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By Root 2453 0

this is not a general invitation to debate my life or work in private. I do enough of that in public and have no interest in doing it in private. And frankly, more or less all of the “attempts to disprove me” I’ve seen have been nothing more than these roadblocks I mentioned or, even more often than that, plain old bursts of anger (and especially passive aggressiveness) because people are afraid, and so they lash out (never once, of course, admitting they’re lashing out). This paragraph is instead a very specific invitation for servants of power not to fall back on force to defend that power, but to try real discourse. And for them to seriously examine the premises of this book. If they honestly find errors in my premises or thinking, I’d be willing to reexamine everything I’m saying, on the condition that if they cannot find errors, they not only seriously examine their own role in the ongoing apocalypse that is industrial civilization, but help stop the apocalypse—help bring down civilization.

Violence

386. Nopper.

387. I am indebted to Alex Guillotte for this definition.

388. My thanks to Redwood Leaverish for this definition.

389. Williams.

390. Conot, 384-85, citing Trial of the Major War Criminals, Volume 5, 118.

391. Cook.

392. Of course it’s not unusual for corporate/capitalist journalism, and that, I guess, is the point.

393. Douglas firs, by the way, do not viably reproduce until they are eighty years old. Soon there will be none or extremely few of reproductive age on the entire continent.

394. Jensen and Draffan, Strangely Like War, 49.

395. This might be a good place to mention Stossel’s self-proclaimed reasons for switching from consumer to corporate protection. “I just got sick of it. I also now make so much money I just lost interest in saving a buck on a can of peas.” When confronted with this statement, Stossel denied making it. But it’s caught on tape. Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, “Stossel Tries to Scam His Public,” Essential Information, http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2004/000177.html (accessed April 8, 2004).

396. Jensen, Language, 2. The version here is slightly different than in the book because I never liked the way that paragraph was edited. Also, just in case people are interested, until I was about three-quarters of the way through Language, that paragraph was actually the first one.

Spending Our Way to Sustainability

397. He forgot military.

398. Sale.

399. We can pretty much say the same thing about sex, eating, feeling, or many other things. Just plug the word in for violence and the paragraph works as well.

400. It depends on who “we” are. I don’t think members of the French resistance would have included the German occupiers or the French collaborators in a similar statement. Similarly, I’m not in this with Charles Hurwitz or John Stossel. Yes, they’re killing the planet they live on, too, but I’m trying to stop them. I’m not on their side.

401. Well, the real point is fear. It’s far less scary to not purchase an airline ticket than to blow up a dam. And we still get to say, “Ha! I delivered a blow against the machine!”

402. Just last month I bought a bunch of heirloom apple trees from a very small grower. The trees will eventually pay part of my rent to the bears and deer and birds and insects whose home this was long before I moved in.

403. And why?

404. If I may change this cliché so it finally makes sense.

405. Barsamian.

406. J. Bradford DeLong, “The Corporations as a Command Economy,” http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Command_Corporations.html (accessed March 17, 2004).

407. Don’t laugh. It’s been done.

408. Too bad, darn it.

409. I want them to not be created.

Empathy and Its Other

410. Silko, 94-95.

411. For a brilliant analysis of this, see Livingston’s Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation.

412. Can you imagine a vivisector or deforester with empathies intact?

413. Hell, Hitler was nice to his dog, although that may not mean as much as it could, since more than one of his girlfriends committed suicide, an overwhelming