Reply #5: And I assumed you were not reading me. [View All]

[NNadir]

Didn't I ask you to put me on "ignore?" Didn't you just make a grand pronouncement about having done so?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=61914#62082

Why not spare yourself from anything I have to say? Our level of mutual respect is pretty clear, and as you've declared previously, you find me unpleasant.

No, I have NOT read Bookchin, nor do I care to do so or see any reason to do so, given the clear stupidity represented in his obituary.

I can tell in fifteen seconds the difference between a person who can identify the core of the problem - which is a matter of physics, chemistry and technology and - to the extend that population dynamics and carrying capacity are involved, biology - and people who are too distractable and intellectually disorganized to flesh out the real issues because they too chase after their pet irrelevant windmills.

It is easy to blame "capitalism" for everything that's wrong with the world, since "capitalism" is a broad abstraction. Everyone is talking about the environmental impact of China. Capitalist? Socialist? Anarchy?

I note that the problems of energy and the environment effect all of humanity, irrespective of social system. I have noted many times that neither anarchies nor socialist countries have avoided these issues, any more than capitalist nations have. In many places that are not ruled "for profit" the environmental devastation is far greater than what armchair "intellectuals" can even imagine. (Of course, my contention is that armchair "intellectuals" - especially the self declared kind - are themselves a big cause of the problem in the first place.) Therefore it should be clear that social systems or economic systems are not the cause of the disaster we face. I note that some of the most ravished places on earth are precisely those that have experienced grand social system experiments. People here often cry about Chernobyl - even as they ignore the disaster of Ukrainian coal mines - but Chernobyl did not occur in a malignant capitalist society. Instead it occurred in a place characterized by the grand socialist experiment, an experiment that did, after a while, flirt with anarchy.

Anarchies fare the worst in terms of environmental degradation and in terms of human suffering. The matter of course, is much more serious for those who are experiencing anarchy rather than people of questionable moral standing or wax romantic about it. But let's face it, the reason that our world is so severely threatened is precisely because there are whole lot of people who wiggle around offering all kinds of off topic evasions.

I've been hearing this kind of pseudo-intellectual crap my whole adult life. When I was a teenager, I even bought into some of it; there was a time that I even admired the mass murderer Chairman Mao. But I grew up, and developed some intellectual and moral sense and that has made all the difference.

You can be sure I will never read Bookchin. Given what I can glean from the report of his death - his obituary happily being the first time I heard of him - it would embarrass me to say that I had. I read a great deal but don't have as much time for it as I wish. Therefore it is necessary for me to use a shorthand to determine where my attention should lie. In general, I rely on quick scans to determine what is worth careful reading and what is not. Except for reading things that take less than fifty seconds to apprehend - your post being an example - generally I only read people who I expect, from such scanning, to be serious. That senile old fool, Bookchin, didn't make it through the scan.

But look on the bright side. Irrespective of whether you can work the ignore function consistently, I'm going to be writing here much less, since at the end of the day, I'm more and more resigned to the fact that nothing I can say or do is going to prevent everyone from getting exactly what they deserve.

I feel terrible because I have children, but I cannot avoid that reality that spitting into the wind generated by the silly speculations of billions of idiots is largely a waste of time.