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Dog 3000
Dog 3000
4611 posts

Re: Progress
Sep 22, 2003, 20:15
"We have the capability to destroy the world. This was impossible 200 yrs ago. This to me represents the very living embodiment of human failure and antithesis of progress and negates everything else."

We have the capability to migrate off this world. It is starting to be possible today, and should be feasible in 200 yrs.

Which doesn't mean we will either destory the world or leave it. These are only "possibilities" and as such don't negate anything. What matters is real events on the ground. Of course that's a mixed picture of what we might agree to call "successes and failures."

We invented nuke bombs and also small pox vaccines -- so far the lives saved from the latter greatly outnumber lives lost from the former.

Sez you:
"As for being blameless, that's an inpossibility, every cause has an effect, the best most of us can do is only promote the good causes. But when you've got one person thinking a good cause is buying more weapons and keeping their thirst at bay with a soft drink manufacturer that sponsors violence, and another thinking a good cause is growing vegetables in the ground and drinking homemade lemonade, then what?"

Comment on the first part: every cause was an effect of some previous cause, and every effect will cause more effects in the future. Every cause/effect implies there were other causes & effects that could have happened but didn't. In the end we've got a history that "is what it is" (which is why I don't go for the "blame game" -- so-and-so slaughtered such-and-such, so it is OK for such's to "hate" so's . . . )

And the present is where we live, and it's the future we can effect.

Anyway! Back to the point -- yes, given the choice some people will live on the farm and drink organic carrot juice, others would live in the city and drink Coca-Cola. I say: fine, live and let live.

If the city-living-coke-drinker lifestyle is non-sustainable, Mama Nature will take care of that problem. Or people will "wake up" and stop drinking coke before it's too late. Everyone who practices and advocates organic-juice-drinking in an effective and convincing manner would be part of the solution (if coke-drinking really is "the problem.") People vote in elections and referendums that would enact laws balancing the needs and rights of coke vs. organic juice drinkers (metaphors for our old pals "X vs. Y")

I like that method of handling the problem better than "let's smash the system!!!!" or "lock up the coke drinkers" or "make coke illegal" etc. -- those "solutions" just seem to me like the causes of more negative effects in the future.

Of course this is a "market" solution -- let the memes battle it out for hearts & minds. I trust humanity to get it more right than wrong in the long run -- we've done OK so far.
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