The Thursday rant
Eagle-eyed regular readers will have noted the day (Thursday) the time (nearly lunch already) and will be wondering what’s happened to our Thursday rant this week. For everyone who hates it: I’m sorry, we haven’t decided to kill it (yet). But it is having a week off, mostly because I was going to have a crack today and I’m too busy. On stuff that feeds my two-year-old, not my ego, that is.
However, we are looking for more Ranters. The rules, remember, go like this:
1. Open to anyone, blogger, commenter, whatever. Even journalists.
2. 350 words maximum.
3. Any subject at all, as long as you have an opinion. Not that there’s a shortage of those here usually… We won’t censor it, beyond the usual caveats.
4. Links or short quotes are fine, as long as they’re just to illustrate your point, not to make it for you.
We give you the floor and a chance to promote your blog or opinions here. Of those we’ve run already, I’ve especially enjoyed this and this. But feel free to rant about whatever you like  they have all attracted lots of readers and even occasionally sparked off decent debate in the comment boxes. The next couple of weeks are spoken for already, but after that we have openings. Leave a comment below or email me at fairvote AT gmail DOT com to book your place in the sun.
The thing that really gets my goat, almost to the exclusion of all other thought, is Robert Kilroy-Silk.
Is he a notably litigious person? I can’t say. But unless the tanning salons of Brussels have internet access, you can surely take a risk and let me have a crack at him…
Kilroy’s underlings – notably one Anthony “Tony” Bennett (one-time failed UKIP candidate, vandal of metric road signs and generally obnoxious former researcher of RKS) – have been known to threaten legal action in the past. I’m rather hoping that now I’ve dropped the anonymity I don’t start getting writs – I’ve had a fair amount of not especially flattering things to say about the permatanned prick (cf my maniacs section)…
Still – give it a pop, eh? Kilroy-bashing’s always fun.
You link-spamming my posts for traffic again, Clive?
In a word, yes. I crave attention, damn it. Why else did I spend more than a year using a stupid pseudonym?
I would be happy to snap and snarl on various subjects, if you can put up with even more ‘Duff and nonsense’.
A bit late, but here’s a rant I wrote yesterday, coincidentally. It’s about capitalism and the environment. The full length one is on my website. Comeback more than welcome.
Dear capitalist,
You can go on forever about how business is supplying us with wonderful products, choice, the chance to be ‘little kings’, rampant consumers – it’s not sustainable.
Bottom line: There’s no way the exponential population growth and resource use of the industrial revolution and its aftermath can continue. There’s no way. The planet is not built to support it. Its climate systems, its air and water, its top soil – all are dangerously near the breaking point of their ability to renew themselves. Remember, every time we lay a stretch of tarmac, or release CO2 into the air, we are killing something, changing something, forever.
The planet has an amazing, wondrous ability to restore and renew itself, but its capacity to do that is limited in both extent and in timeframe. And a population of 6.3 billion people, and the kind of industrial activities which are going on right now are stretching or overloading that ability.
These are simply the facts, from an overview perspective. The capitalist view that our lives are improved by greater choice of products and the other benefits of business is simply looking at the same world but from a narrower, less overhead perspective — limited in time perhaps to our phase where we have enjoyed a growth in prosperity, powered by cheap oil, before the unfactored-in costs come back to us — and limited in place, to the prosperous world.
Perhaps you might agree that national and global economic growth, increased consumer choice, business success, even international development – all must come second to the survival of humanity and the environment. We should be prepared, if it’s required, to tear up anything which threatens the latter – as it is currently threatened.
Business must in effect be saved from itself. Markets and business, like money, like religion, like any other human artefact, can be good or bad. Corporatism – a particular legal structure, a particular configuration of business and markets, which actually works significantly to distort the working of markets – which consists in extended, vastly extrapolated wealth, deployed with enormous world-changing effect purely to further and advance itself, is dangerous.
Our current phase of economic growth without concern for the consequences, elsewhere in the world or even for our own children, will be looked back on if at all as an anachronism, as the prevailing of a strange, reductionist, materialist mindset – that of the economists.