Fight Like An Animal

Exhausted ecological militant integrating revolutionary and evolutionary theory, one podcast at a time.

[Fight Like An Animal @arnold_schroder]

@sentientist For all the people who will respond by saying it's inconceivable there could be a Darwinian Left (I don't call myself a leftist, but the people who try to run me over with their pickup trucks when I blockade their workplaces usually shout "communist"). https://t.co/4n8k3uxYpn

[Fight Like An Animal @arnold_schroder]

I used to say "you dance like a cop" as an insult, and this is what I was talking about.

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

Mayor Eric Adams cut an additional $100 million from education this year, but he somehow found money for the NYPD to promote themselves with a dance team.

[Fight Like An Animal @arnold_schroder]

@PointNemo61 @People4Portland That's a fundamentally different statement than "violence and intimidation are never acceptable" and that's what I'm pointing out. If the thesis is "violence should be used by certain people in certain circumstances," just say it.

[Fight Like An Animal @arnold_schroder]

Always fascinated by reaction continua of all kinds, particularly the ecological-political reaction continuum. Sounds condescending but exactly my phrasing in 2017--I used to be in the business of disruption but now I feel like the weather will take care of that part etc.

[Roger Hallam @RogerHallamCS21]

Balance: Building the Next Civilisation in 2024

I've been thinking a lot in 2023 about fundamental strategic matters - more than at any time since the beginning of Extinction Rebellion. My work was mainly focused on refining and enhancing an established civil resistance model of “how to cause trouble effectively”. The basic frame was - “Look, let’s work together to create a massive nonviolent disruption and push the state into making big reductions in carbon emissions''. We were pushing up against a boulder called ‘the carbon regime’. Now, like Sisyphus, I see that we were doomed to watch it roll back in our faces.

In 2024, I’m working on a profoundly different framing: it goes something like: “Look, the carbon regime has totally fucked up so the climate crisis is now locked in. We don’t need to create massive social disruption because it’s going to happen anyway! The regime will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. So, what next? We need to build the next civilization and stop fascism from taking us to a terminal hell”. Bit long but you get the idea.

That’s the job, like it or not. You might want to stay doing your little thing in the world but greatness is about to be thrust upon you. As Trotsky said, you might not be interested in war but war is interested in you. Some have the privilege to ignore this reality, at least for the moment, but in 2023 the signs were all around us. The situation in Gaza shines a light on the complete moral idiocy of the old paradigm of violence and retribution. It is overwhelmingly obvious that what comes next cannot be more of that! Similarly, the latest COP makes 1984 look like kids’ play. ‘Let’s destroy billions of lives, but dress it all up as having a nice sensible discussion.’ Lastly, I recently sat through an absurd four week “climate” trial where the judiciary were simply unable to confront the enormity of what we face. Humanity’s destruction through carbon emissions was totally off the cards. So much for “intelligence”.

But we know all this. The point is, what’s next? For me, the new central concept is “balance” - which sounds moderate, hence why it has wide appeal. In the present context, in which everything is so imbalanced and getting exponentially worse, the notion of balance becomes a necessarily and paradoxically revolutionary idea. A balanced revolution, as theorised by Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, is actually against “revolution” - in the sense that it’s against the uprooting of human connection by psychotic utopian projects, whether they be communist, fascist or now “neo-liberal”.

Over the year, I’ll outline different aspects of a balanced revolution as I get more ideas about “how to do it” from working on practical designs (e.g. how to hold a public assembly, how to door knock, how to stand in elections, how to create functional ethical control systems). As always with what I do, it is all about turning theory into practice and practice into theory.

The mission is to empower people to see the big picture - one that transcends the traditional categories of politics, economics, social connection, and spirituality in favour of a new fusion of confrontation and dialogue. At this time of total crisis, new social formations need an overarching and uncompromising ideology. What we create over the next decade has to be a credible national and international entity - think early Christian church but without the crappy bits - that can give us a real shot at survival.

A big part of the project is to bring on the leadership of the younger generation so they, in turn, can take their generation through the coming turmoil with a degree of intelligence and grace.

It may be “too late” of course - in which case, so be it. But it may not, and my intuition, for what it is worth, is “we ain’t seen nothing yet” - both in a negative and a positive sense. Many of us don’t want to go gently into that extinct night. The collapse of society means that revolution is now inevitable - transformation is coming and it’s up to us to guide it.

That is the light bulb realisation: that light comes out of the dark.

I wish you all a bright New Year. Whatever it may bring.

[Fight Like An Animal @arnold_schroder]

@DilettanteryPod It's partially a strategy to get people to buy things and leave really quickly, as opposed to actually post up and work on something. The music in coffee shops has become noticeably more prevalent and loud since I was young.

[Fight Like An Animal @arnold_schroder]

@s0f0nisba I have prior illness but can easily distinguish those maladies from flus and colds and whatnot, and it is pretty wild to have not been sick in that way for over four years.

[Fight Like An Animal @arnold_schroder]

@TooSphexy Yeah exactly, there's nothing to say about it that doesn't sound pretty similar to what people who are simply disengaged say... but it is in fact a thing.

[Fight Like An Animal @arnold_schroder]

I legitimately feel like I've done all my grieving for this world, and I want others to know this happens, and doesn't imply disengagement of any kind. For me, it was a lot like other major experiences of grief--namely the death of friends--only it lasted for 25 years.

[Prof. Eliot Jacobson @EliotJacobson]

Thinking back on your entire life ... all the tragedies, deaths, illness, lost love and sadness you've experienced, what is your current state of sadness?

[Fight Like An Animal @arnold_schroder]

@MurrayMack4 @ram_farm Maybe what you're assuming but not saying is that there's some kind of prescriptive, coercive program being implied. Rather than a guy working on an experimental farm to give people a bigger range of options for food production, just in case they end up needing them, you know?

[Fight Like An Animal @arnold_schroder]

Feels like maybe this guy thinks all these phrases separated by commas are one big sentence about zero-input agriculture? Like "diminished reactive aggression" is how you say famine when you're feeling super, super wordy?

[Mack Murray III @MurrayMack4]

Thursday morning agriculture challenge: Say "famine" in as many words as possible.

[Fight Like An Animal @arnold_schroder]

I know what I'm saying in itself probably isn't particularly helpful, but I find that I want to communicate these aspects of my experience in some way that is.

[Fight Like An Animal @arnold_schroder]

I don't feel numb or fucked up or like I shut down because I "ran out of tears" or anything. I always experienced more rage than grief, and it helps that my work is so wrapped up in understanding our situation, which feels existentially valid across a range of outcomes.

[Fight Like An Animal @arnold_schroder]

Zero input agriculture, species hybridization by hand, a future of increasingly diminished human reactive aggression, and this phase of social and ecological chaos as a time of incredibly potent opportunity rather than an inducement to paralysis. https://t.co/f64NcGnoIQ

[Fight Like An Animal @arnold_schroder]

Friends, I am very rarely on this site, and I've neglected to post recent episodes. I'm not going to try to compensate for all that I failed to post, but this one was particularly worthwhile--Dr. Simonsen is working on a very parallel track to my own.

[Fight Like An Animal @arnold_schroder]

But at least this behavior can be explained by a lack of information and serious engagement. What is far, far more baffling is that someone can read over a bunch of policy documents and get the impression activists are calling the shots. Truly, where is that coming from?

[Fight Like An Animal @arnold_schroder]

Once, I watched a judge sentence someone to a year in prison for shutting down a pipeline, in the process explaining what the environmental movement needed to do. She then went on to describe what mainstream environmentalists had been doing for decades.

[Sabine Hossenfelder @skdh]

Yes, our climate targets will fail because plans to meet them are mostly empty words. They are slightly slowing down the developments though, so still better than nothing. Of course we should keep on trying, and of course activists will keep on insisting the impossible is possible and then complain that no one is listening to them.

The reason all this climate talk goes nowhere is that most climate activists misidentify the source of the problem. It's not a technological problem -- we have known how to avoid climate change since we've learned of it. The problem is that we have no system to convert this knowledge into collective action.

The only global system that we have to aggregate information and coordinate actions to use resources are free market economies. And for those to work, we'd have had to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions. Which we did not.

So for several decades now we have witnessed meetings and demonstrations and countless opinion pieces that amounted to very little.

It is not hard to predict what is going to happen from here on because the default mode of humans is simply to keep on doing what they've been doing.

This is why Carbon Capture and Storage and Carbon Dioxide Removal (eg BECCS) will become increasingly widespread -- because they'll allow nations too keep on doing what they're doing.

I see in my mentions that some people insist I must be dumb for not understanding that CCS and CDR are costly, ineffective, and unlikely to scale.

Well, yes, I am so dumb that I said this in a video two years ago. I am not saying it's a good solution. I'm simply saying it's how it will go because it's the closest we can manage to a market for carbon. And fossil fuel companies know this full well.

And since that is very unlikely to keep global warming below 3 degrees, we'll end up doing stratospheric aerosol injections.

Again, a stupid thing to do. I'm not saying we should do it. I am merely saying this is what I think will happen. Why? Because it's cheap and we know how to do it and the more we think about it, the more appealing it will look.

If you want to know what I think we should do, well, I've said this before. Expand solar, wind and most importantly nuclear, CCS on fossil fuel plants, upgrade the electric grids, and stop wasting money on nonsense, like for example those COP meetings...

https://t.co/10Suiccw3m

[Fight Like An Animal @arnold_schroder]

It's not like people aren't prone to offering poorly researched opinions in all domains, but I remain surprised by the extent to which people flippantly scold ecological political actors for neglecting to do what whole generations devoted lifetimes to.