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277 comments on DrumBeat: August 15, 2006

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jesus of suburbia on August 15, 2006 - 9:02pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
This is going to sound a little uncouth, but John Stossel should be strung up by his scrotum.  That was the most amazing display of ignorance and stupidity.  They should have just titled the segment "What John Stossel Thinks About Oil Depletion".  As soon as I saw that moron's face on the screen, I only thought bad things.

Liberal Cornucopian Technofix Douche was just as bad.

The little peak oil girl couldn't have been more timid and unconfident.  She was very sweet and all, but that won't cut it.

I don't have much hope that the general population will take the appropriate steps to cope and adapt to oil depletion and the other catastrophes we face.  I'm pretty apathetic to the whole situation. This display was infuriating, yet a the same time hilarious to me.

To those of you that are still in the fight, don't let this get you down.  It was Scarborough Country for one.  Second, it was on MSNBC, who I'm pretty sure no one watches.  

Ever.

.......UGH!!! Stossel!!! What a d***head!

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odograph on August 15, 2006 - 9:09pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
If it was me, and I had been quick enough on my feet (unlikely) I would have leveraged off what Stossel said.

I would have said yes, companies and individuals can plan ahead and solve a problem ... if they see it coming.  But what if we don't hear about it?

Strossel said "high prices are good", an opportunity to agree, and ask him how high they are going, and if people know enough to be prepared.

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jesus of suburbia on August 15, 2006 - 9:26pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I know people have turned sour on Jim Kunstler for his views on the Middle East, but he would be perfect for these hack TV "debate" shows.

He's not afraid to be mean.  Kunstler would definately not have hesitated to call him an "idiot", which is the only way to describe Stossel tonight.  It was so obvious that the guy didn't do a shred of research or preparation.

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odograph on August 15, 2006 - 9:31pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Kunstler comes across as quite reasonable on these shows, I agree.  Maybe he leaves his evil twin to write his Monday morning rants ...

But the thing about Stossel is that he mostly said true things which don't tell the whole story.  He threw in a few stinkers as well (oil shale), but I think the way to deal with the guy is not to call him names, but to tell the truths that complement his.

IMO "higher oil prices are good" is a very mainstream PO position.

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dinopello on August 16, 2006 - 10:10am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I love JHK, but not sure he would come across as a good convincing persona on this type of show.  It would, however, be highly entertaining.   What would be good is a panel on panel discussion over at least 30 minutes or 1 hour.  What MSM show has something like that ?  
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Kevembuangga on August 16, 2006 - 3:45am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I don't have much hope that the general population will take the appropriate steps to cope and adapt to oil depletion and the other catastrophes we face.

I entirely agree, unfortunately.
For lack of alternatives a realistic solution could be to let darwinian selection work out the problem by weeding out the morons while trying to salvage some basis for the future.
And I DON'T mean back to stone age primitivism.
A tricky endeavour!

I suggest once again that we carefuly read “What normative obligations do we owe to future generations?” [PDF 41 pages].
Excerpts:

Within my taxonomy, the most fundamental intergenerational question—“What normative obligations do we owe to future generations?”— is not an ethical question at all. The principle of reciprocity operates in very limited ways between generations. Caring for the elderly makes sense in part because the continued ethos of such care makes it more likely that we will be cared for in turn as we age—an implementation of the Golden Rule.84 We apologize for past wrongs as a way of signaling our intention to cooperate in the future.85 Apart from these and a few other discrete behaviors, little of what we commonly refer to as “intergenerational ethics” is subject to the principle of reciprocity. Regardless of how we behave, our descendants will not be able to reward or retaliate against us effectively. More fundamentally, implicit in any invocation of the principle is the premise that our well-being is as important as anyone else’s. From an evolutionary perspective, however, our well-being is irrelevant; all that is important is whether we survive and reproduce into the future. Using the Golden Rule to protect present well-being against claims by future generations is precisely what we should not be doing.

.../...

The ethos of reciprocity that operates within the We of a person’s family (e.g., “We the Setos”) may require an individual to undertake duties vis-à-vis family members that she would not feel compelled to undertake with respect to outsiders and would not, in turn, expect them to undertake with respect to her (“Of course your kids can stay at my house the week you’re in New York”). The same actor may also consider herself part of a We defined by her church (“Our prayers go out to members who are not able to be here this morning because of illness”) or other social unit, and part of another We defined by her ethnicity (“No daughter of mine is going to marry one of Them”). In international affairs, some assert that we should only protect citizens of other countries if doing so is in our “national interest”—another way of saying we owe protective duties only to members of We the people of the United States.
One of the current frontiers of ethics is whether our broadest We should extend beyond the human species.
History is, in part, a story of the expansion of We’s. From the tribe to the city-state to the ethnic group to the nation-state to the species, the set of actors to whom we feel at least some sense of ethical obligation has over the long run consistently expanded. It has done so because development of an ethos of reciprocity between groups otherwise in friction is almost always adaptive. The frictions that arise between two groups who have not yet formed a single We are analogous to those that arise between two individuals who have no ethos of cooperation. In the long run, they hurt both.
A Hobbesian international order is no more functional than a Hobbesian nuclear family.

By Theodore P. Seto

My emphasis.

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277 comments on DrumBeat: August 15, 2006

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