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Post by castanea on May 15, 2016 21:57:51 GMT -5
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Post by steev on May 16, 2016 0:43:43 GMT -5
Indeed, but surely you realize that it deals in many matters utterly unconnected to the hermetically-sealed field of plant-breeding, which has no connection whatsoever to Global politics, agribusiness, social control, warfare, Veterans benefits, plant diversity, or common decency. The Geneva Conventions never mentioned depleted uranium, so what's the problem?
I think you've raised troubling questions; well done.
I'm going to stop now, because this sort of crap makes me a tad intolerant of bat-shit.
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Post by prairiegarden on May 16, 2016 15:16:13 GMT -5
I sometimes feel despair for the future of humanity. The world will probably manage, unless we happen to blow the it apart but not sure if our grandchildren will have a world to live in, much less our great grandkids. The only species that destroys its own habitat as well as its own species. If I believed in the antiChrist, I'd think there are several excellent candidates enjoying themselves a great deal right now. The world is being controlled by sociopaths. So sad.
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Post by steev on May 16, 2016 20:07:24 GMT -5
Here in the Disunited States of America, I am encouraged by the rise of the political, social, and environmental awareness of the younger cohorts; they are coming to grips with the mess that's being put on them by their elders and rejecting the "let's just tweak it gradually" line of BS; that didn't work for Women's Suffrage, Civil Rights, or the Viet Nam war; it won't work for Global Climate Change, Health-care, Income Inequality, or the decline of public education.
Thanks to the internet, I think these young people are readily mobilized and motivated; looks like Democracy to me; faced with serious mobilized opposition to status quo bullshit, I think the general run of lick-spittle politicians will get in line or be gone, not a moment too soon. One recent Tuesday, the establishment candidate only won the four states in which Independents were not allowed to vote; so you disenfranchise the people who would have voted overwhelmingly for your opponent and think you won?
What was done to Iraq by the lying, irrational Bush regime was unspeakable; members of that regime are war-criminals and should be prosecuted as such; "weapons of mass destruction"?; what is depleted uranium?
How many generations of Iraqi's will suffer from that shit? Who didn't know it's toxicity? Shouldn't those people be called to answer for their actions?
Plant your seeds, but vote your convictions; both of these actions will help determine our future! Wouldn't it be good if we don't "stupid" ourselves to death?
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Post by blueadzuki on May 17, 2016 6:03:48 GMT -5
I sometimes feel despair for the future of humanity. The world will probably manage, unless we happen to blow the it apart but not sure if our grandchildren will have a world to live in, much less our great grandkids. The only species that destroys its own habitat as well as its own species. If I believed in the antiChrist, I'd think there are several excellent candidates enjoying themselves a great deal right now. The world is being controlled by sociopaths. So sad. (Warning, this is going to be VERY long and VERY depressing) And the real issue is that it really isn't just the so called "evil" people who are doing this, it's pretty much everyone. The selfish, the greedy, and the short sighted are certainly doing more than their part, but the simple fact is that, by now, just being HERE, being human, is doing a pretty big amount of the problem. Our fundamental biological urges, to live, to survive and to reproduce, are putting such a strain on everything that the world just doesn't seem to be able to cope. Those urges are only really an asset when by and large they fail. Wanting to try to stay alive only really works in an environment where you usually can't. Once you get as good as we are at surviving, the urge to survive becomes an extremely dangerous thing. I personally hold out little hope for things. For one I believe quite firmly in a concept I refer to as Tiddles law, which states "As technology improves, the amount of damage capable of being done by and individual increases, and the number of people needed to do a particular amount of damage decreases" (it's true for improvements as well, but people have always been better at making messes than at cleaning them up). The way I see it we're probably only fifty or so years from a point where it will take only ONE evil, or desperate, or even just stupid person to do something that basically wipes us ALL out. And as far as I can see, the solution is not feasible. I think the only solution would be to figure out some way to change the psychological makeup of all of humanity so that they were perfectly selfless. And by selfless, I don't mean generous or kind or altruistic. Those are all nice but they don't go far enough. I mean it in the literal sense, having a total lack of self, being utterly devoid of any ego whatsoever, being utterly incapable of thinking of your own wants or needs. The fundamental urge to survive has become so destructive that I honestly feel that the best thing would be to have people who did not have it, who had no will to live. This probably wouldn't save humanity, since without a will to live we'd probably all go extinct anyway (it's a very Zen concept, the only people worthy of living are those who don't want to live.) but it might mean we do it before we take pretty much everything else down with us. But I don't that will ever happen. |
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Post by rowan on May 17, 2016 14:19:45 GMT -5
Well said, I am of the same mind but it is not something people want to hear.
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Post by steev on May 17, 2016 19:56:14 GMT -5
I think I'm not that depressed; resigned, maybe, but I am Stoic; I don't waste energy on what I can't influence. Things will be different when I'm in charge. and in my small sphere of influence, it is so.
It is clearly obvious that people who have access to education and birth control tend to reproduce less, the obvious solution to so many problems; the rise of atheism is encouraging, as contrasted to fundamentalist "all you need to know is in this Holy Book, and you can kill anyone who disagrees" or moderate Christianity's "I believe in Jesus and the Ten Commandments, but we must kill those SOBs".
As I've posted before, I don't think we'll destroy the planet, but maybe our life-support system and thus our species (unfortunately there are already many collateral-damage species due to our actions, reactions, and inactions); to think we could destroy the planet is to grossly over-estimate our present or reasonably-projected power; maybe if we had enough di-lithium crystals...
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on May 17, 2016 20:30:57 GMT -5
This month's gold star is awarded to steev for the following... to think we could destroy the planet is to grossly over-estimate our present or reasonably-projected power; |
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Post by steev on May 17, 2016 22:13:33 GMT -5
Sheesh; I thought the gold star was awarded for humor (Hoosier Daddy tomato, for example; so well-deserved); nothing humorous about my post ('cept the di-lithium crystals, Mister Spock).
Aside from getting off fossil fuels, pumping less Devonian-sequestered carbon and methane into our atmosphere, the most germane action we can take is making fewer people; I realize this scares some folks who are frightened that their racial, religious, or ethnic gene-pool might lose representation and power, but really, do we need great numbers of foot-soldiers or hordes of factory-serfs of some "pure" line of racial, religious, or ethnic derivation? You want power? Get educated; have fewer children so you can better care for them; get a better job (thanks to your education), so you can take better care of your kids; teach them to value education. Are we really to be frightened of cultural blending? "Espanglish" is clearly well-rooted in the USA's south-west, and it's all good (maybe not so much in Arizona, but what the fuck does Arizona produce except retirement communities, golf courses, and Saudi-owned alfalfa)? I'm really not derogating Arizona's agriculture, just its rightward cultural lurch; so retrogressive.
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Post by castanea on May 17, 2016 22:40:41 GMT -5
The problem with the "making less people" plan is that the only people who will follow the plan are the people who should be making more people. The people who absolutely should not be making any people at all will not follow the plan.
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Post by steev on May 18, 2016 0:12:53 GMT -5
My point exactly about the less educated/religious; that's where education and birth control come in; when women are more educated, they have value beyond being incubators; when parents have more education, they mostly have more income and inclination to educate their children; it's a pump-priming thing, I think we all need to make fewer people; that some will need more time to figure it out is just how it goes; we can only lead by example and relative success.
We have little control over who breeds; nor, in my opinion, should we; we can influence the conditions that lead people to breed or not; in my experience, for example, Hispanics that settle in the USA choose to have fewer children, having access to birth control (unlike in their Catholic-dominated countries of origin); these people don't over-breed because they want to, but because their (religious) societies deny their freedom to choose.
I think "the people who should be making more people" is an erroneous construct; perhaps the world would be a better place if more of its children were blond and blue-eyed, as I was, but where does the land-race concept enter into this? Are we concerned with "pure lines" or with actual viability? California is, so far as I can tell, on the forefront of genetic (racial) land-race humans and I think that's a good thing. When it comes to launching colonizing missions to other planets/moons, or stars, I think Cali will be in the forefront, with our broad-based genetic population. Damn, we're lucky!
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Post by blueadzuki on May 18, 2016 5:30:59 GMT -5
But that does bring up a good point, I'm not sure you CAN talk about dramatic population reduction without bringing eugenics into it. The smaller your population pool, the more significant the genotype of each individual becomes. It one thing if five of you breeding plants have some gene that reduces vigor out of a population of a thousand, it's quite another if it;s out of a population of ten. If the world population is supposed to be no more than say 500 million (the number written on that weird monument outside Langley) is it important to make sure that none of them are carrying the gene for sickle cell anemia, or Tay-Sachs? I don't like the implications that forced eugenics brings (actually as someone who is Jewish, I'm TERRIFIED of what those implications are) but I can at least see the point. To keep your crop strong, you sometimes do need to do a little rouging out.
And of course there is the social implications of the reduction. As I'm not sure that the whole one child per family will drop population fast enough to keep up with our destructiveness (not to mention that, given the pitfalls a lot of new parents fall into, a whole generation of only children will work out to a bunch of spoiled only children who will likely grow up to be adults even more self centered and arrogant than the ones we have now) So how do you convince the vast majority of people to have no children at all? It's all very well to say "lead by example" but a lot of people are just too damn stupid to learn. However silly it was, Idiocracy did make some pretty good points as to where the "better educated, fewer children" plan can end up.
But I agree, a less religious (or more accurately less dogmatically religious) atmosphere is probably needed, we need to stop taking "Be fruitful and multiply and subjugate the Earth." so literally. If you believe that life begins at conception or even before it, that's fine but if you do, maybe you need to think a little more about the weight of conceiving on you AND the world (That's actually the main problem I have with a lot of the organized religions, not that the ban birth control or abortion, but that banning them, they still encourage, or even require couples to have as many children as possible. I'm waiting for a Pope who will look at things rationally and pair his condemnation of birth control with a call to abstinence, not breeding.)
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Post by ferdzy on May 18, 2016 13:49:48 GMT -5
I often wonder what would happen if people sat down and said to God: "You know how you said be fruitful and multiply? Well, we have; mission accomplished. Now what?"
They won't though. Nor would they be willing to hear the answer.
Yeah, I'm another one without much hope for the future of humanity. I'm down to hoping my region doesn't go totally to pot until after I've gone. In the natural order of things.
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Post by steev on May 18, 2016 15:15:36 GMT -5
Between the Zika virus and depleted-uranium munitions, I think we're starting to see undesirable solutions to overpopulation.
I appreciate the "lesser" species more every day.
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Post by Walk on May 20, 2016 15:42:38 GMT -5
I often wonder what would happen if people sat down and said to God: "You know how you said be fruitful and multiply? Well, we have; mission accomplished. Now what?" As growers we know that to be fruitful and multiply can require serious thinning/pruning/division. I never thought of this verse as a directive to overshoot the system's capacity but rather an admonishment to appropriate stewardship. |
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