Are there any other leftists here? 👀

[Earl Grey]

1 hour ago, Taomeow said:

Death is "feminine?"  And who gave birth to you?

 

Not arguing, but I did want to share Death from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, who was a breakout character for being a personification of death as a beautiful and natural thing rather than the ugly thing people fear in many cultures. 

 

 

Quote: 

 

“Death has a body like a model, the clothes of a poet and the smile of your best friend. She wears a top hat for fun, her ankh necklace for power, and carries a big black umbrella for travelling to the 'sunless lands.' I wonder what she smells like? I'm sure it's fresh and clean and her laugh must be wrinkly or maybe it's warm and chuckly, but whatever it is, Death laughs a lot.

We talk about the 'miracle of birth' but what about the 'miracle of death'? We have the science of death pretty much figured out, but death's magic and inevitability have been feared and ignored for a long time now."

 

The funny thing is in that story, the Endless, Death being one of them, actually represent their opposites--without her, there is no life and life is ephemeral and therefore precious. She's a reminder of people who are alive but seldom choose to live. 

 

Quote 2: 

 

“That’s what you were trying to say, isn’t it? I mean, I think … mostly we’re too busy living to stop and notice we’re alive. But that sometimes we do. And that that makes the rest of it matter.”

 

Dialogue: 

 

Hazel: “Can I ask a stupid question?"

Death: "Sure. Ask away."

Hazel: "It's sort of more than one question. But... Look, um... Why do we hurt? Why do we die? Why isn't life good all the time? Why isn't it fair?"

 

Death: "Those aren't stupid questions, Hazel. For some people they're the only questions that matter."

Hazel: "Does that mean you won't answer them?"

Death: "Sure, I'll answer. But it's kind of a big subject, and it's got lots of answers, and the answers don't really mean anything-- They aren't stupid questions but they could just as well be 'When is purple?' or 'Why does Thursday?', if you see what I mean..."

Hazel: "Not really."

Death: "Well, I think some of it is probably contrasts. Light and Shadow. If you never had the bad times, how would you know you had the good times? But some of it is just: If you're going to be Human, then there are a whole load of things that come with it. Eyes, a Heart, Days and Life. It's the moments that illuminate it, though. The times you don't see when you're having them... They make the rest of it matter.” 

Edited August 14, 2019 by Earl Grey

[Taomeow]

@Earl Grey  What I do agree on is that models do have anorexic bodies reminiscent of the traditional depictions of personified death.  And, to a taiji conditioned eye, postural misalignments that may speed it up.    

 

Other than that, I'm more with Laozi on this subject.  I'm not one of those people who shoot from the hip with a Laozi quote at the slightest provocation, but in this particular case, chapter 50 resonates with my take quite closely.

 

Three out of ten follow life.

Three out of ten follow death.

People who rush from birth to death

Are also three out of ten.

Why is that so?

Because they want to make too much of life.

I have heard that the one who knows how to live

Can wander through the land

Without encountering the rhinoceros or the tiger.

He passes the battlefield

Without being struck by weapons.

In him, the rhinoceros finds no opening for its horn.

The tiger finds no opening for its claws.

The soldiers find no opening for their blades.

Why is that so?

Death has no place in him.

 

According to Laozi's math, there's one out of ten who is not interested in death.  How many of those who are not interested in death practice taoist immortalist arts, I don't know.  But I guess ten out of ten who do are the ones who are not interested in death.   How many of them successfully remain uninterested, I don't know.  But there's something about not ordering the dessert if you're after an eternal dinner.   

[Nungali]

6 hours ago, sean said:

 

Thoroughly abominable take my dude. 😬

 

Sean

 

 

I guess I didnt explain it enough  -  note  the airborne contraceptive idea     I am not advocating killing anyone at all , I am saying 'leave  them be' . we all have to die and we all will die .  I am suggesting we limit the amount of people  yet to be born .   Then gradually numbers will drop .

In discussions of this subject, it was the best solution I can come up with  .    I do see just ignoring the problem and breeding ourselves out of existence  as  'rather abominable' .

 

or look at this way , say we get to the level you where describing above ... what then ?  Do we just keep on breeding until everything is  totally fucked ?   Or do we wait until its mostly  fucked and then decide what we do about it ?

 

If there is a third option, I'd like to hear it  ( and PLEASE dont say Mars colonization  !  ) 

 

I am suggesting that the overpopulation problem is better dealt with by  focus on  limiting  the number of future people born, not those already living .

 

 

[Nungali]

On 13/08/2019 at 12:34 PM, Taomeow said:

I brought up Sumer, which built the first city, in another thread with an eye on this one.  I've been reading up on Sumer in the past few months.  The first and only goal of this "civilized" arrangement, from the get-go, was centralized power, suppression of absolutely everything and everyone standing in its way, and an obligatory monarch on top.  The rest of civilized (the word comes from the same root as "city," "citizen") technologies were always ultimately serving this goal. 

 

I'm not saying we are not creatures of tools and arts.  Pablo Picasso, upon seeing the paintings of the Lascaux Caves dating back 20,000 years, proclaimed, reportedly with tears in his eyes, "We've invented nothing.  They've invented everything."  I don't think I ever saw that many modern works of art that made a deeper impression on me either.  

 

What I'm saying is, tools and arts and sciences can exist on entirely different terms if the goal is entirely different.   

 

There's ample evidence, information about which is not being widely disseminated for some interesting (methinks) reasons, of our ancestors taking great care of the old, injured, sick instead of engaging in any which Darwinism and any which "survival of the fittest" (oh how I despise this bogus doctrine -- almost as much as Darwin himself despised it in private correspondence).  It couldn't be any other way for our species in natural environments, because we are hardwired to care for the absolutely helpless -- more than any animal on earth -- and that's because our young are born the most helpless and the most dependent of all and remain so for much longer than the offspring of any other species.  Which means that we can't have anything else in our makeup that would allow us to keep procreating than the desire and ability to care, absolutely altruistically, for the helpless and dependent.  And a child raised like that is not very likely to turn around and discard the, say, grandparents who are helping raise her own children...  another peculiar trait in our species -- a heavy reliance on grandparenting throughout our "pre-history" -- and this help and social value and usefulness of it is in no way predicated on physical strength of the grandparents' bodies.  They can be (and were) storytellers and teachers and just sources of love and I don't believe prehistory was about discarding and not valuing love.  Not for a second.  Same deal with anyone disabled or otherwise disadvantaged in prehistory.  Only with the advent of civilization and slavery that is its prerequisite did "able-bodied" folks get a special status.  So, no problem there.  I don't think modern medicine helped us survive for two million years prior to the past 100.  I think love did.  And, yes, selfless love too, we couldn't raise our young if we weren't capable of that.

 

I don't believe in "overpopulation" either.  It's the stealing of resources and their greedy and absolutely idiotic mismanagement that makes it impossible for the majority of people on this planet to have a good life.  An example of what I deem idiotic: killing 60% of all wild animals on earth since 1970 alone.  Creating The Age of Chicken -- there's currently 66 billion chickens on earth --- almost 90% of all birds living on our planet today are chickens.  And don't even start me on what monocultural agriculture does to life on earth.  Skinning the planet alive is not "technology."   It's pathology and a death sentence.  

 

Billions would have to die if we were to try to switch to a different way of doing things?  That would be horrible and not worth it.  But I don't see how on earth billions won't die if we don't switch to a different way of doing things.  I absolutely can't begin to imagine how this can be practically not our future, considering that every next century brought wars with percentage of victims an order of magnitude greater than the previous one.  Every. Single. One.  

     

I don't think "eco fascism" is a feature of anarcho-primitivism specifically --  I think it's way more mainstream than that.  But then, I'm not taking my ideas from them to begin with.  They just happen to have noticed some of the things I've noticed, and in that, are different from most ideologies that absolutely don't notice the elephant in the room.  To wit, the inverse relationship between the amount of technology we use and the amount of life shrinking away from the planet.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Great post !    

 

What made  humans successful was their social networking and actually allowed them to by-pass the survival of the fittest  'thing'.

 

There is some good info about this and 'how we went wrong'  in " Sapiens'  by  Harari

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind

 

Humans have been brilliant at a lot of stuff for a long time  , just' restricted ' by their technology .  

 

-----

 

If you have not seen this  , DO have a look  - the paintings and drawings are amazing enough  to look at  ... in pictures .

 

But when you see them  MOVING   (as you pass by, in the flickering torch light )   that is something else !

 

 

 

[Nungali]

On 13/08/2019 at 12:43 PM, Walker said:

 

Sorry to make a selfish request, but when you figure this conundrum out, please send me a PM and let me know, just in case I miss the post.

 

I guess you didnt like my idea either ?    

[Taomeow]

The "airborne contraceptive" is already here -- and waterborne and foodborne and electromagneticborne too.  Birth rates in the industrialized world are declining for various reasons, but the main one and the fastest growing one may be an epidemic of infertility in both men and women that seems to deepen with each passing year.  I think some Handmaid's Tale type scenario is a whole lot more likely than overpopulation caused by excessive breeding.  If current tendencies in our reproductive health hold up -- or speed up -- a welcome to Gilead in our future seems entirely plausible.  

[Nungali]

On 13/08/2019 at 1:14 PM, sean said:

 

💯

 

 

Love this. ❤️

 

 

I agree billions very well may die if we don't find new ways and rediscover old ones. I just hope we agree an ideal goal at least is that we not simply shrug; that we do anything we can to imagine and move toward alternatives.

 

I have a penchant for melancholy and even outright nihilism in my darker hours. I'm no stranger to depressive realism. But lately I wonder if a dash of delusional hope for a more enchanted living future is not the worst spell to cast from a corner. 🧙‍♂️

 

 

Agreed! Also, hope my post didn't come across as an attack on your philosophy or anything. I haven't found anything you've written offensive in the way I was addressing at all, and I think there's an important and beautiful dialectic to be had with green anarchism. 💚🌿

 

Speaking of cave paintings: Why are these 32 symbols found in ancient caves all over Europe?

 

Sean

 

 

 

Great vid !  

 

Those  graphic signs seem  a stage before Vinca   ( not 'writing' but  'a script'  )

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinča_symbols

 

 

 and a stage after  the message stick

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_stick

 

 

 

 

Regarding   an early connection  (  as explained in the video-  the shared signs  over vast areas and time   suggest a centralised system, maybe out of Africa  ), this is interesting ;

 

" The Pleiades also figures in the Dreamings of several language groups. For example, in the central desert region, they are said to be seven sisters fleeing from the unwelcome attentions of a man represented by some of the stars in Orion. The close resemblance of this to Greek mythology is believed to be coincidental — there is no evidence of any cultural connection.^[7]

 

...  the study of the stars is probably the oldest knowledge on earth, such that it remains an intriguing possibility that aboriginal star knowledge does contain some fragments of a much older original culture. Aboriginal people came to Australia from Asia 50,000 years ago (well before Greek culture formed 3,000–4,000 years ago), and presumably the Aboriginal people originally came from Africa. While there is no hard evidence of a cultural connection, the possibility should not be written off, and the door is open to research to construct models of older human cultures, through the tracing of these narratives and other means such as linguistics.^[9]

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_astronomy#Pleiades

[Nungali]

On 13/08/2019 at 5:29 PM, gendao said:

IOW, organic, pre-colonialist "permaculture" practices...which all got largely wiped out by colonialism.

 

Seriously, Christian colonialism was the big, planetary gamechanger that has led us into the 6th mass extinction, today!  And the more you wake up, the more glaring this becomes!!!

For example, just consider the basic, daily act of taking a shit.  In the aboriginal days, they simply popped a squat in the woods.  This position gave them a deep stretch while also ergonomically pointing their rectum straight down.  And ecologically, it spread seeds from the fruits they ate and also returned fertility to the soil to sustainably close the loop.  So, it was just a win-win across the board!

 

Then enter the humancentric, Christian colonialist, Western civilizers who decide to "civilize" this process by making it more convenient and less "squeamish."  Let's now instead sit (instead of squat) on a stationary toilet and shit into 5 gallons of clean, potable, freshwater.  No seeds or fertility will be returned locally, but instead reseparated out into sludge by a huge treatment plant downstream requiring miles of underground concrete drainage pipes.  And then let's all wipe our asses with Canada's boreal forest!!!

Now, multiply this simple process by several billion colonized people a day...and the damaging effects are absolutely staggering on the planet!

 

Or consider what we do with the corpses of billions of people?  The civilized way is to inject them full of toxic chemicals (for vanity) and then bury or burn them in deforested plots.  Again, this is an incredibly resource-sucking and toxic method that also does nothing to help close the loop sustainably... 

Yes, why not just let our bodies naturally rot aboveground like all other dead wildlife?

 

Etc, etc...

OK here we go again with having to repeatedly debunk this faulty, myopic, Christian/humancentric colonialist argument...

Can 8 billion people fit into Texas?  Sure...and you can also physically fit into a trash can...but can you actually live in one?  Because, a person living the lifestyle of an average American requires almost 24 acres, 10X the world per capita share...whereupon they (average Westerner) alone also uses 125 lbs of resources extracted from there...DAILY!  Still think they can all fit into Texas and want to know how much space humans actually take up - then do the math with THAT ginormous footprint!?

 

So look, the land required to live in isn't just the space your body occupies...but includes all the resources you use as well!   And this includes at least enough arable land to grow/forage the food you eat, water sources, waste disposal, etc, etc...

 

But even if everyone could simply live in Texas with the density of Paris...where would all the displaced wildlife and plants/forests then go?  As there is no room for them in Paris, either.  I don't recall seeing any native prairies or forests there...lol!  Because oh yea, Christian colonialists don't give a f*** about anything but humans, do they?  Hence, they don't even allocate the MENTAL SPACE for them in their plans...much less in physical space.

 

 

 

Well, at least I am doing  SOMETHING right .  

 

 

 

When I go to town, city, 'civilisation' I find it just weird to defecate in what looks like  good clean water , should not that go against all instincts ??? 

 

 

regarding the rest - I did my bit by not breeding .  You want kids - go look after some already here that need looking after .  IMO .

[Apech]

4 minutes ago, Nungali said:

 

 

 

Well, at least I am doing  SOMETHING right .  

 

 

 

When I go to town, city, 'civilisation' I find it just weird to defecate in what looks like  good clean water , should not that go against all instincts ??? 

 

 

regarding the rest - I did my bit by not breeding .  You want kids - go look after some already here that need looking after .  IMO .

 

Nungas we are all relieved to hear you didn't breed

 

 

[Nungali]

3 hours ago, Taomeow said:

 

Death is "feminine?"  And who gave birth to you?

 

The obvious answer. 

 

In many traditions , The Great Mother , The Great Sea , Binah, is the gateway into life and the gate way out of it .  We are received  and dissolved, into the 'Great Ocean' .

 

When I die, I will become earth, and earth is 'Our Great Mother ' . 

 

This makes perfect sense to me  especially from my Aboriginal shamanic teachings  and also my 'other side' , as a 'Thelemite'   where death is but a reconnection to  Nuit , The Goddess of Infinite Space and Infinite S tars

 

" I am above you and in you. My ecstasy is in yours. My joy is to see your joy.

 

For I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union.

 

I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky.  "

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I said death was feminine , not  that  killing people  was feminine  .  Killing people may well be a 'masculine ' thing .  I was talking about natural death, as part of our life ...  birth is part of it too.

3 hours ago, Taomeow said:

 

 And how many spermatozoa have you killed since then?  Women only discard 300 to 400 eggs in a lifetime with "wasted' ovulations due to just being women.  Whereas men, in their lifetime, kill 525 billion spermatozoa due to just being men.  In the light of this information you may want to reconsider your "death" attribution.  

 

[Nungali]

Regarding my sperm count ....

 

I never thought our dear Taomeow would ask me such a question ! 

 

 

But if you really want to know  ....

 

 

dont look unless you REALLY  have to folks

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

        

       "  Yeah yeah ... I know, its gonna be one of them smart

         arse quips  about curiosity and cats , isnt it ? "

 

 

 

 

[Nungali]

31 minutes ago, Apech said:

 

Nungas we are all relieved to hear you didn't breed

 

 

 

 

One of a kind, dude, one of a kind .

[gendao]

18 hours ago, Nungali said:

Nature , death, the soul , women  .....anything vaguely 'feminine'  , we seem to be at war on it ! 

Okay .... I'm considering throwing my lot in with Bruce Pascoe   ( a whole revision of Aussie eco agriculture based on indigenous traditions and knowledge  *    ... but boy !  has that got a loooong way to go   (but we started getting there a bit ! ;   its now in school geography curriculum

*     http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-dark-emu-and-the-blindness-of-australian-agriculture-97444

 

Nowadays part of this is desolate and the 'Simpson's desert' . early explorers  say grain harvested and in stacks  spreading to the horizon . Earky explorers, near dead and dying of thirst come over a ridge to see this, and are met by indigenous people that give them water , grain cakes and roast duck .

 

This grain survives drought , needs no ploughing and doesnt like fertilizer , phosphate kills it . I mean , what else could you ask for ?

Quote

At the centre of, or just beneath, all of these books is the attempt to try and locate some kind of basic environmental baseline. There seems to be no dispute about the fact that the agricultural colonisation of Australia by Europeans has had far reaching consequences for the organisation of the continent’s biota.
In almost every possible way the land has undergone serious and widespread interventions. The introduction of new predators, notably cats and foxes, caused (and continues to cause) mass extinctions of species. The introduction of hooved animals, in addition to their utterly different patterns of grazing, also hardened the soil and changed the extent to which rain is absorbed or runs off the surface of the land, often carrying soil into rivers which now run faster but also then silt up and slow down.
The removal of perennial, deep rooted vegetation for annual crops causes groundwater to rise and dissolves salt crystalised in the soil, resulting in soil salinity. Fire regimes have changed radically. Rabbits and other rodents out-compete native herbivores, while European carp have transformed the major river systems of the south east. The list goes on, and it is surprisingly familiar to all of us.
But as these things continue to run rampant, and as major questions begin to be asked about the sustainability of agriculture, we seem to be thrown backwards into the origins of these problems. And as we trace them back we come against the tantalising question of what it was all like before this. Before what? Before the arrival of Europeans. What did Australia look like in 1788, in fact? This is the question that each of these writers seems to be either answering, or at the least reacting against.

Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, which builds in important ways on Gammage’s earlier book, provides the most concerted attempt to answer the question about the quality of the country — in particular, the interface between human and nature — in the pre-colonial epoch. Because of the oral quality of Aboriginal societies, many of these questions have traditionally been considered to fall beyond the province of history proper, and into the study of pre-history (archaeology) and anthropology.
Indeed, there is something of a demarcation dispute around this crucial hinge between Aboriginal and European colonial lifeways. One of the strengths of Pascoe’s book is its ability to bridge archaeology, anthropology, archival history, Indigenous oral tradition and other more esoteric but highly revealing disciplines such as ethnobotany and paleoecology.

The Call of the Reed Warbler. The book is in many respect a conversion narrative, documenting the moment when the scales fell from his eyes and he saw truly the world as it was — not a land made efficient and productive by the application of agricultural science, but a land emptied of its relationships and webs of life by a kind of collective psychosis. Farming wasn’t sustaining the land, it was ruining it. It was an extractive industry that had gobbled up thousands of years of sustenance in a few generations of sustained plunder.

These books are not announcing that the environment is broken — they merely mention this in passing, regarding this as beyond any reasonable doubt. Instead, what these books are announcing is that agriculture is broken.

ABSOLUTELY!!!  As I've said, Christian colonialism was the turning point for the natural world's catastrophic collapse!  You literally see this same story replayed over and over like a horrific rerun all around the entire world!!!

Edited August 14, 2019 by gendao

[Apech]

7 minutes ago, gendao said:

ABSOLUTELY!!!  As I've said, Christian colonialism was the turning point for the natural world's catastrophic collapse!  You literally see this same story replayed over and over like a horrific rerun all around the entire world!!!

 

 

Before that the Neolithic agricultural revolution - then much later the Industrial Revolution.  Almost no part of 'nature' as we know it is untouched by human hand - even the Amazon rain forest is partly the result of cultivated trees.  Also you could see the history of the natural world as a series of catastrophic collapses brought on by different causes - like for instance the death of the dinosaurs or the megafauna at the end of the last Ice Age.

 

 

[Nungali]

14 hours ago, gendao said:

ABSOLUTELY!!!  As I've said, Christian colonialism was the turning point for the natural world's catastrophic collapse!  You literally see this same story replayed over and over like a horrific rerun all around the entire world!!!

 

 

 So when I  was on my road trip, I stopped off at Cobargo  , a little place with a lot of closed down stores and cafes.

 

 

 

When I returned home  I was surprised to learn it was  Bruce  Pascoe's home town and site of his agricultural experiments. I wish I had known then, I would have looked him up . 

 

I found some pictures , its very small scale 'back yard' job .  

 

 

 

Thus should be a HUGE government funded university project .    When I get back from WA . I might go back down there and throw some money and labour into it .

 

Some individuals have gone ahead

 

Murnong farm

 

 

 

a 'coconut sweet'  yam .   Some bakers are starting to put native grains into their bred .

 

 If only the first Euros had acquired a taste for kangaroo !  No need for the sheep or cattle that drove the destruction of the landscape .  The Euros could have traded / bought meat from the Aboriginals , benefiting both and preserving the 'estate' ecosystem  * .

 

(actually, there where so many kangaroo  back then the Aboriginals would have to organise massive culls  for environmental balance , nowadays they get to plague proportions , and still have to be culled .... even on the lawns of Parliament House in Canberra !

 

https://citynews.com.au/2019/canberras-biggest-kangaroo-cull-begins/

 

They had that going for a while , hunters where delivering meat to the Sydney settlement for trade  goods  -  then the 'Pemulway thing ' happened  -   all got fucked up   

 

https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/pemulwuy

 

*  https://theconversation.com/the-biggest-estate-on-earth-how-aborigines-made-australia-3787

 

(  First Euro arrivals  described the place as looking like a  'Lord's Estate  Park' ;  copses of woodland, grassy fields and 'lawns',   wilder areas for game and hunting  all neat and manicured  - biomes  set into the wilderness and linked together , gradually changing depending on what part of the country . They appear to have moved across the landscape  ( especially in Tasmania ) for 1000s of years ; 'fire farming' on the leading edge and regeneration behind

 

 

 

This REALLY gets up people's noses !

 

Pre-colonial Australia: natural wilderness or gentleman’s park?

Professor Marcia Langton tells why the book that rewrites the history of Aboriginal land management before white colonisation makes it to her list of the 10 greatest books ever written

 

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/pre-colonial-australia-natural-wilderness-or-gentleman-s-park

 

 

I highly recommend ;

 

' First Fooptrints'  Scott cane  ( and the ABC doco series on it ).   followed by

 

" The Biggest Estate on Earth'   Bill Gammage

 

"Dark Emu '  Bruce Pascoe  .

[MegaMind]

[Taomeow]

20 hours ago, Apech said:

 

 

Before that the Neolithic agricultural revolution - then much later the Industrial Revolution.  Almost no part of 'nature' as we know it is untouched by human hand - even the Amazon rain forest is partly the result of cultivated trees.  Also you could see the history of the natural world as a series of catastrophic collapses brought on by different causes - like for instance the death of the dinosaurs or the megafauna at the end of the last Ice Age.

 

 

 

The difference being that dinosaurs were disaster free for the prior 200 million years.  Whereas civilized, i.e. city-dwelling and practicing sedentary agriculture, human activities (or our hypothetical puppeteer's if neither "creation" nor "evolution" but intervention is our real progenitor/boss) have brought all life on the planet, ours included, to the brink of disappearing in a meager several thousand years. 

 

I say it's a very unusual way to go -- by first fouling up and then blowing up one's nest.  Yes, there's been all kinds of disasters on earth, but this is a first, unless of course there were other civilizations before that went out in a similar manner, as some accounts of Mu and Atlantis and suchlike seem to hint.  But even if they did, and ours is not the first one whose ultimate outcome is self-destruction within a laughably short period in terms of an average successful species' lifespan on earth, that would be just another argument in favor of my position: civilization is not sustainable. 

 

Species that fail, fail.  Perhaps we're failing in an unusual manner, is all.  Species that don't fail stay put for a long, long time.  Ask the shark.  425 million years and counting.  Though humans are capable of putting an end to them in thirty seconds if they so desire or blunder -- whereas nothing that happened on earth in the prior 425 million ever could.  No natural disaster was disastrous enough.  That's the main difference between a natural and an artificial disaster.  Natural disasters are rare (in terms of geological periods) and far between.  When they come, they do destroy.  Artificial ones are fast and furious, and when they come, they  self-destruct.  

[sean]

Reminds of one of the bleaker explanations of the "Fermi paradox": It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself. 😵

 

Sean

 

[Taomeow]

3 minutes ago, sean said:

Reminds of one of the bleaker explanations of the "Fermi paradox": It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself. 😵

 

Sean

 

 

Actually, I don't think so.  I think equating "intelligent" and "civilized" is where the sleight-of-hand happens.  In fact, we seem to have been exceedingly intelligent until we became technological.  Not in a skewed unbalanced left-brain fashion but just overall intelligent -- emotionally, physically, and I think intellectually too.  I think we used to be interesting inside in ways that only appear "primitive" to a civilized observer.  Who was usually struck by terminal envy when faced with who we really are.  There's, e.g., accounts to that effect given to the Queen of Spain by the first Europeans stepping on the American soil.  "Never seen people so beautiful, so healthy, so happy and so devoted to each other anywhere."

[Zork]

On 8/13/2019 at 4:53 PM, Zork said:

And how does this has nothing to do with population density and the dwindling of resources?

To those that are confused like @cheya and @Apech the sources of the problem are the same, you are looking at a different subset and think it is a different problem. It isn't!

Lack of resources are the problem. The financial results that were feasible with one working member in the household are only done with two full time jobs nowadays. Essentially the people got poorer that means that they are getting a smaller portion of a limited resource.

Edited August 15, 2019 by Zork

[Zork]

2 hours ago, sean said:

Reminds of one of the bleaker explanations of the "Fermi paradox": It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself. 😵

 

Sean

 

That is true but it requires a similar behaviour to humanity.

There could also be cases of intelligent life that has no capability of creating tools thus advancing technology. Think of genius dolphins/marine life with no tools or fire due to physiology and the properties of their habitat.

[Apech]

1 hour ago, Zork said:

To those that are confused like @cheya and @Apech the sources of the problem are the same, you are looking at a different subset and think it is a different problem. It isn't!

Lack of resources are the problem. The financial results that were feasible with one working member in the household are only done with two full time jobs nowadays. Essentially the people got poorer that means that they are getting a smaller portion of a limited resource.

 

 

People have less children when they get richer, when material threats reduce families are smaller and replacement rates are not exceeded.

 

I'm not confused - its a different point to the one you are making.

[CloudHands]

On 25/07/2019 at 7:58 PM, dawei said:

 

Not sure where this comes from.  As one who works with data, I'd be open to reading something along this line of argument.   As the population (based on last presidential vote) is more left than right, I'm not sure how one comes to a spectrum as described.

 

 

We live in a globalized capitalist world, if you're not against it you're ok with it.

[C T]

1 hour ago, Zork said:

The financial results that were feasible with one working member in the household are only done with two full time jobs nowadays. Essentially the people got poorer that means that they are getting a smaller portion of a limited resource.

 

This seems like a trend thats universally becoming more prevalent. The theory according to some is that there are forces being concerted towards the eradication of the middle class, with the ultimate aim of having it replaced by AI controlled by the Haves who then use AI as a means to control the Have-nots, all of whom would have been so disempowered by then it eradicates the potential of resistance in all its forms. 

 

I'm watching Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 at the moment, and the part where he talks about a proportion of US teachers barely able to sustain even a basic livelihood thus having to seek dependence on food stamps is really quite disturbing. At one end of the spectrum, there are 1st and 2nd level teachers who are financially and otherwise challenged constantly, and at the other, there's this totally absurd & unviable system of entry into tertiary education where students and their families inevitably find themselves in huge debt just to get a qualification, howsoever its cut, just doesn't add up. 

 

[dawei]

4 hours ago, CloudHands said:

 

We live in a globalized capitalist world, if you're not against it you're ok with it.

 

Not sure if your serious or joking... life isn't as binary most of the time.

 

I bought a Honda but not a Toyota... so I'm against Toyota and ok with Honda ?     

 

I'm all for competition in this realm and someone else is buying a Toyota.