I'm amazed to have entered the consciousness of your house.
As for the sisters, the film would be Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and the term in question was "pixilated," as in 'with the pixies.'
You betray yourself in your own metaphor. It implies that LBO-list is "the town." Of course, LBO is merely 'a' town, and a damn small one at that, and moreover one where you seem to be a minority of one, albeit doing 'revolutionary things.'
> . . .
> Reforms serve to make everyday life a little easier, and they
> give the vampire a stay of execution. Meaning, reforms let capitalism
> grow bigger and nastier . . . >>
This sounds contradictory. If everyday life gets easier, how is the system 'nastier'? Would the system be less nasty if everyday life got worse? Is that the program?
> until the whole planet faces ecosphere-
> destruction (try as I might, I have never succeeded in getting
> Heartfield, Sawicky, deLong et al to do more than raise their
> eyebrows and make noises: 'Pshaw! Piffle! Faugh! Stuff and nonsense!'
> when I mention words like 'anthropogenic climate change'. I have
I never said anything like that. I really have no idea whether there's anything to it or not. I do resist ecological proposals with reactionary distributional implications.
I'm simply at a loss as to how to propose solutions to a problem that does not rear its head for decades, and which is subject to considerable dispute. That's why it's a waste of time, far as I can tell. You can say there are plenty of indications now, but clearly there's not enough to get most people even moderately interested.
> . . .
> Let me put my problem about reforms this way.
>
> Let us suppose that Chris Burford's 'structural reforms' DO get
> implemented, perhaps by some desperate World Underground of Plutocrats
> (WUP), faced with market meltdown, jihad, the 4th Russian Revo, and
> the first IWW Million Wobblie March on Washington. Under the banner
> of Tobin, enlightened partiarchs -- Wuppies -- march to the bright
> new postkeynesian future of reopened Korean, Thai, Chinese, Indian,
> S African car plants, and Greg Nowell's inspirational vision of one
> billion gasoline vehicles by 2010 is realised.
>
> Do you think, my dear friend Chris, that this would be good for the
> planet, on the whole? (The Chinese better make those little amphibious
> cars if they're sensible, so they can motor straight off the Round-up
> Ready-laced paddies and down onto the 100-mile wide, globally-warmed
> Yangtse River...)
Now our ecological consciousness brings us so far as to oppose development in the Third World. It that's the content of "revolutionary things," then I'm more than agnostic.
MBS