This is my opinion too fwiw. I find him an entertaining and useful read most weeks, when he's critiquing unsustainable excesses of consumer culture and the financialised economy, but he's absolutely repulsive on foreign policy - manages to apologise for the War on Terror as an irredeemable clash between ideologies, the civilised world against dangerous irrational Islamists, while simultaneously describing US interventions as being about realist self-interest, and the need to control a finite oil supply. If we're over there bombing them for oil, surely their resistance isn't irrational, but this isn't a point that ever gets admitted.
It'd be interesting to examine the ways the doom-based, resource-based, technological and non-social critique of peak oil allows a completely clear-eyed critique of the social ills of modern society, while permitting an explanation which never confronts social inequity and allows quite scurrilous realist selfish opinions.
On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 4:13 PM, Dwayne Monroe <dwayne.monroe at gmail.com>wrote:
> Doug asked:
>
> But aren't his targets fat American suburbanites, who are mostly white
> and Republican? Certainly my mostly black neighbors in Brooklyn
> haven't been living large on cheap oil.
>
> ..............
>
>
> Yes, he doesn't spare white Americans.
>
>
> But when he describes what I assume to be his ideal future (and while
> he uses words of regret, the relish he takes in imagining it
> contradicts the lament) only white people are surviving in anything
> close to a civilized state.
>
>
> Read "World Made by Hand". I think you'll understand what I mean.
>
>
> I interpret his criticisms of "fat suburbanites" to be an attack on
> the 'wrong sort' of white person. Those who lack the sleeves rolled
> up, let's build a cabin spirit he celebrates.
>
>
>
> In an odd way, he reminds me of H.P. Lovecraft. Lots of talent
> obscuring some truly mean spirited ideas.
>
>
>
>
>
> .d.
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