I have been trying for the last few days to discover a coherent logic towards my feelings on man’s relationship with his environment. This is proving not to be simple.
The process started when I heard on World Service radio a gentleman from the International Panel on Climate Change discussing their latest report. As you know, I tend to accept the established opinion on climate change, and rather take the view that if all our industrial activity were not affecting the atmosphere, that would be strange.
But what struck me was that the gentleman said that a pause in warming for the last fifteen years was not significant, as fifteen years was a blip in processes that last over millennia.
Well, that would certainly be very true if you are considering natural climate change. But we are not – we are considering man-made climate change. In terms of the period in which the scale of man’s industrial activity has been having a significant impact on the environment, surely fifteen years is a pretty important percentage of that period? Especially as you might naturally imagine the process to be cumulative – fifteen years at the start when nothing much happened would be more explicable.
Having tucked away that doubt, I started to try to think deeper. Man is, of course, himself a part of nature. Anything man does on this planet is natural to this planet. I do not take the view man should not change his environment – otherwise I should not be sitting in a house. The question is rather, are we inadvertently making changes to the environment to our own long term detriment?
That rejection of what you might call the Gaia principle – that the environmental status quo is an end in itself – has ramifications. It is hard to conceptualise our relationship with gases or soil, but easier in terms of animals. I am not a vegetarian – I am quite happy that we farm and eat cattle, for example – and you might argue that the cattle are pretty successful themselves, symbiotic survivors of a kind. Do I think other species have a value in themselves? Is there any harm in killing off a species of insect, other than the fact that biodiversity may be reduced in ways that remove potential future advantages to man, or there may be knock on consequences we know not of that damage man somehow? I am not quite sure, but in general I seem in practice to take the view that exploitation of other species and substantial distortion of prior ecological balance to suit men’s needs is fine, so presumably the odd extinction is fine too, unless it damages man long term.
I strongly disapprove of hurting animals for sport, and want to see them have the best quality of life possible, preferably wild. But I like to eat and wear them. I am not quite sure why it is OK to wear animal skin on our feet or carry it as a bag, but not to wear “fur”. What is the difference, other than that leather has had the hair systematically rubbed off as part of the process of making it? A trivial issue, but one that obviously relates to the deeper questions.
Yes I draw a distinction between animals which are intelligent and those which are not. I would not eat whale or dolphin. But this does not seem entirely logical – animal intelligence and sensibility is evidently a continuum. Many animals mourn, for example. The BBC World Service radio (my main contact with the outside world at present – I have just today found my very, very weak internet connection just about works if I try it at 5am) informed me a couple of days ago that orang-utans have the ability to think forward and tell others where they will be the next day. Why cattle and fish are daft enough to eat is hard to justify.
I quite appreciate the disbenefits to man of radically changing his environment, even if it could be done without long term risk to his existence – the loss of beauty, of connection to seasons and forms of behaviour with which we evolved. But I regard those as important only as losses to man, not because nature is important intrinsically. In short, if I thought higher seas, no polar bears and no glaciers would not hurt man particularly, I don’t suppose I would have much to say against it. I fear the potential repercussions are too dangerous to man. At base, I don’t actually care about a polar bear.
“My positive advice? I think purifying our own karma is a good place to start. It will not change the world much but it has a placebo effect. Being calm in a storm is not an advantage?”
Gaia you make some good points. I’ll interpret purifying our karma as studying one self and attaining self-knowledge and through that bringing order within our disordered, fragmented selves. That would result in a transformation of the individual. If each one of us did it, problem solved. But we know that ain’t gonna happen. Still, if some of us would do it, it must impact the collective Human Consciousness. One doesn’t know where the tipping-point is. But, life works in mysterious ways. What humankind ‘knows’ is a tiny fraction of what we don’t know, i.e. the Unknown. Even in string theory, the underlying equations assume there are 10-12 dimensions in the Universe. We live in 3 and ‘know’ of a fourth. The rest of them apparently would operate at sub-atomic levels. Too subtle for a holistic understanding of present-day so-called ‘modern-man’.
But you can see here how busy people are barking rabid up the wrong trees. They want to tinker with the super-structures of society, instead of engaging internally with themselves, without realising that it is you, I, him and her who are Society.
Climate change deniers are likely to be labelled as conspiracy theorists.
Climate sceptics more likely to be conspiracy theorists and free market advocates, study claims
Research confirms previous findings which caused fury among sceptics of human-caused climate change
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2013/oct/02/climate-change-denial-skeptics-psychology-study-conspiracy-theories
The professor in question was chased out of Australia.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/28/stephan-lewandowsky-flees-australia-in-wake-of-investigations/
HMG’s chief scientist has this mindset.
Top scientist Sir Mark Walport urges climate change deniers to give in
Environment Secretary Owen Paterson played down the dangers of global warming recently
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/top-scientist-sir-mark-walport-urges-climate-change-deniers-to-give-in-8854368.html
See he championed neonicotinoids. Big Agrichemical rules. OK.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Walport
‘At the beginning of his tenure as Chief Science advisor to the UK, one of his first acts was to champion neonicotinoids, a class of pesticides which has been implicated in colony collapse disorder and other systemic environmental degradation. In defending the pesticide, he cited a study that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) had commissioned, which purported to show that neonicotinoids do not harm bees. The study, however, was not published in a peer-reviewed journal. (Among many other problems, the controls were hopelessly contaminated with the pesticide whose impacts the trial was supposed to be testing.) The study was later criticized by the European Food Safety Authority.[21] Commentators have observed that Walport’s actions mark a new role for the UK’s Chief Scientist. Formerly, the purpose of that position was to provide objective scientific information and advice.[22]’
Await an edit there.
“But what annoys me about the corporate media (of which advertisers and perception managers form a large part) is that they actually employ psychologists etc. to determine how best to manipulate opinion. They actually strive to create more stupidity.”
Yet the opinions they promote seem very much middle of the road to me. I have seen much criticism in the mainstream media lately of proposed Conservative policies and quite rightly so. I’ve seen much criticism of past Conservative policies too.
I often see people on this blog citing the mainstream media when it supports their argument. I also see them dismissing it as worthless propaganda when it doesn’t.
There is an old myth in these parts that when the Titanic sank the headline in the Press and Journal read “North-east man dies at sea”. True or not it points out that papers tend to pander to their readers. The tail may wag the dog to a small extent but in the main it is the dog which wags the tail, papers tend to print what people want to read, that is how they make money.
The Mail is sinking to new lows.
They gatecrashed the memorial service for Sir Harry Keen at which Ed Miliband spoke. Sir Harry was his father’s brother in law.
Mail on Sunday reporter gatecrashes Miliband family memorial service
Ed Miliband says reporter attended service for his uncle to question relatives about Daily Mail story on his father, Ralph
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/oct/03/mail-on-sunday-gatecrashes-miliband-memorial-ed
Harry Keen obituary
Leading researcher into the treatment of diabetes who was a great defender of the NHS
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/apr/23/harry-keen
Three cheers for Sir Harry.
‘The 1989 white paper on NHS reform brought a new dimension to Harry’s activities. Like many others, he saw most of the proposals as damaging to the NHS and he played a leading role in opposition, including the celebrated, though unsuccessful, attempt to challenge in the high court the secretary of state’s power to act in advance of parliamentary approval of legislation. He later founded the NHS Support Federation, which has campaigned against many of the proposals and legislation arising from the previous and present administrations, not least those that came into force in April this year.’
“There is an old myth in these parts that when the Titanic sank the headline in the Press and Journal read “North-east man dies at sea”.
LOL. Yes no different from recent reports from Nairobi “3 Britons dead” or “One Canadian dead”, etc.
Some incisive material on the various contemporary manifestations of environmentalism (and its funding) from this activist-scholar:
http://michaeljamesbarker.wordpress.com/
[Mod/Jon: insulting ad nauseum, removed]
Expect to see a few more pro-Israel trolls around.
Cash Tweet: Israeli students paid to defend country online
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTtoRrHRt3o
Published on 3 Oct 2013
Cash strapped Israeli students have a new way to relieve their financial plight. They can get easy money by simply posting positive tweets and clicking the ‘like’ button in the right places. That’s after authorities came up with the idea of offering youngsters salaries and even scholarships for protection of the government’s interests and fighting anti-semitism on the web. But ironically, the father of the digital diplomacy program has come under fire for posting racist comments – the very thing he was meant to be preventing. RT’s Paula Slier reports.
It’s sad. You’d hope that people would have more up their sleeves than schoolboy insults, feeble repetitive jibes and repulsive invective – mind you, look at the House of Commons.
Fred 3 Oct, 2013 – 12:09 pm
I see that Villager reverted to the ‘preachy’ mode earlier but is now back to the invective and ad hominems. Schizoid or what?
Nine pages from the DWP worthy of the Third Reich.
Key findings – GB
Since the introduction of the benefit cap on 15th April 2013 to August 2013:
Almost 8.4 thousand households had their housing benefit capped.
Of data extracted at August1 2013:
Just over 7.8 thousand households had their housing benefit capped.
59% of households had between 1 and 4 children,
60% of households constituted a single parent with child dependents.
77% of households were capped by £100 or less.
Benefit Cap – number of households capped, data to August 2013, GB
Publication date: 3rd October 2013
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/245893/benefit-cap-households-to-aug-2013.pdf
That was just for the preliminary trial. The ‘roll out’ follows.
Let’s try to clear this up Mary. Personally i find you to be one of the most boring and least-stimulating commenters here. Thats if one can call your stream of copy-pastes ‘comments’. What you call preachy, i call life, a subject which you demonstrate little understanding of. You just have your little world-view about the Israeli bugbear. That what keeps your little-Berkhamsted-life going: the one-trick Palestinian pony.
“That only leaves philanthropism or influence peddling as motives for buying it. Here’s Lebedev’s biog, which do you think?”
Influence peddling makes money — don’t you think?
“Influence peddling makes money — don’t you think?”
Yes I do – that was my point.
Newspaper owners don’t make money by saying what their subscribers think.
Newspaper owners make money by telling their subscribers what to think.
“I see that Villager reverted to the ‘preachy’ mode earlier but is now back to the invective and ad hominems. Schizoid or what?”
And the answer is: horses for courses.
I hope that puts paid to an oft-asked question. Its good to have agility of the mind in order to deal with people at their level.
Right, Villager. And now that you’ve made your opinion known – and thanks so much, it was of course, very interesting – as another poster here, I’m personally not expecting to see one more reference to Mary – not one – unless you actually have a substantive question to ask about what she is actually posting. I’m sure I can be confident about that because, what, after all, could be more dull, restrictive or narrow minded than repetitive, pointless personal attacks? That was a rhetorical question, by the way. NB: “she always responds” is not a justification.
“Newspaper owners don’t make money by saying what their subscribers think.
Newspaper owners make money by telling their subscribers what to think.”
Since when were the newspaper’s purpose to say “what their subscribers think”? Maybe you enjoy reading your own comments.
Fact is newspapers, and certainly the msm as a whole, Murdoch the leading example, make money and they don’t need your permission to do so.
@ Fred: I’m just someone who believes in democracy.
And I’m someone who believes in a well-informed democracy.
I just think the world would be be better place without bigoted scum who see the general population as plebs.
You’re obviously thinking of our current democratically-elected (well, actually,the sum of two minorities, their leaders chosen by their chums, but they claim to be) government. Yes? Then we can agree.
My point is that the majority of people neither know nor care about the processes to which they are subject – Clarke, above makes the good point, that deluding the masses is now big business- nor the extent of the enormous lies they are being told by their democratic government.
Ghandi said this about Christians:
“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
I feel the same about democracy and many of its most vocal proponents.
Technicolour in schoolmarm mode: take your ticking off elsewhere.
Just for the record, from this morning:
” Mary
3 Oct, 2013 – 7:54 am
‘Are you the same Villager that writes on the ‘Anna Ardin’ liar blog?’ Is that a fact John?
It’s almost a case of split personality.
On the one hand we have the sanctimonious preachy stuff with quotes from Krishnamurthy (?Sp) and then we have the revolting invective stuff as evidenced above. Pretty weird. Perhaps it’s a case of too much C2H6O!”
_______
I take back my suggestion that you should offer yourself as moderator, since you have trouble in seeing the Big Picture.
Btw, fresh-face Gaia made some interesting points earlier to which i responded. Would you like to add? Are you interested in the possible dimensions in life beyond the three?
Macky, thanks. I had thought about Galloway, but I tried a couple of MSM rags* first. Neither followed up, so that’s still an option. (I’m not too keen on Galloway, personally, and I’d rather it wasn’t, but needs must where the Blair flies)
*with solid records on Blair, or so it seemed.
And TC, while you’re on your Neighbourhood Watch, did you spot Captain Komode in action with Fred suggesting: “Or make love to Villager?”
Would you like me to suggest you go make love to Mary?
Fred/Komodo:
Re BBC bias, I think you’re both wrong. Fred said:
Fred has it that, since most people believe the BBC is biased to the left, they must be correct. Komodo says that most people’s views are to the right of the BBC, with the implication that the BBC is already quite biased to the right.
I agree with Komodo insofar as the BBC is biased to the right, but there’s a risk we regard “people’s views” as set in stone, and unaffected by the propagandist environment they live in. Thus, if lots of people think the BBC is left-wing (and I don’t know if this is indeed the case), we should be looking at why they think that. No prizes for seeing that the mainstream papers despise it, nor that they see the concept of a public-sector broadcaster as an unfairly-funded competitor. Thus, stories are chosen that suits the commercial interests of those papers, and some people’s views are sufficiently pliable that they come around to believe what they read.
For me, it is clear that the BBC could not be anything other than biased to the right, because overwhelmingly the “centre” of British politics is biased to the right. Stated more accurately, it is biased towards capitalism, and capitalism thrives in at atmosphere of individualism, competition, class difference and perpetual war. Collaboration and empathy are in much shorter supply – they have less political proponents – and are often painted as weak or unfashionable by the same propagandist elements.
But, the BBC is a powerful political organization, so why does is not produce even-handed output? This is a good question, and one I’ve thought about, in the context of Chomsky and Herman’s work on media bias. My view is that the output of an organisation is, more or less, the sum of “motivation vectors” of all the actors inside it, modified by all the various external groupings it necessarily has to deal with in the course of its business (government, lobby groups, etc).
With that in mind, lower-level BBC journalists probably do hold some progressive views, and this is usually put forward as the source of the “left wing bias”. However, I’d argue that the right-wing influence at the top of the corporation would tend to trump this – how many progressive news items would be required to reset the balance given the board of directors all fired themselves after the Gilligan affair? How many articles would need to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinian people after the BBC management refused to cooperate with other broadcasters in screening a Disasters Emergency Committee advert in the aftermath of Cast Lead?
To a degree, the BBC is in a difficult spot, as are any state-funded broadcasters. If they report the news honestly, they’ll get a lot of flak from well-funded lobby groups, and flak is expensive and time-consuming to deal with. Or, they can kowtow to those interests to some degree, and receive much less criticism in return. It’s a pact with the devil, really.
Thus, anyone who holds that the BBC is a leftist organisation needs to show that there is a source of left-wing pressure on the BBC that guides it in that direction. That pressure would have to be sufficiently powerful to counteract the right-wing pressure upon it. Alternatively, they could argue that the pressure from the right has no effect, and that lobby groups arguing for capitalism or permanent war (etc) have been wasting someone else’s money for decades. I think both positions are difficult to hold for self-evident reasons, but I’m happy to hear an expansion of either.
further to myself @ 1.28
…. to be clear, I believe owning a newspaper is a tool to make money elsewhere. You become a big player when you buy a one. You can, for instance, put pressure on a government to give a company tax breaks, or go to war. Having the power to influence public opinion increases your influence with other big players. You become a major power broker. But not just anyone is allowed to acquire power. You have to sing from the correct hymn sheet.
Fred also mentions the diversity of UK newspapers – that’s as much of an illusion as UK democracy. Different papers are targeted at different audiences in order to reach the biggest overall catchment, but the differences are superficial. How many came out against the Iraq war, for example, or question the banking system (as opposed to individual banks).
Just a few more examples of the oppressive and cruel practices of the ‘Israel bugbear’ as the Occupation was referred to above.
Tuesday, 01 October 2013
Israeli Army opens fire on East Rafah and Palestinian farmland
Night invasion: Israeli forces shoot their way into 2 West Bank homes
Settler mob in Hebron assaults and hospitalises 5-year-old child
Home invasions: Israeli soldiers abduct 3 youngsters
Settler fanatics spray-paint Palestinian tombstones with racist graffiti
Night peace disruption and/or home invasions in 19 towns and villages
2 attacks – 29 raids including home invasions – 1 beaten – 2 injured
4 acts of agricultural/economic sabotage
18 taken prisoner – 12 detained – 103 restrictions of movement
http://palestine.org.nz/phrc/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1725&Itemid=44
~~~~
PS I do not live in ‘Berkhamsted’ nor do I want anymore of the ‘preaching’. Leave it out.
“School caretaker” mode, if you please. My old head would have knocked both your heads together, in fact. But Villager, your cries of “she’s getting at me” kind of overlook the fact that a) you generally start it b) you otherwise bounce in to launch a few salvos at ‘them’ without adding much (scuse me if I’ve missed something) and c) by your own admission you are meant to be on a more ‘spiritual’ path than lesser posters.
But hey, perhaps you are just very bored. I’m waiting for a delivery, so can empathise.
I should add to my contribution above that I subscribe to the Herman/Chomsky perspective that most of the workings of media bias are hidden inside the psychological workings of each actor within a system. Put another way, bias is mainly subconscious, and not many people get up in the morning wanting to “argue for neoliberalism”.
I expect there are a few people who do though, and intrinsic bias is replaced by outright psychopathy. But where do you draw the line? The human mind is very good at deceiving itself.
Fred 3 Oct, 2013 – 12:09 pm
“The tail may wag the dog to a small extent but in the main it is the dog which wags the tail, papers tend to print what people want to read, that is how they make money.”
Not true. Newspapers make significantly more money from advertisers than readers. So, papers tend to print what the advertisers want, that is how they make money.
Jon – as usual, an intelligent contribution. My comment in response to Fred’s Google stats was no more than statistically based. Assuming a Gaussian distribution, that is, but Fred provided no information on skew or kurtosis. The median appears to be to the left of you if you are standing to the right of it. What the distribution measures is irrelevant. This is a universal truth. Thank you for expanding constructively on its political implications.
Hah, John. I’ve just seen the sad spectacle of someone I rather liked, and who could have gone the other way, collapse and give in like a sucker to the bastions of power and privilege. Reasons aren’t hard to see – insecurity, need to be accepted, fear, desire to be part of the winning team, desire for money…
Sad, though.