We're All Doomed

It's true what they say, that facing down your fears is an effective way to deal with them. Though most fears can't be confronted by simply watching television. I watched the programmed that gave me childhood nightmares, and felt the breaking of a small chain when it didn't terrify me.

One odd thing - the scene that caused me most of the fear wasn't as I remembered it.
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I spent the afternoon with Sion R and his wife Michelle, working on a compilation of acts from Friday's gig. 2 tracks each from the 9 bands should make a reasonable 60 or 70 minute CD, sold for UKP1 each as a small additional fundraiser.

Provisional title: Live Music, Hate Racism. My idea :-).

It turns out the gig did make a profit after all - about a hundred pounds, even though we forgot to ask the band members themselves to pay entrance.

So, there will probably be another one in a few weeks time. Sion wants to widen the range of genres, so is talking with a samba band and a blues-funk band he knows.

He wants me to help in the administrative details of room booking and band negotiations - it took a lot out of him to do it all himself this time. Oh, and he thinks Kapitano would be good as a "wind down", "chilled" act right at the end of the evening.

There was me thinking I was edgy uptempo synthpop. Turns out I'm seen as calm and relaxing.
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There was a forum in the evening, about climate change and nuclear power, on the back of the climate change conference the day before.

It's odd that a speaker can undramatically ennumerate the statistical details of the end of the world, to a roomful of people who dedicate their lives to the lost cause of saving humanity from it's own worst elements, and the general response amounts to "Yeah, we know. Kinda bad innit."

Pretty much everyone in the world is aware on some level that industrial capitalism is messing up the planet. Temperature rise, ozone depletion, violent weather, desertification and pollution are making the planet progressivly more hostile to life and civilisation.

Everyone knows this, even if they don't know any details, but no one can see a way to do anything about it, and the big environmentalist organisations seem to have disappeared up themselves.

The Conservation Foundation, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth etc have descened into bickering with each other about the aesthetics of wind turbines on hills. Recommending token lifestyle changes about half filling the kettle and installing cavity wall insulation. Joining the oil or nuclear lobbies depending on which multinational buys their loyalty with quiet funding.

If you talk to enough people, you'll eventually find someone who thinks Iraq is a great success and morally justified. There's one or two who think Tony Blair shines out of God's arse. Pro-war and pro-blair people exist - but have you ever met someone who's pro global warming?!

And yet the prevailing mood about the fate of the goddamn world is one of self-doubting apathy. We were a dozen socialists in a room above a pub wretchedly discussing the difficulties in building a worldwide movement from nothing, 50 years after we should have started.

Then some of these socialists went for a beer and a curry.