Why is democracy messy? Why does it take such a large amount of insult and injury to arouse the populace? Just look at what this woman will soon discover as she attempts to voice her viewpoint.
The state loves to tell you about your "rights" but don't you dare try to exercise them. People are smart enough to know that, so it takes a hell of a lot to arouse the populace. But when it gets outraged, it tends to take down not just the worst of the worst, but most of the worst and even a fair amount of the innocent. A social change is a messy affair. It is so much nicer to use the instruments of democracy to effect change, but when the elites refuse to listen, then you get blood in the streets.
Problems go begging for solutions because those with power in a society are very comfy with the established socio-economic structure. They mouth words about charity and concern, but the reality is they aren't looking for real, effective solutions. From a post by economist Tim Harford:
A recent survey by the economist Michael Clemens, of the Center for Global Development, points out that although the question is largely ignored, any reasonable estimate of the economic gains from freer migration would dwarf that of the gains from, say, freer trade – if we include the welfare of the migrants themselves. Clemens points out that allowing some migration from disaster-hit countries such as Haiti or Somalia would be a far more effective way to alleviate poverty than many conventional aid programs.
I advocate free migration between countries for a different reason: it is the most effective way to undercut dictators and bad government. It is nice to have a ballot to vote, but sometimes you need something more effective, the ability to leave a bad country and go to a better country. But those with power don't like "losing control" so this option will never be. But it would be the most direct path to a better world.
Here is a bit more from Harford's post:
Clemens has, alas, attracted the attention of white supremacists, but even people with impeccable bleeding-heart-liberal credentials worry about emigration because of the “brain drain” – the harm assumed to be done to poor countries as their doctors, engineers and entrepreneurs abandon them for cushy careers in the west. It is for this reason that the NHS has its recruitment ban.
I am not convinced. Should we seek to keep the citizens of poor nations trapped in their countries of birth for the good of their fellow citizens? Nobody would, for a moment, consider banning ambitious Mancunians or Glaswegians from working in London, purely on the principle that they might do more good in their back home. Outrageous infringements of liberty seem to be acceptable only when applied to foreigners. (Another analogy, inspired by Clemens: would we happily discuss working mothers under the heading of “the love drain”? I hope not.)
The real effects of the brain drain have also been poorly thought through by most of us. The economist Oded Stark points out that if western countries assiduously recruit doctors and engineers from poor countries on comparatively vast salaries, that is a strong incentive to train as a doctor or engineer. The result may be more doctors and engineers in poor countries, even after the migrants have left. And there is some evidence that this is indeed the case.
Funny how people can think it is a "right" to move from neightborhood to neighborhood in a city, or within a state/province, or between states/provinces. But to cross a national border suddenly is considered a "whole other thing" where rights and liberties are suddenly not the issue but "sovereignty", "race purity", "brain drain" and other mystical ideas.
I listened to a bit of the Republican presidential candidate debate. It was a fancy event held in the huge "Reagan Presidential Library". Since when does the US build pyramids for their pharaohs? this wasn't true up through the 1960s but something has change, presidents are kings and their deaths require hecatombs to be sacrificed to properly send them off.
These "debates" superficially they sound wonderful. The moderators are polite. Everybody is preened and confident. They have rehearsed their lines so each candidate sound as if he has a plan. They all agree that Obama failed. They all claim that they could just snap their fingers and in two weeks recreate a better America while Obama has struggled mightily and given birth to a mouse.
But when you step back and use knowledge about the real political situation, these people are idiots. Their “solutions” are more of the old voodoo economics that has failed so badly. They ignore the obstructionist Republican Congress. These candidates are still selling deregulation.
Ron Paul wants no regulations on business because he knows that “the market will regulate the businesses”. This despite the $10 trillion evidence that when you let Wall Street set up securitized mortgages based on “liar’s loans” you can destroy the economy. Ron Paul doesn’t believe there is such a thing as a Bernard Madoff. He knows that the market would self-regulate and all those investors would be wise and avoid Madoff’s ponzi scheme. But in the real world they didn’t.
I can see how ordinary folk fall for these lies. It takes some broad knowledge, a daily study of the political players and their acts and words, and a critical mind that isn't easily bamboozled by lies.
I'm truly frightened that one of these fanatics will be elected president of the US.
Meanwhile, in Carson City, Nevada we have yet again “proof” of the NRA slogan that “guns don’t kill, people do”. Yep... if Eduardo Sencion had a water pistol, he would have killed 5. The fact that he had an assault rifle with a magazine of 30 or so bullets that let him unleash a “pop pop pop pop...” string of bullets didn’t kill anybody. Guns just don’t kill. Obviously Sencion would have done the same damage roaming the IHOP and environs with a water pistol. The NRA has demonstrated this fundamental truth. There is nothing here but a sad fact that people kill and there is nothing to be done about this tragedy of "people killing people" except arm everybody to the teeth so that the next fight will be more like “the last of the Alamo” and less of a slaughter of the innocents.
Nutty... the US is insane and the American people don’t even realize it.
I'm a naive person who believes that the wonder of humans is that they are social, cooperative, share, and build.
Most animals will take advantage of each other. They must be on guard all the time. They get worn down by constant vigilance where any advantage is quickly torn down by competitors. It is only social species that can build.
But I learned, yet again, with my post on a supposed encounter with primitives that the Internet is shark-filled waters with those out there who are quick to take advantage of any gullibility or trust. They enjoy fooling others.
In my silly world we are social, we share, we learn, we build. This requires trust and cooperation. But the sharks out there loves to "play games" destroying the little castles in the air that those of us who view the Internet as a collaborative media would like to build. Instead of using this tool to build and learn, they use it to trick and deceive, to undermine trust and cooperation, to destroy any hope of collaboration. They want us to go back to the bestial state where you can never trust any gesture or any attempt to share.
I get depressed when I realize that the forces of darkness are always out there eager to undermine what the foolish and trusting and hopeful would ever try to build. These monsters get their jollies by chopping everybody down to this solipsistic, atomistic, distrustful level.
What a shame.
So I've learned my lesson. Don't be so eager to share. Spend a lot more wasted time verifying fact before posting. Always suspect the worst. Be cautious in posting. Rein in the initial desire to share by asking: is it going to be worth all the effort to do the necessary validation before I add this to the pool of collaboration?
These tricksters who enjoy lying and confusing must be happy at the thought that when parents trundle their children off to school they must first tell them: "Now be careful. When you teacher tells you something, stop and ask yourself, 'Is this something I can trust, is this something I can believe?' You have to know that some teachers don't think that the point of education is to share knowledge, they think it is a game and they want to see how much they can mess with your mind. They enjoy lying to see if you are credulous enough to believe everything they say."
This isn't the world I want to live in. But with this post on primitives, I got reminded, that this is the real, ugly, and cruel world that I live in. One where for each person trying to share and build, there is somebody busy pranking and destroying.
Today my world became a bit grayer, darker, and sadder. I was rudely forced to be aware that the Internet is not a wonderland of shared thoughts and discoveries. It is full of dark souls who lie and fake, who want to undermine knowledge and sociability.
I just suffered three days of being unable to log in to my blogger account. There is nothing at the Blogger status page about this problem, but if you do look under "known issues" they have this very short, very unhelpful bit:
We're investigating an issue which is preventing login and comment posting for some users, and hope to have a fix released shortly.
Thanks for your patience in the meantime. — LATEST UPDATE ON TUESDAY, MAY 24, 2011
Given the service outage two weeks ago that kept blogging down for a day and meant that items posted on May 12 only showed up slowly over the next week with no explanation, this indicates to me that Google has "lost interest" in Blogger. I guess it isn't making the big bucks that the overpaid employees and over-compensated stock holders of Google need to keep the lifestyles to which they have become "accustomed".
I find the number of bugs and failings of Google's Blogger to be outrageous. I worked in the industry building systems where 10 to maybe 100 people would use the systems we built. We built sound software and when something did go wrong (and our sites were around the world so service was sometimes very hard) we got things back up in hours and at most a day or two. Blogger has tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of users, and the quality of the software is truly crappy compared to what I'm used to producing. And to cap this off, Google, Apple, and Microsoft -- all the big boys -- love to pound themselves on the back about hiring "the best" and being "the brightest". I don't think so. They seem slightly better than mediocre but they certainly strike me as overpaid and far too cosseted with management treating them like little princes and princesses.
I simply can't trust that Blogger will be available or reliable. Don't be surprised if this blog simply comes to an end one day either because Goggle can't be bothered to fix its own bugs or because I've simply grown too frustrated with "service" to continue posting thoughts on this increasingly unreliable tool.
It is a bit too late to share this tune with my mother. Instead, I've learned another literal truth in the last two years: dust to dust.
But still I'm appreciative of the journey my mother launched me upon and I still hope to fulfill her expectations. I remain optimistic. Life is eternal, it just isn't in the shape of this body or a resurrection of this fast degenerating shell. It is in terms of DNA I share with her finding a way to procreate and live on in the future.
... the most dangerous thing in the world is someone who has only read one book. The great thing about reading is that you can triangulate your ideas among lots of different authors, different times, or different place. When you read widely and broadly it shows you that everything is relative. It shows that there is a lot of ways of looking at things, and often times, problems can become solutions if looked at creatively.
Having a viewpoint and exposing it to other viewpoints is like getting an innoculation. It will protect you from falling into the hands of an ideologue who will tell you what to think, when to think, where to think, and for how long to think. Ideologues are terrible, dangerous people. Having your own personal viewpoint developed and tested against many other viewpoints gives you immunization from falling under their spell.
There isn't any real discussion of what this picture is telling us. I'll treat it like a Rorschach test:
I immediately see a "blue state/red state" divide. Those liberal bastions on each coast hold the passports while the conservatives hunker down and refuse to admit that this is a world out there beyond America's borders. The passport is a symbol of your "cosmopolitanism".
I see a rich/poor divide. Those states with high median incomes have higher proportions of passports than those will low incomes. The passport is a litmus test of wealth vs. poverty.
I see a rural/urban divide. Those states of the Deep South and the Appalachian backwoords have significantly less passports. These are the areas of poor schools and rednecks versus the coasts which provide more urbane education with an outward looking perspective that makes people more eager to travel and enjoy world culture.
I see a high tech/low tech divide. Those states with high tech industries and sophisticated manufacturing have better educated, more prosperous workers more willing to travel the world and explore possibilities.
I see a historical North/South divide. Those states of the Old Confederacy are more inward looking, one happier with their "peculiar institutions" and their distinctive "culture". Those of the old North and the the modern expression of that culture on the West coast have passports because they are more of a mercantile, worldly-engaged people looking to trade around the world and learn from many cultures.
Of course all those "interpretations" are not truly independent of each other. There is a thread that weaves through them all.
And I can come up with some wilder interpretations: Arizona (and the broader Southwest) has a high passport rate because its latino population has more links to relatives across the border in Mexico so they have a greater need for passports to travel the border. Similarly the states bordering Canada have a slightly higher passport rate because these people more frequently cross in to Canada than the rest of the American population.
I watched a couple of hours of the PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize today. It brought back memories of my youth. And it hammered home the point that social change only comes through a long and painful struggle. Those in charge, those who benefit from a system don't just pack their bags, hand you the keys, and then disappear.
I've seen this video series before, but with each viewing you gain a bit of new perspective. Now 50 years is the chasm through which I view the video. But what I see is the same story as today. Sure the words differ and the cast of characters has changed, but it is still those in power telling you that you have no rights, that you have to wait, that you are asking for too much, that you have to "respect your betters", that those in power know what is best for you, that to press for basic rights is an act of treachery and tantamount to rioting in the streets. All the same old lies. All the same old techniques to keep the bottom 90% of society down so it won't upset the very cushy applecart of those who have power.
I think of the protests in the Middle East. It is the same story. And when I think of the "quick victory" of Egypt and Tunisia, I can see how their "revolution" is already being subverted by those with power. The struggle for rights is eternal. As soon as you get some "rights" those on top set up new rules and add a layer that effectively puts you back "in your place". The Egyptians were promised that once they left Tahrir Square they would lift the Emergency Law. They haven't and it isn't. Their revolution is incomplete.
Eyes on the Prize, the landmark documentary on the civil rights movement, is no longer broadcast or sold new in the United States. It's illegal.
The 14-part series highlights key events in black Americans' struggle for equality and is considered an essential resource by educators and historians, but the filmmakers no longer have clearance rights to much of the archival footage used in the documentary. It cannot be rebroadcast on PBS (where it originally aired) or any other channels, and cannot be released on DVD until the rights are cleared again and paid for.
"It's a scenario from hell," said Jon Else, series producer and cinematographer for Eyes on the Prize, and now director of the documentary program at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. "(Licensing agreements) are short because it's all we can afford. The funding for documentaries in this country (is) abysmal."
Securing clearance rights to archival footage is a growing problem for independent filmmakers -- and documentary filmmakers in particular. Filmmakers must pay for the rights to use every song, photograph or video clip included in the film. Since many documentary films are made with small budgets, filmmakers often can only afford to buy rights for a limited amount of time. That leaves many filmmakers essentially renting footage, and rendering their work unusable after a certain number of years unless they can find more funding to clear the rights again.
Some people fought back through an Eyes on the Screen project. The "property rights" issues must have been cleared up because I saw the series broadcast today. But it is scary that history can be "owned" and an important documentary can be buried because somebody wants to make a "profit" off of a social struggle!
This from the ugly corporate world that wants to force you to wear a logo on all parts of your body, to live and breathe brand names, to have your education reduced to watching commercials 24 hours a day, has struck again. They "own" the social history of the US and won't let this story be shown. Wow! If only the Klu Klux Klan had realized they could have used copyright laws to stop desegregation! They could have bought up rights to "we Shall Overcome" and sued every protester who tried to sing this protest song. They could have seized any video of Klansmen beating protesters claiming that the "images" were the sole property of KKK, Inc. and that news organizations could not broadcast scenes of mayhem and violence without first negotiating a license from the KKK and simply make that license prohibitively expensive. If only!
That made me think... yes there was some progress on race relations in the US but in some sense things are worse now. Back then it was a fight to be part of the community. But these days the corporations own everything and the fight is to get free of corporate control.
One thing I hated when I worked was the fact that I was forced to sign a contract, as a condition of work, that any idea I had whether at work or at home would be the "property" of the company I was working for. It was a slimy lawyer trick to own my soul. I couldn't have any thoughts which the company, if it so chose, could take me to court and enforce their "rights" on me. Nutty! I had no rights because my own thoughts didn't belong to me. That is the extent of the "corporate state" today. Hitler and his Nazis didn't even begin to scratch the surface to the evil to be mined by "property rights" through the legal system.
At 5:00 PM Eastern Standard Time US Secretary of State finally issued a statement about the humanitarian disaster in Libya brought on by a mad leader willing to use his military to bomb, machine gun, and sniper shot them to death. It is one of those memorable "we regret to hear" bland political statements (see here). In short, the elephant has given birth to a mouse.
If you go to the Obama white house site, you find that he has made no statement about Libya since Feb 18. I guess he is "too busy" to worry about carnage and blood running in the streets. It reminds me of Bush's inability to take time out from his political backslapping in San Diego to notice that Katrina has caused a major disaster in New Orleans killing several thousand.
This is exactly the same kind of "lead from behind" strategy of Obama in Egypt. Rather than "lead" he lets facts meander and turn out however they will. After things "clarify" Obama then steps forward to put himself "on the side of history". That is the sleaziest kind of "leadership".
10:25pm: More on the resignation of the two diplomats from the embassy in Washington DC. Counsels Saleh Ali Al Majbari and Jumaa Faris denounced Gaddafi, saying he "bears responsibility for genocide against the Libyan people in which he has used mercenaries".
They said they had nothing to do with the events and they no longer represent Gaddafi’s regime - but that they represent the Libyan people. The pair also called on Barack Obama to "work urgently with the international community to press for an immediate cessation of the massacres of the Libyan people", and they are asking the United Nations to impose a no-fly zone imposed on Libya to prevent the arrival of mercenaries to Libya.
Tragic. The video above shows a representative of the Libyan people who is so disgusted he has called for Gaddafi to step down. When asked what is being organized at the US, this representative essentially says "nothing is being organized". You can thank the "leader" Obama for that. Yes, Obama at the forefront of democracy, once again stepping out to help lead people from out under the boot of an oppressive tyrant! Oh yeah. Obama... the guy who "leads" by waiting for the smoke to clear, for the chips to fall as they may, so that he can step on the world stage and use his golden voice to assure everybody that the US is "in charge" and "looking after" them. Sure. Just like Gaddafi, the "father" of his people, is looking after all those Libyans through the love he is showing with bullets and bombs.
“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” -Friedrich Hegel (German Philosopher (1770-1831)
Hmm... now I know why Karl Marx was so bad at predicting history. He was a student of a teacher who didn't know or understand history!
For a guy who claimed that you can learn nothing from history, Hegel was awfully pedantic and pushy about his vision of history:
"World history... represents the development of the spirit's consciousness of its own freedom and of the consequent realization of that freedom."
Yep... that sure nails it. When I read history I see a "spirit of consciousness" behind the scenes everywhere poking and prodding us forward. Sure enough!
Now you can understand why Karl Marx was such a nut over the "stages" of history. Marx was peering into the Hegelian mish-mash and seeing "spirit" unfolding in stages. Nutty.
I'm going to peer into history and discover:
Empires rise and fall. There is no "unfolding" of history. It is a typical evolutionary process responding to exogenous forces. When the barbarians come, you collapse. When the plague hits, you tear down the walls and let the Spartans in. When you hit upon the world's biggest store of gold you become the Spanish superpower of early modern times and then fritter it all away in incessant continental wars. Yep... there's a lot of rhyming and rhythm to history, just not much sense.
This is an interesting video of stars from the past plucked out by a Norwegian TV show, Gylne Tider, to get together on a beach and sing the Beatles' song "Let it Be"...
... and here's an older video:
It is poignant to see a lot of these stars of yesteryear ill-treated by the passage of time. I must say, time has taken its toll on me as well, so I empathize. We will all end up with the Grim Reaper sooner or later. That's why it is so bizarre to see all the fighting and graspy, demanding, petty behaviour amongst people. We are on earth but a short time. Just look at this video. Why cause your fellow humans so much suffering to "get ahead" in this race to nowhere, this rat race called "life"?
This post by Ursula Goodenough on NPR's 13.7 blog caputres my feelings:
A lot of the times, store shelves are filled with things I can't imagine anyone wanting.
Sheryl Crow gets to the crux of the matter in her song Soak Up The Sun: “It’s not getting what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got.”
Relatedly, the video The Story of Stuff Project notes that the point of an advertisement is to make you feel bad about what you have.
The notion that material goods don’t bring lasting contentment is hardly some left-wing anti-capitalist rant. The first to leave us with a writings on this perspective were a group of philosophers known as the Stoics, starting with Zeno in the early third century BC and continuing through to the marvelous Marcus Aurelius several centuries later.
In modern usage, to be stoic connotes being repressed and long-suffering, but that was not what the Stoics were after. Rather, the goal is to embrace life’s pleasures, as captured in the title of William Irvine’s recent book A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. Stoic practice has much in common with the tenets of Buddhism in insisting that one learn to control one’s own negative emotions and appreciate that much of what happens is beyond one’s control and hence calls for acceptance. And they join the Buddha in counseling that happiness entails an avoidance of craving or clinging to… stuff.
Much has been written about our addiction to consumerism and its role as a key driver of our capitalistic system. Headlines of late read “Consumer Spending Falters; Consumer Spending Stagnates,” and the pundits wring their hands. I fully recognize that as long as our economy is based on consumption, including, of course, energy consumption, then to curtail consumption is to inflict hardship on all those servicing the economy by providing “goods.”
While regretting these hardships, I have to confess that I read the headlines with something akin to joy. Perhaps, I think, people will pick up on the ethos of the 1930s, embodied in my grandmother who, although she wound up being quite well-off, only turned on her water heater once a week to take her weekly shower, and in my mother who confessed that she took pleasure in not spending money.
Frugality, which in the case of my mother and grandmother often bled over into flat-out stinginess, isn’t the message of the Stoics, nor of Sheryl Crow’s lyrics. The real challenge is to take joy in what you have and eschew the craving for what you don’t have and probably don’t need given what you already have.
As it happens, and likely because I was raised by said mother and grandmother, a desire for more stuff is not one of my personal vices. But when I have no choice but to go to the mall to replace something that’s worn out, I brace myself for the inevitable heartache –- maybe a more honest word is disgust — as I see all those shelves groaning with stuff that I can’t imagine anyone would want to have, and the lines of folks at the checkout line who’ve filled up their carts with it.
Here's my really, really big bugaboo...
The person in that video The Story of Stuff Project makes me want to puke. She sashays onto the screen with her iPod (I've never had one) and starts complaining about it as "stuff" then she says that she was so "fed up" that she decided to spend 10 years "traveling the world (I travel only to visit friends and family, I don't travel to burn up fossil fuel so I can gripe about other people's "expensive habits"). In short, I find the idiot who is trying to tell me I have too much stuff to be really, really annoying because she has too much and uses too much and then has the audacity to lecture me about having "too much".
I put this in the same category as the video clips I see on the news where the reporter goes into an "impoverished family's home" and talks about their tragic destitution while the camera pans around and shows a place stuffed with "stuff": TVs, VCRs, computer, kitchen appliances, etc. This drives me over the edge. These are "poor folk" for crying out loud! They are complaining about "deprivation" but they are living with so much stuff it pains me to watch them.
I've never had a fetish to "own" stuff. My only real weakness is books. I confess to owning far too many books. But for 30 years my living room table was a cardboard box. I had one old sofa and a rocking chair as my only "furniture" in my living room. I don't have a lot of "stuff". But I really, really hate being lectured at by people who obviously have too much telling me that "people have too much stuff". Nutty!
I believe in keeping a low profile. If you don't think people should have so much stuff... first live strictly to your own ideals. Don't splurge on 10 years of of "world touring" so that you can claim to have "studied" excess. (I remember reading a global warming critic talking about his "realization" that people's excessive use of fossil fuels came to him as he was flying over India seeing all those dots of open fires in villages as he was jetting from one conference on "conservation" to another. My jaw dropped. This guy was burning up more fossil fuel on this one trip than a family in India would in a year feeding and heating its family. And he has the audacity to lecture others on wasting fossil fuels and "global warming"!!!
I have another quibble with the woman in the video. It isn't the "job of government to look out for us". No... government is not parents writ large. The government's job is to facilitate a civil society, i.e. laws, mechanisms for self-government, education, security, infrastructure, a redistributive function to handle excess. But it isn't to be a "nanny state".
I especially object to her curious technique of trying to sneak around government and get her views imposed without a democratic process. She's for "fixing" a problem she sees as purely one of persuasion. Funny, that's just how the "big corporations" that she hates do this job. But I don't see social change as "persuasion". It is a problem of governance where people come together, share views, respect others, and come up with mechanisms to accomodate everybody while moving an agenda forward. That's quite different from imposing my personal agenda on everybody else by doing a "sales job" like this woman is doing in this video.
When I keep hearing her saying "we are running out of resources" I choke. That's been a slogan to box in and control the poor for hundreds of years. I don't see her cutting back on her "stuff". Instead, she jets around the world for 10 years taking in the sights so she can come back and tell everybody "you can't go anywhere because we are 'up against limits'!" Nuts to that.
You can tell that this woman is a nut when she claims "in the past 3 decades alone one-third of the planet's natural resource base has been consumed... gone". That is just plain flat wrong. That is the kind of doomsday rhetoric that the nutcases use to try to stampede people to whatever bandwagon they are selling. This from a person who has just admitted that she spent 10 years traveling around the world. This from a person who claims that others are using "more than their share". Well, what share does everybody have in "traveling the world"? Ten years of traveling the world? What if China's 1.3 billion and India's 1 billion spent 10 years "traveling the world". Why is this woman on a soapbox preaching at me? She is an utter hypocrite. She wants to stop others from getting "stuff" but she hasn't stopped her own extravagance.
More idiocy: she says "toxics in toxics out". This from somebody trying to sell "recycling". Guess what. In the real world one organisms toxin is another's food. Plants excrete oxygen, a deadly toxin. Animals take it in and turn it into carbon dioxide, a deadly taxin. Guess what... plants take that toxin in and turn it into oxygen. Where does this idiot woman get off talking about some "iron clad rule" of toxins in toxins out. That's the very opposite of what real recycling is about. Real recycling converts one organisms toxin into another's food by recycling!
She's the worst kind of scare mongerer. She is half-informed. She runs off her mouth with only half an understanding. Her crazed complaint that flame retardants are "neurotoxins" so we should stop using them. Nuts to that. There is a trade-off. No flame retardent, more deaths from fire. Some flame retardant, less deaths from fire and... drum roll... no deaths from neurotoxin! Sure, if you swill a whole bottle of the flame retardent you would kill you brain, but at the levels used it is safe. That's exactly why we have government, to check products and decide on safe levels. Here's a woman who claims she wants government to "act as our parent" but doesn't recognize that product safety is a function of government!
She is a propagandist because she has no respect for truth. She puts rural-to-urban migration into a segment on toxins and pretends that people move from rural areas because "big corporations" have poisoned the environment and they have no other choice but to go live in a dismal urban slum. No! People move to better their lives. Rural lives are not idyllic. It is hard work trying to scatch a living in a poor rural environment. The fact that she is willing to do a Madison Avenue sales pitch, a bait-and-switch classic in this case, shows me that I can't trust a word she says. She is a ruthless, unprincipled person out to sell a message. A message about you cutting back your enjoyment of life so that she can continue to enjoy her jetting lifestyle where she spends 10 years flying around the world to "check" on you and me to make sure we are "wasting" resources.
Argh! This woman is terrible. It is a person using "leftist" jargon to sell an elitist agenda, an agenda of "trust me" I know what's best for you, forget your political rights and economic rights, I'm going to centrally plan your life and tell you what you can consume, where, and when because "I know best". Nuts to that!
Bottom line: I enjoyed Ursula Goodenough's personal statement, but I hate -- really hate -- this propaganda of The Story of Stuff Project that she points to in her post. That video is the worst of the slick propaganda from the "trust me I know what's best for you" crowd and the "do what I say, not what I do" crowd.
Update 2010aug16: Here is a BBC report on the "cult of less". My only comment: This reminds me of the "back to the land" movement of the late 1960s/early 1970s. It was a pipe dream of dyspeptic upper class youth who could afford to live off money from the parents while they pretended to be "rebels". Sadly, a number of middle and working class youth got seduced by this "fad" and paid a big price. They didn't have rich parents to rescue them from their mistake.
A word to the wise: avoid fanatics no matter how persuasive they may seem. The Greeks had it right, sophrosyne.
As everybody knows, we could rid the world of arguments if we could get the interlocutors to simply clarify their terms. Almost all arguments are caused by careless use of terms. A little effort at naming our terms can help us avoid all confusion which lead to arguments:
Only a fool would claim that ideologies and prejudice lead to arguments. As Abbott and Costello clearly demonstrate, argument has nothing to do with preconceived opinions or a misguided framework for our thinking. Nope. Arguments come down to a confusion about our terms. The above video demonstrates how an argument is initiated by two protagonists who simply refuse to clarify their use of terms. Abbott works hard to define terms but Costello refuses to listen. Instead Costello takes his half understood concepts and runs with them creating needless confusion.
OK... I'm joking. That comedy routine has nothing to do with real debate and argument. A confusion of terms is almost never the root cause of heated debate. Instead, it is a clash of ideologies, a clash over frameworks that define our stance toward the world.
If I'm a pessimist, I see evidence of decay and ruin everywhere. If you are an optimist you see promising starts and great beginnings everywhere. We will battle because my evidence only confirms your beliefs and show you how confused I am. Similiarly my evidence will be welcomed by you as confirmatory to your viewpoint and reinforce your viewpoint that I'm a fool who has no clear idea of how the world really works. We argue because we are talking past one another.
Most people stumble about arguing a while then realize that they can't come to a resolution because their ideologies differ, their assumptions and theories are simply too different to find a common ground. Only a fanatic will fail to see this problem and disengage. A fanatic refuses to accept the possibility of a differing viewpoint. A fanatic will insist that you must accept his argument. Normal people can disengage and respect their opponent's differing ideology. A fanatic simply can't.
The world is a richer place when there are differing viewpoints. Diverging viewpoints is like artists with different styles or different palettes. Our world would be a dull place indeed if we all saw everything from the same perpective and with the same spectacles.
This, at least, I have observed in forty-five years: that there are men who search for it [truth], whatever it is, wherever it may lie, patiently, honestly, with due humility, and that there are other men who battle endlessly to put it down, even though they don't know what it is. To the first class belong the scientists, the experimenters, the men of curiosity. To the second belong politicians, bishops, professors, mullahs, tin pot messiahs, frauds and exploiters of all sorts - in brief, the men of authority. . .All I find there is a vast enmity to the free functioning of the spirit of man. There may be, for all I know, some truth there, but it is truth made into whips, rolled into bitter pills. . .
I find myself out of sympathy with such men. I shall keep on challenging them until the last galoot's ashore.
This is a wonderful cry for the freedom of thought and the great quest for science in the modern spirit which has burned for nearly 400 years. This is merely a blip in human history. Much like the Song Dynasty was a brief flicker of progress and hope that died out. As I watch the political battle in the US between progressives and antediluvians, I'm reminded that 400 years is not a fast foothold on the human mind. What has been gained can be lost in a new Dark Age.
All we can do is hold a candle up to the darkness. Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World is one of the better candles to hold high. It is his effort to keep the brief light of science alive and extend it beyond its current, all-too-short 400 year run.
The NY Times Opinionator blog carries thoughts by philosophers. Here's a snippet from a posting in honour of July 4th and directed to the issue of America's Independence Day:
When Janis Joplin achingly sang that “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” she (or the song’s composer, Kris Kristofferson) was critiquing a widely held ideal of independence: namely, the aspiration toward maximum liberty from all binding attachments and obligations. Isn’t it obvious, the argument goes, that each promise, and each unbreakable emotional bond, entails a loss of true freedom, an abrogation of true independence? Joplin’s refutation is simple and elegant: in actuality, absolute freedom is a picture of perfect emptiness, since if you have nothing left to lose, you have nothing.
However much the ideal of unencumbered freedom has become associated with the Declaration of Independence, freedom from binding attachments is no part of its philosophical underpinnings. In protesting against British tyranny, the American colonists were not proclaiming an ideal of individual freedom from government. On the contrary, they were pleading the cause for a vital conception of political community.
The above is more charitable to the ideals of American society than I would be. I find that the emphasis on "freedom" is overdone in the US. It is a pursuit of "freedom from" at the expense of self fulfillment within the context of social obligations.
I also believe, as Mark K. Smith points out in an article on Erich Fromm, the emphasis on "freedom from" can lead to a craving for authoritarianism. I find this to be especially true of the right wing politics in the US:
In 1941, the first of Erich Fromm’s deeply influential books appeared: Escape From Freedom. It argued that ‘freedom from the traditional bonds of medieval society, though giving the individual a new feeling of independence, at the same time made him feel alone and isolated, filled him with doubt and anxiety, and drove him into new submission and into a compulsive and irrational activity’. This alienation from place and community, and the insecurities and fears entailed, helps to explain how people seek the security and rewards of authoritarian social orders such as fascism.
We learn from our mistakes and Fromm was writing in the context of the mid-20th century disaster of fascism and war. The rise of authoritarianism was a dire problem. Fromm was pointing that the ideal of "liberty" in the Declaration of Independence was not a simple "good". It could be abused and could lead to the mass of people embracing fascism.
Bernstein is right to condemn the emphasis on "freedom from" as a blind alley that leads to "nothing left to lose". Certainly people need individual liberties to allow them to develop their individual talents. But this is not despite the larger society. A free society imposes obligations. At the very least, one must reciprocate and enlarge the freedoms of others to pursue self-development, but not at the expense of the larger society to have their fair share of security and happiness. Bernstein notes that the "freedom" people really need is the freedom for self realization in a social context of mutual obligations and a society that emphasizes realizing your individual potential in a socially responsible way.
The last 30 years has seen an era of egomania in the US that has allowed the top 0.1% of the population to become maddenlying wealthy at the expense of the larger society. This was the "freedom from" any social obligations and the wild frenzy to seize economic wealth at the expense of the broader society. The economic condition of the bottom 80% of the population has stagnated while the elite has grown rich beyond their wildest imagination.
The elite in the US must use the opportunity of the Great Recession to turn back toward social obligation and focus on "freedom for" the great mass of the population to realize their dreams. We've had 30 years of "freedom from" social obligations by the elite and it has led to tragedy. That now needs to be balanced by greater emphasis on social connectedness and the obligations toward a civil society.
I was thinking this morning about how Obama claimed to be such a devoted follower of Lincoln. And I was thinking of how for 18 months Obama has fumbled around in the presidency saying good things -- he was elected to bring "change" -- but delivering very little. He reminds me of Lincoln's generals. They talked a good fight, but they failed to take the army into the South and deal a deadly blow the to the rebellion. Obama has been unwilling to take on big interests, the lobbyists, big corporations, Wall Street, etc. He has advisors who know who crappy the economy is. He has fiddled while Rome burns. Just like McClellan in the Civil War, Obama has marched his proudly outfitted troops up and down but failed to engage the enemy. Obama preens as a leader who understands the electorate and what is needed. But he is timid like McClellan. He is unwilling to take his troops to war.
It is time for Obama to find his inner U. S. Grant and take on the ills that are strangling the US. The American people have suffered from a decade of no real wage increases. The rich got richer under Reagan-Bush-Clinton and they got phenomenally richer under Bush II. Meanwhile the economy sickened and it is now dying under the hand of the Great Recession. Obama has to find the heart of Grant and slug it out with the enemies that are strangling the US: the Republicans, big corporate interests, the war lobby, etc. Obama needs to turn the US toward a new direction that will see rewards flow down to the people who actually do the work in society. Obama needs to set up a safety net to protect the most vulnerable of the population during this terrible economic crisis.
Big changes are needed. Not the baby steps Obama has taken up to now. He needs to be like Grant and send the troops in and harden himself to the slaughter that war truly is. War is a meatgrinder that feeds off the flesh of the innocent. Only by great effort will the Reagan legacy be slayed like the dragon that Reagan's legacy truly is. Only when the sword of a fired-up politics has been shoved through the heart of Republican intransigence will there be any hope of a new dawn. I'm waiting for Obama to find his inner U. S. Grant.
I find it sad that social protest which was mainly a peaceful activity in the 1950s and 1960s that turned violent only when you had bigoted police or racists "locals" who would attack a demonstration. The actual demonstrators were peaceful. They mostly followed the tactics of Gandhi using moral suasion to try and bring the majority to their side. But starting in the late 1960s when the Yippies and the SDS and other crazies got all the attention of the media, demonstrations turned violent. The lingering "activists" from the 50s & 60s took the wrong message. They were convinced that confrontational street theatre brought social change. It doesn't, it hasn't, and it won't. If anything, it hinders real change because it frightens ordinary citizens away from legitimate peaceful protest.
These days, the demonstrations by interest groups, unions, or social activists are quickly thrown into disarray as a bunch of thugs dressed in black, with helmets and facemasks, show up to "demonstrate". That is what has happened at the lastest G8-G20 meeting in Toronto. Wikipedia details the story with broad strokes.
One thing that bothers me is that a lot of these fanatics/crazies claim to be "anarchists". Traditionally anarchists have attracted crazies. But the political philosophy of anarchism doesn't equate to vandalism and disregard for public order. The great historic figures in anarchism were mostly gentle and reasonable people who abhorred the instruments of a state run by and for elites (landed aristocracies, big organized churches, and the new capitalist class). These anarchist used violent terms, but the same way that a firebrand like Patrick Henry Lee was famous for giving a speech saying "Give me liberty, or give me death!".
Traditionally anarchists called to disband the police and empty the prisons because they had a vision of a self-policing society, a society based on peace and understanding, not violent repression. So the cruel joke is that today, those who come to trash urban centres, who use violence, call themselves "anarchists". They stolen the term and turned it inside out.
There was a violent streak in traditional anarchism, led by Bakunin, whose fervor for "the cause" led him to firebrand oratory and a willingness to join in conspiracies. But his fundamental philosophy was not one of "my way or the highway", one of threatening anybody who didn't agree with him. He was interested in convincing you of his vision, not dictating his "answer" to how the world must be, or else! Sadly, the violent types in Toronto are using actions that say "do what I say, or I'll trash your town; I don't want political discourse, I want mindless violence as the tool for social change". It nutty. It suits the agenda of the media and the current governments because it is a message that almost everyone finds abhorrent.
I noticed that some of the graffiti in Toronto had the traditional anti-cop, anti-prison sentiment. But nobody in his right mind would sign up for a political movement that attacks police, burns police cars, smashes shop windows, and loots. That is nihilism. Not a serious political movement. Traditional anarchists were against the police and prisons because these were the tools that authoritarian governments used to squelch social change.
If you live in a democracy, you don't have to fight the police or demand that the prisons be emptied. That is nutty. The police aren't your "enemy" and the prisons are full of liberals who want to change an oppressive authoritarian regime. The prisons are mostly filled with dangerous criminals. Nobody in his right mind wants those people back on the streets a day before their sentences are fulfilled.
Anarchists have a vision of a society in which the community controls itself, i.e. there is no need for cops and prisons. But these crazies hear half the message: get rid of cops & prisons. They don't hear the other half: a community has to police itself. So these thugs are worse than useless. They actively undermine the true political philosophy of anarchism.
My bottom line: I have no love for the black-clothed thugs. I have no love for the riot police. There is no political dialog when these two groups go at each other.
There are a lot of things I hate about capitalism, but there are some things I like about it. Unlike feudal and aristocratic societies, capitalism is deeply democratic, i.e. anybody is allowed to rise up the ranks by creating wealth. That's good for everybody. What I hate about capitalism is the power they wield and how they can buy off the politicians to reshape society to the desires of the new capitalist elites.
I'm all for protests, but I don't understand any protestor who would immediately "walk away" when he sees somebody dressed all in black or anybody trashing anything. This gives protest a bad name. To remain on the street is to implicitly endorse the violence and the disrespect these crazies show toward everybody who doesn't submit their their "value system".
I don't understand how, when you have many thousands of police, you can let a group of one or two hundred break off and go down about 5 city blocks destroying store fronts and burning police cruisers. Seems to me you quickly bottle up those streets and arrest anybody on them.
I appreciate the Canadian Civil Liberties Association for taking on unpopular causes, but I think it is ridiculous for them to claim that sweeping the street of rioters somehow "abridges liberty". You have no rights if you are in a mob or standing near a mob or encouraging a mob that is looting and trashing. You are implicitly part of a conspiracy to destroy, so you should be liable to arrest. But the Ontario Civil Liberties Association is complaining because their "monitors" were swept up with the rioters. My basic rule: if you see unlawful behaviour, immediately leave the area or risk being painted by the same brush. I have no sympathy for people claiming they were "peaceful" and were "swept up" by the police. The police have no way of deciding who did what when a mob is trashing a street. They have to arrest everybody and then try to sort things out later. The need to maintain public order pre-empts "individual liberty". It is the same rule that says that your "liberty" to shout "fire!" in a crowded theatre is trumped by public safety needs.
So... I watch the G8-G20 summit with interest, but I am aghast at the idiocy in the streets and I'm saddened that legitimate protestors have been bullied and pushed aside by the handful of "black bloc" thugs roam the streets. Whatever message might have come out of the other demonstrations or even from the meeting of the leaders, that is drowned out in the media because violence trumps everything else. That is what these thugs brought to Toronto: just another story of nihilistic violence.
This is what passes for "demonstrating":
What does it demonstrate other than a mob taunting the police daring them to restore order? There is no political vision in this mob. There is no reasoned advocacy of social change. This is not demonstrating for an idea or an ideal. This is just thuggery. And... the police respond with their own organized thuggery. What else would you expect?
And this video shows at 1:20 honest protestors trying to step in and stop the thugs from destroying a police cruiser. They are asking "how is this helping us?". Good question...
And this shows the sheer nihilism of the crowd. This isn't a "demonstration" in favour of any political ideal. This is purely destructive rage by rich kids who are bored and want to lash out at the world. This isn't politics, this is idiocy...
ANTONY HEGARTY - Singer-Songwriter, Composer, and Visual Artist; Lead Singer, Antony and the Johnsons.
Seven generation sustainability is an ecological concept that urges the current generation of humans to live sustainably and work for the benefit of the seventh generation into the future.
"In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation..." — Great Law of the Iroquois
The Seventh Generation originated with the Iroquois when they thought it was appropriate to think seven generations ahead (a couple hundred years into the future) and decide whether the decisions they make today would benefit their children seven generations into the future. (Lyons O, An Iroquois Perspective.)
That sounds great. That sounds reasonable. But it is like "motherhood". Who could be against it?
Well... if you think a bit, something must have gone wrong. The Iroquois flubbed their encounter with European civilization. They may have had a good line about "seven generations" but they obviously didn't think deep and hard enough to achieve a seven generation response to the emergency that European encroachment caused their civilization. Was this simply a failing of the Iroquois, or is there something misleading about having this "seven generations" motto?
My guess goes along the lines of Ray Kruzweil: we are wired to do linear extrapolations into the future, the reality more often in non-linear. We just aren't equipped to project the future using our unaided imaginations.
Here's where science is of assistance. Science has taught us that we are insignificant compared to the immense size and complexity of the real world. We need to develop models carefully using the best open & competitive ideas of science to address the future. The problem is that our primate brain loves to jump to simple answers. The politicians 'sound bite' is what we are emotionally geared to attend to. Doing the hard thinking of using tools like math and modeling to consider the future is not easy (as the misguided and ideologically-motivated climate 'modeling' proves).
I believe that it is too easy to take a "seven generations" approach and fall into the trap of "back to the land" and "eco-conservatism". Our species has been successful by always coming up with a new technology and a new way to exploit the environment. To throw the towel in and claim "technology is causing us to destroy our own habitat" is foolish. When I was a kid pollution was much worse than today. It took a social movement that worried about the environment to get us to use technology to clean up our act. Current problems will be solved not by "playing turtle" and tucking our head into a shell. We will meet the future only if we exploit the visions of our wisest people and take up the best that technology has to offer. This has been our solution for hundreds of thousands of years. It is time-tested. Doomsayers and pessimists are very attractive, but their message is really one of giving up hope and foreclosing our future.
