The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Eric the Green]

(12-24-2020, 05:53 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(12-24-2020, 12:06 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(12-23-2020, 10:23 PM)Einzige Wrote:

(12-23-2020, 09:14 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(12-23-2020, 05:41 PM)Einzige Wrote: I wish Eric were something other than a petit-bourg environmentalist. Ted Kaczynski puts you to shame, lib (and I don't even agree with Teddy K.).

I don't have the full physical or mental capacity to be a terrorist. I guess I'll leave that to you or Classic, if you really feel up to it.

You don't need to be a terrorist. But you should put your money where your mouth is and look into adopting a genuine ecologistic lifestyle. There are schools, like Wild Root School, to help you.

Well, I was one of the first people I knew back in the early 70s to recycle, and I helped in the creation of the first community garden and my school recycling center. I was on the central committee of my local Green Party. I screwed in eco-lights before most people did. Recently, I've made a couple of important transitions toward green energy. And so on. But, just as being a terrorist like Ted K would put me beyond my comfort zone, I feel no need to go to all possible green extremes in my personal life. I don't like farming or growing my own food, for example. But if the right policies are ever adopted after 40 years of neo-liberalism, none of us will have to go back to living like savages. A Green economy with abundance is possible with the right policies and innovation. I will follow my bliss. I will write books and music, and I will donate, exercize and organize.

But the problem, in my life, is not the economy per se. It's people who abuse me. Both my personal and my social/political experience reminds me that humans are still a very primitive species. We mistreat each other badly. Tonight I nurse my wounds. We have emerged from caves only 11,000 years ago, and established an enduring (though flawed) democracy (so far) only 244 years ago, and many people still have yet to see it. Not to mention a true social or socialist democracy, or a green one. And our spiritual knowledge has barely advanced since Buddha and Christ, especially in The West where emperors took over the movement of the founder and created a Church which keeps genuine esoteric knowledge of truth, God and the soul under wraps. And meanwhile our 400-year old science has created its own materialist religion and has been put to the use of greed and war. We have a lot to learn.

People will fit 'greener' lifestyles when the alternatives are absurd or impractical, the latter including overpriced. I see programmed driving as the norm (which is not itself 'green') as a consequence of the higher cost... much higher... than do-it-yourself driving as insurance rates favor programmed (that is, self-driving) cars become the norm. That is practically derivative of Economics 101.  

Certain trends favor 'green' practice, including prosperity. The end of the Age of Scarcity implies the end of  the appeal of conspicuous consumption, itself one of the most wasteful practices. Think of how richer the world would be if so much less effort were put into making status symbols. Think of how much better life would be if simplicity made flamboyance pitiable and ludicrous. I live in Michigan, which has plenty of Victorian houses as expressions of  lasting beauty; in some suburbs, up come the McMansions with their ludicrous designs:



Too busy, too many angles, too many nooks and crannies, and surely out of touch with the culture except of people with too much money for their own good.  

Even in a cultural setting, consider the sickening display of the pianist Liberace, who put a candelabra upon a piano and raised his hands high above the keyboard to simulate a cat pouncing upon a sparrow. No piano teacher would teach the assaultive strike upon the keyboard; fingers as a rule are best located close to the keyboard, as is normal for less pretentious virtuosos like... Artur Rubinstein, Peter Serkin, Emil Gilels, etc. I can only imagine what acoustic effect a candelabra upon a piano would make; it would be no improvement. 

Global warming must be stopped before it causes a great reduction in the food supply due to either the desertification or inundation of some critical farmland. We all know what consequences famine has upon human behavior, destabilizing political orders.

I confess I find that house attractive, if a bit grandiose. I want houses with more angles, nooks and crannies, etc. and I don't like the post-war tract houses made of ticky tacky all the same so much. "out of touch with the culture"? What "culture"? Victorians had that; we have lost it. I dread self-driving cars.

But I agree about conspicuous consumption. Americans don't really know that much about real beauty and real wealth, I think.