My daughter, like every other North American 12 year old, is caught up in the “Twilight” film and book series. And when she was younger it was Pirates.

I am considering this: that the present day fascination with pirates and vampires is because we live in a piratical and vampiric society, and this is a way to project our own self-disgust into a social spectacle that not only exalts these creatures, but is more a way for us to render evil fashionable, so we don’t see the vileness of the global and environmental results of our own common actions.

Pirates were considered vile creatures – we would hang them at the entrance to harbours, as a warning to all. Vampires, while fictional, were always loathsome creatures – just watch Nosferatu and see how creepy and disgusting they were considered. but now, we humanise and venerate these parasites, these vile corrupt murderous undead beings.

What could be a more appropos symbol of capitalism than an undead parasite that lives off the blood of his lessers?

What could be a more appropos symbol of capitalism than the pirate?

These are not people to admire – these are people to abhor. The pirate is not about finding new methods of helping rid society of disease and crime and violence – the pirate is all about aggrandising the self at the expense of society through crime and violence. The pirate doesn’t fight disease – the pirate is disease. The pirate is all about the gang, not the polity; the benefit and glory of the gang leader, not the common wealth.

The vampire is of another nature for as material and sadistic is the pirate, the vampire is metaphysical and seductive. The pirate operates through theft and actual murder. The vampire, being a creature of fiction, operates through parasitism and symbolic death. The vampire lives off of “precious bodily fluids” within the imagination of the audient. Previous media representations of vampires range from the bleak shabby elegance of Dracula to the ghoulish Nosferatu. With Ann Rice’s mythology of vampirism, the vampire, while still a wicked undead beast, was portrayed in much more humanistic terms – ,a href=”http://a.abcnews.com/images/GMA/sipa_Interview_Vampire_090325_ssh.jpg”>child vampires,, ancient vampires who could barely move, romantic and handsome vampires drawn into a disaster not of their own making.

As alluring and attractive and malleable such a fictive creature can be, they are, simply, parasites.

This is the other side of the capitalist ideology: you too can partake of the riches of this world and live forever – all at the expense of worthless dupes and victims whom you will feed on. You will carry the guilt, but learn to ignore the shame, and eventually revel and thrive in your parasitic madness. And internal to vampirism is the same failure of capitalism: what happens when you run out of victims, when the entire world is populated by vampires? What do you do when the engine of production has exhausted the planet’s resources and there is nothing left to profit on? The answer is the same: collapse and extinction.

This is never a point ever thought through, because of the dominant demands of short term necessity refracted through the lens of industrial destruction and capitalist exploitation. Hence, the mythology of parasitism must be inculcated at as young an age as possible, and so we have 6 year olds dressing as Dracula and Blackbeard and movies for teens like Twilight and Pirates of the Caribbean. The most impatient people, the young, are taught to look upon parasitism as just another and therefore acceptable, part of society. So, when they labour at some job for the rest of their lives, they won’t mind that a small number of parasites at the top are reaping all the rewards at their expense. They won’t mind that they, as members of the crew, make their living stealing from others.

This logic can go forward, and as usual, it is through comedy that this society deals with it most directly: the next example is a vampire pirate. And we have one: in the film “Pirates of the Caribbean” in the form of Jack Sparrow’s father played by Keith Richards. It is well known that Richards is undead and a vampire. This can be said because vampires don’t exist, therefore any attribution to Richards as a vampire is as fictive as the notion of vampire itself. to feed this mythology, he regularly has his blood transfused in order to continue living his vampiric life, where over the years he has increasingly come to resemble Nosferatu, feeding off the ashes of his father.

This, of course, has nothing to do with Keith Richards the person. I have never met him, and I am sure he’s a funny and decent dinner companion. The Keith Richards I am addressing is the fictive and mythological Richards – the media creation of Richards – the only one history will ever really know as it writes the story and mythologies of our times. This Richards is a scary and demented derangement of party animal and cultural parasite – someone who has looted all the blues riffs ever known and sucked them dry of their essence and blasted them together in the form of his playing in the Rolling Stones music ensemble – a band who built their career upon defiance and the hint of revolution and then sold it all for millions of dollars, pillaging music history and sucking their fans dry of money for their records, performances, and ephemera in the process.

There is nothing sustainable about Richards – he is the drug-addled adolescent with half a century of practice under his belt, and looking worse for the wear and tear he has put himself through. The excess he has subjected himself to would have killed weaker men, and for that his persona takes on a character of the undead – the vampire – Nosferatu. due to his age and condition, Richards cannot be the face of acceptable vampirism to a new younger generation – so he is the vampire father of the pirate role model for the younger generation.

And the vampire? In the form of Twilight’s Edward Cullen, he is not some rotting husk – he is a rutting hunk, designed and delivered for the fantasies of teen and tween girls. He makes victimhood seem reasonable, as he and his clan are now “vegetarians” in a vampiric sense: they only drink the blood of animals. A more “sustainable” approach to industrial capitalism. Rather than chop down the forest to power the machines, dig up the coal and oil, and slaughter wild animals wholesale for the vampirism, as it mimics contemporary western food patterns of industrial meat production.

At core, they are still vampires. They are still parasites. They take one’s most precious possession, time, and give only illusions and fantasy in return, flickering page turning revelries of fictive space, making us feel good about being hapless victims of a vampiric system of global piracy.

In the mean time, the rivers are dammed up, the earth continues to warm up, and precious metals are ripped from the dying earth to make a handful of people fabulously wealthy. And we’re all OK with that because we get to watch vampire pirates on the screen.

To quote Brian Eno:

I was just a broken head
I stole the world that others punctured
Now I stumble through the garbage
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble

Beak and claw, remorse reminder
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble
Back and forth and back to nothing
Keep them tidy, keep them humble.

Chop and change to cut the corners
Sharp as razors (shiny razors)
Stranded on a world that’s dying
Never moving, hardly trying.

I was just a broken head
I stole the world that others plundered
Now I stumble through the garbage
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble.

Saturday, March 25, 2006
Cosmic
Some have described the human race as little more than yeast who wear bow ties. While it does go a long way to describing the ramifications and boundaries of human behaviour, it does little to provide solutions. I see it as little more than a meagre rationalistion for fatalism.

Personally, I think consciousness is extremely rare in the universe – lord knows it’s rare enough right here on earth. We have to remember that We Are Part Of The Universe. We are the part that thinks and knows it exists. This means *that the Universe itself is Conscious*. We are conscious and we are part of the universe: QED.

As we know that this consciousness is rare enough even among thinking humans, and is predicated on a vast variety of prerequisites of organic brain chemistry, we really do have a deep and abiding responsibility to keep this little light shining, as it is the one truly noble human function. The Universe lives and experiences itself through us and all sentient creatures. That the Universe will extinguish itself is not relevant: even flowers die. It’s the FLOWERING that matters. As creatures who live in time and are self aware, we bring the universe along with us and are part of its flowering.

I am sure there are other blossoms – what is both amazing and disturbing is how ours has bloomed so quickly. It would be a tragedy for our stem to die and vanish from the great flowering universe.

Buddha knew this: he transmitted his dharma to his successor, Mahakasyapa, by pulling up a flower and twirling it between his fingers.

That’s it: right there. Just like that.

Now, I twirl a flower between my fingers, and smile.

Thursday, December 01, 2005
Nihilism part 02

One of my esteemed listmates on Energy Resources responded to my note on Nihilism, and had some good points. I responded to his post as follows.

Mr C wrote:

>You have more than a good point.

Thanks for noticing! I get so much grief so often, it’s nice to hear a positive voice.

>So lets be constructive.
>Let me start by modifying your proposition
>into an If-then-else.

OK.

>IF (conditions are met)
>THEN {we will migrate into a sustainable future }
>ELSE {we will have severe economic depression;
>a final obliteration of the biosphere;
>and ultimately a crash of the human population due to
>overshoot exhausting essential resources};
>We may want to make some modifications to the THEN and ELSE
>statements. But this is easy. Defining the conditions to be
>met is where all the work is at. Believe me, this is the way
> hardest part, and probably the reason so many intellectuals on
>this subject come to rest in the doomer category, myself
>included.

I agree, it is a daunting task.

>So lets make it easy for the first step. Lets only name the
>conditions that need to be met without getting hung up just
>yet on “how” that condition is to be met, or ever could be
>met. This way at least we can say we defined the problem just
>a little better by reducing it into its components.

I agree. Also, to mis-use/apply an old Marxist term, the “prevailing conditions” at the time of will have their own dynamic and set of contradictions, which are largely unpredictable in specific, even though the substructural political economy is essentially unchanged since the 19th century. Which is a coplicated way to say: we don’t know what it will be like then, although the economic fundamentals will probably be similar to today.

>Here are just a couple of the conditions that need to be met
>to bring us into the THEN clause and out of the ELSE clause.

(I’ve snipped a bit for clarity’s sake:)

>A: present energy consumption is within the sun’s annual
>budget for Earth
>B: non-renewable petroleum is reserved for use as a mineral
>and not a fuel
>AND solar, hydro, wind and biomass at sustainable levels
>are the only fuel sources used for all human activities.
>AND ??…
>As you hopefully can see, the lists will be long and decompose
> ever more into further lists of conditions if you attempt to
>properly deconstruct the problem.

>I’ll jump way ahead and bubble it all back up and say stupid >things like “the people in the Los Angeles basin can no longer
> drive fossil fuel powered vehicles to carry out their daily
>lives”. It is near impossible to impose such a conclusion,
>and yet it is impossible to avoid external reality imposing
>the same conclusion over time given our draw down and exhaustion
>of stored fossil energy.

OK: try this: how to double the effective mileage of a given fleet? Even/Odd driving restrictions. Forces people to buddy up.

How to get old clunkers off the road? CA’s plan is fairly ingenious. Up the smog restrictions preventing older cars from passing. If it fails, the state will buy the car for $1000 and send it to the crusher for recycling. My 1991 Toyota Corolla has a weak oil ring in one of the cylinders, causing it to just *barely* fail. I could have leaned out the injectors and have it shake and shudder through the test, but the car is only worth $1200, and has some nasty dents thanks to a certain clueless asshole who lives down the street… But anyway – I’ll be getting a cheque for $1000 in January.

You see- there are lots of ways – each one plays a small role, but in agregate, they amount to something. The problem is, right now, they don’t amount to enough. THAT has to change, and that’s why we have to work on making it happen. The alternative is not acceptable.

>I’ll shift back to doomer now and just say that I find the
>scale and complexity of our problems so intractable when
>confronted with the reality of politics that it does indeed
>seem hopeless. Yet I agree with you that nihilism is not any
>answer at all. This is probably why so many people are on the
>ROE2 list, in my words, “trying to figure out how best to survive
>the coming dark ages”. Homesteading, communities and forming
>other kinds of safety bubbles is the repeating theme. Plus the
>occassional side themes of “guns, and how best to defend your >family from roaming dog packs and the occassional looter”.

Could you send me a URL so I can get on that list? thanks.

>Like you, I refuse to say it is hopeless. But I’m quite
>stymied on how to create a positive future for the big
>picture pre-collapse. There is some amount of hope to be
>found in constructing small pictures that form refuge from
>this very large catastrophe in the making.

I belive it is to be done one step at a time, with more and more people making one step at a time. Eventually you have an entire flood of people doing the right thing.

The first thing to do is to Get The Message Across, and even though I despise them, I must say that the TV ads for BP are a step in the right direction. I don’t believe BP is *actually* doing all it can to help avert catastrophe, but at least in the past few months with all the money they made after Katrina, they do seem to have bought a clue or two and are doing what they can to inform people that Things Are Going To Change.

The next thing to do is to MARKET the change. It’s kind of like dieting. You don’t lose weight by not eating. Yes, you will lose weight that way, but you eventually DIE. The way you lose weight is by eating LESS, eating BETTER, and EXERCISING. If you pigged out and slothed your way into obesity, then you have to eat properly and exercise your way into svelteness. Same goes for the first world. We pigged our way into this, so now we have to manage our intake to get out of it.

Eating less: Consume fewer items, consume less energy.
Eating right: acquire things that are built to last and are functional and integral. Acquire energy from green sources.
Exercising: develop local sources for the acquisition of food, clothing, and shelter. Have this process even atomised into household production systems (growing gardens, beer, cheese, etc.) and then into neighbourhood/town exchange systems.

Also, the solar diet isn’t the only energy source – there is wind, geothermal, tides, etc. Technically, wind is solar, and tides are lunar, but you get the idea.

As I said before: it’s not going to be easy, and the longer all this gets put off, the more dire the transition is *guaranteed* to be. I’m not discounting the “doomer” scenario – I’m simply giving it some perspective and USEFULNESS contexted in the IF/THEN or (by your angle, which is a good one) IF/THEN/ELSE. WiI *thin that context, it has a great deal of meaning. Outside that context, it’s an invitation to paralysis.

I *really* appreciate your take on this. Yes, it is *HARD*. But if we don’t figure it out, it won’t get figured, and then we’re screwed.

That’s why I’ve been hammering away at issues of Victory/Crash conditions. It’s kind of like classical software testing. You have to test the boundary conditions, load, race conditions, input/output, usability, design, etc. It’s all part of making a proper piece of software work.

WE, and I mean WE, as in everyone born since 1945, has a responsibility to Help Figure It Out. Now. Not later. And that’s why I’m bringing up these “meta-issues” of Victory/Crash conditions and definitions. Once we have a grip on what we need to have happen, we can set about inventing our way to that conclusion. Otherwise, we’re just wasting our time.

I’m going to post this to my blog – it’s a good discussion.

Again, thanks for the feedback. This weekend I will be looking at these parameters in greater detail, and I hope I can arrive at some suggestions or ideas for directions and policies and other points of debate and action.

Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Nihilism

I’ve been having a discussion with a fellow on the Energy Resources List. He is of an extremely nihilistic bend in terms of the peak oil issue. Some of our discussion follows, as I think it is of some broader and more general interest:

>On the other hand one could favor business as usual.

No. It’s not binary. It’s not black and white – it’s not like that. The next few paragraphs run according to your straw man argument, but I’ll comment on a few points:

> The population is still increasing, the rain forest is still being destroyed,
> lakes and rivers are still being polluted, topsoil is still being blown
> away and animal species are still going extinct. We are literally
> destroying the biosphere.

And even if we were all teletransported instantly to some Star Trek Fantasy land never to return to the earth, these species would continue dying off and the biosphere would still be a sinking wreck. It would return to an equilibrium faster without us, but we’re still talking many thousands of years.

>We could hope to delay the peak, and the collapse until around 2040 or 2050.

Well, if Deffeyes is correct, the peak is already here. I don’t think delaying the peak is interesting. I don’t find the binary logic behind the argument useful. What IS interesting is how we are going to manage the transition to other fuels and gracefully depopulate the planet.

I think we can all agree that Peak Oil is a fact, and an inevitability. However: imagine something totally extra-ordinary happens: they come up with something like cold-fusion that’s cheap and easy to do. Then oil could peak and no one would really notice…

It’s not the transition itself that’s in question or doubt – it’s more the character of said transition. While I am usually loathe to agree with the likes of Lomborg on anything, he does have a specific insight when he says “You don’t buy gasoline, you buy transportation”. If cars no longer ran on gas, you would still have to buy traonsportation, but gas wouldn’t be part of the equation.

This doesn’t solve te ecological problem, but that’s another issue. I’m simply demonstrating that the reduction in oil production doesn’t *by necessity* require a die off. It CAN, and if things don’t change, and quickly, probability reduces to certainty, but presuming certainty I feel is illegitimate as I discuss below.

>Peak oil in this decade would be terrible.

I tink it’s already here – we’re just cruising on the glutted plateau.

>But peak oil forty years from now would be far, far worse.

I see – I see – you’re conflating the demand/production curve crossings in the economics of petroleum production with some kind of instant die-off.

Well: it looks like you now have a test case. If we are around in 30 years, you’re wrong. If we’re not, you’re right, but it doesn’t matter. Now how is that a useful position?

>I find hoping for a much-delayed peak absolutely morally and ethically repugnant.

I think it’s a non-issue. The peak is upon us – it’s just a question of how it is managed, and the character of the transition to other energy sources takes on.

>And anyone who thinks the earth can support such a population indefinite for half
>a century without destroying what little flora and fauna is left upon this earth simply
>has not a clue as to what is happening to the earth.

I agree – it looks bleak. But not impossible.

>If we had a choice, now or later, it would not be a choice between
>good and evil. It would be a choice between evil and a much greater
>evil.

So we should all vote CHTHULU for president? After all, why settle for the lesser evil?

I’m too cynical to believe in nihilism, and I find the doomsaying in the peak oil debate has its uses as a goad when it is understood in an if/then context. But if it is presented as a certainty, then there is:

a: no point in discussing the issue
b: there is no point to this forum, except as a form of black humour
c: no point in even trying to survive the catastrophe, as those who do will be living lives of a Hobbesian sort, and who wants to live like that?

As a consequence, the nihilist position can be seen as a parasitic middle class luxury. If there are things needing change, the proper thing to do is to change them and to form communities of people to help change them. What needs to be done can be scaled according to need at point. In the USA getting people out of their cars and getting them to turn the damn lights off when they go to bed would be a good “start.” Getting people to grow food instead of lawns would be a really good idea as well. Developing neighbourhood windmill energy projects would also help. But, most of all: GETTING PEOPLE TO STOP HAVING SO MANY DAMN KIDS would be the best thing of all.

The list is long, and there is much to be done. I find the nihilist position disuseful and unconvincing outside of an if/then context. Within such a context, it is EXTREMELY useful and actually, necessary. But outside of such a context, *at this present time* it has no value. Given the stakes involved, the extreme nihilist position outside of the if/then context, is therefore immoral. Russia had nihilists first, in the 1880s, 1890s. Once the nihilists were discredited/jailed/killed off, they had a proper revolution. That the revolution resulted in a disaster of an empire is not relevent – the point is nihilism goes nowhere, and is just as much of a detriment to free and creative thinking as the cornicopian neocon fascists presently running the show.

The only thing that results from nihilism is a cult. Nihilism won’t keep the hospitals open, won’t make the discoveries we need, or even reduce the population – after all – if it doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t matter- have a jillion kids – their lives are their problem, not yours, and besides – it doesn’t matter.

You can’t forge a new society from doom. People need someplace to go and have fun. If it’s dancing in some over lit discotheque in Las Vegas with a buffet of meatballs and oysters, or dancing in front of a camp fire by some rawhide tents cooking up a chunk of buffalo – it’s still fun. People are social primates. As such they need to be led. Pointing a direction into an abyss is not leading. Pointing a direction into a foggy area that seems to go down around the abyss will have to do- travelling down that foggy bottom is all we really have.

So, hold hands, stay close, keep walking, and sing!