Comments on: Shocking Demographics of The Oil Drum Revealed!!

By: Pump

Pump — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 03:35:15 +0000

What should interest you more isn’t the fact that most of them are white and male, it’s that they’re mostly engineers and scientists. That latter point may increase the credibility of a site that discusses peak oil issues!

Finally, given an “ambiguous future,” one’s gender, race, economic status, and age may matter less in the long run because everyone will have to stay home and plant food.

By: Bart Anderson

Bart Anderson — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:07:37 +0000

I’m a little late with this comment, but I wanted to add it anyway, in the hope that it sheds some light on why the discussions at TOD can take the turns they do. I posted it at today’s DrumBeat in response to suggestions by jokuhl to do something productive, rather than just make pessimistic comments….

Thanks for speaking up, jokuhl. I feel the same way.

There is an element here of “old guys bitching around the cracker barrel.”

I’ve heard this kind of conversation before among the aging engineers at my company.

As an “old guy,” I see this as tempting but self-defeating habit — it probably has something to do with our declining physical powers.

Three problems:

1. There’s nothing new.
2. It’s boring and repetitive.
3. No one wants to be around you.

As Jokuhl says, there is a “TON of things to do,” all one has to do is open one’s eyes.

There are psychological hurdles though. One has to admit that one is emotionally vulnerable. One is NOT going to be the top dog when one starts on a new path. It takes a long while, for example, to become a good gardener.

In a survival situation, guess what happens to people who complain, predict gloom and don’t help out. One day they wake up, and the rest of the camp has moved on!

Bart
Energy Bulletin

By: Debbie Cook

Debbie Cook — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:41:58 +0000

There are only a few internet resources I check virtually every day: ASPO’s Peak Oil News/Review, The Oil Drum, and Energy Bulletin. I am fascinated by resource issues and so between those sites I feel I can stay pretty well informed. Having been in politics for eight years, I have a thick skin and am not bothered by the insensitive comments people make in blogs and emails (another bastion of relationship destruction). But there is no denying that each one provides incredible value that is not found anywhere else. I can skim the news articles for issues of interest and in the case of TOD, I can skim the remarks for tidbits of information (I look for links that are often of high value). I decide which tool to use and how to use it. I can only feel gratitude to all of the contributors (whatever their gender) at TOD and hope they can find the stamina to continue what often must feel like a slog.

By: Sharon

Sharon — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:13:38 +0000

DownSouth – I think you have a lot of it right. I’m reminded (and once said this about Stuart Staniford, who I admire enormously and disagreed with regularly ) of what Emerson said about Carlyle: “If genius were cheap we might do without Carlyle, but in the existing population, he cannot be spared.”

That is, the reason I do read TOD is that there are bits of genius there – and it is worth wading through, well, whatever. My fantasy is that someone might someday say the same about my site, since genius is never common .

Cheers,

Sharon

By: DownSouth

DownSouth — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:54:33 +0000

I hope that the TOD staff gives this post and comments a serious review. I think there are some criticisms and suggestions here that might help them improve the site.

My two cents worth:

1) TOD seems to favor the information-driven model that leads to a concept of public education as a one-way process: the expert speaks; the citizen listens. While this model works fine for disseminating objective information, it doesn’t work very well in forming value judgments.

2) TOD is a meeting place for people who believe some, if not most, of the promises of the Enlightenment will not be fulfilled. And as the true defects, and glories, of modernity are revealed, the result is a potpurri of creative ideas, destructive ideologies, strident arguments, brilliant insights, prejudices, pretentiousness, vendettas and obscurantisms.

“Great ideas,” Alfred North Whitehead once observed, “often enter relaity in strange guises and with disgusting alliances.” The same insight is conveyed in cruder form by an old joke. A farmer is seen to be digging furiously into a huge pile of horse manure that towers above his head. When a bewildered observer asks why he is digging, the farmer replies, in some exasperation: “Because there’s a pony under all this horseshit.”

I suppose one is always left wondering, as they take part in this messy process, whether they are the pony or the horseshit.

3) scooperman pondered: “But I wonder where are the big idea, new concept thinkers, TOD is a site where I expect to find something wonderful and instead I get vanilla.”

But I wonder if it happens that way.

For a wonderful lecture on genius, how it operates and how great works come about, I found the following lecture highly informative:

http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-enlightenment-2-0/robert-winter

By: olive

olive — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:27:59 +0000

if this is the best you can do then go back to your shine box

By: Dale Hooper

Dale Hooper — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:33:46 +0000

Are there any websites or blogs dealing with the practical aspects of preparing for Peak Oil/Global Warming?

I have been preparing since 1973 (the Arab Oil Crisis).

By: db

db — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:28:07 +0000

Nice try Sharon but way off the mark.
You have otherwise interesting posts, however so I won’t score you a D-.

By: SV

SV — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:18:58 +0000

TOD is mostly of interest to men because Peak Oil concerns the future availability of a resource by which people may derive the wealth that has made economic growth possible. As men’s primary value to women tends to hinge more closely upon their ability to extract resources form the environment, it is natural that Peak Oil should concern them more. As women’s value to men tends to be much more immediate and automatic, Oil and the wealth society derives from it, tends to be of a more ancillary concern to women. To women, physical appearance and the well-being of their offspring tend to be of primary interest. Men by contrast have little power in these areas. They have little choice but to concern themselves with the scarce resources from which they will attempt to derive the wealth by which they can attract women. Being a homemaker is rarely a viable option for men. It is men who invariably suffer the lionshare of workplace and military deaths. If women want equality, I say come on up to the front lines of war, and work the most dangerous jobs. Invariably, the more beautiful sex is the one that can expect greater physical safety. For the ugliness that is the lot of men and testosterone, life must need be much more about eat or be eaten.

That I’m afraid, is the plain and blunt honest truth.

By: dewey

dewey — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:07:34 +0000

darwinsdog – Your response to me implies that if I don’t agree with you, I must be uninformed – you “challenge” me to take a graduate course in evolution. Been there, done that. And I agree with you that there is no doubt humans have caused many extinctions already and are working up to a mass extinction event, and likewise, that escalating environmental damage must lead to a reduction of our own excessive populations. Still, there is uncertainty regarding the distribution and timing of those species and human population losses. We are still arguing about whether the K-T boundary was really an instantaneous devastating event or a series of crises that took hundreds of millennia to reach their final conclusion. If we know so little about events that have already happened, it’s hubris to think that we have precise knowledge of events that haven’t.