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Merrick 2148 posts |
Oct 20, 2003, 16:09
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You're right about the lack of vicious name-calling, but insults don't have to be of the 'commie fag' variety to have effect. One of the great things about HH is the way people of differing opinions will engage intelligently with one another. People even change their minds and climb down readily. Most message boards are simply arenas for chest beating and as such don't help anyone. To let that sort of thing go on actively discourages people who may have good points but don't like being insulted. It's really important that we preserve the strong repsect here on HH, and that means pulling people up if they get aggressive or insulting. We've lost good people from HH for precisely that reason, and it's important to me that we don't lose any more, so in picking people up on it I'm not getting my knickers in a twist so much as preserving the good space and showing others that it is safe to express their ideas sensibly without fear of aggressive derision. Duckbreath certainly did use insulting terms. To respond to someone's measured post by saying that the ideas 'aren't borne out of political philosophy, history or psychological sociology but a mixture of cynicism and 'revolutionary chic' ' is straightforwardly insulting. The reference to 'pseudo political philosphers' is also clearly a sideswipe. However, our venerable Duck quickly and graciously apologised for any insult caused and went back to intelligent discussion, so I didn't see any point in picking over exactly what was insulting and why.
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morfe 2992 posts |
Oct 20, 2003, 16:27
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"how will you prevent consenting adults from establishing a power relationship between each other - ie. 'i will let you order me about if you give me this benefit'?" Oh that should be encouraged! And I'd pay to watch ;-)
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Merrick 2148 posts |
Oct 20, 2003, 20:45
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How to answer this with a 4000 character limit instead of several long nights of discussion.... Mass societies necessarily mean industrialisation. Industrialisation necessarily means unsustainable consumption and a direct attack on the planetary ecosystem. The only solution is a relocalisation of humanity. This will be partly forced upon us as resources run out. An imminent example will be the oil crash. No credible voice is saying that we have any more than 20 years until demand outstrips supply with oil; many believable sources think it will be a lot sooner. Either way, we're talking in our lifetimes. When that happens, the price rockets, and we not only lose the car culture, but we have to confront the other oil issues; transport and trade networks, raw materials for plastics and, most frighteningly, the nitrate fertilisers that have given such bumper food production and encouraged the population explosion. The resulting starvation of millions is as nothing compared to what happens when climate change really takes hold. I know that most cultures have doomsday stories involving high temperature. But usually they demand faith in some gods or the writings of the monks on psychedelics who wrote the Book of Revelations. We, however, are depending on people like the UN Panel on Climate Change and the Meteorological Office, who aren't known for mad or exaggerative wild claims. The UN say that we can expect a global increase of up to 6 degrees by 2100. Last time such swift heating happened cos of CO2, it killed 90 percent of species; the earth was utterly incapable of supporting anything like humans for tens of millions of years. Put bluntly, for humans to survive, the forests of the earth have to stay up. For that to happen, the factories and human population levels have to come down. People have to live less technologically and more locally and directly. How do we achieve this? I have no Master Plan. Solutions that are to involve and engage everyone have to be visioned and enacted by everyone. It is this first process of awareness and engagement that I'm dedicated to, rather than merely asking people to sign up to something that they didn't have a hand in creating. What I'm talking about is something beyond politics and revolution, its a transcendence of mass culture. It's totally pie in the sky and ludicrous to talk about it as credible. But it is nowhere near as ludicrous as believing that industrialised society can continue, that it will somehow find eternal resources and not poison itself and most other species too. The political parties vying for our support are merely arguing over who gets to drive the bus. Once we are aware that the bus is heading to the edge of a cliff at an ever increasing speed, the only job is to stop anybody driving it. So this does mean a lot of stuff that looks 'anti', but I see it as removing our obstacles, as pointing us in a better direction. Cos wherever our solutions are, they are not in greater fossil fuel consumption, they are not in GM crops, they are not in militarism and centralised power politics. So I fight these things as a way of curbing the worst and most accessible of the manifestations of the destructiveness of our culture. As well as the 'anti' I also work on things like squatted social centres, where we take abandoned buildings and put on cafes, gigs, meetings, films and stuff for free. It not only makes a startling change to the buy-buy-buyness of my city, but it encourages participation. Punters are not just 'consumers'. And whenever we work so totally on something and in groups of this size something deeply and primally feels right, the world feels a better fit. They are small things, but they give a clue to where to go, and they make us less likely to be taken in by the consumerist poison that is, literally, killing us. Like I said, a 4000 character limit ain't the thing for this stuff. But I'll gladly expand if there's any points that you want me to expand on.
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duckbreath 254 posts |
Oct 21, 2003, 12:24
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It's convincing argument. I think when you are talking about ecological disaster of this scale it almost makes philosophysing about rights, freedom, politics etc a waste of time. People need to know the effects of their consumption in these terms definitely. I guess we will end up disagreeing about this but I still find it hard to accept the necessary connection between representative government and corruption. To me it seems we can educate people to elect leaders who have these concerns in mind. There are good people across the whole political spectrum who bitterly oppose market capitalist intervention in the political system - a growing number. It is pointless (and immoral?) as I see it to try and make any changes that will take rights away from people - the rights to form self-interest societies, the right to sell things to each other, the right to form consensusal power relationships between each other, the right to consensually uneven the distribution of wealth - and if you are going to honour these rights you have to work out a system where conflicting rights can live side by side in a geographical landscape. This is what Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Locke, Burke & Marx were all trying to do. All of them (including Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume & Burke the conservative ones) would have seen the disaster of globalisation and this kind of tyrannical international capitalism. Intuitively I think the answer would lie much more based around a new version of the heritage we have built up of honest, impartial rights based political thinking rather than recommending we throw it all away for something you agree is not more than a group of intuitions and feelings. We have as a society to honour people's individual rights - I don't see how we can get away from this.
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Merrick 2148 posts |
Oct 22, 2003, 17:28
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>blame your fellow constituents for not seeing >through her hollow character It seems a tad harsh to put the blame for lies on those who heard the lies rather than those who told them. And this principle ignores details like the fact that most people don't vote for their MP. How we mocked the US Presidential system for letting the loser take office, even though that's what the UK parliament does for the overhwleming majority of seats. Even Ken Livingstone's landslide victory as London Mayor - so obvious that bookies stopped taking bets on him - was the result of 13% of the electorate voting for him. If your MP 'never follows his party's line and says everything he does is for his constituents' then he too is a liar. He is lying by working to support a party whose aims and principles he opposes. He is also lying when he says everything's for the constituents. By being an MP you are part of the party muscle, you are part of the force with which their policies can be set forth. Many of these are nothing to do with the constituents. The problem is that power attracts the power-hungry and it repels those who do not want to be involved in point-scoring and backbiting. As Lenny Bruce said, the only person fit to be President would be someone who'd never do it, someone you'd have to drag screaming into the White House and lock the door.
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Merrick 2148 posts |
Oct 22, 2003, 17:50
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>suspect that is why there is on here an interest in >prehistoric culture - cause all we can see is their >passion and enthusiasm - we won't ever be in a >position to judge their specific beliefs or morality - >it's a vague kind of spirituality and non->threatening morally - won't ever tell us what to do I can't speak for anyone else, but that's not why I'm interested in prehistory. The major part of it for me is that it is so recent and yet so gone. We can go to the same places and touch the stones they put in place, but the whole fascination is that I have no clear idea what it was about. It reminds me of the temporaryness of cultures. The centre of Leeds is City Square. The conurbation stretches off for miles in every direction. At the edge of City Square is a blue plaque marking the place where the West Bar once sttod, the marker for the boundary of the city until about 200 years ago. The plaque tells us that there, in the exact centre of the city, was the edge until very recently, that scarcely a building could be seen west of there before 1780. It is only in the last decade that humans have become mostly city dwellers. Like those facts, the ancient sites show that things have only recently become this way. And that's a reminder that they won't be this way for long. I don't see the neolithic site builders as having 'got it right' or being some lost golden age. They were fuckers like us who had to remould the world to fit their whims and beliefs. They were the first proper environmentally damaging humans, the first neurotics. there's truth in what you say insofaras their belief systems were necessarily more elemental and earth-based, which is a better basis for spirituality than our belief in technology and consumption, and they weren't on a path that will wipe out up to a third of species on earth within a century just because they loved shiny toys and cosmetics and seven types of lettuce all year round. But that's not the same as thinking it was necessarily all great for them.
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