The demise of an Australian Marxist blog site

jeffrichards.blogspot.com has disappeared! The home page now displays the message:

Blog has been removed
Sorry, the blog at jeffrichards.blogspot.com has been removed.
This address is not available for new blogs.

A google search returned a fragment of presumably the last entry on the now non-existent web site : jeffrichards.blogspot.com/2008/03/end-of-my-blogging.html:

This is the last entry in my political diary and blog. This activity has served its ...

I believe I recall elsewhere that the next word in the unfinished sentence was 'purpose'. There was also a link to the full archive of the blog as a pdf document, but the first time I looked the link was broken and the second time I looked I could not even find that record.

Why the author suddenly decided not only to discontinue his diary, but to completely remove it from the Internet, together with the archives, is a mystery. The cost of keeping the blog on the Internet as it was would either have been nothing or very little. Others, including myself, who had commented on the site and may have mislaid their local backups will find that their contributions have been lost forever, and any links back to his site will now be broken.

Dialogue in regard to the finiteness of our planet, population and immigration needed.

As referred to in OnlineWars, I had posted comments to his web site. A few of these sought to challenge the cornucopianism of Marxism which causes most Marxist adherents to either advocate open borders or, at best, to discourage discussion of the issue. None of my posts drew a response from the author personally. This has been surprisingly typical of Marxists, in spite of the claims of Marxism to be the most advanced of all political philosophies and most able to sustain critical scrutiny by other philosophical schools.

Another web-site of a person who sees value in Marxist thought, but who is, nevertheless critical of its unthinking cornucopianism of many of its adherents, www.sandyirvine.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk maintained by Sandy Irvine of the United Kingdom. It's home page states (emphases included are my own):

This website promotes the cause of ecological sustainability. By that, we mean that the conservation of environmental systems, biodiversity and bioregional human cultures must be society's overriding goal. We are committed to a politics for life on earth, all life not just its human form. This politics is founded on an ethos of 'enoughness', sharing the Earth's bounty, rather than the avaricious 'moreness' that dominates contemporary culture.

To put it another way, we oppose the suicidal politics of unlimited expectations and open-ended entitlements, be they under the guise of the so-called 'free' market', 'mixed' economies or centrally planned economic systems. We are therefore against unrestrained population growth and the pursuit of open-ended economic expansion. We similarly dissent from the modern cult of salvation through technological miracles. Equally, we seek to unmask fraudulent goals and policies such as so-called sustainable development.

Tragically, most organisations and indeed large sections of the general public are living in a fantasy world. They behave as if it were possible for society to continue on it present course without disaster. They are living as if there were no tomorrow, thus ensuring that the future will be bleak indeed. The overriding and all-embracing issue today is that the foundations of life on Earth are crumbling. The only truly realistic politics is one that address that reality.

The primary challenge of our times, then, is to cut down the scale of human activity and live within natural limits, to 'think shrink'. All else is a matter, as Fritz Schumacher once put it, of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Overall, our culture, our technologies, our political and economic systems, must be rooted in the checks and balances of life on Earth ... and the sooner we begin to make the transition, the easier and more satisfactory it is likely to be.

The ecological alternative -- a society sustainably in balance with the Earth's capacities, patterns and rhythms -- is also one which most likely a way of life more satisfying and, indeed, more convivial than the destructive rat race that is the hallmark of contemporary lifestyles. Ecocentrism -- Earth first -- not egocentrism must be the watchword.

So if one trail has gone cold, at least there is now another one which is very warm.