Nice to be here and able to contribute my irrelevant ramblings to a forum of people that seem to actually want to rationally comment upon and question extremely important issues, as opposed to the typical blog these days that consists of “diz songe is da *&it”

Hi all, I’m glad to be here and when I have done putting you all on a pedestal I will add some attempted deep thought followed by strong gusts of humor. Cheers

I disagree that they’re irrational.

I’d be very surprised if the vast majority of car drivers did not believe that CO2 contributes to global warming, and did not know that cars produce CO2.

That does not mean that driving a car is irrational. Rationally, the economic impact and inconvenience caused by, say, finding alternate transportation or making big lifestyle instead of say, buying a Hummer is huge at the level of the individual, compared the the miniscule, immeasurable reduction of global warmingwhich that individual Hummer causes. So the individual IS acting rationally to buy his Hummer even if he is 100% confident it contributes to global warming.

So Gore’s point about the ratio of scientific opinion versus op-ed opinion is irrelevant to the basic logic of how individuals make decisions. If you want people to get behind reductions in global warming, or any other environmental or humanitarian depradations you have to find a way to make the cost of that depradation LOGICALLY exceed the benefit the individual enjoys from it.

Good luck. I don’t think it’s going to happen because global warming is a the result of every individual behaving rationally at the individual level even if the emergent phenomenon that results is not too nice. Short of coercive measures I don’t see how you you can change the inherent logic at the individual level.

According to my CIA personality quiz results (via https://www.cia.gov/careers/CIAMyths.html) I am a “Thoughtful Observer” which fills me with rocket propelled confidence.

Suck on that Trotsky!

In an interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Al Gore talked about his documentary and the slide that brings the most feedback: the one that shows how in all scientific peer review journals no articles of 928 over a 10 year period disagreed with the scientific consensus on global warming, but in the msn (NYT, LAT, WSJ, WP, etc.), articles over a 14 year period gave equal weight to the scientific conclusion and the corporate view that humans played no role. In this example we find evidence for the way corporate media helps foster the irrational “rational choices” plnelson attributes to what can only be seen as a selfish and exploitative form of liberty.

Meanwhile, Fraternity (and Sorority, or better yet, the awkward but righteous ‘Siblinghood’) is a nearly meaningless concept in American politics.

Another thing about this whole “family” (brother, sister, etc) metaphor is that real families are voluntary. I come from a big family, and I’m very fond of most of them, sort of fond of others, and few I’m not crazy about at all. I’m under no obligation to send Christmas cards to the ones I don’t like or bail them out of jail or anything. My degree of association or interaction with my family is voluntary.

But “fraternity” the way you’re using it implies an actual, enforcable obligation. Rather like the way a Muslim woman needs the permission of her brother or father or someone to date a man. So it’s a perversion of the concept of fraternity for political ends.

It’s a little bit like the way the left has recently started using the concept of “stakeholder” as a kind of parallel to “shareholder” in trying to extract concessions and obligations from companies. Companies are of course, beholden and obligated to their shareholders. So the left has introduced the idea of “stakeholder” to try to create a new set of obligations for companies. Stakeholders are employees, local communities, mom-and-pop businesses that depend on business from the corporation, local governments that depend of the taxes the company pays, etc, etc. It’s just a semantic game trying to turn a set of voluntary choice-based relationships into binding ones.

There is also another flaw in that statement. The American right is opposed to gay marriage, flag burning, abortion, extramarital sex, smoking majijuana, the kind of photos I put on my website, and whole lot of other expressions of individual choice. So I think you’d be very hard pressed to make a general case that the American right endorses individualism, or even that it claims to.

In general, it’s my view that any extreme philosophy, be it extreme right, extreme left, or religious extremism, tends to endorse collectivist thinking, i.e., where the tastes, values, or will, of the group are imposed on the individual, because it’s a good way to keep people in line, and extremists are always concerned with keeping people in line. Dissenters, whether they dissent by their words, or dissent by their actions, choices, and lifestyles, are dangerous to such enterprises.

That may be Manji’s definition, but we don’t have to accept it.

To me, individualism is the ethos (an ism is an ethos) that says that in the balance between the individual and collective, the individual should prevail. Individualism is the opposite of collectivism. Individualism has nothing to do with who the individual is “out for”. The individual could be out for himself, or for another individual, or for for abstract principal, or for the larger collective. The point is that it should be up to him.

The American Right has succeeded ideologically for a couple of decades now because it claims to be dedicated to protecting individual liberty.

Check again. It’s not just the political right. I’m a member of the ACLU and we ALSO fight for the individual. We’ve defended NAZI’s and the Klan against whole communities who wanted to ban them. We’ve defended pornographers and religious minorities. This is not a left-right issue.

Meanwhile, Fraternity (and Sorority, or better yet, the awkward but righteous ‘Siblinghood’) is a nearly meaningless concept in American politics.

Good. Because in the societies that you think are more enlightened, like Europe, that sense of “fraternity” has resulted in bans on any free expression that might rock the boat. Muslims are not allowed to wear headscarves, antisemites are not allowed to deny the Holocaust, and people are not allowed to publish cartoons that make fun of Mohammed. YOU might think that’s fine, but I think it’s tyranny.

I run a website where I publish sexy pictures of naked models. In some counties I’d be arrested for this stuff. Here, I remain at large.

We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devils bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

— Joni Mitchell

“Individualism—I’m out for myself—differs from individuality—I’m myself, and my society benefits from that uniqueness.” —Irshad Manji

Too many Americans conflate individualism – an ideology dedicated to the perpetuation of selfishness – from individuality – a gift to both the individual person and to the person’s society.

The American Right has succeeded ideologically for a couple of decades now because it claims to be dedicated to protecting individual liberty. The Right champions the “rugged individualist”, conveniently overlooking that, in most decent democracies, individualists are not granted carte blanche to exploit other individuals.
Decent democracies rein in the exploitative excesses our 18th century constitutional environment allows to flourish in the 21st century USA. (And, yes, the Constitution creates the environment that the body politic inhabits.)

Most other modern Western democracies are founded on more than mere individual liberty, giving equal tripartite emphasis to “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity”. The American Right doesn’t seem to care much for the second and third legs of that triad. They cede that domain to the Democrats, who talk up ‘Equality’ but without much sense of how to articulate it into a winning position. Meanwhile, Fraternity (and Sorority, or better yet, the awkward but righteous ‘Siblinghood’) is a nearly meaningless concept in American politics. And to our detriment. I’d rather live in a society that understands itself to be an extended family of individuals rather than a society of individuals first, with little if any sense of responsibility to the rest of the ‘family’. Again, read the lovely distinction given above from Irshad Manji (and leave it to a Canadian to nail it so effortlessly).

People are making rational choices within their value systems and according to their goals. I value reading, painting, writing poetry, designing software, and other activities. Someone else might not enjoy those things, but they might find watching the Simpsons or “Lost” to be a great way to spend an evening. When I chop firewood for my stove, or build a cast-concrete retaining wall for my hillside garden that makes me feel strong and masculine and vital; for another guy it might by driving a Hummer. I save my money for retirement and live frugally, someone else may reason that the future is too uncertain and so they should live for today. That might also inform their decisions about federal deficits or global warming.

When it comes to news and information sources, I read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal; I read the Atlantic Monthly, The Economist and the New Yorker and Scientific American. Other people may prefer Fox TV. One is not “better” than the other – we have different goals. I prefer the mental stimulation of competing viewpoints and in-depth detail. Other people find that stressful and tiresome and prefer to be soothed by hearing things that don’t challenge them.

I’m not “resisting the pleasure” of watching TV anymore than they are “resisting the pleasure” of reading Scientific American. We are all individuals, and individuality is the hardest things for collectivist philosophies like Socialism, Communism, and religious conservatism to accept. A few years ago the Prime Minister of Malaysia characterized individualism as antithetical to “Asian values” and said it was a peculiar western affectation. It isn’t, of course. When I was in Japan I met plenty of eccentric, individualistic Japanese, even though everyone thinks of Japan as exerting huge pressure to conform. But individualism IS a threat to regimes that would limit the liberty of their citizens.

But YOU can see through all of that. Do you have a metal plate in your skull to prevent the ruling classes from beaming remote-control thoughts into your head?

As I said in another thread on ROS, it’s interesting how people who subscribe to the idea that the masses are just helpless sheep incapable of taking responsibility for their decisions (including meta-decisions) always exempt themselves from the sheep herd.

If they have not been educated somewhere to be critical and skeptical of the message and the messenger, the result is as it is.

But no one educated ME in skepticism. How come I knew enough to see through the vacuous claims Bush used to support the Iraq war? How come I’ve never been convinced that I “need” a Lincoln Navigator to drive 4 miles to the grocery store to shop for a family of two? This takes some special education? Did I miss that class? Do I have to retake it?

People CHOOSE to be “bombarded” with those ads. I have never ONCE come home to find a TV network executive in my livingroom with a gun in his hand, trying to force me to turn on my TV and watch it. Maybe things are different in Japan – maybe NTV executives are more aggressive about promoting worship at the electronic shrine, but you know, with budget cutbacks at US TV networks, I’m afraid their “enforcement” program is lacking.

But, as I said, look to the west – the US is about to be eclipsed in all things consumptive by the Peoples Republic of Consumer Capitalism in the next few years. The Great Walmart of China is about to give everyone a few lessons in this subject. And nobody on earth will miss that class!

As for the ruling classes, they use even more energy and were just as keen to go to war or rolled over when they had the chance to stand against. As for debt, they need not worry as they own most of the wealth.

Yes he does.

“The ruling classes” aren’t the ones filling up their 14 MPG SUV’s every day at the pump or leaving every light in their trophy house on at night, or displaying enough Christmas ornaments in their yards to keep the local coal-burning powerhouse humming along all night. Nor are the “ruling classes” the ones who festoon their yards and houses with American flags to celebrate our bombing of Baghdad at the start of the current quagmire, nor are they the ones that keep the slave-labour factories in China tootling along so the shelves of every Walmart and Target in America can keep filling their boundless maws. Nor are the ruling classes the ones who don’t worry about global warming or massive personal or government debt because they expect at any moment to be enRaptured into Heaven, leaving the rest of us to fend for ouselves in the mess they’ve left here.

But fear not. In Japan you are a lot closer to the future than you think, because when it comes to consuming resources and producing global environmental mayhem, the torch is about to be passed. In the next few years China will exceed the US in just about every metric relevant to the topic. They’ve already passed us in several key categories.

That America, as a super power, throws it’s weight around the globe and acts mainly in the interests of its ruling classes (plnelson might disagree) is expected, though not appreciated by many people around the world who have suffered bloody “benevolence”.

Why not then just state it like it is? We need your resources! We want to open up your market to our goods and services so we can profit! We are more powerful so we can make the rules and disregard international laws and agreements. Cheney comes the closest to this kind of in-your-face honesty and most Americans can’t stomach it.

That’s why Chalmers Johnston puts it so clearly when he says the US needs to lose its empire to save its democracy. You can’t have it both ways and just continue to sell an expansionist plate as a nutritionally just and noble happy meal.

The only legitimate purpose of ANY nation’s foreign policy is to “exert influence” toward the result of advancing its citizens’ prosperity, security, and freedom. This is just as true for the US as it is for Iran, Norway, China, or France.

The old adage that “nations don’t have friends, they only have interests” is very true and I FULLY expect the US government to exert all its efforts toward advancing our national interests. The question is whether a policy of repeatedly getting into stupid, unwinnable wars, and finding ourselves with military bases, treaties, agreements, torture-for-contract arrangements, and other relationships with virtually every regime on earth actually advances our interests.

As an environmentalist I’ve repeatedly fought with Republicans who think that every public health or envioronmental law or regulation should first PROVE its benefit with a cost/benefit analysis. If they truly believe in that then I suggest a similar criterion be applied to every overseas military base, treaty, or intervention, and that once the benefit value has been reached by the cost it be automatically terminated on the spot.

Semantics aside, the bottom line is do we believe America should exert its influence in the world (benevolently or otherwise), or should we follow the Victorian England edict of “splendid isolationism”? As a fervent proponent of globalization, I believe in the former. This will obviously be at a cost, just as America’s “manifest destiny” had a devastating impact on the nomadic tribes of Native Americans in the 19th century. Those that persist to this day had to sacrifice their culture in exchange for a modicum of sovereignty and peaceful coexistence; those that did not were (with few exceptions) obliterated.

We’re in a similar battle today — but with far more dire consequences. Many thanks to OpenSource for bringing these two thinkers together.

The fact that there are SOME people who have benefitted from American intervention does not indicate that it is in America’s interest to intervene in the general case. In the early 1950’s we were the only power in the free world with any capacity to intervene AND we had a force structure based nearby to Korea because of our occupation of Japan.

As for the Balkans – they represent a good example of where we should NOT commit combat forces. If you look at the force structure actually employed there, there was very little, if any, that the EU states did not possess: armor, combat aircraft, infantry, most logistics, etc. They have tanks, C-130’s, F-16’s, etc. It’s true that don’t have F117’s but those were not, strictly speaking, necessary. The Balkans are in the EU’s backyard and US involvement should have been nil to at most, token.

The purpose of our military (or ANY nation’s military) forces is to defend national security. Period. They exist to meet force with superior force and to a carry a big enough stick to discourage potential adversaries to think twice.

Since World War II our military forces have been nothing but political playthings, not allowed to carry out the basic function of any military, which is to defeat the enemy. US forces have seen combat in Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Kuwait, Iraq, Lebanon (twice!), the Balkans, and several other places. With the exception of tiny little operations like Grenada, all of these have resulted in stare-downs across new borders (Korea, Kuwait) or disgusting, embarassing failures or unfinished, unstable quagmires like Somalia, Lebanon, Vietnam, the Balkans and Iraq.

Korea is probably the only conflict since WWII we had any likelihood of resolving successfully in the conventional sense, because in principle we could have conquered all of Korea right up to the Yalu river. But when the Chinese came across, the political stomach for raising the sort of forces required to repell them and reunite Korea under one, democratic government was lacking, so soon after WWII, and trying to do it under a UN mandate, and so the war ended in a stalemate, with the northern half of Korea living ever since under a crazed tyranny.

Korea should have been a lesson to us because all subsequent wars followed a similar pattern with a similar lack of satisfying resolution. We need to rethink the MISSION of our military and only enter wars where that mission can be carried out to a successful conclusion. Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, the Balkans, and Lebanon, are all places where, for one reason or another we should never have set foot.

that’s not really true. The only worldwide top dog in history was the British Empire. Before that, top dogs were always regional, e.g., Rome, China, etc.

On the home front, we have just had two straight years of negative savings–the rate’s last dip into negative territory was in 1933. We have had no appreciable increase in median income since the early 70’s. We are faced with two major inflationary pressures: double deficits and rising energy costs due to growing shortages and the requirement to transition to more ecologically friendly sources. We have gutted our industrial base. We are heavily dependent on imported oil from increasingly unstable regions.

Abroad, we are currently “seeking” unprecedented Production-Sharing-Agreements from the country with the second largest petroleum reserve while we occupy them–it is being called the classic oil grab.

So after all the verbiage is set aside, what we are doing in Iraq is fighting and attempting increase our wealth.

jon
Connecting the dots: From human behaviors to Ecosystem decline
http://StudentsForTheEarth.org