rural idiocy

[Mark Jones]

Whenever I see the word 'Prometheus' in a posting by Jim Heartfield I reach
for the delete. Jim, I truly don't understand why you torture yourself like
this. And why reveal to this list your feelings for David Landes? When it
comes to oil, since you are not in possession of the facts by design rather
than accident, we obviously have nothing to discuss. Go back to your family
readings of Julian Simon.

Mark

Jim heartfield wrote:


> >Wojtek wrote:
> >>>>1990:
> >>>>City: 31%
> >>>>Suburbs: 46%
> >>>>Rural: 23%
>
> >However, I would not mind if those scares on our landscape were simply
> >bulldozed -- I would even volunteer for the job.
>
> You want to bulldoze those greedy suburbanites? All 100,000,000 of them?
> This is a Nietzschean loathing of the mass you have.
>
> In message <35533CEB.571B258B at netcomuk.co.uk>, Mark Jones
> <Jones_M at netcomuk.co.uk> writes
> >Doug asks:
> >
> >>What Revolution?
> >
> >When the oil runs out.
> >
> >Mark
> >
> Apropos our earlier discussion of commodity fetishism in the car, I
> think Mark's belief in the spiritual power of oil is another version of
> the same fetish. I remember reading David Landes' excellent book
> Prometheus Unbound about industrialisation, and being irritated by a
> certain phraseology he would use that ran 'coal built steel and steel
> built the railways' (I'm caraicaturing). All the time you would forget
> that in fact it was people who built all these things. Oil doesn't make
> revolutions, people do. Even accepting Mark's gloomy prognosis of
> resource collapse, that will not in itself make social change. All too
> often collapse is just collapse.
>
> On a more optimistic note exhaustion of one natural resource need not
> necesarily mean the end of human civilisation. I don't believe the
> exhaustion of Gutta Percha had such deleterious circumstances - unless
> you consider the development of plastic as a disaster.
> --
> Jim heartfield