Iceland's Pirate Party

SUBHEAD: Radical democrats in favor of legalizing drugs and offering asylum to Edward Snowden running for office.

By Jon Henley on 12 August 2016 for the Guardian -
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/12/polls-suggests-icelands-pirate-party-form-next-government)


Image above: Gathering in June of 2015 in support of Pirate Party. From (https://talesfromtheloublog.wordpress.com/category/iceland/).

One of Europe’s most radical political parties is expected to gain its first taste of power after Iceland’s ruling coalition and opposition agreed to hold early elections caused by the Panama Papers scandal in October.

The Pirate party, whose platform includes direct democracy, greater government transparency, a new national constitution and asylum for US whistleblower Edward Snowden, will field candidates in every constituency and has been at or near the top of every opinion poll for over a year.

As befits a movement dedicated to reinventing democracy through new technology, it also aims to boost the youth vote by persuading the company developing Pokémon Go in Iceland to turn polling stations into Pokéstops.

“It’s gradually dawning on us, what’s happening,” Birgitta Jónsdóttir, leader of the Pirates’ parliamentary group, told the Guardian. “It’s strange and very exciting. But we are well prepared now. This is about change driven not by fear but by courage and hope. We are popular, not populist.”

The election, likely to be held on 29 October, follows the resignation of Iceland’s former prime minister Sigmundur Davið Gunnlaugsson, who became the first major victim of the Panama Papers in April after the leaked legal documents revealed he had millions of pounds of family money offshore.

In the face of some of the largest protests the small North Atlantic island nation had ever seen, the ruling Progressive and Independence parties replaced Gunnlaugsson with the agriculture and fisheries minister, Sigurður Ingi Jóhannsson, and promised elections before the end of the year.

Founded four years ago by a group of activists and hackers as part of an international anti-copyright movement, Iceland’s Pirates captured 5% of the vote in 2013 elections, winning three seats in the country’s 63-member parliament, the Althingi.

“Then, they were clearly a protest vote against the establishment,” said Eva Heida Önnudóttir, a political scientist at the University of Iceland who compares the party’s appeal to Icelandic voters to that of Spain’s Podemos, or Syriza in Greece.

“Three years later, they’ve distinguished themselves more clearly; it’s not just about protest. Even if they don’t have clear policies in many areas, people are genuinely drawn to their principles of transforming democracy and improving transparency.”

Propelled by public outrage at what is widely perceived as endemic cronyism in Icelandic politics and the seeming impunity of the country’s wealthy few, support for the party – which hangs a skull-and-crossbones flag in its parliamentary office – has rocketed.

A poll of polls for the online news outlet Kjarninn in late June had the Pirates comfortably the country’s largest party on 28.3%, four points clear of their closest rival, the conservative Independence party.

That lead has since narrowed slightly but most analysts are confident the Pirates will return between 18 and 20 MPs to the Althingi in October, putting them in a strong position to form Iceland’s next government.


Image above: Birgitta Jonsdottir, a co-founder of Iceland's Pirate Party. From (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/iceland-pirate-party-takes-big-lead-in-polls-ahead-of-election-next-year-a6834366.html).

Jónsdóttir said the party was willing to form a government with any coalition partner who subscribes to its agenda of “fundamental system change” – something the Independence party has already ruled out.

“I look at us and I think, we are equipped to do this,” she said. “Actually, the fact we haven’t done it before and that we won’t have any old-school people telling us how, means we’ll do it more carefully. We will be doing things very differently.”

Built on the belief that new technologies can help promote civic engagement and government transparency and accountability, the party believes in an “unlimited right” for citizens to be involved in the political decisions that affect them, with ordinary voters able to propose new legislation and decide on it in national referendums.

It also wants no limit on individuals’ rights to express their views and share information, unless doing so violates others’ rights, and proposes to decriminalise drugs, raise taxes on the rich, and pursue internet freedoms and copyright reform.

Önnudóttir said she could “very easily see” the party winning 20-25% of the vote. “After that, their success will depend on what they can really deliver, how much they make of their first term,” she said. “With numbers like those, you risk becoming a part of the establishment.”

This article was amended on Satuday 13 August 2016 to remove a reference to “Gunnlaugsson’s Independence party”. As pointed out in comments below, Gunnlaugsson is the chairman of the Progressive party.

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This Changes Everything movie

SUBHEAD: People are ready for a deeper, much more systemic critique and much more grassroots, radical solutions.

By Jon Queealy on 1 October 2025 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/10/01/changes-everything-debuts-us-leave-your-climate-despair-door)


Image above: Detail of poster for documentary "This Changes Everything". From original article.

If he wanted, filmmaker Avi Lewis thinks he could probably scare you into total paralysis.

"I can make the case to you that we're fucked," he says over the phone from New York as he spoke with Common Dreams about his new film, the perils of climate change, the inequities fostered by modern capitalism, and the prospects of humanity's current efforts to make a course correction away from planetary destruction.

"I could say that we should just turn on the TV, take our drug of choice, and just tune it out. I could make that case for you and it would be completely convincing."

But, he then adds, "What on earth is the point of that?"

With his new documentary film—This Changes Everything—making its U.S. debut this Friday night at the International Film Center in New York City, Lewis says the goal was not to "shock people into action."

Rather, the film was conceived with the idea that if the story of the climate crisis was told with the proper balance of fact-based concern and a very specific view of hope, it could inspire transcendence of the helplessness that prevents many from taking action.

"It's the balance of cold-eyed realism which shows us that we're on a truly catastrophic path and that we're hurtling in the wrong direction as a global society and the importance of choosing to be hopeful, because people don't act out of despair," Lewis says.

Put another way: "Despair breeds paralysis. And hope can lead to action."

Considering the current political moment—just one year after over 400,000 people gathered in New York City for the historic People's Climate March and just two months before the much-anticipated COP21 UN climate talks begin in Paris—Lewis says the world remains in a crucial period where understanding of the crisis, and the energetic desire to do something about it, must be matched with a new vision for what the world can be.

 "If you're going to embrace hope," he argues, "it has to be credible hope. It has to be hope that's actually based on something and it has to be hope that is mitigated by an acknowledgement of how bad things are. And that is the very fine balance that I tried to strike in the film."

Citing evidence for this theory of inspiration matched with policy, Lewis cites two individuals who have generated perhaps the most palpable levels of excitement in the U.S. recently: Pope Francis, who just concluded a two-week visit to the Americas, and presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose presidential campaign calling for "political revolution" has ignited grassroots passion not seen in decades.

Both the Pope and Sanders, says Lewis, "are talking about inequality and climate change and making the links between the two—and bing!—they're resonating crazy across society." Because those issues are the tandem themes of the film, Lewis says it's thrilling for them to be getting a larger audience.

"But it's also unsurprising," he says, "because the fact is, people know. Ask anyone on Earth if you can have infinite growth on a finite planet and everyone is going to say, 'Of course not.' It's common sense. And yet, our entire global economic system is premised on that crazy idea."

What the film does show, he argues, is that people all over the world "are ready for a deeper, much more systemic critique and much more grassroots, radical solutions."

It would be too easy to assume that the new 90-minute documentary is simply a film based on the book of the same name authored by Lewis' wife, Canadian journalist and author Naomi Klein—but that's not entirely accurate.

Conceived and executed as a parallel project nearly from the get-go, Lewis' film—which made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month—is just the latest installment of a synchronized and orchestrated endeavor which, though it is narrated by Klein and drew enormous inspiration from her best-selling book, also includes a website and a sophisticated outreach effort (run by a dedicated team of colleagues) which serve to promote and expand the work that has now occupied the last five years of their lives.

As Lewis explains, "I didn't have the book to look at, but I was making a movie about a book that hadn't been written yet."

Shot over four years on five continents and in nine countries, the film takes a global look at the intertwined crises of corporate greed, neoliberal capitalism, and climate change—but does so by sitting down with and listening to some of the very people who are standing their ground against those forces.

Following the New York premiere at the IFC on October 2—which will include a Q&A with both Lewis and Klein—the film will open on the West Coast in Los Angeles on October 16, before a nationwide release—including select theaters, community screenings, and on iTunes—on October 20.

Captured at least in part by the trailer that follows, the film explores the key themes of the book, but does so with a particular emphasis on meeting those individuals and communities from around the world who are confronting—not abstract disparities and economic theories—but actual injustices that have intruded on their lives in the form of polluted water and air, stolen land and traditions, and the systematic erosion of democracy which has been wrested from them by powerful fossil fuel companies and elite interests.


Video above: Trailer for "This Changes Everything". From (https://youtu.be/p1HEgCZBg_Q).

The bigger story, however, is about more than destruction. It is about resistance, renewal, and the opportunity that lies just below the surface of what is commonly understood about global warming and its most negative impacts.

As Klein, who acts as narrator in the film, asks provocatively, "What if global warming isn't only a crisis? What if it's the best chance we're ever going to get to build a better world?"

One of the key examples of this—and one of the most important episodes in the film, says Lewis—is the energy transformation that has taken place in Germany over recent years.

"This is not some tiny outlier," he explains. "Germany is the most powerful industrial economy in Europe and one of the top economies in the world.

And in the last fifteen years they've shifted their electricity system to 30 percent renewable; they've created 400,000 news jobs and—more importantly perhaps—900 energy cooperatives where they de-privatized electricity utilities across the country through referendum and a citizens' movement.

And now renewable energy is run, in many cases, locally by communities who receive the economic benefit from selling that electricity to the grid and use the revenue to pay for local services."

And this transition didn't happen, Lewis goes on, "because politicians just decided it would be a good idea. It was the anti-nuclear movement in Germany that pushed for many years on this.

And once they turned the tide on nukes, they set their sights on renewables, and now that they've got the energy transition going on in a very satisfying way—imperfect, but in a very exciting way—they're moving to shut down coal, which is the final missing piece in Germany."

Lewis explains it as a shift in which people pushing from below in strategic ways can absolutely impact the outcome of policies. "Look," he argues, "the one thing that politicians are really good at is figuring out what's popular and trying to be popular.

So I think our job is to propose policies and build political power behind them until we can get the politicians to come to us. And I think that's what we're seeing in the climate justice movement globally."

But don't get him wrong. "I'm not saying we're winning," he quickly adds. "We're not winning. But there's been an incredible string of victories that really need celebrating and I think point the way forward strategically."

That idea, which Lewis expanded on throughout his conversation with Common Dreams, cannot be overstated.

The film doesn't candy-coat realities, he says, but the realities are not one-sided. "We don't pretend that the tar sands aren't a vast crime in progress against the earth," Lewis explains.

"But on the other hand, there are people up there—like Crystal Lameman of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation—who are fighting the titanic struggle to fund a lawsuit against the Canadian government that makes the case that the cumulative impact of tar sands development is violating their constitutional guarantee to a traditional life.

And there have been a string of incredible Supreme Court decisions in Canada that have advanced aboriginal land rights enormously—like nowhere else in the post-colonial world—that give that lawsuit a real chance, a real hope, of being a game-changer."

Lewis confesses that though inspirational quotes have never been his thing, he did, in fact, print out one short line written by the poet, farmer, and philosopher Wendell Berry which he hung up over his desk and returned to often as he and his wife labored over their joint project during these last years. It reads: "Be joyful... though you have considered all the facts."

If there's a single underlying notion that might serve as the "spirit of the film," Lewis hopes it's that one.

And then what about the sorrow or helplessness produced by the devastating warnings issued by the world's scientific community? Such despair, says Lewis, is simply "an indulgence we don't have time for" any longer.

"The earth is screaming at us to get off this path," he explains. "And when you make connections across various issues—and fundamentally get at the economic logic that's driving our multiple, overlapping crises—you actually see the way towards multiple, overlapping solutions. And I think that's the place where people are getting really excited."

And finally, Lewis concludes, "I believe that the momentum behind Bernie and the euphoria around Pope Francis and the extraordinary generosity of spirit that we've seen recently among populations around the world towards refugees, speaks to the better side of ourselves.

And the ugly side is always there, of course. It's still there—and it still hold the reins of power—but I think these are moments that remind of us who we can be. That's why in the film, you know, Naomi says, 'It's not about polar bears. It's about us.'"

"It's about whether we are going to give in to this message that we are selfish, greedy, self-interested people. Or whether we're people who know how to take care of each other, and of the land—and whether that's the side of ourselves that we can live in, together."

So think about that. Even as you know the facts.

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Feminism and Ecological Crises

SUBHEAD: Love requires us to embrace feminist as well as ecological worldviews, in their radical forms.

By Robert Jensen on 10 March 2015 for Resilience.org -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-03-10/epic-fail-feminism-and-ecological-crises)


Image above: Feminist and ecologist Dr. Vandana Shiva. From (http://lipmag.com/featured/feminism-101-ecofeminism/).

We humans are an epic fail.

In internet-speak, that term can be used derisively or sympathetically. A failure of grand proportions can be labeled “epic” either to mock or to offer condolences to someone who fails so completely. However, given the speed at which pop-culture fads come and go, I’m told by younger informants that the term is already long out of date and that to invoke it is a sign of irrelevance.

Both the unkind and the compassionate aspects are appropriate here; we should be able both to laugh at, and feel sorry for, the human species. But unlike cultural fads, the ecological reality behind my use of the term remains relevant. Our species is an epic fail, and the scope and depth of our failure expands and deepens daily.

First, let’s acknowledge the irony in all this: Life on Earth is the scramble for energy-rich carbon; lately humans have dominated that competition; and now that domination is undermining life on Earth. We’re #1 for now, and it turns out that being #1 in this fashion means that over the long haul we lose big. And, increasingly, the long haul looks like it’s going to be a short trip. Our grandest failure is the product of our greatest success.

So, our task is to face a simple question that has serious consequences: Is the human with the big brain an evolutionary dead end? If so, what are we going to do with our species’ time remaining?

Homo sapiens’ domination of Earth is coming to an end, not in some imagined science-fiction future but as the result of today’s processes of resource extraction and waste generation. The trajectory of the multiple, cascading ecological crises that define our world cannot be predicted with precision, but the trend lines are clear enough.

Our task is not to figure out how to maintain the illusion of human control of the ecosphere—and it always was an illusion, even when we seemed to be more successful—but instead, borrowing from my friend Jim Koplin, “to learn to leave the planet gracefully.”

There are steps we can take to make our departure from the planet’s center stage more graceful, and we owe such a graceful departure to ourselves and the larger living world.

But before we focus on those steps, we need to spend time analyzing how we got to this point in history. When facing the scope and depth of these ecological crises, many people want to move immediately to discussion of actions that can be taken to “solve” problems, which I believe is a crucial error.

Avoiding the reasons for our epic fail tends to lead to “solutions” that are ineffective or counterproductive. There are problems without solutions, at least solutions that are based on the same assumptions and that work within the same systems out of which the problems arose.

It’s time to think about life beyond solutions, which requires us not only to confront the reasons for our epic fail but also to deal with the despair that inevitably flows from such honesty. That process is as much emotional as intellectual, and is possible only if we have compassion for ourselves and each other, grounded in a love for our specific home places that are part of the larger planetary home.

If it seems odd to inject the idea of love into this harsh analysis, consider Dostoyevsky’s insight that “love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.” We have many dreadful realities to face, none of which will be resolved by dreaming.

I will argue that such love requires us to embrace feminist as well as ecological worldviews, in their radical forms. This is a tall order in a culture that either rejects feminism or, at best, accepts a watered-down liberal/postmodern version; and either rejects ecological thinking or, at best, accepts a watered-down environmentalist version.

A graceful future for humans is possible only if we have the courage to act on those radical ideas, not with dreams of dramatically altering our species’ trajectory, but because in our efforts we will be graceful and find some sense of grace, not bestowed by a divine being but created by the human spirit.

That is an ambitious agenda for a short talk. But let me delay the argument with a bit of autobiography.

From the intimate to the planetary
My intellectual and political career started with the feminist critique of the domination/subordination dynamic at the heart of the sexual-exploitation industries (pornography, prostitution, stripping). This first political project of my life forced me to deal with patriarchy at the most intimate level of human existence, in the context of human sexual connection.

I had to confront not only the way in which men routinely are socialized to be sexually aroused by the control and degradation of women, but also the particular way that such training had taken root in my own body.

Once this cruelty was visible to me, it became impossible to treat this as a purely academic enterprise. My own life depended on making sense of the pathology of patriarchy.

My intellectual and political career is ending with a focus on the multiple, cascading ecological crises that define humans’ place in the ecosphere today and for the foreseeable future. That means I spend most of my time these days grappling with the domination/subordination dynamic that defines our species’ relationship to the larger living world. All of our lives depend on making sense of the pathology at the heart of our high-energy/high-technology dystopian nightmare.

That’s my career, thinking about the consequences of the worst aspect of human nature—the quest for domination, no matter what the cost to other people or other living things—from the most intimate spaces in our lives to our collective place on the globe.

As you might imagine, I don’t spend a lot of time skipping down the sunny side of the street whistling a happy tune, which is why I’m one of the most mentally healthy people I know. If that seems counterintuitive—that someone focused on the unjust and unsustainable nature of our society, from the personal to the planetary, would make such a claim of psychological stability—just think of all the intellectual and emotional energy I don’t have to spend on denial.

All around us is the evidence of the systematic corrosion of our humanity and the irreversible collapse of our ecosystems, piling up in ways that are impossible to ignore, and yet most people expend enormous energy to keep themselves from these realities. Freed of that (or, at least, mostly freed most days), I need not waste time on the delusional systems that humans create for avoidance.

What do I mean by delusional systems?

On the question of the sexual-exploitation industries, just think about all the arguments—typically influenced by either conventional liberalism or some version of postmodernism (which is little more than liberalism to the nth degree)—asserting that pornography, prostitution, and stripping are vehicles for empowerment and liberation. That’s delusional, which can be demonstrated by asking simple questions:

If we lived in a world with gender justice, within a wider system of meaningful social justice, would people ever imagine the buying and selling of sexual intimacy? Is gender justice imaginable when one group of people (mostly women and girls, and some vulnerable boys and men) can be rented or purchased by another group of people (almost exclusively men) for sexual pleasure?

On the question of the ecological crises, just think about all the arguments—typically influenced by a superficial understanding of science that privileges physics and molecular biology over the far more important work of ecologists—that rely on technological fundamentalism, the idea that we can always invent our way out of our troubles simply because we want to. That’s delusional, which can be demonstrated by asking simple questions:

Given that many of our most intractable ecological crises are the result of the unintended consequences of high-energy/high-technology, why would we invest our hopes in more of the same? Why would we look for solutions to our problems by embracing the naïve assumptions that have deepened the problems?

Since I don’t have to construct and maintain these kinds of delusions, I’m freed up to deal with reality. That is difficult, but that freedom makes it easier to set aside the culture’s obsession with pleasure-indulgence and pain-avoidance in favor of accepting the inevitable grief and the struggling for deeper joy. That is where we live, “the human estate of grief and joy,”[1] to borrow from Wendell Berry, and it is there that we can accept reality and begin to build a different world.

Evolution and emancipation
At the heart of that different world has to be a rejection of the domination/subordination dynamic that has defined human societies for the past 10,000 years or so. If that seems impossible to imagine, remember that over the 200,000 year history of the species, and the several million years of our hominin ancestors, this dynamic has defined only our very recent past.

The band-level gathering and hunting societies that were the norm for most of human history were far more egalitarian than the hierarchies we now take to be normal in human social organizations.

Ecologically, our species’ fundamental break with nature came when we started farming. While gathering-hunting humans were capable of damaging a local ecosystem in limited ways, the shift to agriculture and the domestication of animals meant humans for the first time could dramatically alter ecosystems, typically with negative consequences.

While there have been better and worse farming practices in history, soil erosion has been a consistent feature of agriculture, making agriculture the first step in the entrenchment of an unsustainable human economy based on extraction, which today is taken to its most dangerous levels with extreme energy extraction in fracking, tar sands, and deep-water drilling.

Socially, the development of patriarchy is tied to that domestication of animals and agriculture, when the communal and cooperative ethic of gatherer-hunter societies was replaced with ideas of private ownership and patrimony that led to men controlling women’s reproduction and claiming ownership of women.[2]

Although modern feminism has successfully challenged that institutionalized male dominance on some fronts in some places, such as access to higher education in the United States, the domination/subordination dynamic has proved difficult to roll back in everyday life, especially in sexuality, leading to pandemic levels of sexual violence and increasingly corrosive media.

Political, economic, and cultural systems at the core of contemporary injustices—nation-states in an imperial system, capitalism, white supremacy—are rooted in the same domination/subordination dynamic.

 Capitalism is perhaps the most perverse, given its attempt at a moral justification; because human nature is immutably and overwhelmingly greedy and self-interested, we are told, the world’s economy must be organized around that greed, even if it leaves half the world’s population in misery and the ecosphere on the edge of collapse.

Given that for 95 percent of Homo sapiens history, and 99.9 percent of hominin history, we evolved in cooperative settings in which a very different set of norms defined us, we should be skeptical about claims that white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy and extractivist economies are natural.

But if we are to take seriously evolution by natural selection, then there is another question about human nature that we can’t skirt.

Once humans’ big brain evolved to the point that our cognitive capacities allowed us to exploit the planet’s carbon in new ways through agriculture and, eventually, the industrial model based on fossil fuels, then it’s hard to imagine why humans would not have used that capacity.

When we first used this intelligence to exploit that carbon for short-term gain, we could not anticipate the long-term consequences. Given our success at that exploitation of energy, was all this in the cards no matter which particular population was holding the deck when it started? Without diving into the age-old determinism/free will debate, it seems that we are at this crisis point as a result of forces that were bound to play out this way.

This isn’t an argument for nihilistic indifference to human suffering and ecological degradation, but rather an attempt to understand how we got here, to guide our decisions about the future.

Our ability to exploit each other and the larger living world is one part of human nature, the one that has predominated in our recent past.

But we must now accept that these methods of control and levels of consumption, which are indeed the product of that aspect of our nature, are not only inconsistent with human dignity (which has been readily evident for some time) but now also an impediment to maintaining a large-scale human presence on the planet in a morally acceptable form.

If our goal is true emancipation, not only of specific groups of people who are exploited by others but of all of creation, this conversation is unavoidable.

A state of profound grief

My friend Jim Koplin, the one who wanted us to learn to leave the planet gracefully, did just that on December 15, 2012, at the age of 79, dying as he had lived, gracefully. Jim was the first man I met who was committed to the feminist critique of pornography and sexual exploitation, and it was through my 24 years of conversation with him that I came to understand these multiple, cascading ecological crises (that’s his phrase, which I have been using ever since I first heard it). More than anyone in my circle of friends and comrades, he was willing to face these realities. 

As a result, he woke up every day in a state of profound grief.

I remember him using that phrase in a conversation a few days after the attacks of September 11, 2001. I had thrown myself immediately into the antiwar movement’s organizing efforts to block the U.S. invasions that would come after that attack.

Jim participated on the edge of that movement, but his own work remained focused on long-term community building, efforts aimed not at specific political ends but at creating networks of people with shared values who could be part of the “saving remnant” that he believed was necessary for a dramatically different future.

Jim was not callous about the loss of life on that day, but he also was not afraid to point out that the casualties from the attack were not all that unusual in a world structured by the domination/subordination dynamic. Jim told me that when he woke up on September 12, he didn’t feel appreciably different than he had the previous day.

“I wake up every morning in a state of profound grief,” he said.

I first assumed that Jim was poking at me to make a point, but as we talked I realized he meant it quite literally. I had always known that Jim felt deeply the pain in the world and the pain of the world, in a way that was hard to articulate. This is what it means to face the world honestly, he was telling me, to not turn away from the horror of it all. He also believed we had an obligation to maintain our sanity and stability so that we can act responsibly on behalf of justice and sustainability.

Jim had fashioned a way of frugal living in progressive communities that worked for him, but he always said there was no template for how to live these values in this world. He believed in embracing the grief, not just because it was the right thing to do but because it made possible a fuller embrace of the joy.

When I think of him, I most remember the hours we spent talking about these ideas, which typically would take us, in a single conversation, from quiet despair to giddy laughter. Others often told us that our ideas about these subjects were depressing, but neither Jim nor I ever were depressed by the subject. It was, for us, a way we loved each other and held onto a love for the world.

Pornography is what the end of the world looks like
In lectures I used to give on the subject, I would sometimes suggest that “pornography is what the end of the world looks like,” not to suggest that pornography was going to lead to the destruction of the world, of course.

Rather, I was suggesting that contemporary pornography deadens consumers’ capacity for empathy for and solidarity with others—the things that make decent human society possible. When these aspects of our humanity are overwhelmed by a self-centered, emotionally detached pleasure-seeking, social justice is impossible to imagine.

 Equally impossible to imagine is ecological sustainability; if that same self-centered, emotionally detached pleasure-seeking leads to support for an unsustainable extractivist economy, our collective ability to emphasize with other living things or act in solidarity with life atrophies.

If these capacities are lost, human societies will become increasingly inhuman, and the planet will not indefinitely sustain those societies.

What can we do to change this trajectory? Rather than search for a pithy ending of my own, something I find more and more difficult to pull off as I get older, I’ll go back to Dostoyevsky, and the section out of which the “love in action” line comes:

“If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself.

Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at your own faintheartedness in attaining love. Don’t be frightened overmuch even at your evil actions.

I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all.

Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage.

But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps a complete science.”[3]

[1] Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 3^rd ed. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996), p. 106.
[2] Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
[3] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, edited and with a revised translation by Susan McReynolds Oddo (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011)p. 55.

[A version of this essay was delivered to the International Conference on Masculinities in New York City on March 6, 2015.]

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Some Sunny Days

SUBHEAD: The euphoria that greeted the end of the fiscal cliff ritual has settled back into the feckless collective state-of-mind that we call "bullish."

By James Kunstler on 6 January 2013 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/01/some-sunny-day.html)


Image above: Bullish on America. From (http://www.cliffkule.com/2011_04_03_archive.html).

The story behind the "fiscal cliff" melodrama and the much-memed handwringing about the "good-for-nothing congress" is probably not quite what it appears -- a set of problems that will eventually be overcome by "better leadership" armed with "solutions." The story is really about the permanent disabling of government at this scale and at this level of complexity.

In other words, the federal government will never solve its obvious problems of mismanagement and bankruptcy and is now only in business to pretend that it can discharge its obligations (while employees enjoy the perqs). It's just another form of show business.

The same can be said of most of the state governments, too, of course, except that they have a lower capacity to pretend they can take care of anything. They can and will go bankrupt, and then they'll go begging to the federal government to bail them out, which the federal government will pretend to do with pretend money.

By then, though, the practical arrangements of daily life would probably be so askew that politics would take a new, darker, and more extreme turn --among other things, in the direction of secession and breakup.

The wonder of it all is that there hasn't been civil disorder yet. When I go into the supermarket, I marvel at the price of things: a single onion for a dollar, four bucks for a jar of jam, five bucks for a box of Cheerios, four bucks for a wedge of cheese. Is everybody except Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, and Mark Zuckerberg living on store-brand macaroni and ketchup? It's hard to measure the desperation of households in this culture of rugged individualism.

At social gatherings friends rarely tell you that they are two months behind in their mortgage payment and maxed out on their credit cards. And that's the supposed middle class, at least the remnants of it. I can't tell you what the tattoo-and-falling-down-pants crowd talks about in the parking lot outside the 7-Eleven store. Perhaps they swap meth recipes.

Civil disorder would at least mean something, a consensus of dissatisfaction about how life is lived. Instead, we only get mad outbursts of tragic meaninglessness: the slaughter of innocent children in school, or movie theater patrons mowed down by a lone maniac during the coming attractions. Life imitates art, as Oscar Wilde said, and these days television is our art. Hence the United States is now equal parts Jersey Shore, Buck Wild, the Kardashians, and Honey Boo Boo. That's not really a lot to work with in terms of social capital, especially where radical politics might be called for.

Does anybody now breathing even remember radical politics? Whether you liked them or not -- and I was not crazy about the whole "revolution" of the late 1960s, which I lived through -- it at least represented a level of seriousness that is now absolutely and starkly absent today, especially in young people.

Who, in the West, besides Julian Assange (and Bradley Manning), has stuck his neck out in the past ten years? And please don't tell me Ron Paul, who had ample opportunity in congressional hearings over the years to really call out the banksters and their government wankster errand boys, and all he ever did was nip around their trouser legs.

So I stick to the point I made in The Long Emergency and again in Too Much Magic: expect America's national and state governments to only become more ineffectual and impotent. They will never recover from the insults inflicted on themselves. Events are in the drivers seat, including things unseen, and the people pretending to be in charge have arranged things into such a state of fragility that accidents are sure to happen, especially involving the basic structures of money. In case you don't know it yet, you're on your own now. Put whatever energy you can muster into finding a community to be a part of.

Meanwhile, reality stands by with mandates of its own. Do people like Barack Obama and John Boehner think we're going to re-start another round of suburban expansion (a.k.a. the housing market)? That's largely what the old economy was based on, and what Wall Street fed off of parasitically the past twenty years. That is so over. Do they believe that when absolutely every task in America is computerized there will be any gainful work outside of a sort of janitorial IT to tend all the computers.

We've already seen what happens with the telephone system: after 30 years of techno-innovation in "communications," it's now impossible to get a live human being on the phone and robots call you incessantly during the dinner hour. Anyway, we don't really have the energy resources to supply the electricity for all this crap indefinitely, or probably even another twenty years.

All the tendencies and trends in contemporary life are reaching their limits at the same time, and as they do things will crack up and fall apart, whether it involves the despotic reach of a government, or a tyrannical corporation, or a hedge fund server farm stuffed with algo-crunching computers sucking the life out of every honest market transaction until the markets are zombies.

The euphoria that greeted the end of the fiscal cliff ritual has settled back into the feckless collective state-of-mind that we call "bullish." It's all noise and the madness of crowds now. And black swans shitting on your head some sunny day.

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Climate Change Emergency

SUBHEAD: The latest evidence on climate change demands a radical reappraisal of our approach.

By Ian Dunlop on 2 October 2012 for the Club of Rome - (http://www.clubofrome.org/?p=5183)


Image above: Jorgen Randers presenting 2052 at Club of Rome meeting in Bucharest on  "The Power of the Mind". The report he made in 1972 was frightning in its accuracy. From (https://gabrielaionita.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/the-conference-the-power-of-the-mind-club-of-rome-celebrates-40-years-since-the-first-report-on-the-state-and-future-of-the-world/). See also (http://transitionculture.org/2012/08/17/an-interview-with-jorgen-randers-its-the-story-of-humanity-not-rising-to-the-occasion/).

The Arctic has been warming 2-3 times faster than the rest of the world. In the last few weeks melting of the Arctic sea ice has accelerated dramatically, reducing the area and volume to levels never previously experienced.  Some 80% of the summer sea-ice has been lost since 1979; on current trends the Arctic will be ice-free in summer by 2015, and ice-free all year by 2030, events which were not expected to occur for another 100 years. More concerning, the Greenland ice sheet this year has seen unprecedented melting and glacial ice calving, adding to a trend which will substantially increase sea level rise.

Beyond the Arctic, the world is in the fifth year of a severe food crisis, largely climate change driven, which is about to become far worse as the full impact of recent extreme drought in the US food bowl works its way through the global food chain, leading to substantial price rises.  Drought around the Mediterranean contributed to this food crisis, and has played a large part in triggering the Arab Spring, and the Syrian conflicts. Globally, the escalation of extreme weather continues.

Science is clearly linking these events to climate change, with human carbon emissions as the prime cause.

Does any of this matter? Yes – It is the most urgent issue now confronting the world, for the evidence indicates that climate change has moved into a new and highly dangerous phase. The polar icecaps are one of the vital regulators of global climate; if the ice disappears, the absorption of far more solar radiation accelerates ocean warming, with increasing risk of large-scale release of carbon dioxide and methane from melting permafrost. This in turn may initiate irreversible runaway warming. Energy, food and water security are also poised on a knife-edge in both the developed and developing worlds

These changes are occurring at the 0.8^oC temperature increase, relative to pre-industrial conditions, already experienced, let alone the additional 1.2^oC which will probably result from our historic emissions. The “official” target, of limiting temperature increase to no more than 2^oC, is way too high.  Current policies, proposed by governments around the world, are far worse and would result in a 4^oC plus temperature increase. Official panaceas, such as carbon capture and storage, are not working.

Political and business leaders glibly talk about adapting to a 4^oC world with little idea of what it means – which is a world of 1 billion people rather than the current 7 billion.  Not much fun for the 6 billion departing.

To paraphrase Churchill:

“— the era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. We are now in an age of consequences”. 

We know how to establish genuine low-carbon economies, which would stave off the worst impacts of climate change, but we have left it too late for gradual implementation. They have to be set up at emergency speed, akin to the mobilization of economies on a war-footing pre-WW2.

Yet we hear nothing of this from the political, business or NGO institutions who should be leading our response. Why?

Financial incentives are the main culprit, in particular the bonus culture which has spread through the Anglo-Saxon world since the early 1990s.  Recently there has been some recognition that this might be a problem. The Chairman of Rio Tinto acknowledged that “the spiral in executive remuneration over the last two decades, simply cannot continue”, and chief executives are graciously deciding to forgo their annual bonuses in the light of adverse corporate performance.  Very worthy, but the damage caused by this culture is far more insidious than a debate about quantum. It threatens the very foundations of democratic society.

The bonus mentality inevitably led to short-termism – few directors or executives are prepared to give serious attention to long-term issues such as climate change when their rewards are based almost entirely on short-term performance. As Upton Sinclair put it: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it”.

Many privately agree that climate change needs far more urgent action that we are seeing, but few are prepared to speak out for fear of derailing “business-as-usual”. This is a fundamental failure of governance – directors have a fiduciary responsibility to objectively assess the critical risks to which their companies are exposed, and take action to ensure these risks are adequately managed.

But if they acknowledge climate change as a serious risk, they are bound to act, which requires a radical redirection of business away from our addiction to high-carbon fossil-fuels, powerful vested interests losing out in the process.  Better then to stick to absolute denial, irrespective of the consequences.

This flows through to politicians, NGOs and bureaucracies, who are subjected to immense pressure from the corporate sector not to rock the  “business-as-usual” boat, the result being politically expedient and contradictory climate policies.

Ethically and morally indefensible it may be, but that is what a deregulated market has delivered, and why it is so dangerous for the health of democracy.

Adversarial politics and corporate myopia are incapable of addressing life-threatening issues such as climate change.  It is time for communities to go around these barriers and demand leadership prepared to take emergency action, before the poisoned chalice we are passing to our grandchildren becomes even more toxic.

• Ian Dunlop is an independent commentator, Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development, Director of Australia21, and a Member of the Club of Rome.  He chaired the Australian Coal Association 1987-88, the Australian Greenhouse Office Experts Group on Emissions Trading 1998-2000 and was CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors 1997-2001.

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