[Newfie]

AD,
I'm not in a lather over it. Just thought I saw some overlap from the theoretical to the practical.

Doh,
Really? Jeesh!

[americandream]

AD,
I'm not in a lather over it. Just thought I saw some overlap from the theoretical to the practical.

Doh,
Really? Jeesh!

Ethics are normative. What we would like to see. Subjective dialectics have their place in the evolution of human systems. Ultimately systems are subject to dispassionate forces that play out beyond human senses and confine us. Thus we are limited to evolving into a system that incorporates social relations which are in balance with the planet.....not because its the ethical thing to do but because its the only thing to do.

[dohboi]

"we are limited to evolving into a system that incorporates social relations which are in balance with the planet"

Yes, that or going extinct--always a possibility.

[Ibon]

"we are limited to evolving into a system that incorporates social relations which are in balance with the planet"

Yes, that or going extinct--always a possibility.

We are limited because we have had limited opportunities to be tested. It is kind of crazy to be standing before one of the greatest inflection points for our global culture and remain rigid ideologically. Knowledge sometimes is a two edge sword, it both enlightens but also can lock you in.

[dohboi]

"It is kind of crazy to be standing before one of the greatest inflection points for our global culture and remain rigid ideologically."

Nicely put. Something I try and mostly fail to get across to bau types (not that I'm labeling anyone on this thread as that)--if now, when we are staring at fundamentally altering the planet toward something that will be fundamentally hostile to our existence, if this is not the time for reconsidering our basic assumptions, one wonders what time would that be exactly.

[americandream]

"we are limited to evolving into a system that incorporates social relations which are in balance with the planet"

Yes, that or going extinct--always a possibility.

We are limited because we have had limited opportunities to be tested. It is kind of crazy to be standing before one of the greatest inflection points for our global culture and remain rigid ideologically. Knowledge sometimes is a two edge sword, it both enlightens but also can lock you in.

Actually socialisation of our resource usage as that is all this exercise is offers us the greatest opportunity to move forward as a species both on this planet and beyond. The great challenge before us is not how we use the pinecones in our tree but whether we can survive long enough to discover our full potential as a sentient species.

[Newfie]

AD,

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch–Kincaid_readability_tests

Try it here.

https://readability-score.com/?url=http ... ookmarklet

Yea know, there was once this guy called Hemingway.

[Newfie]

I took some random samples of writing scores for relative comparison.

Pops was 59
Ibon was 63
My meager contribution was 80

Yours was 46

If you want us to understand then you need to write more clearly.

Really, not trying to be snarky, but honestly helpful.

[americandream]

I took some random samples of writing scores for relative comparison.

Pops was 59
Ibon was 63
My meager contribution was 80

Yours was 46

If you want us to understand then you need to write more clearly.

Really, not trying to be snarky, but honestly helpful.

Scores aside I have pretty much condensed Marxs ideas into a paragraph or two with an emphasis on his core concepts. I appreciate not everyone will grasp them but I cannot simplify any further without robbing them of their distinctive character as an analysis of the central issue that defines our existence as a species.

[Newfie]

I took some random samples of writing scores for relative comparison.

Pops was 59
Ibon was 63
My meager contribution was 80

Yours was 46

If you want us to understand then you need to write more clearly.

Really, not trying to be snarky, but honestly helpful.

Scores aside I have pretty much condensed Marxs ideas into a paragraph or two with an emphasis on his core concepts. I appreciate not everyone will grasp them but I cannot simplify any further without robbing them of their distinctive character as an analysis of the central issue that defines our existence as a species.

40.5. No Maxian ideas presented.

I will annoy you no more on this topic.

Nor will I ever again try to read your posts.

[Timo]

The great challenge before us is not how we use the pinecones in our tree but whether we can survive long enough to discover our full potential as a sentient species.

While i appreciate the sentiment, realizing our full potential as human beings would require us to evolve into a different species, and that simple will not happen in the few decades on this planet that we have left. Realizing the minimum requisites to survive is as far as we're ever going to get.

[americandream]

The great challenge before us is not how we use the pinecones in our tree but whether we can survive long enough to discover our full potential as a sentient species.

While i appreciate the sentiment, realizing our full potential as human beings would require us to evolve into a different species, and that simple will not happen in the few decades on this planet that we have left. Realizing the minimum requisites to survive is as far as we're ever going to get.

Possibly. However, our inter generational obligations require us to at least understand the issues even if we see no resolution.

[jupiters_release]

Scores aside I have pretty much condensed Marxs ideas into a paragraph or two with an emphasis on his core concepts. I appreciate not everyone will grasp them but I cannot simplify any further without robbing them of their distinctive character as an analysis of the central issue that defines our existence as a species.

You think Marx, however well-intended, understood the root problems?

The Socialist solution to the Marxian crisis fails because it doesn't get at the root of the problem, which is not the private ownership of property but rather the concept of property to begin with. And the concept of property, as we have seen, itself depends on our definition of ourselves and the way we understand the world. Greed, competition, anxiety, and scarcity are built into our cosmology and our science, and will not go away until and unless the other pieces of the pattern change as well. Specifically, they will not go away when we see the world, nature, language, thought and idea as things that can be cordoned off and owned as objects.

The characteristics of capital upon which Marx based his theory stem from the characteristics of the money system that currently dominates, which features a "scarce" interest-bearing currency created by banks. Very different economic dynamics would result from a money system with different characteristics, and a different money system will spring forth naturally from a different understanding of and relationship to the world. A very different form of capitalism will then emerge, to which Marx's dynamics do not apply, which fosters cooperation over competition, sharing over exploitation, community over separation; in other words, which values and develops all the non-monetary forms of wealth described herein. It will be a system that makes us richer in life rather than poorer in life but richer in money. And significantly, it will be a system that is not designed in the usual sense but which is allowed to grow. This is the true revolution: not a superficial overthrow of whatever powers happen to be, but a radically new understanding of self and world. Marx criticized the bourgeois revolutions of America and France for merely replacing one set of owners with another. Yet isn't his own revolution similarly shallow, leaving untouched the concept of property, the duality of labor and leisure, the ideology of growth, and the assumption of human domination over nature?

Why is such a deep revolution necessary? The history of technology, at least back to agriculture and probably back to the pre-human technologies of fire and stone, is closely linked to an increasing objectification of the world. We conceptually separate ourselves from the environment in order to manipulate it; equally, our successful manipulation of the environment spurs our conceptual separation from it. The concept of property naturally flows out of such an objectification, and the kind of money we have today arises naturally out of such property, which is mine and not yours, which can be accumulated and measured. It is foolish to think that any system other than the capitalism we are familiar with could arise from such a prior foundation.

A revolution that leaves our conceptualization of self and world intact cannot bring other than temporary, superficial change. Only a much deeper revolution, a reconceiving of who we are, can reverse the crises of our age. Fortunately, to use the language of Marx, this deepest of all possible revolutions is inevitable, and it is inevitable for precisely the reasons Marx foresaw. The conversion of all other capital into money is unsustainable. Someday it will run out. As it does, our impoverishment will deepen. Misery and desperation will overcome whatever measures can be invented to suppress or narcotize them. When at last the futility of controlling reality becomes apparent, when at last the burden of maintaining an artificial self separate from nature becomes too heavy to bear any longer, when at last we realize that our wealth has bankrupted us of life, then a million tiny revolutions will converge into a vast planetary shift, a rapid phase-transition into a new mode of being.

It will happen—must happen—perhaps sooner than we think. Indeed it is already happening. Our social, natural, cultural and spiritual capital is almost exhausted. Their depletion is generating crises in all realms of modern life, crises which are seemingly unconnected except that they all arise from the monetization of life or, underneath that, from our fundamental confusion as to who we are, our separation from nature, ourselves, and each other. This is the link that connects such disparate phenomena as peak oil,ii the autoimmune disease epidemic, global warming, forest death, fishery depletion, the crisis in education, and the impending food crisis. Both monetization and separation are nearing their maxima, their greatest possible extremes. The former is in the completion of the conversion of common wealth into private wealth that I have described in this chapter; the latter is in the complete sense of isolation and alienation implicit in the world of Darwin and Descartes: the naked material self in a world forged by chance and determinism, where purpose, meaning, and God are, by the nature of reality, nothing more than self-delusory figments of the imagination.

Paradoxically, it is in the fulfillment of these extremes (each of which is a cause and an aspect of the other) that their opposites are born. Yang, having reached its extreme, gives birth to Yin. The depletion of social capital launches the revolution that will reclaim it. The agony of separation births the surrender that opens us to a larger version of the self, to nature and to life. But the extremum must be reached.

As any environmental scientist knows, it is certain that things will get much much worse for the bulk of humanity before they get any better. Certain forces must play themselves out. The momentous rise in spiritual, humanitarian, and ecological awareness will not save us, not because it is too late (though it is), but because the course of separation has not yet reached its finale.

Like an alcoholic whose resources of goodwill, money, pawnable assets, friends, and credibility are almost exhausted, our way of life is on the verge of collapse. We continue to scramble, applying new technological fixes at greater and greater cost to alleviate the problems caused by the last fix. The addict will keep on using until life becomes completely unmanageable. Ecological awareness, localism, green design, herbalism, community currencies, ecology-based economics are all like the drunk's moments of clarity on the way down. They will not so much save us as serve as the seeds for a new way of living and being that we will adopt after the collapse. Indeed they will all come naturally, as a matter of course—if there is anything left at all.

[Cid_Yama]

When enough significant anomalies have accrued against a current paradigm, the scientific discipline is thrown into a state of crisis, according to Kuhn. During this crisis, new ideas, perhaps ones previously discarded, are tried. Eventually a new paradigm is formed, which gains its own new followers, and an intellectual "battle" takes place between the followers of the new paradigm and the hold-outs of the old paradigm. Again, for early 20th century physics, the transition between the Maxwellian electromagnetic worldview and the Einsteinian Relativistic worldview was neither instantaneous nor calm, and instead involved a protracted set of "attacks," both with empirical data as well as rhetorical or philosophical arguments, by both sides, with the Einsteinian theory winning out in the long run. Again, the weighing of evidence and importance of new data was fit through the human sieve: some scientists found the simplicity of Einstein's equations to be most compelling, while some found them more complicated than the notion of Maxwell's aether which they banished. Some found Eddington's photographs of light bending around the sun to be compelling, while some questioned their accuracy and meaning. Sometimes the convincing force is just time itself and the human toll it takes, Kuhn said, using a quote from Max Planck: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

link

[americandream]

@jp

Its not a question of intentions good or otherwise but facts which Marx dealt with. Capitalism is at its core, dependent on growth, whether it is green, liberal, conservative or even new agey. It will scour the planet in pursuit of that. We are acculturated into that from cradle to grave and act accordingly without even realising we are.

Socialisation of our global culture and its social relations is the only option. One without sentiment or ethics but goes to our very core such that we act without thinking as we do in capitalism. That is socialism but to get there we transit communism which is the revolutionary phase when we reinvent ourselves.

This will work. Sentiment ethics and other fleeting waffle will not. This is a timeless reality and not subject to fashion.

[jupiters_release]

@jp

Its not a question of intentions good or otherwise but facts which Marx dealt with. Capitalism is at its core, dependent on growth, whether it is green, liberal, conservative or even new agey. It will scour the planet in pursuit of that. We are acculturated into that from cradle to grave and act accordingly without even realising we are.

Socialisation of our global culture and its social relations is the only option. One without sentiment or ethics but goes to our very core such that we act without thinking as we do in capitalism. That is socialism but to get there we transit communism which is the revolutionary phase when we reinvent ourselves.

This will work. Sentiment ethics and other fleeting waffle will not. This is a timeless reality and not subject to fashion.

Your timeless reality is purely metaphysical because the socialisation you speak of never has nor never will exist, not that any healthy culture would desire 'equitable' global systems which inherently require lifeless mythologies or non-sentiment ethics (I do like your elitist phrasing ). No different in essence to the capitalism you want replaced.

Perhaps you're not aware of 20th century science Cid referenced? Only a schizophrenic could reconcile modern science, assuming it were understood with any semblance of reality, with inanimate systems.

[americandream]

I think we could argue till we are blue in the face but primitive socialisation exists in all of the animal kingdom as you will no doubt be aware. Nor has this to do with equity although equity is a function of objective socialism (as opposed to the navel gazing and hollow charity of sentiment). Nor is my phrasing elitist as we are talking here of acting spontaneously rather than of some feel good factor which is as ephemeral as the next meal.

If these do not occur and we continue to delude ourselves out of charitable or other sentiment, we will travel in circles.

[dohboi]

Guy McPherson on his recently completed NZ speaking tour on abrupt climate change.

http://robinwestenra.blogspot.co.nz/201 ... l?spref=fb

[jupiters_release]

^
Oof, only a minute in don't know if I can handle the annoying host.

[jupiters_release]

now they're streaming some awful electronic dance music..

must be having a laugh db, cheeky bastard!