On Sat, 10 Jul 1999, Brad McCormick wrote:
> I am generally as suspicious of "virtue" as I am of vice.
This is basically a wise attitude, but it shouldn't turn into paranoia. ;-)
> The self-styled "simple living"
> movement is one of those things of
> which I am a priori suspicious. I
> certainly would not deny that there are
> probably some persons who live
> under that banner who are genuinely
> decent (etc.). But as far as
> the movement as a whole is concerned,
> I would like to see how well
> these simple livers would like to
> live in a world in which there
> was only their own kind, and no
> high technology system to
> covertly help them live out their ideas.
There are surely many shades/facets/flavors/etc. of "simple living", but
I'm not sure what your point is here. The basic idea of s.l. seems to be
to minimize unnecessary/harmful consumption of resources, and I wonder
what should be wrong with that. Maybe you are confusing two things:
(a) choosing a lifestyle/ideology for oneself, vs.
(b) forcing a lifestyle/ideology onto others.
> Gandhi is one good exmple here: As a
> lawyer, he had the freedom to live rich or
> poor or whatever. He *chose* "voluntary simplicity":
> and he also chose it for his family, who
> *did not* like it.
If the other family members didn't like it, then it wasn't _voluntary_
simplicity (for them) -- so how can this be an argument against voluntary
simplicity ?
> In the "simple life" -- the world of the
> peasants who lynched Martin Guerre,
> and whose besotted bodies litter
> Breughel's paintings (my
> prejudices are showing, n'est pas?) --
> there is no "high culture",
> no rigorous science
Aren't you confusing "simple life" with "simple minds" ? Or in other words:
Confusing material simplicity with mental simplicity ? I think the goal of
most "simple lifers" is the former, and quite the contrary of the latter:
The goal is to get rid of all that mindless material consumerism, in order
to have more time and "muse" to *think* and to grow in a non-material way.
> We know that some of the simple livers
> believe that of all the
> species on earth, it is OK for lions to eat
> gazelles, and for orcas to eat
> penguins, etc. --> but it is not
> OK for humans to -- exist.
Have you personally met such a person, or is this a prejudice from the NYT ?
(or are you just confusing "the right to exist" with "the right to overconsume
and to trash the planet, i.e. to deny other creatures the right to exist" ?)
> I once read that one of the
> reasons that vegetarians do not suffer
> from nutritional deficiencies
> is because of the minute bits of
> meat: dead insect parts, which
> they unwittingly eat in their vegetables.
I'm sorry, but this claim is nonsense. (Read from the same source ? ;-})
While there is _no_ essential nutrient that is _absent_ in a balanced
vegetarian diet, there are some nutrients that are under-represented in
some vegetarian diets (e.g. iron, calcium, sulfur amino acids, fats), but
the lacking amounts of these nutrients can most certainly _not_ be provided
by "minute bits of dead insects"! The source of this claim may have been
alluding to cobalamin, which is the only essential nutrient that is absent
in a vegan (=a subset of vegetarians) diet, and which can actually be found
in dirt on vegetables (which also contains "dead insect parts"), but even
in this case, it is questionable whether the amounts from that source would
be sufficient to avoid a deficiency. Considering the pathogens that may also
be present in that dirt, it's also a very unadviseable source of cobalamin.
Recommendable vegan sources of cobalamin are nutritional yeast, fortified
cereals and soy milk, or OTC supplements.
Greetings,
Chris
> Sorry, but this kind of stuff is
> one of my "pet peeves".
