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We humans are really bad at responding to the necessity of long term change. It doesn’t help that we also happen to be locked into political systems that strongly bias short term thinking and solutions. I’m thinking when most of Florida is underwater and New York City looks more like Venice the powers that be *might* acknowledge that we have a bit of climate situation on our hands.
Canada is not much better, Andrew Scheer leader of the Conservative party during a Town Hall:
“He promised tax reform and reiterated his opposition to the Trudeau government’s carbon tax, which he called “a cash grab, not an environmental plan.”
“Scheer had to get out of his vehicle and walk to the venue in Nisku, Alta., because of a 22-kilometre convoy of truckers protesting Trudeau’s carbon tax and environmental policies. Scheer sought to reassure people by promising to scrap the prime minister’s carbon levy designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
Awesome. Because the weak half measures started by Trudeau and the Liberal Government definitely need to go. Why is it that when it comes to climate change conservative types all of suddenly need to compete to see how can fiddle the fastest while the world burns?
In Counterpunch John Davis writes this on our climate situation:
“Naomi Klein optimistically wrote, way back in 2014, in This Changes Everything, “There are ways of preventing this grim future….but the catch is these will involve changing everything….it involves changing how we live, how our economies function, even the stories we tell about our place on earth”.
Five years later, it is no longer a matter of preventing a grim future. The careless extension of what the American Sci-Fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson calls ‘The Dithering’ – those decades when we understood the atmospheric CO2problem but totally failed to address it – guarantees its imminent arrival. The catch now is that the climate is changing everything for us. We have already liberated enough carbon in the atmosphere to put the weather on disaster auto-pilot for the next millennium. We can but batten down the hatches, stockpile provisions and close the fire-doors. The weather is the effective change-agent, not we nor our politicians. The pretense that humans are in charge has finally to be abandoned. We await our fate possessing only crude materials of resistance and, thus far, almost no political will to emplace them.
The most salient function of government is the protection of its people – our allegiance to the Republic depends on its successful manifestation. The present regime appears totally committed to the denial of our climate reality and its power to inflict terrifyingly real damage on our underfunded and aging infrastructure and to the people that that infrastructure supports. Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Maria, Harvey, Thomas, and Michael, should each have been a wake-up call, a weather 9/11. Instead, they have proven to be opportunities for official prevarication, dissembling and hand-washing. From George Bush’s, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”, to Trump’s notorious paper towel toss (in post-Maria Puerto Rico) there is a through-line that speaks of the government’s dismissal of the seriousness of these amplified weather events and their wider implications. The validity of the updated death toll in Puerto Rico of almost 3,000 was, predictably, denied by the president – while estimates of the toll continue to rise. A Harvard study now puts the number of Maria-related fatalities at over 4,500, as of year’s end. The climate has far exceeded the lethality of 9/11. Its death toll, in fire, flood, drought and wind is ever rising, as each season’s disasters inexorably add bodies to the statistical burial mound.”
The weather gives exactly zero fucks about borders and national security, and ‘rogue’ nations. Every nation is going to have to work together to survive the coming up climactic upheavals. I certainly hope our unerring dedication to fossil fuel industry will be worth it.
Megan Murphy last night at the Vancouver Public Library:
“Despite what transactivists claim it is not illegal to understand that biological sex is real and that it matters which is essentially what I and other women have been smeared, censored and no-platformed for saying . It’s also not illegal to understand that a woman is an adult human female. It’s not illegal to defend women’s transition houses and to argue that when women are escaping male violence they should have access to spaces that make them feel safe where they can speak to women who understand what it’s like to grow up female in this world and where they can be assured that they won’t be made more vulnerable by having to share a room with a man.
It is not illegal to understand that male bodies and female bodies are different and that women and girls have the right to compete in sports under fair terms against other women and girls not against men who, in most cases, would have an unfair advantage…
It’s not illegal in Canada for lesbians to limit their choices in intimate partners to women only and to refuse sexual partners with penises.”
— Meghan Murphy (Excerpt from speech at Vancouver Public Library)
Feminism has a voice in Canada. Meghan Murphy continues the struggle against male power and for the rights of women. This event almost didn’t happen thanks to the ‘progessive, inclusive’ left.
Thank you for persevering Ms.Murphy.
Canadian feminism at its finest.
Made the news as well.
Laurie Penny has a great review of some of Jordan Peterson’s work, this quote illustrates the continued reliance of sociobiological principles by JP.
“Peterson insists in the very first chapter of 12 Rules for Life that if you’re an adult human man worried about your place in the world, you’ve a surprising amount in common with lobsters, “especially when you are feeling crabby, ha ha.” He then draws a thick, wonky line through several hundred million years of natural selection to advise human primates on their posture. If you stand up straight, like the biggest, toughest lobsters do, “you are a successful lobster, and the most desirable females line up and vie for your attention.”
Idiots will believe anything; fools will believe anything that makes them feel better. Peterson’s followers are not idiots. In November 1975, the New York Review of Books published an open letter from a group of Boston scientists, educators, and students entitled “Against Sociobiology,” in which they warned about the enduring popularity of biological justifications of inequality, ideas for which there is scant evidence but huge public appetite: “The reason for the survival of these recurrent determinist theories is that they consistently tend to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race or sex.”
Peterson is extravagantly dedicated to this justification, festooning his unscholarly interpretations of nature documentaries with ethical significance. His vision is of a world of crustacean anhedonia, an ordered utopia of jostling invertebrates endlessly battling to be top lobster, all tough carapace and no backbone.
This is Social Darwinism, not science. Peterson is working in a long, long tradition of conservatives, from Galton to Rockefeller to Reagan, using weak scientific data to give their dogma the mouthfeel of objectivity. Actual science journalists like Cordelia Fine and Angela Saini have done the hard work of going through every lazy assumption exhaustively, making it clear that using evolutionary theory alone to make sweeping pronouncements about human behavior is about as useful as scrying from the migratory patterns of birds or the entrails of whatever we’ve sacrificed to the god of late-capitalist male fragility on this day. Possibly our principles.
Social Darwinism, by itself, is a feeble philosophy. Combined with an investment in mythology and spiritualism, however, it becomes more dangerous. And this, brazenly, is what Peterson does. Standing up straight, for example, is important because of the lobsters, but also:
“To stand up straight with your shoulders back means building the ark that protects the world from the flood, guiding your people through the desert after they have escaped tyranny, [and] making your way away from a comfortable home and country… It means shouldering the cross.”
The simultaneous appeal to both science and religious mysticism, to God-and-or-genetics, is an ingenious arse-covering mechanism: if God didn’t strictly say he created man to compete in a series of vicious status battles and fuck the other guy, then genetics probably did, and any blue-haired social justice neuroscientists popping up to explain that that’s really not how gene expression works simply haven’t grasped the larger cosmic context. If there’s no actual scientific evidence for it, then it’s all a metaphor. It’s a prosperity gospel for toxic masculinity, The Art of the Deal via the Book of Leviticus.”
A review of The 12 Rules of life.
I need to find a pdf or two of JP’s works, there looks like there is a lot of comedy gold to mined.
“A poll that surveyed nearly 1,000 Albertans earlier this month found the United Conservative Party have a large lead over the NDP and would win if an election was held today.
The Mainstreet Research poll has the UCP with 56 per cent support among decided and leaning voters, which translates to a 28-point lead over the governing NDP (27 per cent).
Related“The UCP, led by Jason Kenney, has a substantial lead over the governing NDP and interestingly enough, they also lead among every single demographic that’s out there, which was a surprise,” Mainstreet Research vice president Joseph Angolano said.
The lead largely comes from Calgary (30 points) and the rest of Alberta (46 points) while Edmonton remains competitive for both parties.”
You would think that 40 years of Conservative rule would be enough of a reminder that maybe, just maybe, corporatism isn’t the way to go? Naaah. The people of Alberta currently seem to think that cutting services and giving more breaks to corporations is the way of the future.
Please take a look down south to see exactly what that get the average voter.
If the UCP (united conservative party) takes the next election, will the average Albertan celebrate the lack of access to public service? Thank their lucky stars that the oil companies can continue to line their pockets with our resource revenue? Like what?
These people want the party that walked out of the legislature on an abortion bubble zone vote to represent them? Because preventing a bozo-eruption from the religious fringe that inhabits your party is more important that representing the people that elected you? But hey, it was just an crucial vote affecting the female half of the population, so no big deal because in the UCP, females ain’t shit.
I’m unimpressed with the UCP and the mewing stampede back into the hell that is conservatism here in Alberta. :/
I’m following the Meghan Murphy Twitter-ban debacle and one of the places where I landed was the Quillette. As it turns out, Megan Murphy has written a piece describing what happened to her and her struggle with the totalitarian ideology of transactivism. I liked what MM wrote, but I found the comment section more interesting as the user base seems to self describe itself as the ‘rational middle’. I worry when I see phrases like that because often they end up in the barren hellscape known as American Libertarianism. *shudder*
Now there was some back and forth in the comment section, but generally the tone was, “well this is what feminism has wrought and it’s bastard child has come home to roost”. I’m not sure how the fight for female liberation begat the current state of trans-insanity, but for many commentors the two movements are intrinsically linked.
A couple of radical feminists made an appearance, one I suspect is a dude sponsored sock, as the claiming to be a rad-fem and then conforming almost exactly to the male approved stereotype of what a rad-fem is, just cannot be real.
A second rad-fem entered the debate and this is her comment:
“I enjoy how afraid you are of losing your job for telling jokes. I also enjoy how thoroughly you & other men take on this specific tone—have you noticed yet? It’s the “rational” tone. Literally every male commenter has used it thus far. Men can be rational about women’s issues as they experience almost no part of them. What you’re really saying when you cry about the change in feminism is that women don’t worship the ground you walk on anymore, & this has had repercussions for your ego & your sense of place (ie perceived significance) in the world.
I, for one, don’t really enjoy self-application of the title “man-hating”… feels very corny to me. What I do enjoy is speaking with women who are enlightened to the fact that they, unlike their mothers, do not have to settle for second best, settle for a man who disrespects her, hurts her, abuses her.
I think it’s telling that you’re so afraid of a world where men are not the main axis of women’s orbit. What exactly are you scared of? That women will make men walk on all fours with studded leashes around their necks? Get a grip dude. There is nothing women could do to men that is worse than men have done to women. With 90% of all violent crimes committed by men, your son has a greater chance of getting murdered by a man than getting falsely accused of sexual assault at the workplace.
Ultimately, the weird, fantastical fears you harbor are just excuses. Justifications for choosing to sit back & whine about what feminism has apparently “done” to men, when despite feminism’s very best efforts, men continue to harass, assault, abuse, rape, mutilate, & kill women. What you’re afraid of is change. Not feminists. At least own up it.”
Of course, none of the centrist rationalists have responded. Funny that, when confronted with someone knowledgeable who is quite willing to charitably engage the response is crickets.
Tanya correctly observes the near thematic use of the “rational tone” and how problematic it is trying to deal with people who, calibre of intellect notwithstanding, don’t get the fact that the societal experience for men and women is quite drastically different.
I’ll finish with the thread now, but I thought it would be good to share some perspectives from the ‘rational middle’.
Christmas time.
Celebrate the season; live with loss.
Be happy; feel the keen echoes of what once was.
Remain standing; help others when you can.
Have a Merry Christmas and a Joyous New Year from all of us here at DWR.
Arbourist
Mystro
Bleatmop
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Tanya’s Comment on Twitter’s Trans-Activist Decree on the Quillette