Sunday, December 14, 2014

Ugo Bardi is great



But sometimes he publishes things that make me giggle.  The extended whining by Professor Malamud is a classic self-pity-party.

http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2014/12/first-thou-shalt-not-scare-them.html

I wrote a comment and then came over here to chat a bit more.  If the comment gets posted (and I cannot see why it wouldn't, but one never knows) I will add it here.

But the overall tone is, encompassed in the phrase:
since we're hovering on the verge of extinction, but it will leave an interesting time capsule for whoever might come to recolonize the planet after we're gone.
Man...what a douche.

An Ivy league educated English Professor at a State College might see in the upcoming demographic collapse the end of the world.  All we will be seeing is the end of the unnatural life that he is the poster child for.

Given my druthers, I think that I would have preferred being a nomad of the Pontic-Caspian steppe in the early ninth century CE to being a spreadsheet-brandishing bureaucrat in the early 21st, or for that matter, a privileged child (Ph.D., Columbia) instructing a new batch of not-quite-as privileged children at a second tier university (Georgia State) in a bankrupt education system of a dying empire.

I have a feeling that the future pastoral nomads of the fifth millennium would find the whining equally amusing

3 comments:

russell1200 said...

I don't agree with him

Put if you are going to call him a douche, you should at least pretend to understand his arguments.

As I said, I don't agree with him, but they are stronger than you might suspect.

Degringolade said...

Russell:

I read and understand his "arguments". I find them specious and riddled with self-pity and self-loating.

His arguments fall neatly into "what we have built is the only possible world" scheme with a heavy overlay of lack of imagination. His arguments scream the idea that an atoning END must occur.

His arguments aren't really all that powerful. They just appeal to the guilty feelings of a privileged society.

Ugo Bardi said...

Hey, thanks for the "Ugo Bardi is great" title!