Progress Report

I have started to see many of the conclusions I drew earlier in the term as unfair to DGR authors.  For instance, it's true that Jensen's schema works when you ignore the margins, it's true that McBay understands the implications of anthro (Tainter specifically) for collapse activism, and it's true that the civilization anthro arguments are irrelevant to determining whether to do collapse activism.  On an intellectual level, they are still unpleasant, but they are not really mistakes so much as (potentially poor) choices.  To some extent, I acknowledge that they just aren't emphasizing the things I'd like to see emphasized - they are simply different people with different perspectives on what's important.  To some extent there's also some legit intellectual faux pas's going on.  So gotta parse those out.

However, I am, atm, convinced that the collapse analysis (conclusions I drew more recently) is not evidence-based and is deeply flawed by its reliance on unfalsifiable opinions of the DGR authors.  This is a flaw bought into by all the other Peak Oil authors too.  While I'd still tend to agree with DGR, that's not necessarily because they have any better reason to be right - just that their prejudices and dispositions align with mine.  So this makes me less comfortable doing what they so or even advocating it.

summary:

Jensen does a bad job using evidence about indigenous peoples in his arguments:
- land use claims not necessarily true, misleading, unnecessary
- warfare and child/spouse abuse claims overgeneralized, misleading, insufficiently specific and caveated
- because his sources are this eclectic bunch of old kooky iconoclasts, not mainstream anthropologists who are studying this shit
BUT that's not so much a problem for his argument, because his civ/indigenous division broadly matches the anthropological consensus between the 99.8% of human history family level society and the dominant social mode over the last ~6000 years, which is his point

Jensen's argument about collapse is uncomfortably Apocalyptic
- the specifics of the 'collapse' narratives in DGR are still too vague - they don't lay out what collapse actually is in sufficient detail to overcome the legacy of 'the world is ending' bullshit
- Jensen/McBay/Keith don't sufficiently investigate how civilization emerged, which is supposed to hamper their understanding of how it could collapse
BUT McBay does take into account Tainter's understanding of collapse and apply it to activism (increase costs of civilization and create an attractive alternative)
 - though Tainter is not necessarily the modern anthropological point of view, and a single-minded acceptance of his view of history may be overconfident and/or cherry-picking on the part of DGR

- while I buy a lot of the claims DGR makes about what is and is not plausible for the future (as opposed to claims made by other peak oil authors like Lester Brown, Trainer, etc), I see that this is based more on ideology and personality than on evidence and reality
- failing to include evidence for their claims makes DGR no different from the rest of the peak oil books - they're just selling the same idea in a different style to a more radically minded audience; as long as their argument hinges on things like an acceptance of anti-capitalism, rather than a realistic constrainment of the possible/plausible future paths of capitalism, they will never convince anyone outside their ideological bubble and it will remain an ideological claim, not a serious social wake-up call

All that said, DGR still poses some major questions to the activist community overall that have not been addressed and responded to sufficiently, regardless of how "right" they are.