George Monbiot

There are two things that I consider important to keep in mind when discussing this kind of stuff: the issues with celebrity culture, probably best captured in "celebrity is not harmless fun – it’s the lieutenant of exploitation" by George Monbiot, and (criticisms of) Great Man theory and how that highlights the importance of distinguishing the individual from the structural[0][1].

From Monbiot's writing:

> Corporation means body; capital means head. But corporate capital has neither head nor body. It is hard for people to attach themselves to a homogenised franchise, owned by a hedge fund whose corporate identity consists of a filing cabinet in Panama City. So the machine needs a mask. It must wear the face of someone we see as often as we see our next-door neighbours. It is pointless to ask what Kim Kardashian does to earn her living; her role is to exist in our minds. By playing our virtual neighbour, she induces a click of recognition on behalf of whatever grey monolith sits behind her this week.

Of course, Bill Gates isn't just a nerd-celebrity, he was the actual boss of Microsoft, and as such has a big impact on its culture and vision and all of that. Nevertheless, equating Bill Gates with MS is akin to saying that I am my neocortex while ignoring every other part of my body. With giant companies like MS and Apple, neither Gates nor Jobs were the company. A lot of faceless people steer the whole thing.

Which brings us to Great Man theory:

> You must admit that the…

> The variation is too great to paint everyone with the same brush. It's like saying 'everyone makes mistakes'; yes, but some make far more than others;

I think you are referring to China making more mistakes then UK in the past. If anything, I think it's the opposite. For example, the whole world made a huge deal(rightfully so) about the tiananmen square protest in China. Have you heard of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre ? Hundreds of unarmed peaceful men, women and children were murdered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre

> Do you have any evidence? A history book? A study of history books?

"Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes"
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed-records-colonial-crimes?newsfeed=true

You can see the bullet marks preserved in Jallianwala Bagh. There is a well inside the premises where people jumped to hide from bullets. 120 bodies were recovered later from that well alone.
http://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/8-pictures-of-jallianwala-bagh-that-will-leave-you-teary-eyed-231833.html

EDIT: Here is one more, it isn't hard to find with few online searches

".. Mike Davis tells the story of the famines which killed between 12 and 29 million Indians(1). These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy.."

"..In the Express we can read the historian Andrew Roberts arguing that for “the vast majority of its half millennium-long history, the British Empire was an exemplary force for good.…

My blog and podcast feeds go around these few main interests of mine: software, art, design, music and Apple.

Podcasts:

Varieties, science, design.

* This American Life. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/

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* Planet Money. http://www.npr.org/planetmoney

* Stuff You Should Know. http://www.howstuffworks.com/

* The Infinite Monkey Cage. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00snr0w

* The Weekly Briefly (Shawn Blanc). http://feedpress.me/weeklybriefly

* Actuality (from Quartz). http://www.marketplace.org/topics/world/actuality-marketplace-and-quartz

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* 99% Invisible. http://99percentinvisible.prx.org/

Technology, programming, Apple, etc.

* Debug. http://www.imore.com/debug/

* Mac Power Users. http://www.relay.fm/mpu

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* The Vergecast. http://www.theverge.com/verge/verge_archives/show?mode=EntryGroup&slug=the-vergecast

* What's Tech (also from The Verge, fun show). http://www.theverge.com/whatstech

* Pragmatic. http://techdistortion.com/podcasts/pragmatic

* Iterate. http://www.imore.com/iterate

* The Changelog. http://5by5.tv/changelog

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* The Talk Show With John Gruber. http://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow

*…

>People love to complain about work, but in reality if they become unemployed, many people's lives are destroyed.

That's only when they have been raised in cultures that teach them that their work is their ultimate purpose, and have them structure every aspect of their lives around it.

Nobody dies from not having to work in Mediterranean culture's for example...

>A ton of people work to make everything I enjoy. The food, the buildings, the vehicles, roads, appliances, etc. Millions of people who get up in the morning and work through the day and come home exhausted make all of this possible.

Besides the food, the buildings, the vehicles, roads, appliances, etc, that people do want and depend on, billions of people are also forced to work to make all kinds of crap they don't care about, that makes no difference, is marked up 5 to 100 percent, for others to be unhappy consuming them, and to kill the environment with externalities in the process.

E.g.:

https://www.monbiot.com/2012/12/10/the-gift-of-death/

http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

In Ireland (and I'd guess in most of Europe) bogs are are artificial landscapes, the result of mass deforestation and overgrazing. I don't see them as warranting any particular preservation. At least in the case of Ireland peatland preservation is just trying to preserve a very particular artefact of the agricultural revolution. Maybe it's different elsewhere... . It's about as worthy a cause to me as a golf-course preservation movement would be (ignoring the carbon-sequesterisation aspect of the argument, which I don't feel like assessing right now).

In the UK there's an lot amount of wildlife 'preservation' effort + money spent on on 'preserving' the landscape as an 18th century agricultural-industry idyll (including making sure that the actually indigenous flora+fauna doesn't get out of hand) rather than actually returning it to a more sustainable wilderness. George Monbiot has a big bit on this with his re-wilding schtick - https://www.monbiot.com/2013/05/27/a-manifesto-for-rewilding-the-world/ .

Yes, this article gets to the heart of the problem, like a few others, eg https://www.monbiot.com/2019/04/30/the-problem-is-capitalism/

Electric cars and other techno-fixes at best reduce the damage caused by what we do, and at worst, hide the damage from us.

The actual problem is in what we do, how we live.

IMHO there are two sustainable paths.

We can live 'in nature', as the article suggests. This probably requires a much lower population, and probable accepting nature's solutions to problems. Famine for over-population, etc.

Or we can detach entirely from nature. Live in beautiful self-sustaining cities, our food produced by cell culture, fermentation, indoor farms, etc, energy from solar, deep geothermal, etc. The rest of the world is a nature reserve.