@ Scott Miller:
That doesn't necessarily, or even unnecessarily, follow. There is no excuse for flubbing something as simple as "nuclear winter" when you're setting yourself up as judge and jury on all of civilization, and when you don't hesitate at other points to mock the "barbarians" for their stupidity. In addition, aside from what it does to White's overall credibility, in the immediate context it puts in stark relief how much he's pushing it with the 2nd Law stuff. Maybe we're as far from the real limits of sustainability and of the usefulness of technological fixes as nuclear fuel "into the wrong hands" is from nuclear winter.

And, very incidentally, "into the wrong hands" is a sloppy cliche. The whole point of his book, it seems to me, is that nuclear fuel is already in the wrong hands. Elsewhere he gives the impression that he doesn't really believe that it's ever in the right hands.

I think I get bob's point, but maybe I take from it something different from what Scott does. I take it to mean that White has problems at the collision points between feelings about everything and knowledge about things.

@ Scott Miller:
No way am I going to remain un-distracted.

My view is that, regardless of White's or my or your performances, there is some greater or lesser conformity between White's depiction of the universe and the real universe. If there is no real universe, then his book doesn't matter at all, nor our opinions of it. White very much assumes that these things matter - and then with only a few pages to go he starts advocating an attitude of willful irrationality: If reason tells us (him) that the world is going to Hell, well, then, fuck reason and believe in redemption! Yet that's what the barbarians believe, too, they just have different aesthetic and moral preferences, and different ingrained habits, than he does.

The contradictions, or the need to develop a strategy for dealing with a hopeless/terminal situation, are inescapable if you assume the extreme case, as White does, but, since he gives the critical reader a set of "outs," it's too easy to avoid White's self-entrapment. "The End Might Be Near" also means "The End Might Not Be Near." So maybe there's a role for reason and all that it implies after all. Maybe perfect and infinite sustainability is impossible, but maybe relative sustainability, what most people would just call sustainability, would be more than adequately terrific while we get about the long-term business of cultural and spiritual evolution, especially since reason and experience tell us that rushing that business often leads to conflict and contradictory real-world results.

@ fuster:
er... not sure I getcher point... maybe you can find the draft post under draft posts and maybe you can edit it to your satisfaction....

@ Scott Miller:
Don't worry about distracting me... I'm not heading off to a cabin in the deep dark woods for isolation... So what did you think of that twerpy rightwinger calling for Vick to be "executed." I know you probably don't want to be in the position of standing up for Vick... but... sheesh... Should I do a follow-up post on twerpy dude's explanation and non-retraction retraction?

@ Scott Miller:
In his fiction, White can be quite cuttingly funny, and, though I was being generous in the review when I mentioned his wit, it does peek through now and then. I think, however, since he's writing not just to persuade, but in a sense to alarm, outright humor would have been out of place.

As for taking another pass on the book, I just don't have the time, not if I'm ever going to cope with a backlog of pieces, dive all the way into my larger writing project, and advance a certain editing project you know something about... and also keep on blogging, and also keep on running my business... and catch a few bowl games... and mew-mew-mew, sorry for whining.

On the "religious" perspective, having just finished reading a philosophical biography of Freddie Nietzsche, I was very much primed to be underwhelmed by White's ending, which comes across as extremely derivative. For many people unfamiliar with Nietzsche, I think it would come across as kind of insane, and as far less than White seemed to be promising or at least calling for, which's what people reading hair-tearing-out manifestos like this one most want to know: OK, OK, OK - I hear them yelling - so what the heck are we supposed to do?

In my opinion he punts, then just decides that he's playing a different game entirely, and that punting is actually scoring - not to mention Beautiful. Like many who turn to anti-rationalism, White (like Nietzsche, too, for that matter) seems to propose the Peter Pan solution: If the audience just claps hard enough, Tinkerbell will come back to life, and if they believe hard enough, they can fly, too. Maybe it creates a Dionysian ecstatic spell for a little while, but I don't think those last, and White asserting that a whole replacement civilization can be built on it doesn't convince me at all all - and least of all because it dismisses and laughs at reason. Just because he says it's a plus, doesn't make it a plus.

In short - I really, really wanted to avoid voicing the name "Hegel" - White is nowhere near dialectical enough in his understanding or his process. At one point he asserts, in a footnote, that so-and-so helped him to understand Hegel, and I laughed out loud.

It looks to me like you could do your own pretty good counter-review of the book, however, and perhaps convey more of what it has to offer.

miguel cervantes wrote:

Obama from the Sundial piece, among others believed the nuclear freeze didn’t go far enough, in furthering his ‘peace and justice’ views,

So what? What does that have to do with anything?

Kerry, slandered a whole generation of his fellow servicemen, and used
that as his stepping stone to office,

What does that have to do with anything?

The 2007 NIE, was curiosly absent
of many contradictory notes, like the Mousavian communique to Khamenei. (Candor that rendered that fellow, a fate similar to that of Krasin). Van Diepen was promoted for that last view point, to higher
ranks in the bureaucracy.

What does that have to do with anything?

miguel cervantes wrote:

Isn’t it curious that this theory came about, when Reagan challenged
the premise of ‘the nuclear freeze, Jonathan Schell made his bones, on that topic.

It might be, if the theory hadn't preceded the nuclear freeze. The popularization of the theory was part of the counterattack against Reagan, but also against the resurgence of "limited nuclear war" and "nuclear warfighting" strategies. I don't think you want to compare SDI or for that matter CIA assessments of Soviet intentions and capabilities to The Fate of the Earth on the fallibility scale.

The Day After was not based on the premise you describe. It was based on heightened consciousness of the dangers of nuclear war. No one, it seems, had a higher consciousness of those dangers than Reagan himself, who relentlessly shocked and pissed off the far right with his determination to deal. Human Events and George Will were about ready to drum him permanently out of the conservative movement for his embrace of the "zero option" - now seen retrospectively as one of the great successes of his presidency.

And, yes, you are reading it wrong, probably because you spend so much time reading the wrong. If you got your head out of Pajamas Media and AmericanPower and the like, you wouldn't come up with such absurd characterizations of Obama-Biden-Kerry's supposed levels of concern. Even if they did believe that the Iranian nuclear threat was overblown, they're smart enough about their own interests to recognize a political threat.

@ miguel cervantes:
Actually, the basic idea is sound. It's just questionable whether we ever had enough nukes to bring a nuclear winter about. You should read the first comment under the post you link before you spin off into conspiratorial hyperspace beyond recall.