Discuss: The Age of Ooops

A lucid, perfectly sensible argument, and overall one of Jensen’s finer columns, though seriously, seriously compromised by the whole “head on a pike” comment. Hyperbole or not, I don’t think there’s any place for that in a conversation about healing our world.

Aw, don’t get your knickers in a twist. There’ll be plenty of pikes and pitchforks if things keep going the way they are. That’s what happens when the rich and powerful grotesquely overreach and can’t seem to change course. Of course, I wish they would… change course. And prove the precedents wrong.

I have a problem with Jensen’s argument. I don’t have a problem with it being a sort of a magic wish, or perhaps a thought experiment. What I do have a problem with is ... that different rules will somehow save us. Never mind that the rules are enforced by the rule makers, and the rule makers like irresponsibility built in? Never mind that if somehow a different rule was pushed through the heroic efforts of a Greenpeace coalition on rocket fuel, wouldn’t they immediately work to alter it and to carve out loopholes, along with directing the enforcers to go light on the perps by, say, cutting their funds? I say the whole idea that different rules would make all the difference is, well, completely silly. Sorry, Derrick.

Will the pikes and pitchforks be made in China?

Heh. A good guess. Though a well shaped branch will do in a pinch. :-)

I thought ‘head on a pike’ was the best part of a very well thought out column.  There’s a problem with being non-violent; your enemies, and the enemies of the environment who are by definition sociopaths, count on your nonviolence, which in this venue is the same as being a doormat.  How’s that working for you?

While I support everything the Zeitgeist Movement is proposing, their resolutely nonviolent stand bothers me; I understand the reasoning behind it; there’s the obvious ‘nonviolence is good’ one, and the underlying one of ‘if we propose violence, they’ll shut us down’ one.  It weakens and slows the process though, and time is running very short.  A few well chosen heads on pikes would go a long ways towards convincing certain people that graft and greed is not necessarily a good life-choice.

Is Wendell Berry a doormat?

He’s a poet and a thoughtful man, but I question whether soft quiet talking is really going to make enough difference now.  After the French Revolution, the French aristocracy ceased to be a problem… Perhaps you don’t live near a homeless park and see them everyday like I do.  There’s a LOT of anger out here in reality-land, which is a long ways away from academia-land.

Yes, I would like to see accountability! Good points in article and in comments, and… how do we get there? It seems to have been tricky grounds for 1000’s of years to pass on a sense of morality and ethics.Critical mass is on the horizon- every conversation is critical. My favorite Wendell Berry quote, “nothing exists in isolation”.