The Day of Spirit Guides

On a grey day, everything was bleak
Three spirit guides came down to me
Bearing good news of kindness and love
Forgiveness, compassion, and gifts from above

The first was an Angel gliding from on high
Who said “I'm your guardian: I see when you cry
Not that I can fly and catch bullets for you
But I can give you strength to see you through
The harms of this world are just passing things
You'll be laughing again where Glory rings”

I didn't know at first what to say
A spirit guide? Sent on this day?
But my trust in Heaven boiled up
And I managed to say what was coiled up
“When you can do nothing you just laugh or cry
The powerful don't need to and maybe that's why
God has no sense of humor at all
No that's not true he likes pratfalls
For every person it'll come to pass
God will knock you right on your ass
And as your spirit goes up like smoke
He'll say 'what's the matter, can't take a a joke?
Come on now, you know that I love you
And if you don't smile there's a place I will shove you'
My people have been joking for 2000 years
And still it's not enough to take on our fears”

The angel smiled sorrowfully and said
As a halo of glory gathered round its head
“It's not for you to question what we disburse
Remember that things could always be worse!”
But before any more I saw in the angel's place
A Buddha with a compassionate face

Who said “You are right to reject future things
Cultivate non-attachment to what the world brings
Everything is change: everything will fall
But everything really is nothing at all
Right thought, right action, right concentration
Those will bring Nirvana's liberation”

The enlightened words filled me with rage
I said “All I love is made from a cage
of skandhas, the five trash heaps,
Things block the paths, things I have to keep
Since clearing those 5 paths I missed
I'll curl those paths into a fist
Punch you in the face that's no face
Curse the name you had before you had a place
The slap of one hand's gonna scatter the sand
The sand of our deeds goes up in the breeze
When it's gone you know what's left?
The stain of personality is what's kept
Like a poem with the words rubbed out
Style is the crud that can't be scrubbed out
I can't be mindful that nothing's left
And still have a voice to take another breath”

The Buddha smiled, full of inner peace
And said “Your suffering some day will cease
Although my teachings you cannot now credit
Incarnations may pass but eventually you'll get it”
Before I could reply he faded for good
And a Muse appeared where the Buddha stood

She said “You're right to reject non-attachment
You grow as you are: it's too late for detachment
The way I can help is to make you inspired
To serve as a witness to what has transpired
There may be no address to send up the prayer
But the land still needs its land surveyors”

Before this spirit guide I hung my head
Three guides! There'd be no other one instead
“This might be so”, I said, tired
“If the way that I required
Was to understanding, and perhaps a path
That I could look on and not laugh
When I see poets I see a hive
Of insects, gnawing and alive
Who no one is attending to
And so we can only chew
Turning a pile of meaningless paper
Into a place we can live in till later
A glorious poet may want inspiration
But for a termite that's not our vocation
Rechewing trash is not witnessing
But hurried building with no one listening

The last of the spirit guides smiled
And said maybe she'd stay for a while
The angel and buddha were there too
Where would they go? They were stuck all life through
And so we started to joke and laugh
I'll have to tell my children about these paths

A spirit guide's an idea in your head
But now that these words you have read
If you remember, then along for the ride
A version of me can be your spirit guide
Telling you you're completely fucked!
Kicking your other spirit guides in the nuts
If it would help or even if it wouldn't
Bringing up the things you shouldn't
Showing you just what is in your command
If you can't smash the state, you can still smash your hand!
Laughing along till existence is through
With however existence has to deal with you

Climate endgame

The Paris Agreement is going to have all sorts of pessimistic things said about it, many of them justified. We're probably going to spend the rest of our lives making the goals of it become realized as actual facts. But I don't see any likely way in which this isn't the climate endgame. The world system has substantially agreed that we're going to transition away from carbon. We also have the technology to do it. My best guess is that by 2050 it will be mostly done. This is very good news.

In various arguments among people on the left, many people were of the opinion that the neoliberal world system couldn't do this (and many will presumably continue to hold this opinion, the example of the Montreal Protocol implementation notwithstanding). I think that this was always a misdiagnosis of which class holds power and how that power is used. The managerial-bureaucratic neoliberals who are essentially in power everywhere are not James Bond villains who want to destroy the world so that they can rule a small fragment of it, or simple lackeys who are unable to go against any component of existing brick-and-mortar wealthy interests when the rest of their class has a rational interest in self-preservation. They already rule the system, and their continued rule is perfectly compatible with conversion over to clean energy, which they will continue to control the major infrastructure for. The apparent helplessness that they evince when confronting problems whose resolution would not be to the benefit of the 1% does not have to operate here, because nothing about fixing the climate problem -- which is the most important of our time and really does have to be fixed -- changes the mechanics of their control.

XLent

With the benefit of hindsight I can say a few things about the rise and fall of Keystone XL.

First, about one of the ideas I've written about here that I think has held up best, Infrastructuralism. No lasting gains are going to come about through a carbon tax, trading system, or permit-selling regime. All of these will be subverted as soon as they take effect, if ever. The lasting changes come out when infrastructure is built or not built, because those choices lock in decisions for 30 years.

As Keystone XL illustrates, the major infrastructure-building decisions are never simply made by the magic of the marketplace. They only happen with the active cooperation of government. Even if government somehow absented itself from the decision, there would be no way to build a project like this without governmental use of eminent domain. So the public is already involved in approving or disapproving of all of these projects, no matter how much someone may tell you that they are the result of economic factors beyond our control.

The same goes for the simplistic statements about how commodities have a "global price", as if this just magically happens without extensive publicly supported building projects to make it happen. Without Keystone XL, that oil will have to be shipped by rail and truck, which are more expensive. There is nothing natural about a global price for something that doesn't vary as you cross geographic barriers: it only happens with massive public barrier-removing projects such as the various conflicts fought to keep the Strait of Hormuz open to tankers.

Politically, the story of Keystone XL is a story of -- what is the opposite of leadership? Followership, perhaps. It was always a decision that Obama could make on his own, which was exactly why it was a good issue for 350.org to take up. It dragged on for seven years, and only happened with the combination of a lame-duck President, a change of parties in power in Canada so that we wouldn't deeply offend anyone there, a back-off from the company sponsoring it in the form of their request to suspend, and an upcoming international conference before which Obama wanted some form of face-saving gesture for how little he's done.

What else could have been done with those 7 years? Clearly, the Keystone XL decision has a large symbolic component, and is supposed to lead to increasingly easier decisions to stop infrastructure of this kind. But we can't wait another few years before the next major project is dropped. Making people spend nearly all of the available activist pool in the U.S. on this one project for 7 years was a major cost, one which Obama made us pay with the assistance of supposedly left groups like the AFL-CIO, which supported Keystone XL because of a few jobs. What's going to happen when we have to close down every coal mine? Because that's going to have to happen, sooner than you probably think.

literary criticism of Adam Roberts' work

I've written quite a bit about Adam Roberts' SF on this blog. I thought that it was finally time to collect it (including some material never posted on the blog) on a more permanent site whose home page is here. For the occasion, I've written a new piece on his novel Polystom.

From here down is a copy (without the full bibliography) of what's on the main site:

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Some notes on reading Adam Roberts

Books that I've written about are linked below. Each of these essays is in a different formal style in keeping with the individual work that the essay is about.

• Salt (2000)
• On (2001)
• Stone (2002)
• Park Polar (novella) (2002)
• Jupiter Magnified (novella) (2003)
• Polystom (2003)
• The Snow (2004)
• Gradisil (2006)
• Splinter (2007)
• Land of the Headless (2007)
• Swiftly: A Novel (2008)
• Yellow Blue Tibia (2009)
• New Model Army (2010)
• Anticopernicus (novelette) (2011)
• By Light Alone (2011)
• Jack Glass (2012)
• Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (2014)
• Bete (2014)

The order that I wrote about these works in was, if I remember rightly: 1) Stone, 2) On, 3) Splinter, 4) Yellow Blue Tibia, 5) Anticopernicus, 6) Polystom, if you want to read only the more recent ones.

Lew and Pru romantic comedy philosophical thought experiment fanfic

Once there was a post by John Holbo on a blog called Crooked Timber that was about a philosophical thought experiment from Amartya Sen -- 'his celebrated Prude/Lewd example' -- which G.A. Cohen summarized in Rescuing Justice and Equality as follows:

Lewd has two relevant desires: he likes to read pornographic books, and he would like Prude to read one, because he thinks doing so would corrupt Prude into liking pornography. So strong is that desire that Lewd would prefer Prude to read the book, rather than read it himself; his desire to corrupt exceeds his desire to enjoy his own corruption. For his part, Prude dislikes reading pornographic books, and he also dislikes Lewd reading them; he wants no one to read them, but he prefers reading the book himself to Lewd reading it: that way, he thinks, less danger lies. In light of the strengths of their preferences, Prude and Lewd agree that Prude (alone) will read the book. That is their joint first preference, and so it is required by the Pareto principle. Sen claims that the principle thereby endorses an illiberal result. (p. 187)

John Holbo suggested that stories about this pair be written, people gave various ideas in comments, and from all these ideas I decided to write philosophical fanfic.

Here it is: a romantic comedy adventure story with thought experiments. And pornographic novels.

• Lew and Pru in Paris
• Lew and Pru and the Doctor's Orders
• Lew and Pru at the Circus
• Lew and Pru on Holiday
• Lew and Pru at the Gotham Book Mart