Were our revolutionary fore-bearers standing around with their hands on their dicks mumbling worriedly about the ends justifying the means? If that we're the case, we'd still be pledging allegiance to the queen. If you believe in something, of course the ends justify the means, for better or for worse. Belief in nothing may prevent fundamentalism from creeping in, but it also prevents the genuinely good ideas from creeping in.
Billions die all the time. They just do it slowly. You must be thinking there will be some kind of Apocalypse... It ain't necessarily so.
Obviously I was refering to a shorter time-frame, though not necessarily as short as a matter of days or even months. Let me just pose you a simple question. The food that you eat: where does it come from? And, no, I'm not talking about the supermarket! Where is your food grown and processed? If, like me, less than 50% of your calories are grown and processed further than 100 mi. from your house, how well will you survive the collapse of the West? -- not very well, I would guess. Do you realise that only 2 people out of every 1000 in the US are involved in food production? This is possible because of the extremely high ordered society that we have built. If we knock the pegs out from under our social structure, we may have to quickly return to practices of a century ago where the numbers were closer to 2 in 10. What happens to those other 990 people? A lot of them starve! And since you will have a lot of starvation, there will be a lot of people killing each other for what little resources remain. And with globalisation, if one country falls, we all fall because we are all economically connected through trade. So what I was really alluding to was that within a timeframe of, say, 10 years, it is conceivable that the world population could fall to below one billion; this is predicated on a collapse of any country or economy with sufficient weight to "get the ball roling" as it were.
I'll admit that I'm not very good a explaining this stuff, and I would re-iterate that Jared Diamond's book Collapse is an amazing summary of decades of research into how and why societies failed and succeeded. It gives details on what befell those societies that did fail, what features stood out in similar societies that overcame their difficulties, and what these lessons can mean to us today so that we can avoid failing ourselves. I honestly wish that everyone would read his book at least once each year. And I must also add that, after watching Al Gore's presentation in An Inconvenient Truth, I think it is the greatest tragedy in recent memory that he did not win the Presidency in 2000.
Were our revolutionary fore-bearers standing around with their hands on their dicks mumbling worriedly about the ends justifying the means? If that we're the case, we'd still be pledging allegiance to the queen. If you believe in something, of course the ends justify the means, for better or for worse. Belief in nothing may prevent fundamentalism from creeping in, but it also prevents the genuinely good ideas from creeping in.
I was smiling as I typed that. It wasn't really a serious question. I am all for radically altering society, as I have already stated earlier in the thread, and harbor no wishy-washy inhibitions about what may happen in the meantime. As long as the end is good, the whole thing is good.
Comments
Ah, so she's a Catholic.
/me runs for cover.
Yeah, Anglicanism and Catholicism are pretty radically different.
Yeah, Anglicanism and Catholicism are pretty radically different.
High Church. There's some history there.
Do the ends justify the means?
Were our revolutionary fore-bearers standing around with their hands on their dicks mumbling worriedly about the ends justifying the means? If that we're the case, we'd still be pledging allegiance to the queen. If you believe in something, of course the ends justify the means, for better or for worse. Belief in nothing may prevent fundamentalism from creeping in, but it also prevents the genuinely good ideas from creeping in.
Billions die all the time. They just do it slowly. You must be thinking there will be some kind of Apocalypse... It ain't necessarily so.
Obviously I was refering to a shorter time-frame, though not necessarily as short as a matter of days or even months. Let me just pose you a simple question. The food that you eat: where does it come from? And, no, I'm not talking about the supermarket! Where is your food grown and processed? If, like me, less than 50% of your calories are grown and processed further than 100 mi. from your house, how well will you survive the collapse of the West? -- not very well, I would guess. Do you realise that only 2 people out of every 1000 in the US are involved in food production? This is possible because of the extremely high ordered society that we have built. If we knock the pegs out from under our social structure, we may have to quickly return to practices of a century ago where the numbers were closer to 2 in 10. What happens to those other 990 people? A lot of them starve! And since you will have a lot of starvation, there will be a lot of people killing each other for what little resources remain. And with globalisation, if one country falls, we all fall because we are all economically connected through trade. So what I was really alluding to was that within a timeframe of, say, 10 years, it is conceivable that the world population could fall to below one billion; this is predicated on a collapse of any country or economy with sufficient weight to "get the ball roling" as it were.
I'll admit that I'm not very good a explaining this stuff, and I would re-iterate that Jared Diamond's book Collapse is an amazing summary of decades of research into how and why societies failed and succeeded. It gives details on what befell those societies that did fail, what features stood out in similar societies that overcame their difficulties, and what these lessons can mean to us today so that we can avoid failing ourselves. I honestly wish that everyone would read his book at least once each year. And I must also add that, after watching Al Gore's presentation in An Inconvenient Truth, I think it is the greatest tragedy in recent memory that he did not win the Presidency in 2000.
Enough ranting from me.
Were our revolutionary fore-bearers standing around with their hands on their dicks mumbling worriedly about the ends justifying the means? If that we're the case, we'd still be pledging allegiance to the queen. If you believe in something, of course the ends justify the means, for better or for worse. Belief in nothing may prevent fundamentalism from creeping in, but it also prevents the genuinely good ideas from creeping in.
I was smiling as I typed that. It wasn't really a serious question. I am all for radically altering society, as I have already stated earlier in the thread, and harbor no wishy-washy inhibitions about what may happen in the meantime. As long as the end is good, the whole thing is good.