Yep bio-d, pretty easy.  Here's what I sent.

The ice is melting, the clock is ticking.  We need to replace as much GHG power use as possible asap.  Wind is the cheapest, fastest way to do it.  

Conservation using geo heat exchange heating cooling powered by solar cogeneration is just as effective per dollar invested.  We need both.  

And plugin hybrid vehicles that use clean wind and solar for fuel, cutting gas use by up to 90%.

The big stall of Cape Wind hinders investment in other wind projects.  AWEA says we need to triple wind installation to get to where we need, 20% of present grid generation capacity with wind in 20 years.  Conservation can take care of half.  Solar and biogas can pickup the other 30% plus charge plugin hybrids.

This plan working through a distributed generation and storage smart grid can replace fossil, nuclear, and fossil fuel agriculture within 20 years.  Reversing GHG climate disaster.

Cape Wind could be part of the big kickoff as a green energy friendly uS government comes into power in '09.  Make it happen!   Please!!!  People need to see wind working.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

The Blue Ocean site, which I had never visited before, is beautiful.  And in general I admire Carl Safina for his work.

I hate it when good causes collide.  Is Safina actually on record as deploring the Cape Wind project?  I did not find the quoted sentence in the website.

The biodiversity crisis and the climate-change crisis are not the same sorts of problem (though the latter contributes to the former).  But there should be no inconsistency or conflict in being committed to dealing with both.

Already, on balance, we bird-lovers have done the appropriate accounting, and decided that, yes, some birds will die because of wind turbines in their paths; but many more birds will die if nothing is done about global warming and its effects.  So, most of us are on board with Cape Wind.

Hopefully, Carl Safina and his marine-biology allies feel the same way.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Sent.

_

So why is the US Minerals Service responsible for this?

Shouldn't it fall under the jurisdiction of another organization?

Hey GreyFlon,

the MMS is the reviewing agency because the turbine footings are rooted in federal waters on leased property owned C/O the federal government - in federal waters beyond 3 miles.

The state (Mass) only reviewed the impact of the transmission wires from the leasehold to the shore.

You might think that FERC would be the lead agency, similar to permitting of LNG facilities such as Broadwater (boo!).  

That is a screwy part of how the Fed approaches the issue of offshore and nearshore alternative energy resources.

There is no coordinated approach for wind energy, no regional plan, no coordinated policy, and the system favors fossil fuel sources such as LNG, natural gas wells (a form of mining), and the like.

In the end the Cape project will probably succeed because the state (Mass) has no Coastal Zone Management Act authority in the area to be developed for wind energy.  /sam

Onward through the fog

I take your point, but I think you (and many other people) make far too much of it.

I advocate for public policy that encourages efficiency and conservation precisely because I know that the vast majority of people (including, often, myself) will not voluntarily curtail their own activities.

So while I think people ought to do what they can in their personal lives, there is actually no hypocrisy at all in failing to do so while still advocating for public policies that push things in that direction.

grist.org

Did you ever see the old Far Side cartoons about what dogs and cats hear?

The dog one shows a guy playing with a dog and saying all the usual endearments ("Aren't you a pretty dog!  Good Ginger!  Yes, Ginger is a pretty, pretty dog!") and, in the second panel, it's "blahblahblah GINGER! blahblahblah GINGER!"

The cat one shows a similar setup, only the second panel, where he shows you what the cat hears out of all that noise we make, it's only "blahblahblah."

When you write:

I take your point, but I think you (and many other people) make far too much of it.

I advocate for public policy that encourages efficiency and conservation precisely because I know that the vast majority of people (including, often, myself) will not voluntarily curtail their own activities.

So while I think people ought to do what they can in their personal lives, there is actually no hypocrisy at all in failing to do so while still advocating for public policies that push things in that direction.

What the politicians hear loud and clear is "the vast majority of people (including, often, myself) will not voluntarily curtail their own activities."  The politicians supply the " . . . and will vote against anyone who tries to make them" and, presto!  Here we are.  

Every airline trip is DEMAND for air travel, an industry that sits at the absolute pinnacle of a mountain of energy intensity and waste while providing an almost-entirely non-essential luxury to a tiny class of privileged elites who consider consumption of this product essential to their social status and who do so in droves, regardless of the cost it imposes on others.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

Grey Falcon,
as the husband of a librarian (yes, I have that in common with the President of the United States, along with a short attention span and a tendency to shrink from reading anything too long) (Laura, by the way, was kicked out of the American Library Association for having failed so grievously to do anything helpful with her husband), I must commend you for your excellent rapid online research skills.

But in the case of Veterans Against McCain, bashing John McCain from the right tends to nauseate me.  True, the man has a notorious temper.  But to suggest that he has relentlessly suppressed evidence of his collaboration as a North Vietnamese propaganda tool is crazy.  And to suggest (as that Aries Irish-American NYC-born former congressman from CA, Bob Dornan, did indeed suggest) that while in prison, McCain calculated that he should opt to refuse early release because that would mean the end of his professional life, is really mean.

Also, it gives no pleasure to hear Jane Fonda's name dragged around yet again, to inspire a round of drum beats from the right.  Her visit to Hanoi was perhaps the best thing she ever did; she certainly has been a remarkably boring actor -- almost as bad as her hugely over-rated father, whose best performance was in "Young Man Lincoln," when he played a white marble statue in Washington.  But back during the Republican National Convention in August, 2004, I knew that we had lost, when George H.W. Bush in a skybox told either the CNN people or the Jim Lehrer people that he refused to shake Jane Fonda's hand in a receiving line at the White House.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

That last one's probably uncalled for.

I really did like the montage ones I posted tho.

Yes, the two "montages" videos are a bit crudely made, but make an important point.

For the only time in my long life, I actually registered Republican, in 2000, in order to vote for McCain in the NY primary that Spring.  Of course, I switched back right afterwards; and even if he had won the nomination, I had no intention of voting for him in November; but I thought he represented some good movement in his party.

Subsequently, though, he has flip-flopped disgracefully, especially pandering to the right.  If the media get their act together -- as at least Tim Russert and Jonathan Alter seem ready to do -- , I suspect McCain will not be able to count on as much support from independents as he has so far enjoyed.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

I'll let Michael Pollin respond to DR's objection to Bart's post about the need to align your individual actions to your values, not just call for government response:

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It's hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: "Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money." So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle -- of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we're living our lives suggests we're not really serious about changing -- something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking -- passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists -- that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It's hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

it is not either mass action or individual action, both ought to be pursued.

The problem comes when the opposition to GHG cures go after guys like Gore.  They argue that since gore wastes energy, his arguments on GHG climate disaster are wrong.

Wether or not he really does waste energy is a moot point, in the GHG climate debate.

The opposition tries to use the false dilemna/hypocricy claim to discredit his presentation on GHG problems/

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Little Dog's veterinarians had a large copy of a version of the Larson cartoon by the door of their old office; they seem to have chucked it during the move to their new digs -- or perhaps they suppressed it, as being too denigrating of their patrons.

As I recall, there are four frames.  In the first and third, both the dog's person and the cat's person are scolding their respective companions for some characteristic bit of misbehavior (getting into the garbage, in Ginger the Dog's case), with their speeches in cartoon-balloons, both with the caption, "What You Say."  In the second, the first frame's image (with the dog) is reprinted, with the caption, "What Your Dog Hears"; and the speech in the cartoon balloon is replaced with, "blah blah blah GINGER blah blah GINGER blah blah ... "  In the fourth, the third frame's image (with the cat) is reprinted, with the caption, "What Your Cat Hears"; and the speech in the cartoon balloon is replaced with nothing, i.e. a void; the space is totally blank.

A hasty Google-search did not bring it up, but I am sure it is available online somewhere.

As for JMG's reference to virtue, by way of Michael Pollan quoting Michael Specter: I agree with the ever-excellent Amazing that this is a false dilemma.  I would caution my old pal Bart not to get too hung up accusing people of hypocrisy; but I do indeed agree with him (and JMG and Michael Pollan) that our personal decisions to greenify our lives matter: not so much to avoid the charge of hypocrisy -- as if other people's opinions of us matter! -- as to instruct ourselves in accord with the Mahatma Gandhi's wise saying, that the change we wish to see in the world we must first realize in ourselves, personally.

What this has to do with democracies and electoral politics, you poli-sci types can figure out.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Bart, I like your comment, but re: this part:

Secondly, the matter of personal integrity, of walking the talk. Are we asking people to make sacrifices that we ourselves are not willing to make?  Do we have one set of rules for ourselves and our friends, and another set for other people?

This is kind of my point: I'm not asking anyone to make a sacrifice I'm not willing to make. I'm asking politicians to pass policies that realign incentives to encourage energy efficiency at both the macro and micro (personal) level. I'm asking other people to live under those policies; and yes, I'm perfectly willing to live under those policies.

So where's the hypocrisy?  

grist.org

I think that's kind of what Adam was trying to get to.  Energize the individual and the culture simultaneously.  The corporate/commercial angle turns people off though.

Yep there it is Canis, Ghandi.  Become the change.

How much more effective is a movement that does it that way?  I think when Barack  answers tabloid attacks by speaking out  against politicis as usual, diversion from solutions to real problems.  He is illustrating that very Ghandi-ism.

That is his particular genius, he does not need talking points.  He is what you see.  He embodies the change in his individual integrity.

Did you know he was a community organizer?  He was told by his organizer, the one who trained him, to get other people involved, get them to speak in front of the group.  Instead of speaking to the group himself.  He was a coach.

That's how they won the caucuses.  Assembled teams that were self activating.  Give them the confidence to do it and set them loose.

Become the change, that's zen.  All the members become the change, they know what to do.

We econauts need this tactic that's not a tactic, you be yourself, live the change.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

In many cases, perhaps the great majority, striving for the greatest good for the greatest number of sentient beings is indeed an excellent ethical guide.

Nevertheless, it is inhumane to judge our actions by utilitarian criteria.  Human beings can be virtuous, even if what they attempt fails -- maybe even because it fails.  Human beings can be virtuous, even if what they attempt is to help just one special beloved being, when they might instead be helping others.

Utilitarianism is a great ethics; and Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill have certainly advanced us a great deal.  But there is more to living well, to living respectfully, to living flourishingly, than what is contained in utilitarianism.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

OK, so:

<<
Im lo achshav, eimatai?  Im lo attah, mi?
>>

"If not now, when?  If not you, who?"

So alright already: let's say everybody has to stop flying in airplanes.  Nobody in the Grist community is allowed to fly in an airplane.  For any reason.  Period.

This is the categorical imperative: We must allow ourselves to do only what we would allow every other moral agent to do; and we must forbid ourselves from doing, what we would forbid every other moral agent from doing.

So what would happen, if Grist sent out an all-points-directive, commanding everybody in the community to cease from flying in airplanes?

Sounds fine to me; but I always hated flying.  Plus, I like to stay here with Little Dog.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Bart writes:
In the case of US environmentalists, three areas stand out:

Air travel
Individual autos
High consumption lifestyles
To me it is obvious that the Earth is doomed if everyone on the planet were to imitate our behavior. Thus we are failing Kant's categorical imperative.

In the case of air travel and high impact lifestyles, it is true that if you don't purge all voluntary hi-impacts from your lifestyle, you have no moral authority to call upon others to do so, or to advocate societal policies regarding them. I'm sorry David, but your argument sounds like that of the alcoholic who advocates prohibition "to save me from myself".
(It also sounds alot like the dance America and China have been doing - "I won't go first until we have a policy which makes you go first."
I've shaken off proximal concern with China's coal binge. I say America should go first simply because it's the right thing to do. America  should have the pride of a leader. Then, once you ARE a leader, you can turn to China and say with authority, "Now how about you?"
I think the same is true in reforming our lifestyle.)

I'll use the admittedly hackneyed Gore example to distinguish gratuitous and necessary impacts.
I think Gore's jetsetting is an unfortunate but necessary part of his critical work. (I'd say the same about David flying to a green conference.) So that's a necessary hi-impact, and that's the proper place to buy offsets if you can afford them.
But I just can't accept that a mansion is "necessary" by any measure, certainly when you take into account heating and cooling it, which I assume Gore does. This is a purely voluntary, gratuitous hi-impact, and to say you're "offsetting" a destructive toy like this really is buying an indulgence (which, in spite of what some have said here, is not some tired metaphor, but a comparison precise and exact in every way).

As for the suburban car lifestyle, here it's alot harder, since decades of depraved policy seem to have locked us in and lost us within this labyrinth, and it's hard to see how to find our way out, at least within the current political configuration. Although some individuals may be able to find individual ways out, it's certainly not as easy as saying turn your thermostat down, eat less meat, and don't fly if you don't need to. Here David's right that the real action has to come first from broader policy change:
raising fuel efficiency standards, raising the gas tax, eliminating SUV subsidies, flipping the idiotic 80/20 federal transportation spending ratio (highways vs. mass transit), congestion pricing, regional planning to emphasize sustainability instead of "growth", stop favoring home ownership over renting in the tax code, tiered water use pricing, and so on.
Only this panoply can gradually discourage the whole suburban mindset and eventually bring a sea change in the way we live vis this "automobile".    

OK, Russ, lead the "panoply," and the "sea change"!

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

he posted it 3 times!  :)

But I did not know that, so I decline any points; I just did a Google search.

I have only read "Lolita," and some shorter things, or excerpts, or something, by Nabokov.

But even if I had read "Pale Fire," I doubt I would have remembered, my memory being such as it is.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

In the case of air travel and high impact lifestyles, it is true that if you don't purge all voluntary hi-impacts from your lifestyle, you have no moral authority to call upon others to do so, or to advocate societal policies regarding them.

I'm sorry, that's just absurd on its face. I can't call for a social policy that discourages flying unless I voluntarily give up flying? The whole premise of my support for social policy is that I believe very few people will give up flying voluntarily. That's why you need public policy!

Also, the equally absurd attack on Gore's house -- which I won't get into yet again -- shows just how dangerous this business of passing judgment on other people's lives can be.

Also, Bart, I'm happy to call for public policies that will, in some incremental way, constrain my own activities -- flying, driving, whatever. Again, it is precisely my unwillingness to substantially curtail those activities on my own that leads me to believe that we need public policy.

Of course, I'm exaggerating somewhat. I do try to lighten my own footprint. I encourage others to do so, to the extent I can without feeling like a judgmental, self-righteous enviro type. I believe there are many benefits to doing so -- personal, social, economic, etc. (Pollan makes these points well in his current essay.)

But still -- there will never be enough people who voluntary do what we need. We need to advocate for public policy. And if we set the bar so high for even allowing people to advocate for public policy, we're only shooting ourselves in the foot.

grist.org

... for public policies that will, in some incremental way, change your activities.  The roar of the jet is simply too loud.

Humans and certain other advanced primates use and are constantly alert for the use of deception. It's a hard-coded survival skill; children and other infant primates learn it early.

A key signal for deception being practiced against you is that the person/creature who wishes to deceive you has actions that don't align with their stated (indicated) intentions.  

When this is the case, the primate brain has a very hard time hearing the words, because the limbic system is interpreting the mismatch as stemming from a threat.  (Being deceived means being vulnerable, either to lost opportunity or to worse.)

So if you truly want to advocate for those policies, you best advocate for them by adopting them.  That allows for the creation of trust--that what you say is what you mean, and that you don't intend them harm.

But whispering the old prayer of the man who finds himself in a bar enjoying the attentions of the beautiful maiden ("Lord, make me pure -- but not yet.") is just wasting your breath.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

I'd love nothing better to advocate emission-free air travel.  I'd shout it from the rooftops. I would pay a premium. I'd wear a little, bitty bikini with the company's name plastered across my butt (OK, well, that might not actually be positive reinforcement).

The reason I can't advocate it is that it does not exist.

The reason it does not exist is because there is no incentive for the air travel industry to create/provide emission-free travel.

The reason there is no incentive is because airlines can still make money by doing business as usual.  They can do this because 1) people do not eliminate air travel based on global warming guilt, or on mildly increasing fares (they  may reduce, but will likely not eliminate) and 2) there is no negative reinforcement for either the traveler or the airlines for continuing business as usual (i.e. carbon tax or vastly increased fares related to vastly increased fuel costs).

So, concerned greenies can do our best to eliminate all emissions, flying included.... but we all know how good humans are at resisting temptation.  How many of us do not have 10 pounds to lose?  Or, concerned greenies can do their best to 1) curtail/reduce personal emissions by lifestyle adjustments (flying included), while 2) pushing for legislation that gives us the best hope of continuing some form of our previously enjoyed lifestyle while not killing the planet (i.e. clean energy air travel).

I guess this is the last time I'll say this, since it's very simple but doesn't seem to be getting across:

I am not deceiving anyone.

I am not asking anyone to make voluntary changes in their behavior that I am not willing to make. I am asking for policy that shifts their incentives and mine alike. There is no hypocrisy. There is no deception.

And the insistence that there is echoes, almost word for word, the specious charges enviros constantly hear from the right side of the aisle. We're going to accept their frame? Personal purity as a precondition for policy advocacy? Why would we impose so insane and so counterproductive a stricture on ourselves? Why do the right that favor?

grist.org

Let's get beyond environmental ascetism.  It doesn't get anywhere useful.

We used to praise monks who sacrificed their own personal pleasures out of deference to a higher God.  To the extent that such self-sacrifice gave those individuals a greater spiritual awareness, it's all for the good.  But at an individual level.  Joe the Anonymous Monk may get great personal gain from sacrificing sex, wine and song, and no doubt has a unique vantage point on the world as a result.  Not better, not worse - just unique.  The village vinter, minstrel and nunnery-operator also had unique vantage points.  And the world benefits from a diversity of perspective.  We all owe thanks to Joe.  But also to Ernst, Julio, Simon and Garfunkel.  

This is the same standard we ought to take to our modern-day monks who chose to live a life of self-sacrifice for environmental reasons.  If people individually want to live a life without a car, without meat and without a plasma TV, that's fine.  We ought not question their motives, nor the fact that there different lens provides them with a useful vantage point that us (fatter, more mobile and more sitcom-knowledgeable) folks lack.

But just as Joe didn't grow his faith by telling people how awesome celibacy was, we shouldn't expect to grow environmental consciousness by telling people how great life without travel is.  The challenge faced by Joe - and the most responsible of the environmental movement today - is therefore not to maximize their sacrifice, but to maximally leverage their efforts.

So the question for the environmental movement is this: how do you leverage your actions?  Not how much do you sacrifice - because even if you completely eliminated your environmental signature, you've only made our challenge one-six-billionth easier.  To be blunt : You don't matter.  Y'all do.  What Al Gore has done outside of his house is a heck of a lot more important than what he did inside it.  The individual who gets their town to institute a recycling program is vastly more leveraged than the individual who sorts their paper and plastic.  So let's stop judging based on irrelevant individual behavior.  If we insist on evaluating individual environmentalist's impact, let's do it on the basis of how well they leveraged their beliefs to lower our collective footprint, not how big their shoe is.

...particularly when the carbon-emitting that goes on is the result of a social construction, e.g., cars and the built environment of sprawl.  I don't even have a driver's license, and we take trips across the country by train, but I would never berate someone for having a car -- and probably not a plane, although that involves more choice.  I disagree with Sharon Astyk, for instance, who has foresworn taking airplanes, because I think a lot of people would hear some very important ideas from her if she did take them (on the other hand, I remember a comment from JMG that he didn't give a lecture because of all the driving involved -- but driving is also dangerous, imho, and a total waste of time).

What I would criticize someone for is not working with other people on a national or international movement -- if there was one -- that would lead to a situation were it would be possible to take a train instead of a car or train.  In other words, the problem is to change the way the society is put together, more than to change individual actions.

And to get back to the OP, what makes the situation so frustrating is that putting up a wind farm is a social solution, not just an individual one, and certain individuals (who happen to be famous liberals and environmentalists) are working against it.

In the case of air travel and high impact lifestyles, it is true that if you don't purge all voluntary hi-impacts from your lifestyle, you have no moral authority to call upon others to do so, or to advocate societal policies regarding them.
I'm sorry, that's just absurd on its face. I can't call for a social policy that discourages flying unless I voluntarily give up flying? The whole premise of my support for social policy is that I believe very few people will give up flying voluntarily. That's why you need public policy!

Also, the equally absurd attack on Gore's house -- which I won't get into yet again -- shows just how dangerous this business of passing judgment on other people's lives can be.

I'm sorry I wasn't as clear as I thought I had been in distinguishing necessary flying from gratuitous, pleasure flying. Of course, if you're saying it's morally tenable to indulge in unnecessary flying but at the same time say "we need to cut down on unnecessary flying", I guess we're at an impasse there.

Of course you're right that most people will never give up their bells and whistles voluntarily. But it is unhelpful for those who advocate change and seek to educate regarding the need for change, to refuse to personally undertake that very change all they are able, to be exemplary. It tells the people, who are not by nature committed to this, who indeed want nothing more than to be able to believe none of this is real, and to forget about it and get back to the party, that it is in fact not so important.
(Not to mention how the enemy scores such easy propaganda points off examples of hypocrisy. The people find this both entertaining and convincing.)

As for my other alleged "absurdity", well, yes, anyone who thinks mansions have any constructive role to play in this world anymore looks absurd to me as well.

DR, I never said you were trying to deceive anyone.  I am trying to suggest an explanation for why people find your calls for carbon limiting policies unconvincing.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

...might be good publicity, no?  Sort of like John Madden, except more important (not that Madden isn't important).

Who finds them unconvincing because I am not an environmental ascetic? Can you cite a single person? This sounds like a construction that lives in your imagination.

grist.org

Allow me to rephrase my comment to read:  "I am trying to suggest an explanation for why people find environmentalists' calls for carbon limiting policies unpersuasive."  I wrote quickly and did not mean to suggest that anyone found you, personally, unconvincing.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

Boy, you can see how bad things have gotten when, even on an environmentalist forum, this stupid corrupt "airplane", which has only existed for the blink of an eye in the timeline of man's experience, is taken as the reasonable baseline, and I'm supposedly some kind of monk for slightly regarding it.
On the contrary, it's modern man, a creature with no culture, no history, no context, and evidently no sense of time at all, who has departed the realms of reason on this hedonist binge which is obviously unsustainable and can't last much longer. Yet these revellers really think this dance of death is "living". They think it's the only way to live, and the only way anyone has ever lived.

As for hypocrisy in the abstract, I guess I'm just coming at all of this from a completely different angle. When I consider, why do I hate the Right?, two things come to mind. One is their actions, the policies they enact and seek to enact. The other IS the hypocrisy which their core trait. I hate them for claiming to be "moral" when they're patently not. They claim to be patriots, christians, supporters of compassion, cherishers of family, ardent for beauty, vigilant for the national interest and security, economically responsible, even solicitous of conservation issues. Yet their every action proves they have nothing but contempt for any of these things, that they are nothing but loathesome money-grubbers and waterboys of greed, and that greed fundamentalism is their only real ideology.
I hate this LIE. (Which, BTW, does not have to involve deception. All the worst hypocrisy is right out on the open. It's a brazen lie right to your face, a direct insult to your intelligence.) So I guess that's why I get so frustrated when even among decent people I see anything like this, let alone anyone actually defending hypocrisy in theory.
Hannah Arendt asked, Why have moral philosophers universally regarded hypocrisy with such disdain? her answer: "Hypocrisy is the one vice which cannot coexist with any form of integrity." (inexact quote; I don't have the book ready to hand.)

One last point - I don't understand why we shouldn't have these discussions. The fact is, we don't have any sort of coordinated movement with agreed-upon principles, the way the enemy developed over the fifties-eighties. I'm not saying there necessarily should be such a movement, but surely we can at least explore some fundamentals from time to time. Maybe this gets in the way of the wonkery, but what also gets in the way is where people seem to have fundamental disagreements on principle but lack even a mutually recognizable framework for understanding and discussing them. As for the notion that such issues should just be repressed, (1) again, that sounds like what the Right would do, (2) it can't work anyway.

Just admit it Bart.  It's the first step to recovery, hehey.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Perhaps Russ's "asceticism" may be too mysteriously aesthetic or phiosophical for me at the moment, and I might have to try reading it a few more times another day when feeling more fresh and chirpy, but in general, in a whole bunch of posts above, I cannot find anything useful to digest.

A word that springs to mind is:

Waffle,

Or possibly:

Gobble Gobble Gobble, as found in turkey-speach