Samizdata

There’s no doubt that one of life’s pleasure’s is abuse, both dishing it out oneself and seeing it dished out by others. And here, and again in the comments attached to that posting, some excellent abuse is dished out, to one Thomas Disch, and to a chap who defends Disch. Disch has apparently just committed suicide. He was not so much a science fiction writer as an anti-science fiction writer. He wrote the kind of “science fiction” that was intended to put the world right off the real thing. Good riddance, says whoever it was who wrote the posting.

Jeff Read defends Disch thus:

Most literature is about people. That’s a topic that the Asperger’s-afflicted bulk of the hard SF audience has great difficulty with. And I don’t think you can truly write about people, especially modern people, without a certain anguish that comes from grasping or glimpsing the terror of the situation.

And with more in a similar vein. Eric S. Raymond (“esr”) responds with, among other bon mots, these ones:

This is the kind of self-indulgent, self-pitying crap I expect from English Lit majors in the throes of an excessively prolonged adolescence. The “especially modern people” is particularly silly, considering the conditions of pain, oppression, disease, and early death that almost all premodern humans endured. Aesthetes in air-conditioned rooms who’ve never had to worry about where their next meal is coming from have no fucking business talking about “the terror of the situation”.

The subject of “peak oil” then comes up. This catastrophe has arrived, says Read, “right on schedule”. Replies Raymond:

Another myth. M. King Hubbert originally predicted that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. Later “Peak Oil” models pushed back the date at least four times as it unaccountably failed to materialize.

In any case, the relevant economic issue is not when oil peaks but if and when when oil and its functional substititutes become too expensive to run an industrial civilization on. Given the rate at which entrepreneurs are making progress on synfuel from photosynthetic algae, I’m not at all worried. The remaining problems are just engineering.

As for copper and platinum – they’re not destroyed by use, you know. We can mine landfills and junkyards for them; in fact that’s better quality “ore” than we could find when we had to pull them out of nature. And when those run out, asteroid mining.

Which is all as maybe, but I particularly like this:

The trouble with doomsaying is that it leads to perversely bad prescriptions. We don’t need to slow down capitalism, we need to speed it up so it can innovate our way out of resource traps more quickly.

Had I been in a hurry, I could have just slapped that up as a SQOTD.

Read then alludes to some arguments against Raymondism, here. So, Raymond, did you read them?

I did. They’re staggeringly dumb, in large part because they assume that the problems they’re describing are things that government action can actually fix reliably. Reality would be better described as follows: there is no form of market failure so egregious that political failure can’t make it worse, and such failure is the normal outcome of politics.

In among that there’s another potential SQOTD, I think.

There are intelligent arguments against libertarianism, …

And so it goes on. I’ve lost the taste for this kind of argy-bargy-ing myself. But it still pleases me to see it being done. Later Raymond links to his essay entitled A Political History of SF, which I intend to read Real Soon Now. I also intend to add, Even Sooner, Eric Raymond’s Home Page to my personal sidebar, here. It should have been there years ago.