There are very few of us here now who were around before 2008 when this site was jumping, to remember the palpable Y2K-like state of fear that accompanied the runup of oil to $147/bbl. There were constant discussions of where to bugout, where to build your doomstead, how to garden, building off-grid systems, plus the usual doomer porn discussions of long-pork, brave militia fighting off jack-boot thugs, georgia-guidestones, olduvia gorge, Ishmael, the whole doomer circus. No matter what the flavor, all of this was fueled by a common sense that TS would HTF and TEOTWAWKI was nigh.
I remember projecting myself into the future and wondering how long this site would remain online and whether any of us would be able to keep comparing notes while the world crumbled beneath our feet. Never did I imagine that the center would hold this long and the main talking points would be that oil being cheap during a glut is the main problem rather than oil scarcity.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The reason there are so few posters here is that fast-crash peak-oil doomerism has been effectively discredited. This is why The Oil Drum is dead, Matt Savinar is an astrologer, Sharon Astyk is selling her farm, why Chris Martenson rebranded his stuff to Peak Prosperity, and why most of the remaining doom blogging has fallen back to cranky whine-fests about everyday geopolitics.
It's not like the discussions here cover oil that much anymore. When Monte poked in here almost a year ago he was mostly concerned with debt. And pound for pound there is more substantive AGW talk here than peak oil. The parrot-like restatements of ETP's faulty logic is really all that resembles a peak-oil discussion since oil remains cheap.
It's really down to a literal handful of posters who are in any way true believers. Any rational person faced with such dwindling peer support would probably have thrown in the towel. So by definition, those who remain, do so because there's something wrong with their thinking. StarvingLion is the poster-child for that. Others tend to harbor huge ideological axes to grind, and peak-oil provides a convenient vessel in which to wishcast the end of systems or ways of life they dislike. A need to construct eschatologies.
What I see the least of is any genuine desire to tease out the truth. Most people here are starting with a conclusion and trying to spin and cook the books however necessary to justify that conclusion. Unfortunately nobody here's willing to acknowledge they are doing it. And so we see this endless appeal to authority. Doomers keep linking almost exclusively to zerohedge and shadowstats and things like that. Moderates post to Newsweek, National Geographic, Washington Post, etc... And yet doomers think their authorities are more definitive. Oh, you can't trust the MSM, they say. And so they kind of wrap themselves around a cult-like reality-distortion-field of doom. Maybe they don't believe in FEMA coffins and reptilians, but by constructing an us vs. them mentality in which the only sources worth listening to are perma-doom bloggers, they really are not that far off from cultists.
DISCUSS
