“Why do I not satisfy myself that I have two feet when I want to get up from a chair? There is no why. I simply don’t. That is how I act.”
(LW)
Monthly Archives: October 2006
TBTM20061005
Blogger is in danger of losing a customer.
TBTM20061004
“If you tried to doubt everything you wouldn’t get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”
(LW)
Shock news: Richard Dawkins accused of intellectual arrogance
Go watch. Remarkable to find myself in sympathy with the evangelical minister on this (not the detail, but the broad point).
(HT Sven)
Vow of non-violence
Challenging.
Intelligent doomerism
This is one of the best articles I’ve read describing a doomer perspective on Peak Oil.
He even references Wittgenstein!
Speed; Severity; Duration.
My take is: speed depends entirely upon the sanity of the US administration, and whether it attacks Iran. Assuming that they do, I think a decline in oil supplies will hit very quickly afterwards – so, within a year or two, max.
Severity: rapid, 8% or more, with all the consequences thereto.
Duration: permanent.
So maybe I am a doomer? Unlike this writer, I think some form of domestic living comparable to what we have now is possible. What we won’t have is personal cars.
A bit more about coal
Following Ian’s comment, I thought I should link to this article, which I read a while back, and which lay behind my depression at that letter in the local paper.
“As a species, we must back the right horse and stop being misled by the coal industry’s delaying tactics. There’s a big opportunity cost in time and resources to going down the wrong path. Each new power plant big coal builds means decades of fat profit for it, but for the rest of us here on Earth, it’s just bad, bad news.”
TBTM20061003
“If you are not certain of any fact, you cannot be certain of the meaning of your words either.”
(LW)
Harsh, but fair
TBTM20061002
“The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their role is like that of rules of a game; and the game can be learned purely practically, without learning any explicit rules…
The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the movement of the waters on the river-bed and the shift of the bed itself; though there is not a sharp division of the one from the other.”
(LW)
I think that what has happened since the ’60s is a shift in the river-bed, in Christian mythological terms. See here for a bit more.