Nature
It is suggested that "pristine" nature or wilderness has curative, restorative powers that can serve to re-connect humans to a deep "rootedness" (possibly ecstatic, feral, harmonious etc..?) The word nature, like environment or place, is contested, controversial and full of multiple meanings, especially when you try to put the word "human" next to it. We confront terms like "natural laws" and a "state of nature" and all kinds of what Arthur Lovejoy calls "incompletely explicit assumptions , or more or less unconscious mental habits,operating in the thought of an individual or generation", but which define "the dominant intellectual tendencies of an age." In other words, meanings have power and Nature is a site of all kinds of struggle for dominance.
This reminded me of a crazy film I saw where Slajov Zizek tries to explain in his slushy accent why humans need to embrace refuse piles as "natural places".They are the "environment" and every bit as natural as a park, dairy farm or wilderness. Yet these sites of "creative destruction",which are the final point on the commodity circuit, end up categorized, separated and alienated from nature and from most people.( except the denizens of the trash world)
Last night I learned a great deal from a representative of the Beehive Collective about mountain- top-removal coal mining in particular and capitalist energy development more generally. What a fucked up mess. Environmental destruction on that scale is a horrendous new escalation in the history of mutilation, on biodiversity, on communities, on workers,the air we breath, the planets ecosystem and of course on justice. And guess where the worlds richest deposit lies? Under Montana. This is the new Saudi Arabia and our governor wants to be King Abdullah. Of course Wal Marts and slurry ponds are Nature too.
Speaking of workers and my disappointment? ( I could, like Obamas reaction to the Israelis, say I am "dismayed") in their passivity, it was reported that "in the third quarter, productivity rose at a 9.5% annual rate...businesspeople respond to rising demand by coaxing employees to work harder. At a certain point, people will start to collapse at work."
"coaxing"? There are lots of ways abusive husbands "coax" their wives to stay, sometimes at gun point but more often though pathological dependency, self-loathing, withdrawal into fantasy. As for "start to collapse" ,um..hate to be the one to break the news,but our society passed the dysfunctional stage a while back. Does the picture of Sarah Palin in shorts on the cover of Newsweek "sexualize" her? Welcome to Cartoonville.
posted by troutsky @ 8:29 PM
13 comments
13 Comments:
I'm not giving up, trout.
Locally we managed to get a vacant lot from the city and turn it into a community vegetable garden. It's worked out pretty well.
All the commies get together and get to know each other, work to produce healthy food and give some to the local food bank and keep the rest. Then they all stand around with their lattes and gossip about Beak.
The local community garden movement and farmers markets has been growing at a pretty good rate but Archer Daniels is still rated a Buy, I imagine.
Or we can enjoy the fruits of capitalist choice and run down miles of soda and potato chip aisles at the grocery. "Low cal potato chips" ... think of them whenever you doubt the power of contemporary marketing.
Being a product of humans, civilization, with all its ingenious rules and prosthetics, trying to impose itself on the environment has a nature as well. You think Afghanistan is a winless war, civilization is so deep into war with nature it is about to be anihilated, yet everyone runs around putting their thumbs in the dike rather than learning to swim. We gag on gnats while swallowing camels trying to fish for minnows from the back of a whale. Silly humans.
See my post, Detecting the Inevitable, for my fuller take on the essence nature is.
Cartoonvile??? That must be the place that employs Che Sponge Bob as an educator.
Leave it for an apologist for a thug in Caracas where people emigrate to complain about the USA.
The rant on productivity shows typical Marxist economic idiocy. This is idiocy also is the reason Marxists create famine and food shortages in their failed states.
Maybe if Elton John lends Che Sponge Bob some of his clothes he can hang with Kim Jong Mentally Ill.
Duncy
Lets see you get to play Mr Green
Jeans on the weekend. How about sending those veggies to feed the folks in North Korea .
The consumer should make his own choices without you being nanny.
If anyone exploits the environment and abuses wild animals it is a certain bug eyed trout guide.
I have already addressed the slavery of employment; the necessity to work to be fed, because we can no longer get our own food from nature. There is no confusion about that word; it is only intellectuals who are confused.
Yo-Dood - great remarks, symbolism and poetry and truth in your words. Let those who have ears hear!!
Beak - I have never seen you smile; please bend over!
Kultur
Your degree is likely from a rectal thermometer. While you grasp the inherent evils of applied Marxism you continue to spout its idiotic dogma.
Slavery.
You might be correct that work is slavery if you were discussing North Korea or Hugo's crack den. Where the state owns the means of production and the governmental power it is indeed slavery.
In a Capatalist country where private property is recognized there is governmental oversight and freedom to switch employers at will. Rational adults ( Not Commies
like Ren or Anarchist clowns) can then discuss the regulatory policies.
Employment is a blessing and a social contract. Ultimately the worker is to provide his best efforts in exchange for financial remuneration. The employer is supposed to guarantee work place safety.The employee's rights are protected by freedom of movement and governmental oversight.
The reality impaired Kultur thinks all the people fleeing these workers paradise are victims of false consciousness. This is supreme arrogance by a mediocre academic hack who assumes he knows
more about people's lives than the people who live them. Kultur also aids Fred Flintstone in his other job as the great Kazoo.
The facts speak for themselves. When a worker's paradise is created workers flee in droves. The State needs guards to keep people from fleeing. Even American
apologists for tyranny are not stupid enough to surrender their citizenship and live in Hugo's crack den style communist.
Superfly + Marx + mental illness =
Hugo
Yodood
Stop watching Mazzola commercials and start reading Jared Diamond.
Ask Kultur about the actual environmental records of the Soviet
Union, Communist China and so forth. He may still spout Marxist nostrums but he does not lie about
facts like the rest.
There is no green eden. In your case it is Paradise Never Was vs.
Che Bob's Kill them all so we can create Eden.
Beak - I am pleased you finally pulled your finger out of your ass and tried to say something intelligent.
In case you have forgotten Beak, the 'workers in America... a capitalist country, do not own the means of production either. Well, there may be some fancy employee stock option plans, amounting to nothing more than 'jerking off in a jar'... perhaps you understand that metaphor.
Anyway, my use of the term slavery refers to the fact that individuals in any country today, capitalist, socialist, etc., no one is able to feed and clothe themselves without having a job to provide the means to buy the goods they need.
My argument, Beak, is not with marxism, fascism or capitalist democracy... it is with civilization. (And, no, I am not suggesting there is a way back... nor could I do it if there was). I am only suggesting that with the shift from a pre-civilized, pre-agricultural, pre-urban social existence to what we now have today, humanity gave up a certain core freedom inherent in its genetic, animal constitution. Why that shift took place, why agriculture began and led to the development of city states, empires and urban life is anotehr issue. But the worker is no more free to be what he/she wants.
The choices are already laid out and limited by the socio-economic structures in place within a specific political structure. I do not thave the choice to work or not, and live instead as I want foraging and hunting. Becuase the state does not allow it. There are legal and social costs associated with any such decision like that. As well, the natural conditions for the possibility of making that choice, realistically, no longer exist. Our civilization (the mono-culture of Western civilization)has effectively destroyed all of those conditions; it has destroyed the natural world; it has taken almost all of the forested lands and privitized them as arable property or commercially developed them for other technological and commercial purposes.
We are slaves to the systems and the time-clocks, the schedules, the necessity of 'working to live, which this experiment in human ingenuity has given to us. So think about this a bit; before you spout some more ignorant shit!
Ducky: I am far from "giving up", Iv'e been chopping this same tree since Dick bombed Cambodia. I love my "local" food, my garden, the two whitetails I shot last week (one for my neighbor),the fish I exploit, etc ) and the "foodies" are good folks. But, merciless critic that I am, I have to point out the bourgeois aspects of it and in so far as it is a movement, it's lack of a radical critique.
Yodood, How much baby are we throwing out with bathwater? Is all culture (art ,music, literature) , all science (medicine, physics, astronomy, anthropology) , all politics "civilized" and therefore tainted?
I will argue that it is a particular concept of nature, Newtonian/Cartesian that is problematic (the same problems occur in our understanding of the "individual"). This Enlightenment view is different from "civilization", much more particular.
A dialectical approach sees our relation not as an increasing separation of man from a "state of nature" but as an increasing interpenetration WITH nature. We produce nature, not just observe it. "This means conceptualizing a socio-ecological world that is actively being shaped by a wide array of intersecting processes operating at different scales...There is therefore, no solid, independent, independent "external nature" we can appeal to as an authority or wage war against or interact harmoniously with. Nature and society are internal relations within the dynamics of a larger socio-ecological totality."
this means the story of economic production plays a huge role, which I am trying to change and Beak is not.
We must conceptualize"a sociol-ecological world ( think Mexican Chicago or Mexago) "Environment may initially shape the range of choices available to a people at a given moment but then culture reshapes environment responding to those choices, the re-shaped environment presents a NEW SET OF POSSIBILITIES for cultural reproduction, thus setting up a new cycle of mutual determination." Co-determination, yo!
Beak, Diamond argues that current geographical inequalities of wealth and development are largely explicable in terms of the initial environmental conditions that gave rise to domestication (such as the shape of the coastline) This is bunk.
I marvel at your faith in the free market (LMAO), Beak. Even you must be aware of the destructive power of advertising and it's ability to cause people to do all kinds of harm just to satisfy a personal whim, no?
Is it your position that an unregulated market will ensure sustainable use of resources? Frankly I think you are going to have some conflicts between profits and public interest and no way to properly price the junk you are so fond of to factor in physical damage to the environment and other costs.
Do you have any thoughts on the studies that state organic methods, without petrochemicals, can generate equivalent yields to petro-agriculture?
I will argue that it is a particular concept of nature, Newtonian/Cartesian that is problematic (the same problems occur in our understanding of the "individual"). This Enlightenment view is different from "civilization", much more particular.
Civilization as we know it Trotsky, is the fulfilment of the Enlightenment. The Mono-culture we have created, the Culture of the West, which has systematically extinguished all other cultural options,is the full flowering of Enlightenment thought, which Descartes brought up to date from the Greeks and beofre them the Babylonians. It is all of a piece Trot
Kultur
You are still oblivious to the unique evils unleashed by Marx and his bug eyed minions. The death and deprivation are quite real. Are you going to wax in some amoral above it all fog.
Lets see workers have less rights in Cuba than they do in the USA. Kindly explain this imbalance in practical terms.
Marxism is a power scam.
As for your over romance with preindustrial man this comes from Mazzola commercials. Preindustrial man lived in a variety of settings
that was as diverse as man itself.
The notion of man in harmony with nature is Paradise Never Was. We can argue about the rise of city states.
I will stick with Jared Diamond's views on this subject.
Duncy
I will point out results of Marx induced famine in food exporters.
Advertising is an added benefit of a free society. Corporations are more efficient than government but need regulatory oversight.
You are not nearly as sharp as you presume. Your days passing bs with
developmentally disabled Marxist lemmings and Anarchist clowns has weakened your wits.
Lets go into history, facts and logic.
The enviromental movement rid itself of the it starts with you lifestyle change solutions. Its not about if you drink from a styrofoam cup. The solutions are political.
1) No one country can make a difference.
2) Capitalism is burdoned with competition, so it can't be green.
We have to go back to the American Revolutionary war policy of expropriation without compensation. Not only Tories were expropriated.
Renegade Appendix
The evil one fails to note the actual record of Commie states on the environment has been a disaster. Communists like Kovel and Norman Finkelstein ( The world's most notorious anti semite and Maoist) pretend to be greens to escape the
stench of their views.
The actual greens ( all two of them)have their cause discredited by the failure to expel communists.
Troutsky a person that exploits fish for re numeration is quite the hypocrite. Actual fish are higher on the evolutionary scale than communists.
Your kind does better in institutional settings like prisons or asylums
ren, you are correct stating that the ecological awareness is a corporate phenomenon. They will control it and we will watch PBS because it must be green and there's Exxon with the cute little ads about algae.
Until we understand a few basics such as the absolute inability of the earth to support the "western lifestyle" it's going to be chaos as that lie is transmitted.
It will take either dictatorial power to break that idea before the profit motive generates structural collapse. I wish I could believe more strongly in democratic possibilities.
But we may agree that the profit drive is at the root of much mischief.
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