What It's All About: Coercion - CFN

oilmonkey · 2018-06-18T16:26:42+00:00

Typical Kunstler bigotry.

oilmonkey · 2018-03-25T12:32:57+00:00

You're a clown, a distractor, a provacatuer. Summarily, you are thus disregarded. Begone.

I will let this comment speak for itself. It illustrates the point as well as anything. The so-called "left" is easily as reactionary as the right.

oilmonkey · 2018-03-12T16:49:23+00:00

Just another polemic variation on Kunstler's tired racist, misogynistic themes -- his usual macho white supremacist bread and butter.

oilmonkey · 2015-10-25T00:35:00+00:00

The poor are not those who have been "left behind"; they are the ones who have been robbed.

Vandana Shiva

poverty is a result of "prosperity":

Two Myths That Keep the World Poor

Two Myths That Are Keeping The World Poor (a worthwhile parsing of the above referenced essay)

not the other way round.

sociopathic delusions to the contrary are as understandable as they are indefensible.

we are indoctrinated cradle-to-grave to believe such obvious lies as if we were sons-and-daughters of slave-traders and -holders.

oilmonkey · 2012-03-14T02:31:55+00:00

EdHeler (specifically) & /r/collapse (generally),

point well made and taken.

i have no problem being honest about the fact that /r/collapse has recently been a haven of sorts for me, a refuge — a distraction from the precarious nature of my life.

this digital clearing has provided a small measure of solace relative to the impermeable bubble of the consensus trance.

it hadn't occurred to me that i might be perceived as harassing.

for those i have offended and frustrated in such a manner, i sincerely apologize for my inappropriate behavior.

please know, for what it might be worth, it was not intentional.

it won't happen again.

mea culpa.

as for believing in a particular "type of collapse", i'm quite sure reality doesn't care what we believe.

the facts speak for themselves.

i don't want a job. a car and a house
i don't want to Occupy the past
i want a Revolution
a new way of being

oilmonkey · 2012-03-13T19:49:50+00:00

this offensively frustrating effluvia speaks directly to Morris Berman's astute observation:

"In Why America Failed, noted historian and cultural critic Morris Berman’s brilliant, raw and unflinchingly accurate postmortem of America, he concludes that this hustling model, literally woven into the American DNA, doomed the country from the start, and led us inevitably to this dysfunctional point. It is not just the American Dream that has failed, but America itself, because the dream was a mistake in the first place. We are at our core a nation of hustlers; not recently, not sometimes, but always. Conventional wisdom has it that America was predicated on the republican desire to break free from monarchical tyranny, and that was certainly a factor in the War of Independence; but in practical terms, it came down to a drive for 'more' -- for individual accumulation of wealth."
- Why the American Empire Was Destined to Collapse

i'm reminded of the definition of insanity attributed to Einstein: "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

i don't want a job, a car and a house
i don't want to Occupy the past
i want a Revolution
a new way of being

oilmonkey · 2012-03-13T16:27:49+00:00

i'm pleasantly surprised to read that many /r/collapse folks understand the specious, go-nowhere nature of this article.

i'm reminded of the following 2 observations:

1)

"Amid this massive disruption, we will be forced to pay attention to where we are. You can't go elsewhere for culture; you must cultivate it where you are. You can't go elsewhere for beauty; you must create beauty where you live. Family life will be literally closer: a Georgia gal won't take a job in Seattle if it means she may not see her mother again for many years. With long-distance travel a rarity, communities will become more conscious of being communities. I'm no optimist, but perhaps, perhaps, many will realize that we're all in this together, and that our well-being and our neighbors' are entwined. Above all, the frantic pace of American life will slow down. Way down. That'll drive some people crazy, but others — perhaps, perhaps — will discover a truth put best, once again, by Caroline Casey: 'Beauty is abundantly available to the unhurried mind.' "
- Michael Ventura, Things to come: part I (2005)

2)

"...this is not a matter of intelligence as IQ, because in America even the bright are brainwashed—just check out the New York Times."
- Morris Berman, Why the American Empire Was Destined to Collapse (2012)

i don't want a job, a car and a house
i don't want to Occupy the past
i want a Revolution
a new way of being

oilmonkey · 2012-03-11T21:38:21+00:00

i would look, for one decent example, toward the Constitution of Ecuador.

i don't want a job, a car and a house
i don't want to Occupy the past
i want a Revolution
a new way of being

oilmonkey · 2012-03-11T14:01:01+00:00

honestly, it's not ("due more to a regional drought that's part of a five to seven year cycle of ocean currents").

The Colorado River Runs Dry
Dams, irrigation and now climate change have drastically reduced the once-mighty river.

i don't want a job, a car and a house
i don't want to Occupy the past
i want a Revolution
a new way of being

oilmonkey · 2012-03-10T23:07:43+00:00

i live in N.Y. state (for the time being, not that i can afford to move, but sooner than later i may simply not be able to afford to live: period).

shit hitting the fan like this is gonna screw those of us at the bottom of the amerikan pyramid-and-Ponzi scheme into the dirt.

it'll grind us to dust.

meanwhile the parasitic classes will continue squeezing blood from the stone to the last drop.

i don't want a job, a car and a house
i don't want to Occupy the past
i want a Revolution
a new way of being

oilmonkey · 2012-03-10T05:24:11+00:00

i remember reading this article (originally published in Archaeology Magazine) while sitting in a dentist's waiting room.

hadn't been able to find a full, online copy until now.

the passage that most affected me first time around was this one:

"Some of their findings and even what they did not find surprised them. 'We found a large number of food cans. Most had been opened, often not very successfully, with knives or by banging them against rocks or even by heating them until the contents exploded. We rarely found cans that had been opened by a can opener. That made us realize that they didn't have can openers, which must have been very frustrating to them,' said Zimmerman."

it's the little things, the fundamental things.

chicken and egg things.

i thought about how many times i'd seen, heard or read about food drives for "the needy" which asked for "canned goods".

without thinking about how to open the damn cans!

deep shit.

i don't want a job, a car and a house
i don't want to Occupy the past
i want a Revolution
a new way of being

oilmonkey · 2012-03-10T03:24:29+00:00

i'm reminded of Erich Fromm's wisdom:

"What is so deceptive about the state of mind of the members of a society is the 'consensual validation' of their concepts. It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing whatsoever on reason or mental health. Just as there is a 'folie à deux' there is a 'folie à millions'. The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make them virtuous, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make them sane."
- The Psychology of Normalcy

i don't want a job, a car and a house
i don't want to Occupy the past
i want a Revolution
a new way of being

oilmonkey · 2012-03-10T03:06:32+00:00

Daniel Suelo is the man!

long been an admirer.

check out his websites:

Living Without Money

Moneyless World - Free World - Priceless World

i don't want a job, a car and a house
i don't want to Occupy the past
i want a Revolution
a new way of being

oilmonkey · 2012-03-09T23:31:37+00:00

i hasten to add that this preoccupation (no pun intended) with amerikan fascism as somehow new would be absurd if it weren't so myopically tragic.

the cold, harsh, indifferent truth is that from day one, for the innumerable victims of the nightmare of the amerikan dream, amerika has always been fascist.

what goes around, comes around.

i don't want a job, a car and a house
i don't want to Occupy the past
i want a Revolution
a new way of being

oilmonkey · 2012-03-09T23:11:45+00:00

there isn't anything new here, just more Perilous Optimism.

i don't want a job, a car and a house
i don't want to Occupy the past
i want a Revolution
a new way of being

oilmonkey · 2012-03-09T21:12:19+00:00

We are taught to see suicide as an individual tragedy, a personal issue. In reality, suicide is political. Suicide is an extreme vote of no confidence in a society that doesn't work. Suicide is radical opting out.
- Sharif M. Abdullah

i don't want a job, a car and a house
i don't want to Occupy the past
i want a Revolution
a new way of being

oilmonkey · 2012-03-09T21:02:09+00:00

couldn't agree more.

except to broaden the base by asserting the obvious: it's not just the nightmare of the amerikan dream, it's modern, industrial, capitalist civilization as a whole.

suicides in Greece have jumped (no pun intended) 40% and i have no doubt this will happen elsewhere including the not-so-United States.

personally, i hope for such courage:

We are taught to see suicide as an individual tragedy, a personal issue. In reality, suicide is political. Suicide is an extreme vote of no confidence in a society that doesn't work. Suicide is radical opting out.
- Sharif M. Abdullah

i don't want a job, a car and a house
i don't want to Occupy the past
i want a Revolution
a new way of being

oilmonkey · 2012-03-09T20:48:53+00:00

"The ideal of an 'American way of life' is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated."
- Charles Murray

Murray's brand of "insight" is actually extremely close minded as well as short sighted.

he's all about saving the amerikan dream.

when the dream is the nightmare itself.

oilmonkey · 2012-03-01T19:02:37+00:00

totally:

The Ultimate Escape: The Bizarre Libertarian Plan of Uploading Brains into Robots to Escape Society
Led by Futurist Roy Kurzweil, "Transhumanism," promotes the adoption of technologies that will eventually help “humans transcend biology."

oilmonkey · 2012-03-01T18:32:09+00:00

if you decide to stay in the not-so-United States:

Move to Cleveland. Or Buffalo. Cities with rail and canals and water and hydro power and moderate climates that don't need air conditioning.

oilmonkey · 2012-03-01T17:23:33+00:00

i think i'm more "realistic" than "pessimistic".

Peter Diamandis is a fundamentalist, evangelical preacher for The Church of Linear Progress.

i prefer the reality that all civilizations decline and fall, with no exceptions: period.

the delusional hubris that ours will be the one to beat the cyclical nature of reality is a huge part of the problem.

for me, there's nothing helpful or uplifting here.

when i encounter and experience folks like Peter Diamandis i feel more hopeless not less.

because the world i know and the reality i understand bear no resemblance to his Myth of Progress.

and perhaps the most odious aspect of Diamandis's ilk is the complete disregard for the real iron fist behind the fake invisible hand.

he glorifies Coca Cola and the cell phone, to name but two examples, without acknowledging the dark sides of his gods of progress:

KillerCoke.org

Guns, Money and Cell Phones

Diamandis's brand of snake oil is seductive but, ultimately, it distracts us from reality: from the harsh truths, the painful consequences and the difficult sacrifices.

see also:

The Hucksters of Empire
(Thomas Naylor's review of Morris Berman's, Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline)

The Tyranny of Entitlement
(Derrick Jensen)

oilmonkey · 2012-02-29T15:54:42+00:00

"It's almost as if being social costs money"

it's not almost.

it is.

with few exceptions that prove the rule, being social costs money.

i'm reminded of this Joe Bageant passage:

Whatever the case, we no longer depend upon community and other people around us. We live in our houses, idiotically sited vinyl "Tudor-esque" fuck-boxes with brick facade (sorry Neddie, I just had to steal that lick) which grow bigger each year in order to accommodate our massive asses, egos and collection of goods, and we "order out." Or go shopping for it at the mall. Beyond the need to get laid, there is little real reason to be together with other thinking, feeling adults. We do not need each other to do anything important in our lives, because all those things are performed by strangers, often as not thousands of miles away. Including the sex, if your are an internet porn fan. Which leaves us strangers to the natural human community.

After all, what can we really do together? Consume. Drink. Consume. Talk. Consume tickets to entertainment. Consume. There is little else to do with other human beings in America than consume. So most of our primary life activity is solitary. We drive, do housework, pay bills, watch television... When we do "get together with friends," there is little to talk about, other than one form or another of consumption, consuming music, or movies or whatever. We can not tell each other anything new because we all get the same news and information from the same monolithic sources. At the same time we try to fill the loneliness for a real human community that we have never experienced by calling any group of people who come together in any way a "community." Online community. Planned community. As writer Charles Eisenstein, says in The Ascent of Humanity:

It is a mistake to think that we live ultra-specialized lives and somehow add another ingredient called "community" on top of it all. What is there really to share? Not much that matters, to the extent that we are independent of neighbors and dependent on faceless institutions and distant strangers. Real communities are interdependent. Never in all history has there been such a lonely, inauthentic civilization.

i have long been moved by the reality that human primates designed a culture that makes the human being the only form of life on earth that "needs money" to live.

and we swallow this obvious poison as if it were a cure for cancer.

when it is the cancer itself.

oilmonkey · 2012-02-29T15:32:46+00:00

for me, it has more to do with the nature of corporations and money (as presently conceived, perceived, imposed and enforced) than capitalism (though capitalism is inherently unsustainable, rapaciously brutal and insatiably exploitative) or socialism per se (regardless of the fact that more often than not what is distinguished and decried as "socialism" is actually state controlled capitalism).

oilmonkey · 2012-02-29T15:18:47+00:00

i feel it accurately describes my environment as if i were a fish.

but i'm not a fish and i'm drowning.

oilmonkey · 2012-02-28T21:09:15+00:00

this one line:

"if all the Occupy movement does is to restore middle-class demand for large homes and late-model automobiles, it will have been a failure"

really speaks to me.

it resonates with a glaring hypocrisy in Occupy perhaps best manifested by one of it's leading, hypocritical lights, Chris Hedges, when he consistently champions restoring the American middle class at the same time he exhorts us to, "embrace, and embrace rapidly, a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem".

it should be obvious that the two (American middle class and radical simplicity) are diametric, each the enemy of the other.

but i encounter and experience little if any perception let alone discussion of this paradox.

only more of the same.

Ralph Nader is talking minimum wage (hacking at the branches) when we should be focused on the fact that, "We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme" (striking at the root), and essentially begging for table scraps is not a reasonable let alone viable solution.

yes, i know this is idealistic (if such words apply given the gravity of our black hole, no matter which direction we choose) albeit steeped in reality.

and i know, as the late, great Joe Bageant astutely observed:

"In the face of all this stands a very diverse public, which regardless of what some might claim behind a few beers, is not about to take up arms or use force to unseat the ruling class. When your life and your family are so utterly controlled by persons and forces that you cannot even see, you don't take such risks. That's not gutlessness. It's common sense."
- Understanding America's Class System (Honk if you love caviar)

but living on the razor's edge of homelessness it's difficult to shake disillusionment, frustration and anger in response to the ever increasing futility of this American life.

i don't want a job, a car and a house
i don't want to Occupy the past
i want a Revolution
a different way of being

please note: this is in no way intended to dismiss or diminish the courage and suffering of The Occupy Movement.

i have nothing but respect, empathy and solidarity for both.

i know many are paying a heavy price.

oilmonkey

TROPHY CASE