149. DOOMER PORN
Carbusters is an anti-car organization which recently featured a piece of doomer porn called "Bicyclopolis". Here's one of the panels:
Once "The place for fun in your life," the megamall is now a crumbling hulk. During the brief transition from the modern to the medieval period, the Megamall served as a food distribution center. They ceased distributing food when suburban marauders set up roadblocks on the major highways and hijacked the shipments. Authorities tried to order the thousands of starving and diseased people back to their homes, but they prefered to stay and die in a place that held so many fond memories for them.
--by JD
-----Thanks to nhoj for the link.
posted by JD @ 1:19 AM
17 comments
17 Comments:
LOL this has to be seen in context really. It may come as a surprise to folk, but some people don’t like cars. If you live in a smog filled city, have had friends of relatives killed or seriously injured by cars or dislike the noise or a road building project has blighted your life, the ‘war on the motorist’ seems like a jolly good idea. In statistical terms, this man-made invention and the misery it has caused makes Hitler look like a pussy.
The WHO said car-related mishaps killed 1.2 million people a year, injuring or disabling 50 million more, and said the casualty rate would increase by 65 percent in the next 20 years without preventative measures.
Pro car people swipe back and start ‘X is just anti car’, as if it’s blasphemy. Quite laughable really, especially when there’s plenty of anti plane, rail, bus, even bike about. Some pro-car organisations have stated ‘walking is a Victorian activity’, as if they are making the argument in evolutionary terms our legs are now redundant – and in the technological future world progressively every part of the human being will be made ‘optional’, thus we will be reduced to cabbages. Nevertheless I think it’s a fairly harmless bit of porn, probably tongue in cheek, to get people thinking about the negative aspects – of which there are plenty – concerning the humble automobile.
JD is anti-car, as he points out in this post.
My objection to fantasies like this one is that they promote a "head for the hills" survivalist mentality. They encourage people to drop out of society rather than contributing to it and through a wider anti-car movement.
I don't think it's so bad to be anti-car. It's just that instead of after a solution that will really work (showing people that mass transport will work and meet your needs) they instead seem to look forward to people dying in a mall because "[it] held so many fond memories for them."
If you don't like technology, that's fine... but don't use 'peak oil' as a lame excuse to push your views on other people, and make them sound reasonable.
I don't think it's so bad to be anti-car. It's just that instead of after a solution that will really work (showing people that mass transport will work and meet your needs) they instead seem to look forward to people dying in a mall because "[it] held so many fond memories for them."
I don't get that there's any kind of "looking forward to" the doom attendant on Peak Oil, not by prominent Peak Oilers, anyway. This sort of extreme, in your face advertising is intended to wake people up to the negative consequences of peak. Only a moron would look at it and want that to happen, and only someone with a serious personality disorder would assume that this was the purpose of cartoon.
If you don't like technology, that's fine... but don't use 'peak oil' as a lame excuse to push your views on other people, and make them sound reasonable.
I don't see any pushing going on here, except maybe from the other side. There's a reasonable, plausible chain that links peak oil to this kind of outcome. Whether it will happen is a matter of debate, but it's not impossible, and is usually presented with some backup. On the other hand, this pronouncement is based on a complete misunderstanding of what it is to push a view on someone (i.e. to threaten without reason in order to achieve compliance); in a sense, then, it violates its own imperative. It would be funny if it were a little more artfully done.
anonymous:
Huh?
You go from suggesting I'm mentally ill to saying somehow if done better the idea of a reality that mimics a bad sci-fi apocolypse movie would be funny?
That comment was a whole lot of words to say not very much.
You go from suggesting I'm mentally ill to saying somehow if done better the idea of a reality that mimics a bad sci-fi apocolypse movie would be funny?
No--that if your comment had been done better, it might have been funny.
This doomer porn is a good illustration of the fact that some people desperately NEED this peak oil doomsday scenario to come true, for some mysterious reason.
They're willing to be 'creative' with 'facts' in order to keep their bullshit story standing up.
Boy oh boy, are we gonna have a good laugh at these people, a few years from now...
The problem is now solved in any case. Using a combination of mass transit and small instant hire satellite tracked electric cars; oil use can be significantly reduced. Not only does this go back to the hub and spoke type network, it solves the problem of battery cars, liquid fuels and promotes mass transit solving a lot of its problems and congestion. A superb solution. The only people that now need to buy cars is those in very remote areas or those that like owning cars for the sake of it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4394080.stm
The problem is now solved in any case. Using a combination of mass transit and small instant hire satellite tracked electric cars; oil use can be significantly reduced.
Is this actually a reality anywhere in the world that you're aware of?
They're willing to be 'creative' with 'facts' in order to keep their bullshit story standing up.
What facts, specifically?
I would suggest we need to look at cities like Copenhagen which do very well without cars.
Yes, the Europeans made better urban planning choices than Americans did. But they tend to be the exception rather than the rule. The problem I have with these kinds of suggestions is that they'd have worked 20 years ago. 20 years ago, we might have razed San Francisco and rebuilt it, and we'd be ready for peak. We don't seem to have that option any longer.
"Only a moron would look at it and want that to happen, and only someone with a serious personality disorder would assume that this was the purpose of cartoon."
I must have a serious personality disorder. As I see it, the cartoon and the site it comes from clearly celebrates the worldview of those who long for wastrel suburbanites to suffer horribly for their profligacy. At least we agree that people who share this worldview are morons.
Sorry, I just don't get that from the website (not that I read every last word thereon). It appears they're convinced that if we continue trying to live the lifestyle we are living, that we will suffer horribly. But nowhere do they say that this is what they'd like to see happen.
There's a difference between believing something to be the inevitable consequence of a set of causes, and actually longing for those consequences.
Suppose we were all on the Titanic, and I happened to notice that we were heading full speed into a vast ice field, where it would be very likely that the ship could be damaged. Worse, by my analysis, if the ship were to run into an iceberg in the right way, it would sink, and if it did so, half the people aboard (or more) would die. Suppose I started off that Sunday morning being very reasonable in my conversations with the officers and crew, telling them that we needed to slow down or change course. They don't listen. I then get as many of the passengers who will listen and tell them a horror story about what seems likely to happen. Does this mean that I want the ship to sink? Do I want all these people to freeze to death or drown?
Of course not. It might be taken as pretty strong evidence that I wish to avert that catastrophe that I'm talking about it at all. Even supposing, once we hit the iceberg, I started telling people to make their way to a lifeboat ASAP, am I hoping that a bunch of people are about to die? Again, of course not.
That these people would put up a website like this indicates to me that they wish to avert the fate that they see as likely. They hope to do this by painting as vivid a picture as possible, so as to motivate people. How in the world someone would think this means they pine away for the days when people will starve to death at the local mall is beyond me. If they wanted that, and sincerely believed (as they seem to) that if we do nothing, that's what will happen, they'd hardly bother with a website.
Moreover, those who look at doomers and think that they must actually like the picture they're painting, that they want it to happen, must suffer some kind of disorder that causes a fundamental disconnect between observations of behavior in others and reasonable assumptions of motivation for that behavior. Doomers would just shut up if they wanted doomsday to come.
Well, if you read Kunstler, it seems pretty clear that he really does like the idea of economic collapse. Keep in mind that he was calling for an end to car culture long before he latched onto peak oil.
Just a load of hyperbole, these cartoons. For the scene to come true in this set of doomer porn, you'd have to drop a H-Bomb on Minni-St.Paul.
Honestly, biking from the shore of James Bay? Have fun "biking" through 1000's of kilometres of untamed wilderness (nobody but Native peoples live out there, and there's not that many to begin with) on your way to the U.S.!
" The only people that now need to buy cars is those in very remote areas or those that like owning cars for the sake of it."
I think you will find many people fall into the later class. Look at a typical american city. Or the many small, dispersed towns here in Australia. Mass transit isn't gonna cut the mustard. People like private transport, and it is no mystery why. Good thing plug in hybrids work.
Icebergs?? What icebergs? Waiter! Get me another bottle of that abiotic champagne!
hic
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