[PLUG-TALK] Re: [PLUG] Mad SCO Disease

Jeme A Brelin jeme at brelin.net
Wed Jun 30 01:05:23 UTC 2004


On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 gepr at tempusdictum.com wrote:
> The topic was Jeme's deceitful attempt to teach us properties of the
> real world.  The real world is not managed via fear and violence because
> of people like Rob.  That's putting the cart before the horse.

Well, the only reason we still have horses is because people like Rob keep
building the damned carts!

It's a cycle.  You break the cycle by not participating and working on
something else.  Put down the gun and you decrease the amount of violence
and fear in the world.  Carry it, and you keep things as they are or maybe
make them just a tiny bit worse.

> The world is managed (in part) by fear and violence because we're in a
> very large biological system where we're all competing for a finite
> amount of resources.

There's more to it than that.  The fear and violence are used as an
effective means of making sure some have very much while others have very
little.  It's true that resources are limited, but rather than spending
our time and energy trying to find ways to get more out of those resources
or get them distributed in a way that doesn't increase the amount of pain
and suffering in the world, we spend massive amounts of energy keeping
people from resources that will otherwise barely or never get used.

> Yeah, I agree.  And, to be honest, most of the people who have carried
> their weapons into my house or my friends' houses while I've been there
> and pulled them out for some reason have freaked me out a bit.

Right.  It's not just about how EFFECTIVE your solution might be, it's
about how pleasant it is, too.

[Glen, Russell Senior, Glen]
>  > gepr> Ack!  Nothing frightens me _more_ than a "Universal Declaration
>  > gepr> of Human Rights".
>  >
>  > Why?  It seems pretty innocuous to me, particularly since it is
>  > mostly universally ignored.  Given that, I can't tell what would make
>  > it frightening.  As a statement of how I'd like to be treated, it
>  > isn't so bad.  See:
>  >
>  >   <http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html>
>
> Why?  Because equilibrium means _death_ to a biological system. So, if
> we achieve it, then society (if not the whole biosphere) will collapse.

We're not talking about equilibrium, we're talking about minimum
standards.  There's a huge difference.

> Or "public education", which is a policy that is intended to provide
> anyone and everyone with the same education.  Ack!

Again, it's a base-line.  Hopefully you didn't get ALL of your education
from school.

> But, in the end, even if those policies fail, they still scare me for
> two reasons:
>
> 1) they _might_ succeed and kill us all, and
>
> 2) what is it about our psychology that keeps _insisting_ that
>    everyone must be the same?
>
> That's scary.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights isn't an insistence that
everyone become the same, but a recognition that there are some small ways
in which we ARE the same and those needs should be assured before we can
spend serious time working on those things that make us different.

J.
--
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     Jeme A Brelin
    jeme at brelin.net
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