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@alberto_cottica

But the emphasis is on "fight": as in "Fighting the long defeat".

The piece certainly shines a bright light on why the near-inevitable "-- but there's hope" phrase in climate pieces rings so hollow, and why doomers, who call themselves realists, pooh-pooh hope, which they call "hopium".

Fighting the long defeat is more like Joanna Macy's "Active hope", more like - sorry Yoda'- "No. Hope not. Do. Or do not. There is no Hope."

If you put it that way, imma Do.
That is, fight.

@CelloMomOnCars great. I will proudly ride by your side at Helm's Deep. 😃

@alberto_cottica

Deal!
Also, there is a lot to do before we even get to Helm's Deep. Let's go.

@alberto_cottica

I read this remarkable thread by @adapalmer and thought of you and the "long defeat":

"Machiavelli said peoples who treasure their liberties can preserve them even through long stretches of tyranny. That it’s peoples like 1450 Milan who yield quickly to the tyrant and don’t try to hold the line who lose their liberty completely. He wasn’t wrong. 22/? "

mastodon.social/@adapalmer@wan

mastodon.socialMastodon

@alberto_cottica Thank you for sharing this, it gave me a great concept for an attitude I couldn't totally explain or express.
The intuition that, in a strange way, when there's no hope and we've already lost, the only thing that makes some sense to do is to keep fighting.
Or, in other words, that the only thing that will matter once the world is inevitably "over", is what we chose to do along the way.

@CelloMomOnCars I also loved your variation of Yoda's quote 🫶

@eldelacajita @CelloMomOnCars yeah, same. I do well, psychologically, when things are grim. "Fight like you are already dead" and all that. When you have nothing to lose, heavy burdens become light.

@alberto_cottica

"In fairness, no one has succeeded in motivating the inert masses, including the so-called “alarmists” and “doomers.” As Kopecky notes, neither scaring people nor not scaring them is working — if by “working,” we mean to say giving them a way to cope psychologically with the overwhelming nighness of it all and helping them break out of the resulting paralysis."

@alberto_cottica

"Tolkien’s King Théoden, vastly outnumbered and facing almost certain annihilation at the Battle of Helm’s Deep, models the mindset of the long defeat when he says, “The end will not be long. But I will not end here, taken like an old badger in a trap. I shall ride forth … Maybe we shall cleave a road, or make such an end as will be worth a song — if any be left to sing of us hereafter.' "

@alberto_cottica

"A Call To The Storytellers"

We should not be surprised that the story of the state of the world and our role in it is being so ineptly told. The activists and academics who have served as the scientists’ main scribes.... are unsuited to tell the story of even the best of times; it is certainly far beyond them to forge a rhetoric for these urgent ones.

....we will need to turn, and soon, to storytellers who can."

#solarpunk
#writers
#writersofmastodon
#WritersCoffeeClub

@BrambleBearGrrrauwling @alberto_cottica that's actually great point! I worked with some academics who tried - lowcarbon.leeds.ac.uk/dreams-o , or professor Joshua Pearce with aditiandslick.tumblr.com/ and appropedia.org/To_Catch_the_Su - and I could see how much they want to express something, but don't have the right skillset.

It's up for the storytellers to help them find new symbols and languages to tell their stories. I wrote about it at lenses.alxd.org/

lowcarbon.leeds.ac.ukDreams of a Low Carbon Future | Doctoral Training Centre in Low Carbon Technologies

@alberto_cottica

Read at your peril, indeed. You meant a rabbit hole, a firehose, a host of ideas to explore!

Interesting that you bring up Iain M Banks. In one of his non-Culture novels he describes an economy based on "kudos". What's your take on that? Kudos are not fungible or transferable, but is it too close in nature to money?

@alxd @BrambleBearGrrrauwling

1/2 @CelloMomOnCars I don't think I have read that one. Anyway I would not use expressions like "too close to money". They imply that there is a right amount of closeness to money, whereas the whole point of sci-fi econ is to do thought experiments.

@alxd @BrambleBearGrrrauwling

2/3 @CelloMomOnCars @alxd @BrambleBearGrrrauwling

Many authors have played with the idea of reputation as currency: for example @bruces ("reputation servers"), @r_emrys ("upvoting") and @DanielSuarez ("darknet credits"). All these thought experiments are valuable. My heart goes to Cory Doctorow's (@pluralistic) explanation of why reputation economies are a bad idea, but that's just my own conclusion.

@alxd @alberto_cottica Science exucation and training actively curbs expressive language and communication, striving instead for a measured, calm, "rational", dispassionate tone. Which is very useful to most scientific discussion. But we need as much passion, outrage, excitement and heart as we can muster to wake the overwhelmed and capitalism-zombified to action. Unlearning that measured, dispassionate style will be hard scientists. But all that is what storytellers do best!