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150 comments on Wednesday Open Thread

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HKThom on March 15, 2006 - 12:58pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The article you link to is indeed staggering. Chongqing used to be anglicized Chung King, which you may have heard of, at least as a brandname for frozen Chinese food.

I have always tried to think in terms of positive actions for the near and medium term as the energy situation become acute. Sometime this is difficult, obviously, and when getting even a tiny idea of the incredible monetary inertia and masses of humanity and human nature at work in a place like Chongqing, as describe in this article, even those with the sunniest dispositions would need to sit down and catch their breath. Surely no amount of windmills or reccyling or local farmer's market or organic gardening or public transportation stands a chance. Indeed, no amount of oil, coal, or globalization can handle the crushing forces swamping places like Chongqing these days for any significant amount of time. It mocks the concept of sustainibility.

But you just do what you can. I guess.

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sr on March 15, 2006 - 2:02pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"...positive actions for the near and medium term as the energy situation become acute."

If our situation doesn't call for radical political thinking, what situation would? Luckily, I have discovered ideas which are up to the task. Of course "local action", "putting sustainable practices into one's life", and other such piety is useless -- so useless, they named a special paradox for Jevon. What would possibly be NOT useless? What is the smallest useful ambition (SUA)?
    I say that the SUA is: to think myself the citizen of a surviving State which exists, say, 100 years from now, and to act as such a citizen. And if I look for an example of a man - even a "chatterer and dilettante" - who thought of a state and had a state grow from his thought, I find that there has been such a man, and that that thought was what we cal "nationalistic" - and "racialist". The SUA pushes me toward nationalism and racialism: I don't think liberal-democratic universalistic piety will work too well in the coming crisis. Now, it is not enough to be a racial nationalist in theory. One has to find a particular racial-nationalist idea. This is not difficult if one has a mirror handy.

sr
Rogers Park National Front

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Twilight on March 15, 2006 - 2:33pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Congratulations - you've been beating around that bush for quite some time now (rather transparently), it's good to have you come out and say it.  Do tell - which race have you decided will survive?  And how do you plan to finish off the others?  What rubbish.  Read the link Nick posted above, and see how hard "the others" will work to survive - think they'll roll over so easily?  

If you think that racism will save you, you may consider me your enemy.  

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sr on March 15, 2006 - 3:34pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Twilight, do you think Theodore Herzl was a racist and would-be genocideur? That is what you imply. Did he "plan to finish off the others"? If not, then why am I those things for  wanting to emulate him? [I know why. Will you say it?]
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writerman on March 15, 2006 - 6:32pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. I don't think you really mean all that stuff about WNEF. Your probably an ok guy underneath it all. You know that kind of thing is really not the anwer to our problems. Not Peak Oil and not the population question. The world is just too complicated and hard to control to believe in such ideological simplicity. And please don't think I'm attempting to patronize you, I not. I'm just trying to understand you.
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Twilight on March 15, 2006 - 8:17pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
writerman, people have always used times of major upheaval to further whatever agendas they already had.  The idea of having the constraints of society's limitations loosened has all sorts of bats flying out of the belfry.
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wkwillis on March 17, 2006 - 6:33am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
You pushed one of my buttons. Herzl was not a racist, he was not into genocide, and more specifically, he was not the kind of real estate developer that stole the Palestinian's land and marked it up to sell to Jewish immigrants.
Herzl believed and advocated a Jewish state that was urban and that did not steal land from Arabs, and didn't steal their water, either. He was intent on letting the Arabs have the land, the water, the pasture, the fishing industry, and any minerals that turned up. He wanted to build a Singapore, not an Israel.
Which is why he and the rest of the German Zionists were purged by the Russian Na-Zionichki in 1904 or sometime, and lost control to the steal the land and run off the natives fruitcakes running Israel now.
He wrote "Altneustadt" (literally "oldnewstate") about what he thought Israel should be like. Read it sometime, if you can find it.
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sr on March 15, 2006 - 3:38pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
By the way, I fail to understand how I have beating around the bush -- is it possible that you haven't read my posts? I think that the phrase "white nationalist ecofascism" is not all that subtle. And yes, I do consider you my enemy, and I am happy to have matters between us so refreshingly clear.
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writerman on March 15, 2006 - 6:13pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
White Nationalist Ecofascism, somehow I think not. I'd prefer to put my bet on Brown Internatinalist Socialism. That is of course if I had to choose.
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sr on March 15, 2006 - 3:39pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
... have BEEN beating ...
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AlanfromBigEasy on March 16, 2006 - 12:18am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I disagree.

China just committed to a $22 billion high speed rail line from Beijing to Shanghai.  

Annual oil consumption ?

Several hundred barrals of lubricants for many billions of passenger-kms.

China has the capability to develop in a high efficiency/low oil use way given their massive capital investments (~50% of GNP).  They certainly seem to be hedging their bets (massive subway programs, railroad improvements, new hydro, HSR above) as well as following the path of the EU & US.

I could see a Chinese electric grid that was 90% nuke + hydro + wind with gasified coal making up the balance.  I could see a per capita GNP five times that of today with annual oil consumption slightly lower than todays level.  Pollution levels much lower than today.  A sustainable (sort of) China.

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150 comments on Wednesday Open Thread

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