Like the illusion of Wall Street, with its vast and powerful investment banks, now shuttered, China too is an illusion perpetuated by the Globalists that gave us the 15,000 mile Caesar salad, poisoned cat food and lead based paint on babies' pacifiers. Like the illusion that money would come from thin air to always push housing prices higher, China has spent a generation pursuing its illusion. Pursuing an unattainable dream to be like the West, while 6000 years of its carefully shepherded top soil blows into the sea.
Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 1:53 am Post subject: Re: #500- Who else is headed for the Pacific Northwest?
mercurygirl wrote:
BW, I've been agreeing with you. I GOT it. I've read every word of this thread and thousands of others as well. I have eyes and a serviceable brain.
Sadly, I just wanted to lighten things up a bit, but it didn't go over well.
So what do we Cascadians do? What will you do? Personally, I'll continue to try to do better on many levels and look for a little joy here and there as well.
MG
I know what I will be doing.
If you don't already know what you'll be doing... then I think maybe there is a problem.
Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 3:49 am Post subject: Re: #500- Who else is headed for the Pacific Northwest?
Political correctness was deliberately conceived by the rockerfellers and others of their kind of ilk to facilitate the criminalization of independent thought: "thought crimes" . This has been admitted to in various personal conversations and autobiographies.
Now, The good thing about most people being sheople and not being aware of the world around them, is that they are not prepared for anything and don't know crap about how to survive. You only have to outsurvive the overpopulation for a couple of months at the most, once things like the power grid and "just in time" inventory logistics systems collapse. Remember the old saying: "I do not have to run faster than the bear, just faster than you."?
Hopefully, the (pacific northwest) environment will be able to make a recovery after the sheople die off and then the prepared can enjoy the place once again. This is my hope for the future. My biggest fear for the future is that the government will target and exterminate the prepared. On the other hand Mutant Zombie bikers don't scare me as I am well prepared for them.
Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 10:29 am Post subject: Re: #500- Who else is headed for the Pacific Northwest?
Ayoob wrote:
I know what I will be doing.
If you don't already know what you'll be doing... then I think maybe there is a problem.
Well, I'm working on what I'll be doing with the help of good people with good ideas like the ones here.
It was more of a rhetorical question...and I'm interested in what BW projects and would advise for our region. Dieoff, I guess.
Yes, you come off severe, but realistic. Just wondering about your practical ideas.
And I guess my question was a musing in the spirit of the first thing I said when my husband informed me that a killer hurricane was bearing down on New Orleans, "What will the poor people do?"
Sadly, I know the answer to that particular question now.
Joined: Oct 15, 2005 Posts: 1633 Location: Portland, Oregon
Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 10:32 am Post subject: Re: #500- Who else is headed for the Pacific Northwest?
Yes Cascadia has been despoiled by overlogging, excessive damming, too much fishing and excessive land development....but...it has the potential to be restored more easily than other regions. In other areas of the world, desertification makes it nearly impossible to restore the landscape and it will take millenia for things to turn around.
My hope is that Peak Oil and then Decline Oil will slow and then strangle the growth cancer movement that is destroying the planet. Less oil and nat. gas
less cars, roads, building projects, suburbs, factories, etc etc.
In just 1-200 years clear cut land could become old growth stands again. Logging roads will decay and be lost as there is no money/energy for keeping them up. Limited logging will continue but nowhere near the level of previous years. Breeched dams could lead to salmon recovery. Withering suburbs could become permaculture farms and small villages. In short, full ecological recovery could occur in this region.
Of course, its early in the morning and I'm in my naive, uber-optimistic "hooray for the future" mode. Give me a few hours and I'll be right back there with you Blistering Whippet. But come on, if there's nothing to hope for...
Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 5:46 pm Post subject: Re: #500- Who else is headed for the Pacific Northwest?
thuja wrote:
Yes Cascadia has been despoiled by overlogging, excessive damming, too much fishing and excessive land development....but...it has the potential to be restored more easily than other regions. In other areas of the world, desertification makes it nearly impossible to restore the landscape and it will take millenia for things to turn around.
To this I will only say that there are different perspectives on the reversal of desertification that say that it is practical. All it requires is conceptual change of mind. Right now the famine plauged, desert areas are dominated by a "helping" paradigm that rejects simple solutions for complex, dependence-forming models. There is no reason for the people that have always lived in these areas to flee, condemning the land to be a playground for biotech giants and corporate overseers to determine the best way to capitalize on its solar endowment in the service of creating commodity crops (or energy for export). Of course, this is exactly what industry would prefer. So the simple steps to engender self-sufficiency should not be expected as part of any official solution.
Quote:
My hope is that Peak Oil and then Decline Oil will slow and then strangle the growth cancer movement that is destroying the planet. Less oil and nat. gas
In short, full ecological recovery could occur in this region.
200 years is a long time. I hope so. I will allow for that.
Quote:
Of course, its early in the morning and I'm in my naive, uber-optimistic "hooray for the future" mode. Give me a few hours and I'll be right back there with you Blistering Whippet. But come on, if there's nothing to hope for...
I am not a hope merchant. I cannot tell you how far and wide I've looked for hope. There is no hope. Nihilism is objectionable to people who have to maintain a functional rationale for their lives. Don't ask how I manage, at the fringe, walking between the raindrops. I start the morning at gun-to-the-head suicide level and work my way up.
As for the PNW, and any plan I may have: I'm outta here. Vamoose. Secret destination. As for my suggestions on solutions to the problems: as far as I can tell in my research and experience, there is no solution. Biological imperative rules the day. Eat, crap, make babies and develop are the prime movers of humanity. Philosophy is a gloss on human nature.
If there were something I thought could turn it all around, the legend of Prometheus comes to mind. All we need is the secret to sustainability, brought to humanity from nature. But humanity has been cast against nature. We look for its secret after shooting the beast and examining its entrails. This was put it motion thousands of years ago and the concept is embedded in our language and thoughtways.
The general consensus among people sufficiently aware is the acknowledgement that, in order for culture to change, extreme pressure must be exerted.
This morning's Seattle PI cover story is about two women who firebombed the UW's research offices developing hybrid poplar species for commerical harvesting. How did these two "bright young women" turn to "violence"? The kind of conceptual leap these two women made must be simultaneously legitimized across the social strata in order for some kind of sea-change to happen. Otherwise, value systems remain entrenched, and activists will be persecuted, or more importantly, the social conscience will be unmoved by moral action outside the parameters of what they consider valid in terms of protest and revolt.
In a police state, with a citizenry incapable of reordering value systems, we are all but guaranteed a continual sacrifice of the environment at the alter of personal gain. Dieoff certainly resembles an easy solution, but for any wide-scale problem, its easy to imagine a galvanizing effect on the population. The child-parent meta-relationship of the corporate state to the citizen makes it apparent to me that what we will see it a strengthening of system as cultural edifice faces annihilation by nature.
Our civilization has no existential conflict as long as the consensus thought rules. With the cessation of consensus, expect the state to rewrite the rules to keep itself in power, like rewriting a play to keep themselves in the role of protector and provider. Human nature is fatally attracted to this relationship, so I don't expect dieoff to shake the dominant assumptions and philosophies that undergird its authorities.
Dieoff will create alternative heirarchies of thought and action, but those will be inevitably cast against the state entity. Piracy and gangsterism will be lumped in with eco-homesteaders and "the other". The conflict is always between the forces of light (order) and darkness (chaos or nature). Industry has had a 100+ year head start setting legal precedent into virtual stone, so I don't expect a sudden regression to a coda based on any other concept than extractive capitalism. Without capitalism, there is no civilization.
Retreat to an "enlightened" stone age is sustainable, but far removed from today. In between are successive stages of regression and reformation of civilization. In order for any of this to change rapidly requires a trauma just as likely to involve the total loss of the "enlightenment" half of the stone age question.
Clearly though, I think managability of the process is beyond reason. Managability is a fiction of a people obsessed with control. The mess already created is not solvable by the entities that created the problem, ironically, they will be the only players offering a solution. The citizenry of America is not composed of populist individualists, but corporate avatars. They will not come to learn any new mode of existence as long as the parent heirarchy is intact- They and "it" are the same thing. Imagine us flying in some Amazonian pygmies and giving them complete authority to tell us what to do and how to live sustainably.
As far as being severe and non-fun and incorrigibly caustic, it in many ways is just a matter of perspective. One of the major problems of moral or ethical consistency as I see it is the predispostion to rationalization that the majority seems to posess. Hand in hand with that comes a selective perspective. People are actively ignoring things which contradict their mythology. That mythology is clearly defined and explained in everyday media: That we are empowered, that we are in control of our lives, and that we are good or bad relative to our "productive" capacity, etc.
Without a standard of morality that emcompasses non-capital concepts of value, ethics and morality in the public discourse is fatally flawed. Cultural value judgements rendered without regard to a livable, sustainable future are a fraud, exposing the essential paradox of civilization itself: what claims to protect us exposes us to danger. Civilization's solutions create problems that only civilization can solve. A circularity resembling a vortex sliding down a drain, slowly at first, then ever faster. The only good news is that inevitably, civilization takes itself out. What consequences it has for those within the matrix of its influence doesn't look good.
Even now, agents of civilization, the Eagle bearing arrows, circles. There is a war of concepts still raging. The government is filled within and without with official and unofficial culture warriors. Fortress America is an inevitability and its physcial permanence will stand as a monument to the fall and slide of liberalism. Outside the gates, nature and chaos will roar. Inside, the population will be galvanized against a common enemy: nature and death against the life cult religions and human 'order'.
If technology continues to its apogee, I think that transformation of the independent citizen into the corporate individual will occur. Corporate control of government will trickle down and expand to include the entire constellation of molecules within official dominion. Liberalist individualism will become toothless and obsolete as ownership becomes a universal attribute of all things, including people. Definitions of virtue will be re-engineered to legitimize and create mythological rationalization to fit the new primary mode of citizenship. Already citizenship describes the relationship of an individual to the role of the state, more than it describes a set of individual benefits. You go to the consulate because you are property of the country in question, not because you are able to wield its power. Fealty perfected will be self-declared ownership in the similar way that one chooses Dem or Rep or who their favorite ball team is. New government will be a hydra of Insurance, corporate, and legal interests. Fundamentally, the state has always been an instrument of control and power. The mythology of America is that this monster can be controlled by its subjects.
As smallpoxgirl pointed out to me yesterday, American "Freedom" lasted only until government troops were sent to put down by force a contingent of simple farmers daring to assert control of the monster. American "freedom" lasted 10 years.
Today, true freedom exists only conceptually, in the present moment. Dominion remains powerful because it is only conceptual. It is everywhere, yet nowhere. We are only free where the roving eye cannot fix our position (Tolkein's metaphor is prescient). Obvisouly this is a problem the government works tirelessly to solve. Corporate power in ascendency aids and abets this effort (thanks Google). The individual can run and hide from its formless emanations, but its physical agents are everywhere. Corporeal or not, thought energy in the service of the state exists to consolidate its power, even in the embodied energy of language as it hums along neural pathways.
This is where, I think, the caustic impulse comes from. A hallmark of intelligence, I once read, is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at once. This internal battle of ideologies and value systems characterizes a critical experience of reality, and preempts a state of equinamity or mere happiness. Critical thought must allow for the imposition of severe value comparisons. One of the most effective mental tools of the modern cultural milieu is the banishment of hate.
"Hate" is bad, not allowed, maligned, an cast as destructive, corrosive, and unproductive, a mental weed. Yet the banishment of hate from the psychoemotional mindscape has resulted in a monomaniacal dominant mindset incapable of leveraging its legitamite power as motivational exercise. Thus, we cannot understand or counter it effectively as a country ("why do they hate us") just as we cannot counter our own self-destructive impulse to destroy nature through a doctrine free of legitamite value judgements. A mind that does not hate attempts change by compromising its values, inviting self-annihilation. The dominant culture eagerly co-opted the hippie message of universal love and used it to destroy that movement by sublimating the idea into a kind of universal Positivism.
I maintain we cannot sufficiently change anything until we have the appropriate level of hatred for it. Hate is a natural, organizing human emotional value judgement which gives love its meaning. Without hate, Love has become a tool for growth for its own sake, and every corporate excess. Any cost is bearable in the service of "love". Postivism abhors unofficial destruction. Hurricanes and Earthquakes are evidence of Nature's hate for us. The firebombing of the UW's hybrid poplar research facility is a hate crime against growth. Ecological or Environmental movement is pagan idolatry, creeping hatred wearing sheep's clothing.
Love for Positivists is a total lack of any negative. Semantic and value scale gymnastics reorder ethics and morality to remove negativity. For Positivism, anti-growth is hate. Hate must defeat Positivism in order to allow destruction. Destruction is necessary for creation, as any real artist knows. But this power is a threat to the state. Therefore, the thrust of state power has been to strip individuals of the physical and conceptual means of commanding it. We see this in a steady erosion of personal power and the ascendency of state and organizational power. Children are very well indoctrinated. The socialization process is engineered to create an individual who cannot threaten the state.
So there is very likely to not be any Che Guevaras emerging from the culture at large. Try to imagine a Che Guevara, or any American revolutionary allergic to using force. Modern liberalism is neutered by the impossiblity of fomenting change or revolt without hate. We love ourselves too much to lay down in front of a tank. The fantasy of the 60s is that a flower in a gun barrel is sufficient to stop the march of organizational culture. Protest has been hamstrung by idolization of people like Jesus and Ghandi. These are the perfect foils for a culture which seeks to annihilate opposition by absorption. The problem with anarchy is anarchy. It does not suggest an alternative heirarchy to beings who compulsively search for it. The conceptual leap for heirarchical man to anarchist would require a wholesale amputation of those instilled neural networks, working fulltime to filter experience.
Nature is a stand in for the existential problem of modern man. Nature is hate. It hates our bridges, roads, and buildings by eroding them. It hates us by destroying our bodies with age and atrophy. Postivism is the doctrine that we cannot live with nature as it is, and makes it out to be bogeyman and the state a protective parent. It infantilizes minds and creates a people who will constantly seek comfort and security. Humans do need comfort and security. We need to laugh, joke, and drink beers, stay warm, etc. But its clear the extent to which the drive toward these things has become counterproductive. The apparatus designed to meet these needs begins to fail. Positivism steps into the gap between responsibility and comfort and shortcircuits the basic instincts that still send faint signals through our minds, signals designed for no other purpose but to keep us going.
In order to be effective in collapse and great change, we have to be comfortable with concepts of change. If we want to create anything new, we have to be comfortable with destruction. We need to be able to hate in order to be decisive. We need to understand hate in order to recognize malefic Positivism, embodied in the professionalism of the guards in Gitmo, or those professors of growth. In short, we have to reexamine everything we took for granted and recast it with all the agents of value judgement at the table.
So to wrap up this ramble, I find it highly unlikely that massive sea-change will occur. If I were to take a guess as to what percentage of people are capable of this kind of conceptualization, I would say less than 1%. 90% of the population I would say is incapable of integrating these concepts simply because of entrenched thoughtways. Dedicated Positivists will suffer neuralgia by allowing specters of uncertainty to range freely within their mental headspace. The psychology of previous investment is a feature of Positivist thought. In Freudian terms, the ego is fortress for the superego. Such thoughts die at the gates. Set the phaser to 'ignore'.
The mass of humanity will walk backwards into the future, gaze fixed on the setting sun. Blown by the wind, rudderless, "in the hands of God", "come what may", "se la vie". Indulgent, active ignorance, a variety of hedonism, which is not totally without merit. But why come here for that? Compartmentalization of this impulse is one gift of this culture.
So I would suggest that some of the tenets of modern Positivism, especially in regard to intellectual life, are harmful. Positivism is inherent in the popular Internet dictum "all information wants to be free", which begs the question, "for whom?" "Secret" and "security" have the similar root meanings: Secret, from L. secretus "set apart, withdrawn, hidden," and L. securus "without care, safe," Without secrecy, security is in question. The operators of the underground railroad, for example, took the direct relationship between the two seriously. Why shouldn't we? My suggestion is to remain out of view of the roving eye for as long as possible. Camouflage and masquerade.
The UW firebombers made critical mistakes in taking secrecy seriously. We can all learn something from their example.
Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 7:14 pm Post subject: Re: #500- Who else is headed for the Pacific Northwest?
"I didn't say it would be easy. I just said it would be the truth." - Morpheus in The Matrix
Thank you BW, for the last hour of reading. I'm reminded of a book I recently read. It is hard to rein in the mind that's not trained, but I'll keep on trying.
I truly appreciate the time you took to lay all that out.
Joined: Oct 15, 2005 Posts: 1633 Location: Portland, Oregon
Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 10:53 pm Post subject: Re: #500- Who else is headed for the Pacific Northwest?
Bdub...ya gotta lay off the coffee man...it makes you write like Engels on speed. Turning into a rantaholic...
Good stuff though- positivism...the killing disease that infects our species.
I look at Al Gore's movie and I think of positivism...If only we all drove a Prius and turned off the lights when we went to bed. I think of of positivism when people discuss the Kyoto agreement as a solution to our problems. I see positivism when people talk about how biodiesel will solve our energy problems.
The whole notion is flawed...all of it. The two sisters who torched the genetically modified cloned seeds got it. The cancer is endemic and it needs to be cut out. Hate is an understandable emotion when it comes to a population asleep at the wheel, watching as the wheels fly off the train. Hate wakes people up...at least causes an emotional reaction. Unfortunately hate usually generates a backlash, and is unlikely to wake people up to the necessity of change. It makes people more entrenched.
Look at our response to 911- reactionary slash and burn kill em all melt sand response. Recently Kunstler wrote that the fanatical Muslim suicide movement is really nature's way of developing population control. Thinking of 911 jihadists as population control mechanisms is an interesting concept.
So burn it down, if you want...but the reaction will only be worse.
So let it crumble, and hope that it goes fast so the natural world can restore itself quickly and not be left in radioactive decay for millenia. But even millenia is a short time geologically.
So...let it be. Ages come and ages go. Life comes and then death. We're just riding around in circles. How we give and take and love and hate in our time alotted...that's what matters to me.
Last edited by thuja on Wed Oct 18, 2006 11:38 pm; edited 1 time in total
Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 11:21 pm Post subject: Re: #500- Who else is headed for the Pacific Northwest?
BlisteredWhippet's rant leaves me empty. I gave up with impatience. Mastery of words and ideas is complete but emotions empty, timeless, clinical, dead. I agree. It leaves me with nothing. What do I do? _________________ ree rah rip ram. sunofabitch godamn. hidey didey christ almighty. rah rah crap
Posted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 3:16 pm Post subject: Re: #500- Who else is headed for the Pacific Northwest?
pstarr wrote:
BlisteredWhippet's rant leaves me empty. I gave up with impatience. Mastery of words and ideas is complete but emotions empty, timeless, clinical, dead. I agree. It leaves me with nothing. What do I do?
I must apologize for the essay. After I left the computer, all day I thought back to what I wrote and cringed. I do need an editor.
The part about hate vs. love and all that... the point I was trying to make is simply this: that hate is a symptom of passion. For the masses, Positivism is a doctrine that neutralizes hate. Therefore, it neutralizes passion. Passion is the missing ingredient which denies any kind of deconstructive change (which predicates truly "constructive" change.
For example, the Seattle PI recently ran a weeklong series examining the impact of pollution (growth) on the Puget Sound ecology, highlighting the plight of the resident large mammal (Orca) pods. The picture could not have been more dire. Systematically the series proved that the infrastructure designed for our modern existence is destroying the Sound's ecosystem. It detailed the decades of rampant exploitation (where Orcas were simply hunted and netted and sold to aquariums for profit or to private individuals seeking to make a sidewhow out of them) and the more recent decades of 'official' attempts to mitigate damage (which were diluted, the programs eviscerated by budget cuts.)
The spectacle of problem and presentation never seems to arc into sustainable solution. The public seems unable to mashal any power to solve or mitigate problems. The nature of the Orca problem is a perfect example of the obstacles to change, because the causes are embodied in the civic structure itself- storm drains, surface streets, a million people flushing ejecta into the sound. As if on cue, this week's news of three missing Orcas from the pod, starving for lack of salmon, overloaded with toxic chemicals, underlined the severity of the problem.
My theory is simply that in order for a balance to be restored, a massive reversal must take place. The ingredients missing from the equation is not indignation or love for Orcas, these exist. What doesn't exist is the hatred for that which destroys what we love, and the willingness to destroy for the sake of it. When we don't hate enough to be willing to destroy in order to protect what we love, we are doomed to powerlessness. We cannot create anything without destroying first.
A people that cannot defend, protect, or destroy, inevitably destroys what they love. So the example of the firebombers is a good one, I think, regardless of what you think of their object or motive. The action includes the correct ingredients for active change: passion to act, willingness to destroy.
The state of mind for the majority I would characterize as self-abdication, clearly inspired by the dominant religious ethos of Christianity, with its clear exalting of eternal victimhood. Turning the other cheek never serves to solve or address real-world problems, it only validates our passage into an afterworld.
This is why I have no hope for change in the now, from a population heavily invested in a value system clearly designed to eunichize personal will. This pseudo-love is a toxic blight, a modern disease of the mind. We cannot successfully cope with multiple, parallel, cascading problems. The media focuses public attention on problems serially. The society dies by a million little pinpricks.
The social organ whose purpose is to sheperd us through the vicissitudes of life, government, has been completely and utterly comprimised. Passion is a public problem, official opposition codified in laws preventing vigilantism, so-called "crimes of passion". Aggravation is only legitimized if carried out by elephantine bureacracy.
Solutions? If Homeland security was an extra-judicial branch created because existing bureacracies were unable to effectively address problems, then similar bodies are the obvious alternative. But the bodies created to address the Orca problem in the 80s suffered the lack of public involvement and the cancer of being attached to a larger bureacracy that is infested with the basic malignant tendencies I already discussed. Effective corporate government will not suffer the existence of flagrantly non-capitalist appendages for long. Like warts they are gradually burned off.
Lasting legitamacy to such an appendage must therefore be annually justified by budget considerations. Existential considerations of protection laws must be economic in nature, which is anathema to passion. Salmon farmers win over salmon lovers. Love has no value, no currency. Sentiment is not a line item in a spreadsheet. For advocacy groups, action and passion become atrophy and apathy, on a path that infers that the only effective social body resembles a corporation. Advocacy groups resemble corporations which resemble governments. They grow and bloat to include CEOs, accountants, and lawyers. Soon all the appendages of bureacracy appear. Passion is subsumed in this process.
Without a direct relationship to life, people are rendered powerless and unable to escape the consequences of lifeforce diluted. Passion becomes psychosis and mental illness. We resemble more and more gerbils. Examine the artifacts: treadmills, bottled water, wood chips on the front lawn.
The relationship to nature disappears, and everything else is sucked out with it, replaced by synthetic objects without visceral power. Without a primal, vital experience of nature, I don't think you can form or inform a meaningful value system that supports or respects a concept like sustainability. Modern society self-organizes to protect itself and its constituency. So I think the urge to preservere in the collapse will manifest in the effort to remediate the natural order. But by the time we do that, it will no longer be "nature", as Bill McKibben argues in "The End of Nature".
The difference between remediating Puget Sound so we can continue to spew sewage into it and pull salmon out of it and doing it because we "love" Orcas are vastly different. The latter requires that we sufficiently hate the causes in order to destroy them, and I see no way conventional authority would allow this. They rightly fear and recognize that what would start with storm drains and leaky automobile engines would end with dam removal, economic debasement, and dismantling of the entire power structure.
As for what to do, I don't know. I write stuff like this. I think you should align yourself with the principles you hold to be important. "To thine own self be true" and all that.
If you are depressed, modern society has a variety of drugs to keep you happy spinning the treadmill. As far as suffering goes, it is and always has been the human condition. Take a look at the kind of lives lead by Scottish Highlanders in the 14th century (I watched Braveheart last night). Walk around all day and night, in the rain, in a woolen smock, with a straw and mud hut your only refuge. Impossible depravity, according to modern standards. Yet, suffering and death was encapsulated in a value system that made it bearable. Normalcy and comfort is a transitory illusion of modernity. Suffering is alleviated by perspective. Pain is a mental phenomenon first and foremost. Sounds pretty uncomfortable, but that is the real, visceral truth behind PO and ecological collapse.
The most frightening thing to me is the degree to which even basic needs become compromised by ecological problems like pollution and overpopulation. Clean water, food, and shelter are increasingly commodified. This culture creates value by creating a condition of rarity- food, water, shelter. It ensures its existence by providing the solutions.
I don't know enough to say what must be done except to expect sacrifice as a condition of moral and ethical consistency. The examination of such concepts should be explored through broader concepts of existence and meaning. It would probably be helpful to completely throw out Judeo-Christianity as the building block of personal morality. Pagan pre-industrialist cultures provide inspiration for contrarian value systems. A development of personal mythology provides tools in which to conceptualize new forms of meaning, especially when connected to nature, which I believe is indispensible. The mind lends itself to incorporating the self-image in interconnecting heirarchies. What beliefs have you aligned yourself with? In the absence of other forms of experience, I think it is valuable to study or somehow connect to the natural world in terms of modern science. Practical knowledge of botanical and animal kingdoms is important. What is wild, what is invasive. How to read the weather. How to make shelter. How to hunt.
There is plenty of good things, necessary things to do which should inspire new ideas. Trying to reform or fix the problem of growth or government or culture is also valid, too.
Joined: Oct 04, 2004 Posts: 5709 Location: Body in OK, Heart in TX
Posted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 3:22 pm Post subject: Re: #500- Who else is headed for the Pacific Northwest?
BlisteredWhippet wrote:
What doesn't exist is the hatred for that which destroys what we love, and the willingness to destroy for the sake of it. When we don't hate enough to be willing to destroy in order to protect what we love, we are doomed to powerlessness. We cannot create anything without destroying first.
Have you read Endgame yet? Or wait, did you write it? _________________ "Every junkie's like a setting sun..." - Neil Young
Posted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 3:57 pm Post subject: Re: #500- Who else is headed for the Pacific Northwest?
thuja wrote:
Bdub...ya gotta lay off the coffee man...it makes you write like Engels on speed. Turning into a rantaholic...
Good stuff though- positivism...the killing disease that infects our species.
I look at Al Gore's movie and I think of positivism...If only we all drove a Prius and turned off the lights when we went to bed. I think of of positivism when people discuss the Kyoto agreement as a solution to our problems. I see positivism when people talk about how biodiesel will solve our energy problems.
The whole notion is flawed...all of it. The two sisters who torched the genetically modified cloned seeds got it. The cancer is endemic and it needs to be cut out. Hate is an understandable emotion when it comes to a population asleep at the wheel, watching as the wheels fly off the train. Hate wakes people up...at least causes an emotional reaction. Unfortunately hate usually generates a backlash, and is unlikely to wake people up to the necessity of change. It makes people more entrenched.
Look at our response to 911- reactionary slash and burn kill em all melt sand response. Recently Kunstler wrote that the fanatical Muslim suicide movement is really nature's way of developing population control. Thinking of 911 jihadists as population control mechanisms is an interesting concept.
So burn it down, if you want...but the reaction will only be worse.
But how could it be worse? The rationale requires the existence of an invisible consequence. We think and imagine it being worse, but maybe its just the stick that keeps us marching toward the carrot?
As far as Iraq goes, or even Afghanistan, I would suggest it is our incomplete relationship with hate and destruction that results in cascading negatives, not the acts in the first place. An artist deconstructs in order to create. The legacy of 9/11 response is a symphony of destruction by people who believed in it for its own sake. The end of WWII was different, by contrast, there was a plan for rebuilding civic infrastructure that respected the local culture. This was massively engineered, planned from the outset. Every war since engaged by the superpower shows evidence of a disconnect from the concept of destruction as prolouge to creation. Clearly the emphasis on destruction to the detriment of creation is evident in the failures of all the major conflicts since Korea. Bushco had no rebuilding plan, and cannot be bothered to come up with anything now, not even a coherent "exit" plan.
I think we can't create anything because we don't have any experience doing it. Perhaps the experience of rebuilding society after the great depression was the impetus for reconstruction. Burning it down isn't the problem, building it up better is. Iraq was a shithole from day one, ruled by transcendent religion and craven thuggery. Today, those forces still rule. So not even destruction was complete. People say it is only "creating" new terrorists. True.
By contrast, at the end of WWII, the population was de-armed. Civil engineers from all strata of society flooded into the country. In Iraq, we simply destroyed and expected them to rebuild by themselves. Impossible fantasy considering their brutal repression for decades. No living memory of a coherent social existence meant they were incapable of going about it alone. Also there was and is no recognition of the cultural history of the area. The effort was explicitly executed for the primary rationale of preserving a colonial-era non-physical political boundary. Bizarre and stupid.
As far as opposition to official modes of destruction, the countermovement is totally handicapped by Positivism, inherent in the rationalizations and contradictory sentiment of simultaneously being anti-war yet supporting the troops. We want to have it all, industry AND salmon. Peace AND troops. Its nonsensical. Hippies embraced love and hate by hating the war and spitting on GIs. Unpleasant but consistent. There is no passion in the toothless antiwar movement, filled with ranks of postfeminist namby-pamby SUV environmentalists.
Quote:
So let it crumble, and hope that it goes fast so the natural world can restore itself quickly and not be left in radioactive decay for millenia. But even millenia is a short time geologically.
So...let it be. Ages come and ages go. Life comes and then death. We're just riding around in circles. How we give and take and love and hate in our time alotted...that's what matters to me.
I think thats a good place to be. The short and long view in consideration.
Posted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 6:07 pm Post subject: Re: #500- Who else is headed for the Pacific Northwest?
Ayoob wrote:
You hippies need to eat your bacon and eggs and do pushups and stop writing this crap.
Dude, you are so not going to survive in Bellingham. All the hippies are going to tie you up in hemp and make you sniff patchouli until you crack. _________________ "So while you sit and whistle Dixie with your money and your power.
I can hear the flowers a-growin in the rubble of the towers.
I hear leaders quit their lying
I hear babies quit their crying.
I hear soldiers quit their dying, one and all." - OCMS
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ree rah rip ram. sunofabitch godamn. hidey didey christ almighty. rah rah crap 
Dude, you are so not going to survive in Bellingham. All the hippies are going to tie you up in hemp and make you sniff patchouli until you crack. 
