BTW, if I become an environmentalist will the Devil invite me to play racquetball? I can take out a second mortgage on a soul, right?

(Please tell me that there isn’t a secret circle of Hell where you spend all eternity eating anarchist vegan cooking.)

A year ago you could have said the same thing about American insurance companies. Concern for the bottom line prevents them from breaking established patterns of business that exclude millions of people from access to healthcare.

Until they figured out how to turn the crisis into a government candy grab, that is. Then the problem was solved/mitigating through precisely same oligarchical maneuvering and wheel-greasing, the same economic and psychological incentives that were already at play.

Cynical realism leads me to believe that they can do the same with any other crisis. Once it truly reveals itself as a crisis (meaning it has an impact somewhere that kills a lot of people, preferably in one or several of the countries with the largest carbon footprints), the Senior Partners will cobble together some Marshall Plan that puts energy companies on the dole and overpays them to shift to alternative sources, like Germany currently does with solar.

And of course, when they’re not contributing to politicians’ campaigns, the aforementioned energy companies will be sure to have some prominent environments in their pockets for additional moral support. Human nature being what it is, those environmentalists will certainly take the bait and rationalize about all the good they can do with those resources.

You don’t need to have an extraordinary amount of faith in the system to believe this is possible. In fact, the less faith you have, the more likely you are to believe that an unholy union with energy giants is likely to happen, because it happens already.

If only things could not get worse for the world´s majority. And yet 60% of the human population draws its water from rivers fed by the Himalayan glaciers, glaciers which are already melting now. Bangladesh´s massive population lives like a metre above sea level. My recollection from a Radio Ecoshock program concerning the predicted effect of climate change upon Africa is that it will make large portions of the continent uninhabitable.

I know of any way to interpret these facts which does not imply a democide of hundreds of millions, or worse, possibly much worse. And, yes, this is as undeniably a democide as the Holodomor or the 1770 British-induced Bengal famine. Perhaps it is an unintended democide, but carbon pollution remains a man-made fact open to change. If it is not open to change under our present conditions, then aspects of the current economic system, whatever we wish to cause it, are as structurally antihuman as are feudalism, slavery, gulags, concentration camps, prison-industrial complexes, or export-processing zones.

And yes, I think that our elites will let it happen. Not because they are particularly evil (some of them are), but because they are trapped within endlessly self-referential economic and psychological incentive structures which keep radical facts and alternative courses of action off the table.

Bob Barr as a “freedom-lover” was a colossal joke, I just don’t understand why nobody seemed to get it.

As for me, I have said before and repeat now, that I’m not interested in libertarianism as a movement. I find that my ideas fit with a radical conception of libertarianism, so that makes me a libertarian.

The last time I dealt with ISIL was when I was 19 years old. I ordered US$180 of their wonderful pamphlets. I passed out a few of them at college tables and eventually gave the rest to the local Libertarian Party affiliate(=). They’re most certainly one of the few libertarian organisations I’ve a retained high respect for. Didn’t Mary Ruwart work with them?(==)

Thank you so much! I’m always grateful to learn of such things, and I am grateful for the kind gesture. Is there anyone in particular you think I’d gel with?

Incidentally, do you know Kerry Howley? I love her writing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(=)That would have been 1998, I think; I’d just read Ayn Rand, the Russian Radical and written to Chris Sciabarra. Goddess, how much has changed. I feel like I’m living in some alternative timeline prefacing the setting of a post-apocalyptic dystopian cyberpunk novel.

Do you remember when the American empire didn’t openly torture? When so many of us didn’t know friends who had been abused by police? When most of us felt political surveillance of dissidents to be a distant and impersonal issue? When we weren’t waiting for the other shoe of a second great depression to drop? When we thought that our bank accounts, our homes, our liberty couldn’t be unanswerably stolen from us at the system’s whim? The U.S. is at war in, what, four countries now?- with half the soldiers brutal mercenaries culled from our client states’ death squads, and half the supply lines contracted out to cynical looters too singlemindedly predatory to be described as merely ‘corrupt’. Where is our universe as it might be and ought to be?

I have friends who dissent from the scientific consensus on climate change, and I hope they’re right, but even without AGW we are in serious enough ecological trouble that we will soon be facing plausable calls from both right and left for state mobilisation of society in the face of collectivist disaster. And if AGW is right…. as this review sharply conceives it, Copenhagen may have been our Munich in its failure to prevent our species’ unintentionally declared war on nature. We may be very fortunate if the cultural collateral damage from the ecological war to come is less brutal than that of WWII. Every achievement in liberty, equality, feminism, anti-racism, cultural freedom, aesthetic refinement, social mobility, public secularism, material progress, distributive justice, civil benevolence, humane pedagogy, and basic nutrition and life expectancy will be under fire from both natural stress and scarcity and collectivist pressure from a terrified populace urged on by legions of demagogues. And that will be in the rich countries.

How can we prevent these things? What can the philosophical minority do to somehow keep alive the Promethean spirit through a century in which we are all forced to fight the future? Every contemporary and resurrected collectivist morality will demand every kind of individual sacrifice from both malice and genuine evidential conviction fortified by brutal necessity.

(==) Was I the only one to have felt metaphysically, heartbrokenly disgusted in 2008 when libertarians or any society of human beings could choose that bigoted authoritarian opportunist mediocrity over the kindest libertarian who ever dedicated her life to teaching people to be nice to themselves and to others- someone who managed to fulfill both egoistic and altruistic virtues?

Have you had any experience with ISIL? I just got back tonight from their Phoenix conference (I’ll blog about it soon), but it was a libertarian atmosphere I think you’d mostly like.

Maybe some here reject neuroscience but I think there should be a litmus test for sane libertarianism. If you cannot hear the words ‘government’, ‘control’, ‘force’, ‘coerce’, or ‘compel’ without twitching then you’re allowed in. Seriously, the degree to which the libertarian movement has become represented by the aforementioned “postmodernists” and “reactionary despots” is astounding.

I speak from the awkward position of starting-in-libertarianism-through-reactionary-postmodernism. If it weren’t for Roderick’s more broadly focused lens, I would have never dropped the pitch fork — irrespective of what direction I was headed with it. Through his work, I found out that libertarianism is much more than “being-against-the-state.” It’s a frame of mind. It’s a way of being. And it stays that way whether the “state” dances or shoots itself.

Whether you want to accept what Aster has to say or not, it is the truth. Libertarianism is a movement being hijacked by anti-intellectuals. If that’s part of a big tent strategy, it’s also part of an eat your own ass strategy.

I know I don’t have any clout here. I’m just a guy who listened to three years worth of Roderick’s lectures. I did so because he’s of fucking genius. Now, most kids would never get that opportunity because they’d hear he’s a libertarian and think “redneck idiot.”

For the sake of anything Holy, it’s not about being-against-the-government. It’s about being-for-a-different-way-of-institutional-behavior. Call me a statist-prick-ass-hole-fuck-shit-stick, but there is a government. Call the government a statist-prick-ass-hole-fuck-shit-stick, but it still stands. Take its legs out from underneath it, then you have a statist-prick-ass-hole-fuck-shit-stick splintered all over the place.

In the “war of ideas”, bringing-down-the-state is about as viable as holding-your-breath — and it looks just as intelligent. I say that we (a) go back to talking about praxeology, (b) listen to more of Aster, or (c) listen to Roderick dissociate himself from anti-intellectual Libertarianism. Did I say “or”; I’d really like “and” to replace that.