel’s concepts of heredity. Haldane also contributed to the theory of enzyme action and to studies in human physiology. He possessed a combination of analytic powers, literary abilities, a wide range of knowledge, and a force of personality that produced numerous discoveries in several scientific fields and proved stimulating to an entire generation of research workers.
an author quote from the same page:
Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming.
― J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds

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“We want to keep the oil”

“We Want To Keep The Oil”

Oct 24 · 6 min read

“Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand,
workin’ in the dark against your fellow man.
But as sure as God made black and white
what’s down in the dark will be brought to the light.”
~ Johnny Cash/traditional, ‘God’s Gonna Cut You Down’

The Grayzone has an excellent new article out titled “US troops are staying in Syria to ‘keep the oil’ — and have already killed hundreds over it” detailing the many ways the Trump administration has openly admitted that it is keeping US troops in Syria to control the nation’s oil fields so that the Syrian government can’t use it to fund reconstruction efforts.

“We’ve secured the oil, and therefore a small number of US troops will remain in the area where they have the oil,” Trump said in a recent press conference. “And we’re going to be protecting it. And we’ll be deciding what we’re going to do with it in the future.”

“We want to keep the oil,” Trump said in a cabinet meeting a few days earlier. “Maybe we’ll have one of our big oil companies to go in and do it properly.”

“A purpose of those [US] forces, working with the SDF, is to deny access to those oil fields by ISIS and others who may benefit from revenues that could be earned,” said Defense Secretary Mark Esper. As Grayzone’s Ben Norton accurately explains, “and others” necessarily means the Syrian government; preventing Assad from accessing Syrian oil is standing US military policy.

And that of course is the real reason US armed forces constantly remain in Syria despite all the empty babble about ending wars and bringing home the troops: it’s about control over a nation in a key geostrategic location which refuses to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized empire. Controlling its material wealth is an ideal way to do this.

Read more »

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limitarianism

!tw #limitarianism / below is a selection of current Latest tweets with this hashtag






Chris Hedges: The Age of Radical Evil


image is from this tweet; article is here; all tweets that link to it are here

excerpt:

Immanuel Kant coined the term “radical evil.” It was the privileging of one’s own interest over that of others, effectively reducing those around you to objects to be manipulated and used for your own ends. But Hannah Arendt, who also used the term “radical evil,” saw that it was worse than merely treating others as objects. Radical evil, she wrote, rendered vast numbers of people superfluous. They possessed no value at all. They were, once they could not be utilized by the powerful, discarded as human refuse.

We live in an age of radical evil. The architects of this evil are despoiling the earth and driving the human species toward extinction. They are stripping us of our most basic civil liberties and freedoms. They are orchestrating the growing social inequity, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a cabal of global oligarchs. They are destroying our democratic institutions, turning elected office into a system of legalized bribery, stacking our courts with judges who invert constitutional rights so that unlimited corporate money invested in political campaigns is disguised as the right to petition the government or a form of free speech. Their seizure of power has vomited up demagogues and con artists including Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, each the distortion of a failed democracy. They are turning America’s poor communities into internal militarized colonies where police carry out lethal campaigns of terror and use the blunt instrument of mass incarceration as a tool of social control. They are waging endless wars in the Middle East and diverting half of all discretionary spending to a bloated military. They are placing the rights of the corporation above the rights of the citizen.

Arendt captured the radical evil of a corporate capitalism in which people are rendered superfluous—surplus labor as Karl Marx said—and pushed to the margins of society where they and their children are no longer considered to have value, value always determined by the amount of money produced and amassed. But as the Gospel of Luke reminds us, “what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God.”

That’s the first three paragraphs. You can read the rest here.

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inexcusable inequality

Here's a copy-paste of a still from the animated infographic in the tweet below.

It really is worth watching the 12-second animation in the tweet – also embedded below – where you also can click through to the NYT op-ed by David Leonhardt if you feel so inclined. If you need to, you can read an archived copy (missing the animated graphic you already saw in the tweet).

Note how the 99% used to pay tax at a much lower rate than the 1%. That was then, this is now. The richest 400 taxpayers now pay at a lower rate than anyone else. (Okay, at a lower rate than the rate for any decile.)

The situation is not hopeless.* See the NYT op-ed by David Leonhardt.

David Leonhardt is a former Washington bureau chief for the Times, and was the founding editor of The Upshot and head of The 2020 Project, on the future of the Times newsroom. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for columns on the financial crisis.

*We've simply been propagandized for years by the rich and their well-compensated enablers in the media and government to believe that “there is no alternative” (!gb) to how things are.









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