He said "make me do it" so they showed up to make him, but were arrested.

[dreamnightwind]

63. That's funny, that's what I thought of your posting against resisting Keystone XL

Last edited Mon Mar 3, 2014, 02:50 PM - Edit history (1)

that it is wasted effort that will actually hurt our cause in the long run (in case I'm not being clear, I mean your posts in this thread, not the resistance to Keystone XL).

You being right (hypothetically) about the pipeline will be built is somehow you being right about not opposing it? That's some pretzel logic right there. I think you're wrong whether it gets built or not.

I make no prediction about the pipeline's future, I only know that advocating against it, and in so doing, advocating against society's domination by the fossil fuel plutocrats, and advocating for carbon-neutral (or as close to neutral as possible) alternatives, is the correct side of this issue.

There is value in standing against this, through protests, through message board activity, through leading by example changing our own energy profiles, through finding and promoting political candidates who will take this issue on with the urgency that is required, there is value to all of these things that cannot be measured by the outcome of a single metric (whether the pipeline gets built, whether a particular candidate gets elected), it's a much more complex world than that, as I'm sure you know. Sometimes you win the war even while you appear to lose the battles, through your fight you are changing the ground on which the future battles will be fought (sorry I dislike the battle metaphor, easy to fall into when discussing politics, or any interaction between conflicting forces). And sometimes, because you tried, you win.

In our case it is clearly not a political system that has any inclination to self-correct, so leaving the issue to the elites is out of the question. They have demonstrated that they have other priorities, probably because they think their wealth will enable their children to survive well even in a rapidly deteriorating biosphere, and let's face it, many of them are short-term thinking hedonist/narcissist types. If they have any solution up their sleeves, it is likely an intent to kill off most of us (or let poor living conditions, disease and attrition do the culling for them) once automation advances sufficiently to perpetuate an industrial and information society (they will want their gadgets and their comfort) with only a small human workforce. That's very tin-foil, but I actually think it's being discussed somewhere by people that matter, along with alternative strategies like geo-engineering hail-marys. What I don't think such people discuss is making the radical societal and lifestyle changes that will have to happen to sustain humanity at anywhere close to our current population level.

So, I don't think they will care until we make them care. I really don't.