Against Sustainability

Recently I’ve found myself wishing—when I hear the word “sustainability”—that I had a revolver to reach for.  “Sustainability” has become a coded mask for a cause I detest—the salvation of Capitalism.  Obviously, Too-Late Kapital is running down the road to “global” ragnarok, and has been doing so since the great take-off of the Technopathocracy in about 1830 (when, according to HG Wells, “the first superfluous human was born”)—ie, the Industrial Revolution, the triumph of the Machine over Nature.  Nietzsche dated the birth of the Terminal Human to about this same date; so the first shall be the last.

The whole point of sustainability is to save cars, but re-design them to run on sunshine or salad oil—to save highways, parking lots, jet planes, suburban lawns, bourgeois yuppie liberal smug self-satisfaction and “first world” entitlement—but to transform them all into something beige, crunchy, “ecological,” “organic,” smiley–faced, goodygoody—and to go on like this forever—“sustainably.”  To avoid the Fall, even if it means abandoning huge swathes of the human race and its habitat, so as to salvage the part that counts—US—or put another way, US (of A).  To escape to Mars with Mr Musk in a driverless spaceship “shared” by other billionaires, and fuck all hoi polloi and their degraded junkfood “lifestyle.”

Solar power and wind power, the panaceae of sustainability, are themselves source of vast hellscapes of aesthetic filth and poisonous pollution—the factories (in Mexico, of course) to produce those ubiquitous alien-gray panels and war-of-the-worlds-style windmills (impervious to any poor Don Quixote)—to cover the deserts with black glass, the seas with whining avicidal behemoths—so that WE can go on enjoying our horrid health-food, our idiotic iPhones, our crapulous computers, our tedious televisions—not to mention our armies and police forces, our bureaucrats, politicians, lawyers, silicon-valley “disruptors” and all the other parasites and oppressor-class scumbags who take but never give.

Forget sustainability.  Forget efficiency.  Efficiency is the devil’s shit.  Fuck “green capitalism” and its neat corporate cornucopia of consumer garbage and badly-designed “designer” crapola.  Technology will not solve the “problems” that technology created in the first place, any more than heroin will cure morphine addiction, or arsenic will save you from arsenic poisoning.  The only way to free ourselves from the rule of sick machines is to smash the machines.  The Luddites saw the light already in 1812.  A sledgehammer is the sole solution.

Lions and Tigers and Bears (and Swine and Bees), Oh My!

Like the cowardly lion, people just love to be afraid.  From bear attacks in Anchorage, to “pandemic” swine flu, to famine caused by a mass die-off of bees, to rampant child abuse and abductions, the news media, the government, and experts of various sorts constantly bombard us with warnings about current or imminent disasters.  Continue reading

The Inhumane Society

On June 8, 2007, the local newspaper carried a telling story.  It was about the experience of a baby moose that was apparently starving to death because it could no longer nurse after its mother had been killed by a bear.  The moose was picked up by a local group dedicated to increasing the alaskan moose population, treated for a couple of days by a vet, then turned over to the zoo which killed it when it appeared not be thriving.

The reason this all was considered newsworthy was because the state’s head wildlife cop wanted charges filed against the folks who “rescued” the moose because they had no permit to do so.  Continue reading

Plants, animals, and climate change: Some ruminations on the environment

A number of years ago I wrote a couple of pamphlets about the politics of AIDS.  At the time there was a vast amount of mis- and disinformation about AIDS, its causes, its methods of transmission, and the risks it posed to individuals being peddled as science and fact.  I argued that many scientists, much of the AIDS activist movement, and most of the mainstream media either ignored data that was inconvenient to their analysis or circulated “facts” that were simply untrue in order to scare people into supporting one political agenda or another.  Now that global warming has replaced AIDS as the current threat to the existence of humanity, if not the world, I see similar politicking, suppression of debate, misunderstanding, and manipulation of the scientific data being used to deceive and frighten people.

Such fear-mongering, however, would not be effective unless there was a large group ready and willing to be convinced that, this time and at long last, the sky really is falling.  Despite the fact that neither a sudden ice age, genital herpes, acid rain, AIDS, SARS, nor any one of the other disasters we have been warned about in the last 20 years or so has lived up to the hype, lots of people are worrying that this time the experts and news media are right. Continue reading