…it’s one of the reasons one converses with folks, instead of carving solitary manifestos onto a park bench with a pen-knife

Oh there you go, making unwarranted criticisms of my life’s work again.

More to my point (which in fairness was not particularly clear, being carried way downstream on a current of sarcasm) was that in searching for those very solutions, the narrative of TEH EVIL RICH using their heartless technology to deprive TEH NOBLE POOR (who are, in these tellings, always curiously devoid of agency) is not only unhelpful, it’s also rather inaccurate and misleading. And problems are generally better solved by accuracy than by the machinations of interested parties. Witness Iraq, where accuracy went straight out the window so early in the game. One could give numerous examples, but it would be tedious.

“I was thinking of these ‘less imaginative’ people who didn’t choose their place of birth more carefully. Also the less robust infrastructure subject to stronger and more frequent storms in some parts of the world.”

Not to quarrel, but these two sentences go some distance to illustrate a bit of what I’m on about, in more than a few ways. But as you say, it’s a topic for a different conversation.

CK — “the poverty of his own thinking…” Well, as Hong Kong Phooey used to say, “Hmmm, *could be*!” I try never to rule out the possibility that I’m being an idiot, and if so, how; it’s one of the reasons one converses with folks, instead of carving solitary manifestos onto a park bench with a pen-knife. On the other hand, not that anything I’ve said is of a completeness, and I wouldn’t claim it was; still, which is the part that isn’t at least somewhat true?

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation warns that in some forty poor, developing countries, with a combined population of two billion…[crop] production losses due to climate change may drastically increase the number of undernourished people, severely hindering progress in combating poverty and food insecurity. (Cited in George Monbiot’s ‘Heat’)

I was thinking of these ‘less imaginative’ people who didn’t choose their place of birth more carefully. Also the less robust infrastructure subject to stronger and more frequent storms in some parts of the world.

Not to mention a bunch of drowning Pacific islands and the odd river delta here and there, like Bangla Desh and Vietnam.

I thought also of the less imaginative and less awake types who found themselves living in a ditch when the levies broke in New Orleans, but I decided not to go there. After all no science can prove whether global warming had anything to do with Hurricane Katrina, although logic and commonsense says it did.

Kelly is wrong. There was nothing clever about Howard’s speech. It was the old “of course he WOULD say that, wouldn’t he” line.

Fact is, it doesn’t matter what Howard says now. Because nobody believes him, and even if he turned into Cicero overnight, it still wouldn’t make any difference. The punters have already made up their mind about presenting the Rodent with a pink slip. And about time.

the advantages of which they largely shared with the ‘poor’ (you could also read as, less imaginative)…

In which j_p_z demonstrates the poverty of his own thinking…

http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/niggers/english/e_ncn

Way too simple. Another way (among many) of stating the same case would be, A bunch of people used the fossil energy to create vast and previously non-existent wealth, massively and imaginatively raising the material standards of human well-being (and transforming themselves into “TEH rich”); and they also ‘used the energy’ to create head-spinning technological, medical, and agricultural innovations, the advantages of which they largely shared with the ‘poor’ (you could also read as, less imaginative) on an international scale. This could conceivably have made global poverty a fossil of human existence. But instead the poor then took this incredible unearned windfall and, rather than using it to become non-poor, simply used it to quadruple their numbers, roughly every thirty years or so, thus ensuring that poverty will be with us humans for a very long time to come. Thanks, guys, you did us proud.

THAT’s for starters. I’m not anti-poor people, but I am pro-accuracy. And if we’re all going to march joyously into the future on an ostensibly ‘equal’ phenomenological footing, then *some* of us (by which I mean “most” of us) seem to need to have a bit of fookin’ common sense knocked into our noggins. To paraphrase Mistah Orwell, All animals are awake, but some are apparently more awake than others.

Finally, the Australian people have demonstrated Burkean ‘prejudice’ in their judicious evaluation of the need for change when asked to vote in referenda, including and especially the 1999 republican referendum, on changing the constitution.

That use of quotation marks to suggest that Burkean ‘prejudice’ should be distinguished from the kind we usually mean when we use the word – one whose praises Burke sings in a certain passage of his Rantings on the French Revolution reminds me of a certain device Derrida employed in On Grammatology. Perhaps the task of the next generation of conservative intellectuals will be to explicate the differance between Burkean prejudice and prejudice.