An extra on Medicare.

At least I invent me own jokes, culties…your humour is like your insults- Grade 5’s noisy recess…

Coincidentally, I posted the following reply on a Crikey “top story”- about the real environment- which appeared on 20th Nov. That story had just 4 comments on it until today. That shows where The Cult’s priorities really lie:

kulange
Posted Friday, 11 December
Frank, I agree with you. The world is heading towards disaster. I have done some work on this issue and have concluded some interesting results. It will be interesting to see the end result of the Kutubu drill fluid leakage and drilling within the boundaries of a gazetted RAMSAR area. Kulange, PNG.

Posted Friday, 11 December 2009
I’m glad someone does Kulange…I’ve spent the last month like a naked Spartan down to his last cod-piece fending off waves of AGW’s…how do I do it? Well luckily the AGWs are armed only with primitive insults…

I don’t see 100 plus Oz pollies and bureaucrats jetting off to Indonesia, PNG or anywhere else to discuss the end of the rainforests…Sumatra’s lost 85%. the last Orangutan in Borneo is renting a flat in Sandakan….photos of his murdered parents hang on the wall, where he hangs most of the time too…

“Farmers loom as the winners from the strategy, with the state vowing to fight for existing water entitlements to be protected when the reduced extraction limit is imposed nationally on the Murray-Darling river system….

River flows will be ”Insufficient in the long term and would lead to a rapid and continued deterioration of river health and likely loss of many species.”

Fuck Dopenhagen

and all the ensuite Greens…

Equally obvious since the 60s is that anti-industrial ideology had little effect on environmentalism. How could it be otherwise when 90% of greens are middle class suburbans? Avid consumers all. So what if they hate Gunns and Big Oil? All they’ve managed thus far is to curb some of the worst excesses of feral capitalism and vanquish certain species of light bulbs.

The number of bathrooms per house has climbed relentlessly, and most greens are en suite with that.

That’s the tragedy of the climate cult- the environment movt. finally grabs its chance to change the world. MRET and ETS. A farce we all have to pay for.

While the faithful gather in Popehagen, the pack-rape of the environment continues.

Rundle, if you can struggle your way through de Maistre then you can grab yourself a copy of The New Left: the anti-industrial revolution by Ayn Rand. As soon as Minchin talked about the Greens and de-industrialisation it was clear what his sources were.

In the ’60s Rand predicted the hippies would form the basis of an environmental movement that would seek to set up an economic system that did not feature surplus value - to each according to his/her needs, &c. Yes, the debate has moved on since then - but like the idea that Indonesia poses a real and immediate invasion threat to Australia, or that Australian republicanism is Fenianism rebranded, Rand’s New Left contains a whole bunch of Ideas That Will Not Die for the right.

I’ve read that book, I’ll bet Christian Kerr has, and I’ll raise you that Minchin and Peter Coleman have too. If there was a Right Book Club, The New Left: the anti-industrial revolution would be in it. Unlike her novels, Rand’s New Left is a short read but far more instructive about one side of the current political debate than bloody de Maistre.

The environmental candle was kept alight by academics in related disciplines and people of alternative persuasion more or less since the publication of Silent Spring in the 1960s until the late 1980s so it is not as if there was a sudden move to this cause. As evidence of environmental problems became more obvious, the attachment of people to this cause, people who care and think became more widespread.

I dispute the claim that the right have somehow won the debate because of the privatisation of industry. Private industry now operates within a set of regulations designed to ensure that virtually every item on the wish list of those on the left has been won. I don’t think there is any dispute that at least in this country, workers in any workplace have more rights than were ever envisaged in the socialist or government-owned enterprises here or abroad in the 1950s. Through superannuation and widespread investment the ownership of the means of production is now so diffuse that the Marxist agenda is now meaningless.

As for economic growth, consider the Iphone. This has for most young people who own one, replaced the gramophone, the radio, the telephone and a host of other devices in a gadget which weighs less than 100gms and whose value is embedded in its intellectual property. It is vastly kinder the to environment than the myriad devices it has replaced. There are many such examples of economic growth that have happened and will continue to happen in the future that can and will reduce the impact on world resources while adding to the quality of life. Consider just the quality of food we now eat and the better farming practices used to produce it, and the electric car industry that will take the world by storm over the next 10 years.

Lastly, in the long run conservatives are always wrong. We are not a conservative species. Consider the social changes since the Wilberforce campaign against slavery.

And yes, we know that Trots in the 80s, having Entered and Deep Entered every organisation they could find, fetched up in the Green movement where they vanished up their own contradictions before turning into organic broccoli.

Stating the obvious is fine, but why is this a Crikey “Top Story”? Didactic, tangled verbosity masquerading as political analysis.

N.B. Evan Beaver, there’s no need for sycophantic apologies for your ignorance. It’s not you, it’s Rundle.

One village shitting in a river (together with the animals along the riverbanks) equals a natural cycle, a city of billions shitting in a river plus excreting hormones and antibiotics etc in their excreta (not no mention the wastes from industrial agricultural and livestock production, and taking water *out* of the river in large quantities to satisfy these enterprises) stuffs up the entire ecological system. As I understand it.

I don’t know how to solve the problem without condemning the world’s inhabitants to even more deprivation and starvation than most already endure today … but more than likely the disasters forced on us by climate change will solve it for us. (Gaia’s revenge?) Not a pretty picture. Even China with its ‘one child’ policy is increasing in population. And by all accounts the Chinese Govt seems to be taking the country’s problems seriously. Unfortunately the methods they’re using seem harsh - what IS the answer? Freedom/opportunity versus sustainability? How? Any suggestions?

Meanwhile the spoilers seem to be doing their best to undermine the Copenhagen meet … leaked emails, leaked leaks … small stuff so far, can’t they find anything better? Or is the ‘best’ yet to come?

I think it’s the engineering background, but I baulk at long sentences and get lost easily. Also, I want to know exactly what your point is so I can argue against it.

Took quite a few goes for me to fully grasp this:

“Because Minchin, Kerr and others can give no credence to the Marxist argument about capitalism — that it must expand endlessly, and at ever greater velocity just to keep going, that the idea of a stabilised capitalism is an illusion of the pre-Marxist classical economists who thought of it as an eternal structure (hidden beneath centuries of bondage) — they can’t credit the possibility that left wing people would work in either a Marxist organisation or a Green one, because they believe the criticism to be correct.”

Otherwise, I totally agree with the finer details of the actual desires of a large swathe of the left. I don’t want to turn off the power all together; I just think it would be a good idea to stop fucking up the planet so quickly while we’re making it.

But do we mean it as pejoratively as Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) -the ‘refuse of all classes … including swindlers, confidence tricksters, brothel-keepers, rag-and-bone merchants, beggars, and other flotsam of society’ like modern bogans?