Re: More thoughts.

Thank you for your typically generous response. I read your earlier essay and some of the responses, including kit's. 2015? Bloody 'ell, you and kit have been around a long time. No offence, but I don't think I want to be around for quite the same amount of time. ... My motivation for writing my OP was that Laudate Agno's initial post led me to think about what the ideological basis for my defence of pederasty would be, given that I actually share his professed rejection of market individualism. Capitalism has led to the world we currently inhabit, and the idea that pederasty can enjoy a renaissance through some sort of extension of market logic strikes me as implausible. Mu will keeping Mu-ing, no doubt; and I don't want to be too horrible to them because they are at least trying, and it is not as though I have anything to offer in the place of their activism. My guess, however, is that nothing will change unless society changes very radically. And this is where we come to the movement that we're seeing rising around the world for a genuine people's democracy that seeks to repair community in the wake of the devastation left behind by decades of neoliberalism, and to repair nature, and our relationship with nature. On the one side, you have this movement; on the other, you have Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump - this last a perfect symbol of the "noxious and vulgar brand of right populism" that is currently in the ascendent in the US. These people are not just vulgar; they are, essentially, the worst humans who have ever existed. They have fantasies of going to Mars or uploading their consciousness to the cloud once AI brings about the singularity. To achieve these secular heavens they will lay waste to the whole Earth. I have no interest in colonising Mars or any of the other sterile orbs in the solar system. Here we have a planet of such perfection, we literally cannot imagine a more beautiful planet than the one we have. What I dream of, when, just very occasionally, I allow myself to hope, is a world in which the psychopaths like Donald Trump no longer wield power, but are instead in institutions where they are receiving the expert psychiatric care that they so clearly need. A world in which we are not all encouraged to think that there is something normal or right about throwing elderly women out of their homes in order to increase profit margins, because the system that nurtured this world view, and gave economic power to the most ruthless, no longer exists. I was listening to someone the other day bemoan the fact that people play music even in the quiet carriage on the train, totally inconsiderate of the needs of others. But what do we expect when the whole of society has been telling us for half a century that we should each focus on what I can do for me, but not on what we can do for us, and has actually made this seem like some sort of normal and innate behaviour, when it is historically exceptional? In a world that had left behind the destructiveness and psychopathy of capitalism, the whole discourse would be different. It wouldn't be a discourse focused on the individual but on society and the wider global system of nature in which society itself is embedded. Instead of the nuclear family struggling to survive, the young would be raised by the whole community, fully integrated in society. Instead of humans serving technology, we might even dream of a world in which technology was under democratic control. What would be the relation between the sexes in such a world? What would be the attitude to juvenile sexuality? To adult-child relationships? The truth is that none of us can have any idea, but it is bound to be light-years from anything we envisage trapped as we are in this eternally depressing shopping mall, this capitalist version of the end of history. But is not the victory of capitalism, of the techno fascists, inevitable? Maybe so. Maybe I shouldn't care, but should just try to enjoy the remainder of my life, and not worry about humanity's inevitable fall to its own technology. Still, when I see, for example, what has just happened in Brazil I can't help but think that maybe there's a chance that we can win. Look how Trump's poodle lost, despite the best efforts of Mark Zuckerberg. Lula won, but also the Earth won, the biosphere won, indigenous people won, millions of the poorest won. The oligarchy was, at least this once, defeated. But what is the long term trend? Can we derive any comfort from history? That I do not know. And so we come to Laudate Agno. Trump and the oligarchs see the whole Earth as so much resource to exploit, not as something to be revered. And by siding with the Right, LA sides with them - and against those who oppose the oligarchs, which it pleases him to slander as fascist or antisemitic. The Green Party of England and Wales, of course, is the only major British party to be led by a Jew, who has the overwhelming support of the membership of the party. Is he seriously saying that my support for the Greens makes me a Jew-hater? Does he really believe such rubbish? Does he think that kit is a Jew-hater for being opposed to genocide? Come on, let's have the truth. 'Pro-life'? Don't make me laugh! First stop siding with those who are burning the planet to feed the monster of AI. Let him explain the contradictions.