Kyoto

It’s fascinating and terrifying when you get into man made climate change the extent to which people have been bamboozled by capitalism. Someone just two days ago implied they “they” were responsible for the California wildfires. There are so many narratives, specific to the needs of the ones that peddle them. How can you boil it down? You can’t. Everyone has a perspective on it, and the internet has given us a tool that lets us ignore actual researchers. For every brilliant and properly researched nightmare scientist, too tired to wash, uninterested in dressing well, speaking from their vocal constriction or writing from their social obstruction, there are fifty good looking and socially acceptable public speakers who disagree with them but present extremely well. Them and idiots are driving what is now considered to be the mainstream narrative by people who haven’t noticed that the “niche” sites are the mainstream now, however you got invited. Some of these fuckers have done physics degrees or whatever and they can call themselves “scientists” to further complicate things. The whole COVID thing didn’t help, oh god it made these thought experiments into all your biddable friends thinking they found a magic secret that makes them better then everyone else. Even those of us who know how long science takes didn’t like or respect the obedience in the narrative around the pandemic. It’s no surprise I’m enjoying Baldur’s Gate 3 when you look at the central premise of the narrative. How many people have been “tadpoled”?

I’ve already had sleepy drink for tonight, I forgot I hadn’t written. I’m about to embark on a deep attempt to look at all the stuff where people who have been used their whole life to being told they are wrong or they don’t understand things properly have been jigging around trying to say “I told you so” because of an internet shared pattern matching nonsense. The exact parameters shift consistently so there’s no point sciencing things. It used to be that the deadlines in the inherited made up shit our pattern matching friends were peddling would come quick and fast: “There’ll be a great big shift and all the crap we invented about well known people will have a made up thing happen to them by Dejanubery the 53rd, Kingyear 17662.” The dates would often be just a few months away, and I would always wonder how the people buying into this “secret knowledge” would cope when it turned out to be wrong so quicky. But they never cared. They just readjusted the dates, moved onto the next one. “Oh yeah, it didn’t happen in Dejanubery because of “Well Known Person”. “Well Known Person,” who has “{usually liberal opinion}” (and this casual attack on their politics appears whether I’ve asked for it or not) “Well known person blocked the thing that was definitely happening but it’ll be definitely happening again in X TIME.”

It’s like a kid’s game I guess. You can just shift the rules based on the needs. Nobody playing these games is necessarily a bad person, even if some are not the best at critical thinking. Instinct is important, but if that’s your only guide you really have to be able to trust you aren’t being manipulated by clever people pretending to be like you.

I watched this fucking hard show about the way we were bamboozled by oil into leaving it too late to do anything about man made climate change.

What I didn’t know was how early people started to try to have the conversation. The first half was HARD to watch. I was still at school when this stuff happened. Maybe back then we could have slowed things down.

It’s done now. We will reap what we’ve sowed, but not fully in any of our lifetimes. These things are slow, but human society as we know it is long past tipping. We will continue for the short term to be able to get home and say “This evening I shall have Chinese food in twenty minutes, delivered to my door “. Depending on the oil, there is a bit longer before collapse. Get good at your martial arts though. Resource war is coming and our convenience habit is the main driver.

Kyoto made me sad, ultimately. I’m glad to see it, it leaves us with an optimistic finish. It’s a great piece of theatre. But I don’t buy the optimism, and I speak as an optimist. We’ve fucked it. Civilisation as we have built it will burn, it is burning, it’ll get worse because we can’t stop ourselves. More than half the world will probably lose their homes a lifetime. There will be mass graves, civil unrest on a scale we have never seen. Fire and water. Earth and air. Nature is bigger than us unless we do the ultimate and just ruin the atmosphere and then that’s that. I’ll be dead for the worst of it, or in another life, forgetful.

I’m so tired. Silly boy, had sleepy drink before I remembered I needed to write, no filter, no going over. Ooch. It was lovely to share the show with Claire and Jethro from Othello. And I got to meet Matthew from casting, and thank him. WIN. zzzz