sinnycool
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“Humans may owe their place as Earth’s dominating species to their ability to share and cooperate with each other”
That’s just fine at the tribal level but at the global level it would be easier to argue that humans more likely owe their survival to uncooperative diversity.
That is our ‘dispersal mechanism’ that causes us to be driven – not by the force of arms or pressure of competition for resources but because of our inability to cooperate and our ideological differences (for want of a better word) – to even the toughest places on earth to survive where we form specialised subsets of humanity.
The size of these subsets ranges from big, eg. Australian aboriginals or Eskimo people amazingly adapted to their environments, to the really tiny…
The most profound example for me is the Heaven’s Gate sect. Outwardly normal yet conceiving that the earth was to be destroyed and they were to be saved by an interstellar space craft following the Hale-Bopp comet, they willingly killed themselves in order to pass up to the space craft.
The point being: no matter what catastrophe has befallen our planet, somewhere there is a group of humans ready, prepared, willing, adapted and best suited to survive it.
That’s what we’ve evolved to and how we’ve dodge famines and pestilence and wars and meteors and climate change – that is our inheritance and that is what causes us to quarrel and hold irrational beliefs whether we call it wokesterism or trumpianism it’s true name is DIVERSITY.
Ironically that’s also why our civilisation won’t survive our current global predicament – we are incapable of cooperating at that level. So the vast majority, as always, will perish, but living somewhere right now are those whose descendants will be equipped in unknowable ways to survive the next bottle neck.
Just as in 1945 at the end of a world war and the planet lay in ruins, who would have conceived that the first man who would walk on the moon was already a fifteen year old boy.
Well, we know that the energy animals need to acquire to live is derived from a food chain that goes all the way back to plants and photo synthesis, so even plants need the sun’s external energy.
All our evolutionary and social transit has been a scramble to maximise energy for ourselves as individuals, then on through our DNA relatives, as per Dawkins ‘The Selfish Gene’.
Along the way fire and cooked food took as past the point where we no longer have the ability to chew or digest what we once did and then coal and oil etc put us on a parabolic trajectory of unsustainablity.
And it’s not just energy is it, we can’t live in our own waste products be they carbon dioxide or plastic, regardless of rate of depletion of soil water minerals insects plants and fish.
Too. Many. People.
So what’s the endgame? As if I ever needed to ask. The Automatic Earth and others spelled it out long ago. Yeast in a sugar solution and the reindeers of St. Matthew Island.
The only excitingly unknown bits are how we get there and how long it takes, whether via the seemingly irreversible catabolic collapse of Mr Greer or the 5 stop escalator of Mr Orlov. At least his escalator was capable of stopping at any given floor and going back up.
What are the chances of that I wonder? My guess is somewhere between Buckley’s and 30:30,:30 where one of the 30s represents a deliverance by God, another a deliverance by benign interstellar beings and the last 30 by a change of mind of the big kid who’s computer game we live in.
Forgive the intrusion on the above, Ilargi, I will make amends.
It’s just that it seems to me, finally, Trump has personally and directly committed a clear cut almost universally acknowledged impeachable offence, something capable of being seen from almost every viewpoint as a “high crime or misdemeanor”.
“We should be able to take some also, and what I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an ExxonMobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly”
Amongst other tweets and statements.
Surely they have him on toast.
One suspects the Democrat controlled Star Chamber impeachment process will pass up on that wonderful gift to remove him from office in exactly the same way and for the same reasons they ignore Biden’s activities in Ukraine.
@ Ilargi “A lost people. A lost country. Nothing there.”
Hang on Ilargi,
We poor buggers down here in Oz suffer under the yoke of our bloody politicians just the same as the US and the UK and France and Hong Kong … and the rest of the world. That’s the way it’s all going, isn’t it.
It’s not just this bloke who’s utterly ashamed at our treatment of Assange, crapped off mightily for being done over by Adarni via bastard political connivance, dismayed and pissed right off at the attacks of the pricks on the ABC, our national broadcaster and on and on and on!
Everyone on the planet bar the top percenters is being pushed and shoved down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in poor and rich countries.
Morality, lack of prejudice, problem solving are on the top level and get increasingly discounted in the zero sum struggle for a House and Jobs n Growth. It’s a driver of intolerance towards immigrants, lack of care for things green and towards junk food.
We know you know all that, so fair suck of the sav!
Your old mate, Bruce.
Hi Ilargi while it might appear that “abetting” is a new charge it’s more than likely not. Here is a quote from the “Criminal Code Act 1924” in Tasmania which I’m sure would be typical of similar Acts world wide in relation to parties to a crime:
3. Which parties to crimes to be deemed principals in the first degree
(1) Where a crime is committed, each of the following persons is deemed to be a party to, and to be guilty of, the crime, and may be charged with actually committing it:
(a) every person who actually commits the crime;
(b) every person who does any act or makes any omission for the purpose of enabling or aiding another person to commit the crime;
(c) every person who abets another person in committing the crime;
(d) every person who instigates any other person to commit the crime.
(2) Any person who instigates another to do any act or make any omission of such a nature that, if he had himself done the act or made the omission, the act or omission would have constituted a crime on his part, is guilty of the same crime as if he had himself done the act or made the omission; and may be charged with himself committing that crime.HTH.
BTW seems to me that the UK will try to avoid sending Assange to the US and send him to Sweden instead so as to get around the extradition argument that he’s being extradited for a crime to which capital punishment applies. Let the Swedes do that. After the rape of course.
I wondered what distraction the deep statists in the US would dream up to distract everyone from the failure of Russiagate and help sell more “news”, now we know.
Ilargi, you do it very well please do not have the slightest doubt. Sometimes we don’t know how you mange to hold out in the face of the emotional tides that swirl around us all and make it so hard to push against their currents.
You have the singular ability not just to see clearly and articulate what you see beautifully and succinctly but most importantly – you do not bend with the remover to remove.
🙂
BTW, it’s a lovely day in Tasmania.
Best hopes, P.
Late to the party I know, Ilargi.
“Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”…
“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”~ T.S.Eliot, Burnt Norton
ref. https://www.davidgorman.com/4Quartets/1-norton.htm
===
It’s not just other cultures is it, we can be proud too.
And yes, for us, there is only the dance. Take your partners, please.
🙂
Best regards,
Phil
PS
Omar:
“One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste,
One moment, of the Well of Life to taste–
The Stars are setting, and the Caravan
Starts for the dawn of Nothing–Oh, make haste!”Willie:
“What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter.
Present mirth hath present laughter.
What’s to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty.
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty.
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.”@ V. Arnold
“The problem is, of course, that not only is economics bankrupt but it has always been nothing more than politics in disguise … economics is a form of brain damage.”
~ Hazel Henderson
I think she might have got in before David 🙂
“For when truth enters into a fight with the lies of millennia, we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of. The concept of politics will have merged entirely with a war of spirits; all power structures of the old society will have been exploded-all of them are based on lies: there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth.”
~ NietzscheIlargi, do you ever feel like Bertrand Russell or Aldous Huxley?
“Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate”
~ Bertrand Russell
“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse.
And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”~ Aldous Huxley (from his final book ‘Island’, 1962)
Only a very minor point … leeches are used in contemporary medicine 🙂
“Australia’s leech industry, in comparison, is a backyard business. Brian and Carol Woodbridge began farming R. australis in Echuca, Victoria, 15 years ago, and now supply up to 5000 leeches a year to hospitals in WA, SA, Victoria and NSW – including Katie Laing’s stash in Liverpool Hospital. Brian says the demand is growing as word spreads. “If a doctor or a hospital doesn’t use leeches, it’s generally ignorance rather than dislike,” he says. “As doctors rotate around hospitals, they introduce others to leech therapy. I find if I make one sale to a new hospital I’ll generally make more.””
