Hi Robert >On 5/15/2011 1:41 PM, Keith Addison wrote: > >(My remark concerning your optimism) > >> That's not quite the full picture Robert. This is a cyclical >> discussion here, and am I right in thinking that the cycle is >> speeding up? > > I'm not sure. The Biofuels list doesn't seem as active as it has >been in the past. Is that true, or just my perception?
No, it's true. It's not self-sustaining, it seems to depend on my input. I'm rather sad about that. > > Anyway, you usually say I'm more optimistic than you are, as if that >> explains it. Actually, it's been accepted here before that there's no >> contradiction between optimism and realism. So what do you really >> mean when you say I'm "optimistic"? Maybe I'd call it "realistic". If >> you take a good look at previous discussions I think you can see why. >> In fact it's not a matter of opinion, there's an ever-growing >> preponderence of scientific evidence to support it. (Though Joe went >> into denial over that a few months back.) Now, wouldn't it then be >> more rational to attribute your view of things to simple pessimism? >> Eg. "Robert is far more pessimistic about human nature than I am." Hm? > > Ok. I'll concede that I'm more pessimistic about humanity. We >could argue that you'd remain more "optimistic" in contrast, but that's >really not the point of this discussion. Is our intelligence >responsible for the environmental mess we're in? No. You might see such things as scientific / chemical / engineering progress as a product of intelligence, but before you ascribe their share of the environmental mess to human intelligence, you should check to see who was paying the piper. >If the scale of human >activity has pushed us to a breaking point, It hasn't. It's not human activity that's pushing the whole biosphere to breaking point. See what I was saying about eco-footprints, below. >I don't see that brainpower >necessarily equates to a "lethal mutation." Those who survive whatever >fate awaits us will be those who can adapt most readily, and without >intelligence, it's hard to imagine how that can happen. Indeed so. > > Also, I often have to insist on a clear distinction between human >> behaviour and the behaviour of not-human "persons", but then the >> waters get muddied again and soon enough the dire consequences of one >> type of behaviour are being attributed to the basic innate rottenness >> of the other type of person, or "person", I'll leave you to decide >> which is which. > > The trouble is, that definition can become rather arbitrary. I don't think so. >When >I discuss the support for the current social and economic system, I >refer to flesh and blood human beings within my family, my circle of >school mates and fellow countrymen. I hear their points of view on a >daily basis. It's hard for me to categorize those people as "non-human" >just because their perspective differs from mine. There's no call to do that Robert, heaven forfend. But it is your prerogative to question whether their points of vierw and their opinions really are their own and not just opinion implants, manufactured elsewhere by the opinion industry, made in Madison Ave, paid for by Wall Street, with a reach and sheer drench factor that's never been seen before. See next. ><snip> >> From a recent post: >> >>> It seems to me that the higher a country's per-capita advertising >>> and PR budget gets, the more likely people are to think humanity is >>> a disease, and the bigger their eco-footprints get too. They're only >>> a minority, but they've already far outgrown Earth's carrying >>> capacity. > > Please don't paint me with that brush. I woudn't paint you with any brush. >While I think that people >most often behave in a self-interested manner, I view people as a >resource and agree with you that cooperation is a necessary norm among >us. Our problems do not derive from the fact that there are too many >people, or that we're too smart. Our problems, by and large, exist >because of inequities within our social and economic structures. Good start. >These >have existed as long as civilization has existed. Longer than that, I think. But that fails to explain away what's happening now, and to assign the blame for today's woes on human society itself. True, you can find examples of failed civilizations that have ruined their land, but there are as many or more examples of traditional societies that have farmed sustainably for a very long time without causing any devastation, China isn't the only one. >You might argue that >our social systems are not human, That's not what I argued, our societies are distinctly human. The same can't be said for some of society's institutions though. >but they certainly are human >creations, and there are living, breathing human beings who actively >perpetuate those systems by whatever means they can. Historical >examples of this sort of thing abound. > > Mr. Chomsky brought this point up in writing about "institutional >irrationality." Most of the people who I know support these >institutions with religious fervor. No amount of rational discussion, >no compelling evidence and no venturing into hard moral questioning will >dissuade them. Indeed, it's futile. Opinion implants work with belief systems, not facts, the effects are emotional, not rational. >These folk may not rank high among that tiny minority to >which you refer, They're not even a part of it, they're just obedient consumers - or at least that's the intended result, though I don't believe its grip is nearly as strong and thorough as hoped. Especially since so many people have shaken it off and started making their own choices, more and more all the time. >but they defend those wealthy and powerful people with >great zeal. Yes, don't they just. > >> If you start at the other end of the scale, with countries that >>> don't even have an advertising budget, people, even poor people, >>> tend to have much happier views, and their feet fit the planet with >>> lots of room to spare. That's most people, they're the majority. >>> >>> Back at the rich end there's a tiny minority with truly monstrous >>> eco-footprints, but, persons or not, they're not human at all. > > Is that because they are intelligent, or because they have power? Which do you think Robert? From Roberto Verzola, secretary-general of the Philippine Greens: > >Economics, properly defined, is the study of human behaviour in the > >marketplace. IT is a BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE. Unfortunately, people are too > >often greedy and the economic models can predict behaviour by reducing > >humans to a collection of pecuniary interests. > > > >So, the problem is not to change economics. The problem is to change > >people's attitude. When that happens, the economist's models will fail. > > > >You can denounce economics all you want, but it is really human behaviour > >that is the problem. That is what we need to address. > > > >Pat > >Hi Pat. >I have a different interpretation: it is true that people are >occasionally / often greedy in varying degrees. However economists >idealized this greed and made it the centerpoint of the ideal economic >agent. Then society created a legal person in the perfect image of >this idealized economic agent. This legal person is the >corporation/business firm, the epitome of pure greed. Corporations >(which I'd count as if they were a separate species) have domesticated >many humans and forced them to act and think like corporations too. >This is what we need to address. >Roberto Verzola Prehistoric peoples could kill mammoths; how about corporations? by Roberto Verzola Most legal systems today recognize the registered business firm as a distinct legal person, separate from its stockholders, board of directors or employees. In fact, laws would often refer to "natural or legal persons". It should therefore be safe to conclude that such registered business firms or corporations are persons (ie, organisms), but NOT "natural persons", and therefore not humans. Other social institutions have been created by humans (State, Church, etc.), but they have never quite reached the state of life and reproductive capacity that corporations attained. It would be very useful to analyze corporations *as if* they were a different species, and then to extract ecological insights from the analysis. (By corporations here, I am basically referring to registered business firms, or for-profit corporations). Corporations are born; they grow; they might also die. They can reproduce and multiply, using different methods, both asexual and sexual. We have bacteria within our bodies as if they were part of us; corporations have humans within them. Their genetic programming - profit maximization - is much simpler than human genetic programming, humans being a bundle of mixed and often conflicting emotions and motives. Corporations' computational capabilities for such maximization easily exceed most natural persons' capabilities. Therefore they easily survive better in the economic competition. It is profit that keeps corporations alive. They are genetically programmed to maximize the flow of profits into their gut. To extract profit from their environment, corporations transform everything into commodities and then make profits by selling them or renting them out. Corporations can transform practically anything into a commodity, including corporations and profits themselves. Today, corporations are the dominant species on the planet. They have taken over most social institutions and other niches that humans have originally created for themselves. The physical reach of the biggest corporations span the entire globe. The term "globalization" can mean, without exaggeration, the global rule of corporations. The non-stop transformation of the natural world - the ecological base of human survival - into commodities for profit-making has, in fact, become a threat to the survival not only of human beings but of many other species. In the same way that we learned to domesticate plants and animals, corporations have learned to domesticate humans. Much of today's educational process is a process of corporate domestication, reinforced subsequently by corporate-controlled media. Corporations have perfected the art of training humans, using carrot-and-stick methods, to keep them tame and obedient. Of course, some humans have remained wild and undomesticated. But today, they are outside the mainstream. Corporations have trained domesticated humans to immobilize, maim, kill or otherwise "neutralize" those fellow-humans who have remained feral and uncontrolled by corporations. But there's a growing body of feral humans who are now trying to learn how to disable, maim or kill corporations. Prehistoric humans knew how to kill the largest beasts of their time; modern humans have not yet learned how to kill corporations. Individual humans have practically no hope of fighting off a determined corporate attack. Most confrontations between corporations and communities of humans end up in corporate victory, with humans ending up dead, maimed or subdued and domesticated, their human will broken. On those occasions when humans manage a victory, it almost never results in the death of the attacking corporation. When corporations lose a battle with feral humans, they can simply withdraw for a while, split into several persons, combine with another person, change their persona, or adopt other survival tricks which they have evolved over time. In fact, when entering new and presumably wild territory, a corporation would often clone itself and send its clone in. Even in the remote possibility that the clone dies from human attacks, the mother firm stays unharmed and as powerful as ever. In prehistoric ages, our ancestors learned how to repel, disable or kill an attacking mammoth; the challenge of our age is learning how to do the same with corporations. _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
