Rogers Randomness

I am NOT Charlie

Details: Category: Rants

I am not Charlie.
Freedom of speech, like all rights and freedoms, carries responsibilities with it. The belief in absolute rights is essentially the same as the belief in religious truths as absolute - it is a nonsense. Specifically the right to free speech carries a responsibility not to use this freedom to offend or oppress the weak or powerless.

Satire is the use of humour to attack the powerful and the oppressor and give the oppressed something to laugh about. Thus satire typically targets the government of the day, puncturing pomposity and highlighting hypocrisy, it doesn't target minority groups in the underclass - that is bullying.

Hebdo has been behaving like a playground bully picking on the 'different' kids. Sometimes the victims' friends manage to sneak up on the bully and punch him on the nose. He then goes crying to teacher saying look what those different kids did to me and teacher takes his side and punishes the true victims. Isn't it interesting that the French state sees fit to fund 3 million copies of Hebdo now to continue its demonisation of a particular set of religious beliefs.

I will not stand with the oppressors, I am not Charlie.

Hard Green Choices Ahead

Details: Category: Rants

Reply to Brian Heatley who linked my comments on the 2014 Election results with pieces by Adam Ramsay giving a Green-Left perspective and Sandy Irvine raising issues from a Forest-Green point of view. I don't have links to Adam and Sandy's originals - maybe I'll create a Guests section to re-post them in.

Thanks for copying me in Brian, nice to know someone reads something one writes! (and on the members website too - I thought that was a real graveyard)

I tend towards the Sandy position on the wider issues. I haven't looked at the results in detail but my impression is that Adam is painting an over optimistic picture, and even if he is right it seems that trying to energise a left of labour activist base about an ecological emergency is going to be a tough task.

Fracts About the Way Fings Are

Details: Category: Rants

In all the smoke about fracking there are only one or two facts about the way things are that clearly decide the matter - questions about earthquakes, or visual intrusion of drilling rigs, or the possible pollution of ground water, or even the economic viability of extracting gas locked up in micro pores in rock are all just hot air.

Derailing the Behemoth

Details: Category: Rants

From an email discussion on the Transition Cornwall Network list debating the implications of a peer reviewed scientific paper by Anderson and Bows on climate change

A quote from the last page (of Anderson & Bows 2010):

"the logic of such studies suggests (extremely) dangerous climate change can only be avoided if economic growth is exchanged, at least temporarily, for a period of planned austerity within Annex 1 nations [that's us] and a rapid transition away from fossil-fuelled development within non-Annex 1 nations."

The only way that is going to happen is if activists start actively disrupting infrastructure now to force a controlled collapse. The alternative is to gather your favourite books and people together and prepare to survive in the +6deg world which inevitably follows from +2deg through positive feedbacks.

Forget Galvanising Cornwall - it would be more appropriate to simply stop Cornwall's CO2 emissions by direct action; half a dozen dedicated people could now probably derail the capitalist consumption behemoth at least within an area the size of Cornwall.

Good luck and pass the matches...