Nowtopian

Comment posted Thinking About (Growing) Food by Martin.

Fine rejoinder – you’ve certainly got a right to your more optimistic views, but in trying to understand the “whole systems” of social reality, I just don’t get that imperative – but that is for me to live out, with some amount of joy and fun in seeing a mess of dead-ends and a lot of green wishfulness that cannot go much of anywhere – but we are here to enjoy the entirety, the good life along with the massive crack-ups. Thanks for your fine work, as always.

Martin also commented

• This seems to me like TED talk:
  “Sustaining anything close to the comfort and convenience of our current world is not going to be possible unless we apply the whole systems, regenerative thinking that is so well applied to urban homesteading in this volume, to larger industrial systems too.”
  We can “apply” all the “thinking” we want, but the large industrial systems are far too large and embedded in fossil fuel supply systems for pie-in-the-sky or rutabuaga-in-the-sidewalk kind of green messianic charlatanism. Talking green, living brownish – that’s about where we, the collective human race, stand at even the earthy-crunch edge.
  Once again I’m here to wreck the mellow vibe, but that’s what comments sections are for.

Recent comments by Martin

• Cracks, Openings, Uprisings
  Strong post, as always.
  I wondered what you thought of this little note I read of in a Men’s Journal article, on a certain Lebron and D-Wade being ardent Critical Massers:

  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/29/dwyane-wade-critical-mass-gab rielle-union_n_1925176.html

  Down with the Cause?

• Amnesia and History
  I guess I’m too focused on the heartbreak of this sentence:

  It would be a pity to be evicted from the city after working on San Francisco history for nearly two decades.

  What good is a museum to a city if the city cannot love its people?

  Despite not having blogged much here, the proprietor’s words are still some of the best reporting on the state of empire.

  Where do evicted folks go?

• Old Patterns Still With Us
  Great photos, affecting notes in the post – it’s says something about my own own intellectual futility that I sneaked many a look at your blog – the political writing is always incisive, the narrator reliable, which is very, very hard for me to find on the big web.
  I agree that no one should write for anything but his or her own stimulation ( one excellent aggregator of all things craptastic in this political culture is forever whinging about “traffic,” being querulous in comments, and so forth), but a little appreciation from the wider world is certainly not to be disdained.
  There’s no money in blogging, and a lot of work with often little reward, but these parlous political times demand a critic, one who has been been versed in vritually all the left wars, and you’ve got the goods.
• Return of the Repressed
  Considering the work you’ve done, I’d say you were the intellectual godfather of the Occupy movement, not Elizabeth Warren. Yet I remain an apostate of its claims for effect.
  1. Just as in the 60s, there is no appreciation for the enormity of the corporate supersystem. All well and good to diagnose the social ills – but where is there the slightest sociology of the dimensions of corporate control?
  2. Why always the valorization of protest? In Egypt, the brave and stupendous occupations have brought about no political change other than exchanging one tyrant for his military.
  3. Fighting the police is not war. They get paid overtime, they have now been given massive funding, they get the right to prosecute, they get majority backing.
  4. The left keeps functioning on vain, self-ennobling dramas of “hope” and “change,” and in America this takes on a peculiar academic exceptionalist glorification. OWS kids are not going to take over city councils and town meetings, senates nor assemblies. Getting Thomas Friedman to pen manifestos of sympathy calling for identification of politicians with their corporate sponsors means, yes, the wind has shifted, but winds blow this way and that, and the edifices are built of granite.
  5. I hold the wise elders responsible for patronizing the young – you have a right to see great and glorious worldwide revolution from coming from these heavily surveilled encampments, but the underemployed college youth should also hear nihilism and pessimism – after all, which has ruled our times?
• Fraud and Corruption: The DNA of Business
  Great review, as usual, but I just don’t get how “radicals” (such as McNally) can be so on-target with critiques, then so uniformly moronic when it comes to prospects. All that organizing “poetry” is going on now, at the margins, by the self-anointed few, yet capitalism has always had these by the wayside, and here we are with more financial crime and international technowar and specious work and nonwork.
  None of the bottom-up strategies are going to work – there is never going to be workplace “democracy,” whatever that could be, and the other stuff will be barely tolerated and then marginalized if it ever gets beyond the back alleys. Massed corporate power is far too intertwined with institutional power to permit even a view of “another world” that will get anyone off the couch.
  Why not see the folly of triumphalist social rhetoric, and then have some fun with the contours of a personal world of conditional splendor amidst the rubble of a deteriorating social reality? To your credit, you seem to be one of the few on the outer-left orienting toward that – if I read you right.

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May 19th, 2013 | Category: Book Reviews, Nature and Me, Nowtopia, Public Space, Work and The Economy | Subscribe to comments | Both comments and pings are currently closed