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- Anatoly Karlin is the author of this site on i) the geopolitics of limits to growth, and ii) Russia watching.
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Category Archives: Sublime Oblivion
Review of “Limits to Growth” (Meadows et al.)
If I could recommend just one book to someone with a business-as-usual outlook, someone who believes human ingenuity and free markets will always bail us out of any resource scarcity or environmental problem, it would be Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (henceforth LTG). After reading it, you may never look at the world in quite [...]
Also posted in Reviews Tagged agriculture, climate change, collapse, economy, energy, pollution, resource depletion, review, Reviews, vision 4 Comments
The Endgame Begins
A year ago I predicted that there will be a “decoupling from the unwinding“, as “emerging markets” by and large ride out the temporary shocks of declining Western demand for their exports (China) and the interruption of Western credit intermediation (Russia) before resuming growth. This is one aspect of the trends leading to the imminent demise [...]
Also posted in Coffee House Tagged authoritarianism, corruption, economy, energy, finance, geopolitics, germany, iran, japan, peak oil, politics, rant, usa, vision 22 Comments
SSR #13: China, The Last Superpower
This is the third of my Sublime Strategic Reports (SSRs) covering global trends, regions, and geopolitics. After two hundred years of global ascendancy, the West is in rapid relative decline to (re)emerging Asia, which is mounting a steady “Great Reconvergence”. Likewise, the legitimacy of today’s “neoliberal internationalist” order promoted by the West is being questioned by the more [...]
Also posted in Coffee House Tagged agriculture, authoritarianism, china, climate change, coal, culture, energy, environment, finance, geopolitics, imperialism, international relations, japan, military, morale, politics, resource depletion, ssr, usa, vision, water 10 Comments
Collapse Ethics: Anarchy or Coercion?
The reaction to my article on the “ecotechnic dictatorship” garnered a vigorous response on this blog, and more of a vitriolic one elsewhere (see below for a summary). So let’s ask the question outright. Suppose that all your observations and models indicated that business-as-usual would doom the global industrial system to collapse, causing the premature [...]
Posted in Sublime Oblivion Tagged apocalypse, authoritarianism, collapse, communism, energy, environment, ethics, human rights, politics, vision 16 Comments
Human Sustainable Development Index
How should the ecotechnic dictatorship measure its progress and define its legitimacy to the people, since continued physical output growth is anathema? How can one reconcile a post-scarcity environment with the sustainably low level of physical throughput that we need to avoid a crash with the limits to growth on a finite planet? Though the [...]
Also posted in Coffee House Tagged communism, economy, education, environment, ethics, politics, publ 1 Comment
Ecotechnic Dictatorship is Our Last Hope of Averting Collapse
As a follow-up to my article on the historical necessity of Green Communism, I would like to 1) refute some common myths and misconceptions about limits to growth-induced collapse, 2) clarify the concept of Green Communism, and 3) elucidate why the only realistic way to prevent collapse now is to force through a “sustainable retreat” [...]
Posted in Sublime Oblivion Tagged apocalypse, authoritarianism, chaos, china, climate change, collapse, communism, corruption, culture, economy, education, energy, environment, ethics, fantasy, geoengineering, geopolitics, history, human rights, imperialism, matrix, peak oil, politics, singularity, technology, usa, vision, war 31 Comments
Philosophical Musings #2
4. Freedom from fear, the only real freedom.
Political scientists try to rank countries based on their levels of “freedom”, frequently arbitrarily defined and applied (Freedom House, Economist Democracy Index, Polity IV, etc). Yet despite the inconsistencies and difficulties with quantifying something as abstract and intangible as freedom across cultural and civilization borders, for all but [...]
Posted in Sublime Oblivion Tagged collapse, imperialism, philosophy, politics, rant, usa Leave a comment
SSR #8: On Future War