Pessimism is intellectually delicious

From openDemocracy found via grist: Ian McEwan writesLet's talk about climate change. It's a superb article, beautifully expressed. Here are some of my personal favourite quotes, but go read.

But also large and growing larger is the great rim of grime -- as though detached from an unwashed bathtub -- that hangs in the air as we head across the Alps into northern Italy, or the Thames basin, or Mexico City, Los Angeles, Beijing -- the list is long and growing. These giant concrete stains laced with steel, those catheters of ceaseless traffic filing towards the horizon -- the natural world can only shrink before them.

For we tend to be superstitious, hierarchical and self-interested, just when the moment requires us to be rational, even-handed and altruistic. We are shaped by our history and biology to frame our plans within the short term, within the scale of a single lifetime; and in democracies, governments and electorates collude in an even tighter cycle of promise and gratification.

... above all, we have our rationality, which finds it highest expression and formalisation in good science. The adjective is important.

Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient data or challenges to fundamental precepts.

Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would be self-defeating, if the environmental movement degenerated into a religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue).

There are rss feeds for both Grist--gristmill_rss--and openDemocracy--opendemocracy--that I've started following recently--each enlightening.

Supersize Polling Cards

Inflation--like that in the bulk of the paperwork associated with bank accounts, phone bills, and so forth--has occurred. My polling card is bigger. Inconveniently so: it won't easily fit into my handbag (deliberately kept small to avoid strain on hands and shoulders). Fine, so I won't take it to the polling station (makes it easier to escape the nosy vultures (no offence to any of my flist who might be doing a stint!) outside). But, not only is the thing bigger, it's in two colours. Now were this doing anything useful, I'd be fine with this too. But it seems simply to be providing a nice purple background and not a means to greater legibility. How much extra has this cost, I wonder.