64 comments on “OPEN DISCUSSION FEBRUARY 2023”

• Feb 1, 2023 at 4:52 am

  Moderator says:

  Welcome to the February 2023 Open Discussion thread.



  If you’d like to continue any of the discussions from earlier Open Discussion threads, please do so here rather than there.

  Comments about books or the climate crisis should be posted on the dedicated threads (see above).

  For discussions about Film/Video/TV/Arts in general, please use https://richarddawkins.net/2020/12/film-club/ 



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• Feb 1, 2023 at 4:59 am

  Moderator says:

  Selection of recent comments copied across from the January thread to aid the flow:

  Jan 23, 2023 at 11:58 am

  JANUARY #56

  Strato says:

  This is most encouraging. All I can really do is share it.

  I have Keynesian economist Joseph Stiglitz’s book, Globalisation and its Discontents: Updated. Great book. He is into universal prosperity, opportunity, economic justice.

  Tax the rich at 70%, again, as did FDR, and even higher. But world over.
   
  Lets see if it generates groundswell. The American masses have to critique this obligatory individualism indoctrination. It’s a hangup.

  Republicans, red in tooth and claw, will fight this desideratum from the likes of Stiglitz and Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, AOC.

  So lets see. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

  It’s out there now.

  Reason and justice will prevail.

  It’s a fine article.

  ____________

   

  Jan 23, 2023 at 3:01 pm

  JANUARY #57

  philrimmer says:

  Stiglitz is on the money (sic) taxing both income and wealth, Strato. Fancy doing a review of it in the Book thread when you’re done?

  An earlier book thread covered some of Keynes developing ideas in a discussion of Frank Ramsay’s biography by Cheryl Misak. Translated Wirrgenstein went a good way to change is mind almost 180 degrees and constructively sparred with his tutor Keynes, refining the philosophical roots of his economic theories.

  Because wealth increases disproportionately the ability to become wealthy, and because the origins of wealth lay in the theft of what was commonly held, the enclosures , the conquering colonisers. we need to restore some fairness to this lottery of birth. I call myself a capitalist (of a Robert Reich disposition) and I’m never going to say (out loud) property is theft BUT I will advocate for “obliged stewardship” to replace ownership beyond the personal, and sooner rather than later.

  The big and growing issue to face is that of Rent. The traditional left stance on this is that rent is wrong, simply making money out of an asset looks to be a motor for driving inequity. BUT the whole of the circular economy our salvation in other words depends on owned stuff being replaced by sold services. In this way technology can solve three categories of problems through financial pressure applied rather than just the one of low initial cost per function. What we need is technology also solving the energy efficiency issue, the longevity issue (so less manufacturing) and the reliability issue (so less costly servicing). Only if one entity sponsoring product evolution has all these burdening issues to offer the most cost effective service, wil technology actually shine in all that it can achieve.

  Rent will save the planet but landlords must become fully public servants, publicly obliged. I see banks and financial institutions becoming a class of obliged asset holders, divorcing the “property” from the service provider, state or private, themselves obliged to maintain the assets to mandated standards.

  We need to re-invent our financial institutions to put expertise in there to handle these necessarily longer term physical assets…

  ____________

  Jan 24, 2023 at 2:24 am

  JANUARY #58

  Strato says:

  And I was reading this today. About Agenda21, an urgently needful memorandum and the conspiracy the paranoid and control-obsessed right  turned it into, effectively making it ‘fall dead-born from the press’, as David Hume would have put it.
  It’s from the tireless Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC).
  Although it is from April, 2014, factual history is indispensable, empowering, knowledge.

  ____________

  Jan 29, 2023 at 6:26 am

  JANUARY #70

  Strato says:

  The people of the Czech Republic have shown wisdom and reason in electing Pyotr Pavel for president, over power addict and rightwing populist billionaire Andrej Babiš, who has now lost three times, a political hat trick for him.

  That’s very significant and positive. We sure do need it.

  Hopefully Pavel will prove to be progressive, which the young people want.

  ____________

  Jan 29, 2023 at 9:15 am

  JANUARY #71

  Marco says:

  Cheers Strato (#69)

  Great news about the presidential election in the Czech Republic (#70). Those former countries of the Soviet bloc have all struggled to find a clear path through to liberal democracy, haven’t they: they seem to be forever teetering on the brink, torn between yearning for the affluence and freedoms of the West and the old certainties of strong-arm authoritarianism, and never quite sure which way to jump. In the cases of Poland and Hungary, they’re not even teetering. Largely driven by Catholicism-induced social conservatism in Poland and nationalist-induced social conservatism in Hungary. The Hungarian situation is actually quite ironic, given that, pre-1990, it was considered by some distance the most liberal of the countries in the Soviet bloc (Yugoslavia was more liberal still, of course, but not under the Soviet wing to anything like the same extent). 

  But this is a resounding result, and it’s come at a key moment too, given the war in Ukraine. Let’s hope it’s the start of better things.

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

• Feb 1, 2023 at 6:15 am

  Strato says:

  Well I was going to walk to the supermarket tonight before it closes at 10, but gravity bested me. Trucking six km is good to do. Everybody drives there. Ah, well, there’s still tomorrow.

  And I want to watch Yearning to Breathe Free (1938-1942), , free on SBS, Australia.

  The first is ‘The Golden Door (Beginnings – 1838).’ Riveting film..

  It’s the second film in the galvanising three part American series about the plight of the Jewish victims of Nazi mass mania and murder and inaction by other countries to rescue the Jews when the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ was written on the wall. Eugenics, learned from America.

  Marco recommended it in the Arts, Music and Film discussion.

  As a kid my older brother got asthma attacks so severe he was in danger of dying there, quite a few times. My poor, ever-loving, longsuffering mother would stand there in the doorway in anguish.

  Dad learned of a health practitioner practising in Prahran, an inner easter suburb of Melbourne, Dr Sonnenberg.

  He had escaped the Nazis with his daughter. His wife wasn’t so lucky.

  He had been the chief doctor of Berlin hospital during the war, and so he was too useful to execute, but they banished him.

  He was required to sit for exams in Melbourne to be licensed to practise. He wasn’t young. Not a big man. He told them, “I wrote some of the textbooks studied in the Faculty of Medicine, Melbourne University.” Still, they wouldn’t relent. Hidebound.

  And so he practised privately in his house as a ‘health consultant’ and people found him, as did my dad.

  His regime for my brother was to build a robust constitution. Breathing exercises, strenuous aerobic exercise.

  Dad did up his old racing bike and my brother took up riding and long-distance running. He’d beat the school at the three-mile cross-country. He joined Amateur Athletics, running on Saturdays.

  Dr Sonnenberg saved him, transformed him. My brother is still into it today. Actualising.

  The Holocaust was of course genocide committed upon the Jewish population of Europe in its own right, but it robbed all humankind of incalculable talent and intelligence and good, as exemplified in Dr Sonnenberg.

  The lion’s share of Nobel prizes are earned by Jewish people. Like Joseph Stiglitz.

  There are no saints, of course, but some come pretty close.

• Feb 2, 2023 at 5:31 pm

  Sean Leffert says:

  Hello to the community,
  This seems like an appropriate place to pose an issue relating to religious dogmatism and animal welfare. I’m a veterinarian in America and used to perform welfare audits at livestock slaughter facilities. For those unfamiliar, Muslim and Jewish slaughterers refuse to render animals unconscious prior to cutting and bleeding them, and they claim religious exemption from our animal welfare laws for that reason. I published a review paper on the subject (linked below), but I’m also interested to see if this community is familiar with religious (ritual) slaughter, as it seems to stand as a fairly clear case of predictable suffering brought about because of religion. I’d be glad for any feedback!
  https://doi.org/10.1080/09712119.2021.2011296
  – Sean
   

• Feb 3, 2023 at 9:53 am

  Michael 100 says:

  Sean Leffert #4:  Without being able to cite any authority, I would think this is another example of people not wanting to abandon practices that made sense in the Middle East in the centuries before the common era and the early centuries of the common era.  As you say, “it seems to stand as a fairly clear case of predictable suffering brought about about because of religion.”  I look forward to reading your article.

• Feb 3, 2023 at 9:59 pm

  Sean Leffert says:

  Michael 100 #5: Thank you for the comment, and I believe you’re correct about practices which used to make sense. Back when Jewish and Muslim customs for animal slaughter were established, the alternative to making a deep neck cut to kill an animal was essentially blunt trauma to the head. Even more recently, when Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” was written about U.S. meat packing plants, I believe cattle were rendered unconscious via sledgehammers to the skull. Things have obviously changed a lot. Now we have guns and captive bolt devices that can immediately make livestock unconscious without causing them prolonged suffering. But religious slaughterers feel they must continue to instead cut throats of conscious animals because that is what their religion has instructed.

• Feb 4, 2023 at 8:48 am

  LaurieB says:

  Sean,

  Sometimes the law steps in to impose restrictions on our behavior. We have laws that require us to wear seatbelts for our own good, laws that prevent us from beating other adults, children and animals too. How would you feel about a law prohibiting ritual animal slaughter as an extension of the animal protection laws that already exist?

  I suppose we’d have an ethical conflict between animal rights and freedom of religion. 

  In ethics, conflict is expected between our many obligations and it is always up to the individual or society to sort out the conflict for the best possible solution. Some ethical obligations are stronger than others and can swing the decision one way or another even though the decision won’t necessarily be a perfect one. In ethics we accept this imperfection.  Sometimes we have to dive into the gray area and do the best we can.

  Making things perfect is an unattainable goal. Making things better is what we really are doing and to do that we might step on a few toes. 

  Your thoughts?

• Feb 4, 2023 at 11:01 am

  Strato says:

  Sean Leffert #4,

  Thank you Sean, I read your very thorough essay closely.

  I hope it is the norm that people would find the descriptions distressing, as I did, although you have reported on the subject entirely objectively, substantively and non-emotively.

  I think a distinction might be made in regards to relative sense of pain and cognition.

  A steer touching a 1amp electric fence will experience enough pain to induce learning to avoid it.

  I think that a steer experiencing the cutting of its throat, and even subsequent tearing of the flesh and pulling out the gullet with a hook, as has been observed in ritual killing methods you recounted, will experience a sense of mortal wounding, which is of a profound nature and depth.

  It has the ‘will to live,’ survival instinct, the most primal behavioural motivator.

  It could be proposed that that experience even triggers a sense of self, which we ascribe to humans, ourselves, sort of exclusively.

  Cultural relativists will remonstrate that those in the west have no right to impose their moral mores upon traditional societies. ‘It’s their way. Who are we to judge and impose our way upon them?’

  Here I would call up the authority of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 in regards to, for example the practice of FGM.

  We can extend this ethical universality to animals, and not to is indefensible.

  It gives me pause to know that Australia has shipped millions of steers to Indonesia.

  In the scandal which came to light in 2010 concerning killing methods there, distressing footage on Youtube, of blunt force trauma, beating these big, and beautiful animals to death in enclosures in slaughter houses there resulted in a temporary halting of live shipments, themselves utterly inhumane, in these multi-storey industrial transport ships in the tropics. Sheep die.

  It caused a backlog in livestock in Australia’s Top End with our giant  Brahman cattle stations, one the size of Texas. Transport drivers driving triple carriage ‘road trains’ in long haul, transporting cattle to the special loading ports were out of employment.

  Economics talks. And so we turned a blind eye. And we want congenial relations with our neighbour, don’t we?

  But it continues still. To be personally blameless, one would be vegetarian.

  Here is a recent article on this subject in The Sydney Morning Herald. Some might find this too distressing.
   
  https://amp.smh.com.au/world/asia/on-the-kill-floor-shocking-indonesian-footage-sparks-new-live-exports-probe-20211031-p594qk.html

• Feb 4, 2023 at 11:41 am

  Strato says:

  I went to a rock festival today, in the common in Torquay, by the sea. Good surf there. They hold surf comps nearby. The Southern Ocean swells.

  My special friends called me and said, “Come on down!”

  I live near there. I didn’t even know it was on. We watched six classic Aussie bands, sitting near the speakers and a screen. Bloody loud!

  Since lockdown finished they’re playing has gained new energy.

  Outdoor music events are therapeutic. One needs it. There is much that is troubling. But we are winning.

  It’s summer here. A beautiful day out.

  https://bythec.com.au/show/hoodoo-gurus-23/torquay-2/

• Feb 4, 2023 at 11:49 am

  Marco says:

  Sean – welcome!
   
  To Sean and everyone else:
  Like many (probably most) others here, I find halal slaughter abhorrent, but please don’t let us run away with the idea that the non-halal equivalent is not also utterly horrific. 
   
  Animals crammed into trucks and then transported, often insanely long distances, often internationally even, journeys that can take several days, often without adequate (or indeed any) food or water, or room to lie down; utterly terrified the entire time (I once had the sickening experience of getting stuck for many miles behind a huge truck heading to an abattoir, and hearing the constant bleats of sheer terror). 
   
  And there have been repeated exposés of goings-on at supposedly “humane” abattoirs when they finally get there. The animals wild-eyed with terror (you think they can’t smell the blood? or hear the huge machines? or the other animals’ screams?). Sometimes treated with nothing short of outright, vicious brutality by some of the abattoir workers (think anyone can spend any length of time working in an abattoir without becoming desensitised? dehumanised?) (Here’s an example if you can stomach it.)
   
  The stunning process itself is hit and miss. Fortunately probably more often hit than miss, but by no means failsafe. Again, exposés make it clear that a minority of animals are not unconscious at the moment of slaughter. And given the vast numbers involved, even if that minority were very tiny indeed, we’d still be talking about unimaginable number of animals. These are the Humane Slaughter Association’s latest figures for the UK alone: 
   

  Every year in the UK approximately 2.6 million cattle, 10 million pigs, 14.5 million sheep and lambs, 80 million fish and 950 million birds are slaughtered for human consumption.

   
  That’s 1,057 million animals per year, in the UK alone. Even if the stunning only failed one time in 1000, that’s still over a million animals per year, in the UK alone, that go through that industrial slaughter process without first being stunned. 
   
  The whole thing is horror and terror and brutality on an industrial scale.
   
  And, as if that weren’t bad enough, for most it is the culmination of a life of truly hideous suffering. Industrial livestock farming is an evil. Yes, a small minority of animals destined for our food tables are fortunate enough to lead a free-range life first, but the vast majority do not. The vast majority spend their lives in huge barns, with no natural light, no room to move, no ability to engage in any kind of natural behaviours. In some countries pumped full of growth hormones to the point that their joints can no longer carry their weight without agony. Have you ever seen the extreme distress of a dairy cow having her calf taken away from her? 
   
  And of all the animals we treat as nothing more than industrial commodities, pigs are treated the most cruelly of all.  Continental Europe consumes eye-watering quantities of pig meat in every conceivable form. Last year 52 million pigs were slaughtered in Germany alone. And yet you could travel the length and breadth of Germany and almost never see a pig at all. They are almost all – tens of millions of them – kept in enormous indoor barns, in tiny enclosures, without room to move properly, without any ability to engage in natural behaviours (such as rootling around in mud) and consequently stressed out of their minds. Sows kept in farrowing crates for stretches of up to 33 days at a time. Around the world, more than 600 million piglets castrated without anaesthetic every year.
   
  And of all the animals to do this to, pigs are the most intelligent. More intelligent and more trainable than some breeds of dog. They are highly sensate, highly responsive animals. If you care about animal cruelty but just don’t feel able or ready to cut out meat altogether, giving up pork products would be a significant step in the right direction. And here’s the thing: that hideously cruel halal slaughter? Jews and Muslims don’t eat pigs, so, unlike the rest of us, they’re not slaughtering them either.
   
  And all this ties in to some of the wider discussions we’ve been having too: about climate change, the environment, inequalities, and the steps we need to be taking, globally, urgently, to deal with them. Industrial livestock farming (with the inevitable industrial slaughter at the end of it) is simply not compatible with any of the pressing problems facing the world. We urgently need a return to smaller-scale, less industrialised, less mechanised, less water-consuming, more natural farming that is in harmony with the needs of climate, environment, livestock and humans alike. And actually, we urgently need to reduce the amount of animal products we’re consuming at all. 
   
  So yeah. Down with halal slaughter? I’m 100% with you on that.
   
  But intensively farmed animals held in hideous conditions that often amount to physical and psychological torture, pumped full of hormones and antibiotics as standard, then transported vast distances; all the while producing vast quantities of methane, not to mention the huge amounts of CO2 involved in the entire process from start to finish? That really isn’t ok either. I’m sorry, but pots and kettles spring to mind.

• Feb 4, 2023 at 3:25 pm

  Sean Leffert says:

  I’m blown away by all of the thoughtful comments, thank you all.
  LaurieB #7: I think your point is a great one; I think this does come down to how people weight the freedom of religion versus animal welfare. Surely both are important. Personally, I feel the negative externalities that these particular religious practices impose on the well-being on sentient, non-human species outweighs the otherwise admittedly important rights of Jewish and Muslim people to practice their faiths as they desire. Arguments can be made that neither religion demands the slaughter of meat, but supporters of halal and shechita slaughter have argued that any laws limiting their practices would represent acts of bigotry, Islamophobia and antisemitism, respectively. Those are muddy waters indeed, but I think many would wade them for the sake of these intelligent livestock animals dying avoidably agonal deaths.
  Strato 8: Thank you for the feedback as well as the article and your philosophical question regarding the circumstances which would elicit a sense of self among these distressed animals. Unfortunately, economic considerations do often predominate these discussions; especially with the high volume of meat produced in my country (and elsewhere). Anything which slows the speed of production is met with resistance from meat producers. For this reason, too, it is beneficial to religious meat producers to maintain their exemption from animal welfare laws during slaughter, as conventional slaughter conditions all USDA inspectors to intervene and report inhumane occurrences. You mentioned vegetarianism, do you believe we all ought to be vegetarians? Or is there a way meat production can be redeemed in your perspective?
  Marco 10: Several things I very much agree with you about, definitely. I believe the quality of life for livestock raised in large scale operations is usually overwhelmingly worse, relative to that of free range, smaller operation settings. You say industrial livestock farming is an evil; I would not disagree with you. However, one of the stark differences between religious slaughter establishments and conventional ones in America is that federal employees with no connection to the meat producers are allowed to stop and report inhumane conditions in conventional plants. That means livestock must have safe conditions, access to water, and instantaneous euthanasia. If these requirements are not met, there is a public record made and plants can be shut down. In religious plants, inspectors cannot intervene with religious practices, so much more suffering is tolerated. Failed stun attempts do happen (rarely), but when they do happen the federal inspectors step in and the meat producers have to answer for the event. This, in my mind, sets a clear distinction; a reason for religious slaughter to be the focus, first and foremost. A reason why conventional slaughter is, though imperfect, not as bad as ritual slaughter.

• Feb 4, 2023 at 11:29 pm

  Strato says:

  Further to Marco’s rightful condemnation of the tragic treatment described in the above posts, undergone by what we arrogate as ‘food animals’ at every stage of production of meat and culinary enjoyment, George Monbiot has also written in the same way in the Guardian on the industry and also on its environmental impact, focussing on the UK, its land and waterways.

  A great percentage of food animals in the UK and I presume Europe-wide are densely housed in pens in multi-storey buildings. It’s ghastly.

  Feedlot cattle are fed on soya beans grown in Brazil from the cleared Amazon rainforest. I guess pigs are also, and sheep, if they can be. It’s alien to their natural diet.

  The soil won’t produce after a couple of crops from virgin rainforest soil, depleted. And so fertiliser produced from natural gas is required, which has nitrogen and the essential nutrients locked up in it, concentrated.

  Worms become absent, burned by fertiliser. The soil biochemistry is sterilised. Production is forced.

  Hybridised or GM seed is patented and supply is controlled by such as Monsanto and requires a regime of proprietary hormones and chemicals to even germinate, or to grow. Bees die from pesticides and herbicides.

  That’s a critical problem globally for human food security, on its own. But what about Nature?

  This intensive feeding and industrial production of animals and fowls in factories and on land fertilised to maximise pasture, creates quantities of manure which the land can’t possibly absorb or use, or the treatment plants cannot process.

  Concentrated with nutrients and pathological microbes, it runs off or is discharged into the rivers and canals, destroying the unique ecology. They become contaminated with toxic algae, killing the fish, and life, destroying the unique ecology.

  You ought not to swim in them.

  George Monbiot became vegan  some years ago. He couldn’t not, in all conscience. He made a documentary on this ecolcide,

  and writes on the subject.

  The classic book, Diet for a Small Planet, 1971, stated the facts about vegetable protein production per acre  in comparison to animal protein output, claimed as a nine-times difference.

  It hasn’t been taken up. Clearly consumption behaviour hasn’t changed on any real scale.

  There are new emerging technologies for industrial production of protein, ‘faux-meat’ alternative to animal protein and with that being taken up, we might more approach sustainability.

  I don’t assume that. It necessitates input. 

  Production is consumer market driven. People won’t change voluntarily. And so we are heading for collapse.

  And so there are four issues concerning this matter: animal welfare, environmental impact, land utilisation, and economic sustainability, each as compelling as another.
   

• Feb 5, 2023 at 12:09 am

  Strato says:

  I trust this won’t distract from the profoundly important subject initiated this month by Sean Leffert, #4, and the ongoing discussion.

  In my relating the cool and therapeutic rock festival I went to yesterday, I said, “There is much that is troubling. But we are winning.”

  Well, that’s just hopeful. Last month Arountown had a bit to say about naïve hope. He’s not into it.

  This is what America is up against. Europe is also. The right. Trump has done untold damage. He hasn’t gone away, nor has his legacy.

  But the problem of course is widespread ignorance. And education is its remedy, as the Republicans well know.

  And so they are concertedly bent on managing that. And it will most likely work.

  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/04/conservatives-ron-desantis-florida-education

• Feb 5, 2023 at 6:44 am

  philrimmer says:

  Above all that we have to do, education is the single most important lever for long term rational behaviour and extending our species tenure.

  Kids look to us as the responsible adults, who have failed some populations egregiously, and thereby, the health of the entire planet. We have not done sufficient battle with the parasites. We have not been diligent enough in our own mortgaging of the future. We have not earned the privilege of despair. Should Kids look at us someday soon and say FU, then we can despair all we want, but we must keep it short and clear out of the way as soon as we can.

• Feb 5, 2023 at 2:13 pm

  Alan Appleby says:

  It seems that one of the more backwards countries of the world, has their religion to thank for being set on a course to become even more backward!
  Blasphemy is the  attack on the critical,  in support of the delusional, to prop up  the indefensible!
  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-64523501

  The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said Wikipedia failed to comply with its ultimatum.

  The Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, said the ban meant Pakistanis would be denied access “to the largest free knowledge repository”.

  Blasphemy is a highly sensitive and incendiary issue in Pakistan.

  . . . .
  Apparently the loss of a vast educational resource is regarded as of no consequence in some theovracies!

   

• Feb 6, 2023 at 1:00 am

  Strato says:

  Alan Appleby #15,

  This reaction could be a dialectical swing of the pendulum in Pakistan’s historical stumble forward into modernity.

  There is a fondness for heavy metal music, British rock of the 80s and 90s, and there are a few outspoken journalists, exposing corruption.

  Obviously the patriarchal authorities feel their power is threatened, and one suspects they feel embarrassed about what the public and the world can see, factually, in Wikipedia about the culture and the repressive authoritarianism, and choose to remain in denial of that, doubling down instead.

  Pride is an impediment.

  They have banned social media in the past on grounds of moral decadence and of course, blasphemy.

  Islam looks very much to be a monolithic, absolutist religion.

  Pluralism and diversity are healthy. And democracy.

  According to Wiki, for most Pakistanis, Islamic identity takes primacy over nationalistic identity.

  We are indeed lucky to know what we know and to be able to, and are free to discuss anything.
   

• Feb 6, 2023 at 8:28 am

  Strato says:

  I think Ron de Santis, hard-rightwing governor of Florida and certain to run for the Republican party presidential nomination, is just getting started on his militant drive against progressivism and his predestinated incarnation of the full-blown fascist, if he can.

  Perhaps he knows the dictum attributed to Ignatius Loyola, “Give me the child until he is seven, and I’ll show you the man.”

  Hitler put it, “…and he is mine forever.”

  And so de Santis is bent on determining what is not to be taught in schools, and universities, but is censored, under pain of dismissal and conviction for felony, and what is to be taught, that is, “Western Culture,” rewritten history, rightwing white christian ideology, and ‘black conservatism,’ must be promoted.

  And it’s working. Teachers and boards are scared, and are complying.

  I trust you can access this.

  (I need to make a further donation to the trusty old Guardian on top of my online subscription. I do read it a bit, and they know it.🙂 Same with wiki.)

  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/05/schools-and-universities-are-ground-zero-for-americas-culture-war

• Feb 8, 2023 at 6:33 am

  Strato says:

  George Monbiot on the grotesque industrial cruelty to animals, the scourge of giving money preeminence over life, and the next impending, and incubating pandemic, which could well make Covid look rather lenient.

  George certainly is one of our most important intellectuals, writes on various subjects, perceives what’s to prioritise, does his research thoroughly, has the requisite integrity.

  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/08/next-pandemic-bird-flu-mink-farms-transmission

• Feb 8, 2023 at 9:25 am

  Marco says:

  Thanks for that link, Strato. George Monbiot is always worth reading on all the subjects we talk about here so often: the environment, climate and the evils of capitalism.

  In fact, given how much time we spend discussing those issues, and how much hair we pull out trying to analyse root causes and identify possible solutions, I am positively shocked that we (myself very much included) had somehow, until Sean’s helpful prod on the animal welfare front led us in that direction, omitted to mention the enormous role played in all of them by industrial livestock farming. Actually, all industrial farming, but industrial livestock farming especially. And that’s before we even come on to the grotesque cruelty involved. And, as ably argued by George Monbiot in your linked article, Strato, the ticking time-bomb it is for human health.

  And in addition to the potential emergency of another, quite possibly even worse, pandemic, there’s also the issue of the way industrial farming depletes the nutritional value of our food too.  Soils depleted by monocultures and/or excessive artificial fertiliser use = fewer nutrients in the crops harvested from them. Even chicken, which we have long thought of as the healthy option on the meat front, now contains far more fat than it used to, and nowhere near as much of the healthy omega 3 DHA fatty acid (interesting press release from Cambridge University Press here, albeit from 2009). 

  While googling, though, I came across this very interesting 2017 piece by Small Farm Future, which, while generally a fan of George Monbiot, does take issue with him on a claim he’d recently made about the future of farming lying in high-intensity arable farming, with livestock farming ceding to artificial meat production, and makes a great case for a return to small-scale, mixed, organic farming. It all makes perfect sense to me.

  As an aside, I had to smile at this bit, though:

  George has written some great critiques of ecomodernism along such lines, so I can only think that his article strapline “as the artificial meat industry grows, the last argument for farming animals has now collapsed” was written by some hapless sub-editor, and not by the man himself. Say that it’s so, George!

  I know from my own occasional brushes with the journalism trade that authors have no control whatsoever over either the headline or strapline, and that both frequently distort what the author is really trying to say almost beyond recognition. Never ever blame the author for anything that comes before their first sentence. That’s always down to “some hapless sub-editor” !

• Feb 8, 2023 at 1:59 pm

  Strato says:

  Thanks Marco,

  I read Chris Smaje’s blog.

  I vacillate between solutions and fatalism in the quandary of how the world’s current population, and growing apace, can be sustained.

  That’s obviously George Monbiot’s dilemma, for which he is trying to find solutions he can advocate for. Perhaps he sometimes thinks of just becoming a musicologist to see his days out. Or a Buddhist. But one has to eat, even if it’s chick peas.

  Chris Smaje, at point 13, in advocating for labour-intensive small mixed organic farms, with crop rotation, leguminous leys and animals as the best for land, sustenance and sustainable productivity, admitted that current population, its consumption requirements and its consequent degrading land utilisation, which George decries, is only sustained from fertiliser from natural gas, which is all going to end.

  And artificial meat is no cheaper to produce, in the end. Nuclear power and renewables, wind and solar might provide energy for an alternative way of making fertiliser for high productivity, when the gas runs out. I don’t know. Hope is no consolation, or palliative. It seems there is no real fix. It all requires energy, materials and industry to even create.

  And Europe is now having to wean itself off Russian gas and Belarussian potash. Necessity is the Mother of Invention (love the Mothers.😄)

  And so it seems Smaje envisions the way of the future, and the Ideal, is in small labour intensive mixed farming and local supply, really as it was before industrialisation. How romantic.
   
  Meanwhile there remains the issue of industrial animal and poultry farming, at least. It’s impossible to make it ethical and it is resource hungry.

  And George Monbiot writes about what that is doing to Britain’s waterways. And on the next pandemic coming from the practice.

• Feb 8, 2023 at 11:05 pm

  Strato says:

  I looked up whiskey production. It’s interesting. Sprouting, malting, smoking with peat.
  But it is sort of top of the food chain.
  Peat is cut from bogs, vegetable matter that rots in anaerobic conditions for thousands of years, since the Little Ice Age when the tress disappeared.
  It’s another finite carbon based fossil fuel.

   
   

• Feb 8, 2023 at 11:08 pm

  Strato says:

  I looked up whiskey production. It’s interesting. Sprouting, malting, smoking with peat.

  But it is sort of top of the food chain.

  Peat is cut from bogs, vegetable matter that rots in anaerobic conditions for thousands of years, since the Little Ice Age when the tress disappeared.

  It’s another finite carbon based fossil fuel.

  It won’t copy, but the last paragraph in this informative article, about grain requirements for the UK industry does give pause, in the light of the above discussion.

  That industry has significant economic value, and the UK needs all it can get now.

  Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die comes to mind.

  https://www.diffordsguide.com/en-au/g/1168/single-malt-scotch-whisky-production/malting

• Feb 8, 2023 at 11:26 pm

  Strato says:

  Sorry, I doubled up again. “Hasty,” as the Ents would say.🙄

• Feb 9, 2023 at 2:43 pm

  Marco says:

  The irony of all this, of course, is that if we in the Global North would just live according to our needs as opposed to according to our compulsion to keep up with the Joneses, a lot of these issues would largely resolve themselves.

  It’s hardly surprising, is it, that we need highly intensive agricultural practices when 40% of all food grown for human consumption ends up being chucked away (most of it still perfectly edible).

  And it’s not just food. As the internal richness of our lives gets eroded ever-further by the enormous social pressure to buy, buy, buy, consume, consume, consume, it’s hardly surprising that so many Global Northerners seem unable to imagine a future in which they don’t spend their free time going to the shops, constantly buying new clothes, shoes, gadgets, furniture, ornaments, jewellery, cosmetics, perfumes, TVs, phones, stuff.

  Someone I used to know had a new kitchen put in every 3 years because by then she’d got bored of the old one. A neighbour recently told me she was having a new bathroom put in because the current one is 8 years old (mine went in in 2010, and I literally can’t see any reason to change it at all for as long as I don’t actively need a walk-in shower as opposed to a bath).

  It all needs to be manufactured at great CO2 expense; it all needs to be transported at great CO2 expense; when we get bored of it, 9 times out of 10 it ends up in landfill or transported, again at great CO2 expense, to developing countries, where it simply gets dumped and becomes an eyesore (sometimes a lethal one, depending on the chemicals involved).

  Fast fashion alone is the second-biggest consumer of water and is responsible for about 10% of global carbon emissions – more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. Do we really need a new outfit every time we go down the down the pub or have a night out with the lads/girls? Is it really so very terrible if we wear a t-shirt we bought two summers ago? 

  And is it really so very difficult to reduce the amount of meat we eat? Or use up the food in the fridge before going out to buy more? Or pop those last few slices of bread in the freezer rather than leaving them to turn mouldy? Or to walk or cycle rather than using the car when going short distances? Or to turn the thermostat down a degree or two? Switch lights and appliances off when not using them? I could go on and on and on.

  It’s amazing how simply and how well and how environmentally responsibly we can live when we step off the conveyor belt of consumerism. And it’s great for our mental health too. Not only does it leave time and space for more fulfilling, less mind-numbing activities than trailing round the shopping mall every weekend, it saves an absolute fortune and consequently a huge amount of stress.

  I don’t actually see any solution to any of these crises that doesn’t involve a major shift (in the Global North, at least) to a simpler, slower, more humble lifestyle. The pay-off, quite apart from a major step towards undoing some of the damage we’ve done to our planet, is that it would make us healthier and happier too.

• Feb 9, 2023 at 11:31 pm

  Strato says:

  Well said Marco.

  My son wants me to play music with him two and a half hours away, after having driven through the city. It’s for a yacht race party.

  Although I want to hang out with him, I clearly have to decline. Five hours driving.

  Our Labor government is passing the requirement for us to vote soon in a referendum as to whether we agree to the proposal that our Indigenous people be recognised politically and more empowered, in the Constitution, called The Voice.

  I very much doubt many of the 400 attendees at this party will vote “yes,” at all, on this compulsory referendum. Not out there, rural Australia. They never vote Labor, let alone Green!

  The Indigenous people were actually exterminated right across western Victoria in the 1800s. And many places besides.

  I am in a different world because of what I get to read, and my engagement here, which I count myself very fortunate to be able to do. But it’s not always comfortable, to say the least.

  I soaked and boiled a bag of chick peas, added a jar of tahini, cumin, garlic, pepper, lemons from my tree, vitamised it up and that’s two days’ sustenance for me. I had some nectarines.

  I got new boots. The old ones I wore for about 17 years. They fell apart. I buy quality and wear it out. Good cotton shearer’s shirts. I do need new jeans. One has to be presentable.🙄

  The hair is pretty long now, and rather unruly, though it’s clean.😑
   

• Feb 10, 2023 at 12:36 am

  Strato says:

  I am reading Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests and the Pursuit of Freedom, Derecka Purnell, 2021, Verso Books.

  What a powerful book.

  Drereck is a Black career activist and lawyer, earned her degree at Harvard. Ron de Santis went there too. Ivy League.

  There is nothing like lived experience. She recounts her political evolution from advocating for police reform to abolitionist. There’s a lot of history in there, colonialism, slavery, runnaways, Indigenous subjugation and massacre, and the origins of policing from the beginnings of that institutional oppression, colonialism, slavery, capitalism.

  Although it’s an audacious proposition and abolition won’t happen of course, Derecka Purnell is absolutely right.

  It’s critical race theory. ‘Theory’ as in the theory of evolution, not just propositional, or opinion.

  What’s in Becoming Abolitionists is everything Ron de Santis comprehends when he remonstrates against ‘wokeism’, and passes laws banning the teaching about racism or gender identity, and more, in schools and colleges, and has books banned. With threats of conviction for felony under statutes outlawing the dissemination of pornography!

  It’s going down in Republican governed states across the US.

  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/09/ron-desantis-florida-education-censorship

  And he can because this. Rather scary, or troubling,

  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/09/most-republicans-sympathetic-christian-nationalism

• Feb 11, 2023 at 5:24 pm

  Marco says:

  Strato #25

  I soaked and boiled a bag of chick peas, added a jar of tahini, cumin, garlic, pepper, lemons from my tree, vitamised it up and that’s two days’ sustenance for me. 

  Sounds good. Was there some olive oil in there too, because if so that sounds like a cracking homemade hummus, and exactly the kind of food I love. In fact, I absolutely adore pulses of all kinds: real soul food. I love their simplicity, I love their versatility. Proper Earth food. I make a fabulous dried marrowfat pea stew in my slow cooker: simplicity itself, but absolutely delicious.

  My son wants me to play music with him two and a half hours away, after having driven through the city. It’s for a yacht race party.

  Sounds as if you’re further down the path I was preaching at #24 than I am myself, Strato 🙂 . Playing music with your son, even if it is two and a half hours away, sounds like precisely the kind of valuable, life-enhancing experience that I’m advocating more of! I’m not preaching self-sacrifice, I’m preaching an adjustment to what we value, so that we focus on the things that really matter to us rather than getting trapped on the conveyor belt of consumerism. Experiences are life-enhancing, things (on the whole) are not: we’re just conned into believing they are by the purveyors of tat. I genuinely believe that simplifying our lives (by which I mean stopping buying endless stuff, stopping thinking we can buy happiness/confidence/respect/love etc in the form of the latest fashions or a bigger car or the latest gadget) can actively enhance our lives, because it sweeps out the dross and leaves more time and space and, yes, money and CO2 allowance for the things that really matter to us.

• Feb 11, 2023 at 8:41 pm

  Michael 100 says:

  February 12

  Both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born February 12, 1809. In spite of very different circumstances as well as some similarities, both achieved greatness and changed the course of history.

  Darwin was born at The Mount House in Shrewsbury England. “It is a building of the typical Georgian style, showing influences over the neoclassic movement.” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mount,_Shrewsbury).

  Abraham Lincoln was born in rural Kentucky at Sinking Creek farm, “an unpromising homestead of infertile ground, nestled among unproductive ridges.” It’s often said that Lincoln was born in a log cabin. It’s my understanding that a log cabin would have been considered a palace compared to the “miserable habitation” in which Nancy Hanks Lincoln delivered her baby. (Abraham Lincoln by Michael Burlingame).

  Of his youth, Darwin wrote: “my earliest recollection goes back only to when I was a few months over four years old, when we went to near Abergele for sea-bathing, and I recollect some events and places there with some little distinctness.” (The Autobiography of Charles Darwin).

  Lincoln was ashamed of his youth. He told a biographer, John Locke Scripps, “it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence, and that sentence you will find in Gray’s Elegy; ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.” Speaking about his youth, Lincoln said: “I thought of the time when I had been pinched by terrible poverty. And so I told them that I had been poor; that I remembered when my toes stuck out through my broken shoes in winter; when my arms were out at the elbows; when I shivered with the cold.”

  Charles Darwin’s father was a doctor and financier. His mother was Susanna Wedgwood Darwin. His grandfathers were Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood.

  Lincoln’s paternal grandfather was also named Abraham. In 1774, Grandfather Lincoln, participated in Lord Dunmore”s expedition against the Shawnees, and during the Revolution he joined General Lachlan McIntosh’s futile campaign against Fort Detroit.In 1776, while serving in the Virginia militia, he attained the rank of Captain. (Michael Burlingame)

  In the spring of 1786, while Lincoln’s father, Thomas was helping his father with farm chores an Indian shot and killed Grandfather Lincoln. The Indian then grabbed Thomas and began to make off with him. Thomas’ older brother, Mordecai, dashed back to the family cabin, grabbed a rifle and shot and killed the Indian. Michael Burlingame wrote: “The Indian may have belonged to a tribe the Captain had battled during his militia service.”

  Lincoln’s paternal grandmother, Lucy, had been raped by her employer and gave birth to Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks (I read, in that most reliable source — Parade magazine — that the actor Tom Hanks is a descendant of Nancy Hanks’ family). Lincoln once described Lucy as “a halfway prostitute. As a result Lincoln never knew either of his grandfathers. He did, however, attribute his intellectual abilities to the man who had raped his grandmother. I recently read that there were rumors that shortly before Nancy and Thomas were married, Nancy had sex with a man named Abraham Enlow. “One story in local circles was that Nancy Hanks had been impregnated by a man named Abraham Enlow (also sometimes spelled “Enloe”) before her marriage to Thomas Lincoln and that Abraham Lincoln was Enlow’s natural son. ‘She was a woman that did not bear a very virtuous name, and it was hard to tell who was the father of Abe,’ a Kentucky contemporary of Lincoln’s recalled. The story circulated for decades—and Enlow insisted it was true. However, as Herndon [one of Lincoln’s law partners] was told, ‘Abe Enlow was as low a fellow as you could find.’” (And There Was Light, by Jon Meacham). I have no idea if the Enlow story is true or not, but maybe that’s who Nancy had in mind when she chose the name Abraham for her son.

  Darwin’s mother died in July 1818 when he was a little over eight years old. She had gastrointestinal symptoms that were probably a sign of either a severe ulcer or stomach cancer. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susannah_Darwin). Darwin wrote: “My mother died in July 1817, when I was a little over eight years old, and it is odd that I can remember hardly anything about her except her death-bed, her black velvet gown, and her curiously constructed work-table.

  In late September 1818, Lincoln’s mother contracted what was then known as milk sickness. Burlingame wrote: “If Nancy Hanks died the way most victims of milk sickness did, her husband and children in the small cabin must have been horrified as her body was convulsed with nausea, her eyes rolled, and her tongue grew large and turned red. After a few days, as death approached, she probably lay in pain, her legs spread apart, her breath growing short, her skin becoming cool and clammy, and her pulse beating ever more irregularly…On October 5, 1818, a week after her symptoms first appeared, she died, unattended by a physician…Young Abe helped his father construct a coffin, a melancholy task…Nancy’s body was conveyed on a homemade sled to a gravesite near the cabin…No tombstone marked her final resting place, and no preacher delivered a funeral sermon until months later, when David Elkin arrived from Kentucky and spoke to a group of about twenty mourners gathered at the grave.”

  In the same year that his mother died, Darwin was sent to a day-school in Shrewsbury, where he stayed for a year. “I have been told that I was much slower in learning than my younger sister Catherine, and I believe that I was in many ways a naughty boy.” In 1825, Darwin spent the summer as an apprentice helping his father. In the fall, he attended the well regarded University of Edinburgh Medical School where he found lectures dull, so he neglected his studies.

  Lincoln was self educated. His formal education was the next best thing to nothing. Burlingame wrote: “Later in life he laconically referred to his education as “defective” and estimated the aggregate of his time spent in school was less than a year…The Indiana school available to young Abe was a low-ceilinged, flea-infested cabin with a floor of split logs, a chimney of poles and clay, and a window of greased paper. Pupils sat on uncomfortable benches without backs but with splinters aplenty. The young scholars usually studied aloud so that the teacher could tell that they were not daydreaming.” Such schools were known as “blab schools.” Never the less Lincoln taught himself to read which he preferred to any other activity. In his 40s, he taught himself Euclidean geometry so he could take a job as a land surveyor. Lincoln taught himself to read the law and became a successful lawyer in the state of Illinois. One time, during the Lincoln Douglas debates, the stage, at Knox College could only be accessed through a second floor window. After going to the room and crawling out the window, Lincoln said something to the effect of “well, now I can say that I’ve passed through college.”

  On December 27, 1831, Darwin began a five year journey on HMS Beagle. At various stops, Darwin spent time investigating geology and making natural history collections. As we all know, the knowledge gained on that voyage, was the basis of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

  During his childhood, Lincoln’s father frequently “rented him out” to other farmers. All wages were paid directly to, and kept by, Thomas. In March 1831 Lincoln left his father’s home. “No longer could Thomas rent him out to neighbors and attach the wages he earned in the abundant sweat of his brow. Though unsure about what he wanted to do, young Lincoln knew for certain that he did not wish to lead the crude life of a subsistence farmer, mired in poverty, superstition, and ignorance.” One of Lincoln’s first jobs as a free man was to take a boat load of goods from Illinois to New Orleans. First, however, Lincoln had to cut the trees and build the boat. He eventually made it to New Orleans where he witnessed the slave markets in that city. That experience, as well as having been rented out by his father, was the basis of his aversion to slavery and the eventual Emancipation Proclamation.

  Charles Darwin closed On the Origin of Species: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

  I read somewhere, although I can’t find the citation just now, that when Lincoln was signing the Emancipation Proclamation, he remembered his days of growing up in the mud of Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois and the irony that now he was signing a document that would free millions of people being held in bondage.

  These are just some of the things that mark the similarities and differences between two little boys that were born February 12, 1809. Although they grew up in very different circumstances, each left a marked imprint on the whole world.

• Feb 12, 2023 at 3:51 am

  Strato says:

  Marco #27,

  Thanks mate, for that response.

  I told my son I had to decline. I really feel they’re not my crowd. Rich conservative I think, unlikely to vote ‘yes’ in the upcoming referendum to recognise our Indigenous people in the Constitution and give them a formal ‘Voice’ in parliament. There could be 400, all talking, animated, where we would likely be just more room noise. Unless we win them over to listening and maybe digging it,

  I would get a mere $200. It would actually cost me.

  But you have me really rethinking it.

  Doing it with my son is rather precious. He digs my musicality and how I take on the physicality, playing chords on a rich old Yamaha 12-string I restored, did a neck reset, refret, installed a good pickup system. Or playing rhythm on a loud Martin D28 replica I built from a kit from Stewmac, USA. I sing harmonies, play guitar and harmonica with a holder I have amplified with a lapel mic, homemade arrangement, which sounds pretty excellent.

  I am into it, have been forever. So is he. He’s a music teacher, built a fine recording studio in his house. I think he’s disappointed but he was gracious about it.

  Jees, I’ll have to do it. Actualise with him. I will deeply regret it otherwise. Just copping out, failing, lost opportunity. While I still can. It’s the Easter weekend.

  Choose life.

• Feb 12, 2023 at 4:16 am

  Strato says:

  Michael 100 #28,

  How interesting, and a welcome reprieve really, from what I have been immersed in, Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests and the Pursuit of Freedom, Derecka Purnell, 2021, Verso Books.

  She is amazing, a scholar, lawyer and career activist. This is some book. I now understand. But the account is a heavy one. Derecka is positive, highly motivated, driven by love. Love makes the world go around.

  It’s about the Black, coloured and Indigenous historical experience of injustice on every level in the US, South Africa, Australia also.

  We are taking some measures to address that, if the Australian public will demonstrate the will to care.

  But Abraham Lincoln wasn’t mean, but a humanist, enlightened. Such a contrast to the likes of Ron de Santis, moralistic control freak, rightwing christian fascist actually. They’re consolidating.

  You have me really wanting to read Michael Burlame’s work. It would be good for my mental wellbeing.

  He is prolific, at 81. He just published two books on Lincoln in 2021, including this, linked below, about Lincoln’s personal affirmation of Black people as fully equal, against the usual racist bigotry.

  He was fearless, a truly independent thinker and leader, and pioneer.

  Edifying to study Abraham Lincoln, and a reminder of the standard, against the Republican noise, rightwing media, attention hijacking bombardment and ignorance.
   
  https://www.booktopia.com.au/the-black-man-s-president-michael-burlingame/book/9781643138138.html
   

• Feb 12, 2023 at 9:20 am

  Marco says:

  Michael #28 – that’s a great contribution, thank you! Really interesting.

  Darwin is the subject of a rather nice piece in today’s Marginalian, too, for obvious reasons. It focuses on a less well known aspect of his life: his love of poetry and music, and his sadness when sight and hearing loss in old age meant he could no longer enjoy them.

  A quick Google showed that a love of poetry was something else he and Lincoln had in common. Lincoln actually wrote a few poems himself and memorised and frequently recited this (rather gloomy!) poem by William Knox. And Lincoln was a music fan too, it seems, and frequently went to the opera. 

  I think even more highly of both men for knowing this. Responding emotionally to art, music, literature, beauty in general: it’s all part of being truly human and living life to the full, but easily sidelined in pursuit of a grand vision, be that scientific or political. It says a lot for both men that they didn’t let that happen.

  Thanks again, Michael – this has been a lovely way to mark Darwin Day.

• Feb 12, 2023 at 10:44 am

  Marco says:

  Strato #29

  Jees, I’ll have to do it. Actualise with him. I will deeply regret it otherwise. Just copping out, failing, lost opportunity. While I still can. It’s the Easter weekend.
  Choose life.

  Good man! Life is short, and the greatest myth of all is that we can always do X another time (I’ve learned that one the hard way). Totally get that they’re not going to be your kind of crowd (they wouldn’t be mine either). But hey, you’re not going to be doing it for them, you’re going to be doing it for yourself, and your son. Creating memories, strengthening bonds, enhancing both your lives. That’s proper living, that is.

• Feb 12, 2023 at 4:10 pm

  offg says:

  darwin day
  reading a book leading up to this day
  a few pages a day
  with the great man always in mind
  https://www.phaidon.com/store/photography/evolution-a-visual-record-9780714871189/
  full of
  endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful

• Feb 13, 2023 at 12:09 pm

  Strato says:

  offg #33,

  Darwin had that ‘appetite for wonder’ RD titled one of his later consistently excellent books.

  I read over a dozen. A couple twice. Transformational. I had been a christian but curiosity and awareness of my ignorance was my salvation. Richard has been a major educator in my life.

  But I haven’t yet read Darwin’s own books. They are on the list.

  I have the six volume box set In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, 1908-1927. I had started the first, Swan’s Way but I can’t see that I’ll ever get around to finishing them, regrettably. Non-fiction is always taking priority.

  I read Shakespeare’s complete works, Chaucer, London Fields, Martin Amis, heaps of Hitchens, Alice books.

  But Charles Darwin is essential, arguably our most important scientist. I need to get to know the person and his evolution.

• Feb 13, 2023 at 12:31 pm

  Michael 100 says:

  Strato #30, Marco #31: Thank you both for your kind remarks — much appreciated.

  Marco, the story in the Marginalian is a keeper.  What you say about Lincoln’s love of poetry and music is very true.  He read everything he could get his hands on. That could well be the subject of another essay!!

  Strato, I have Burlingame’s The Black Man’s President on my must read list.

• Feb 13, 2023 at 1:08 pm

  Strato says:

  This is excellent.

  Chris Hedges has had quite a career. Profoundly literate, has deep moral integrity. Really worth looking into.

  The subject is most serious, but the remedy is articulated.

  The book he discusses with the authors is Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management and Critical Media Literacy,

  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C_PZ8rvpqyc

• Feb 13, 2023 at 1:26 pm

  Strato says:

  Nolan Higdon and Mickey Huff discuss with Chris Hedges how America became so polarised, where there is actually widespread talk of civil war.

  Such an unthinkable scenario wouldn’t be standing armies as before, over the issue of slavery, owning human beings, but “all against all,” to quote Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan.

  The gun owners are likely very predominantly Republicans. But the order would collapse. No one would survive.

• Feb 14, 2023 at 2:07 am

  Strato says:

  Times like these have been before. We once thought it was a 20th century scourge, defeated. Good prevailed.

  The spectre of full-blown fascism in America is prevented from re-arising in Germany by the universal, generational teaching to German children the uncomfortable truth about the past, Nazism, the Holocaust.

  Hence Germany is the most stable and flourishing liberal democracy of them all.

  Ron de Santis’s Orwellian decrees, mischaracterised as merely the right’s push-back in the ‘culture wars’, are being enacted in many other Republican states. And it’s only getting started.

  People are unwilling to read and get themselves educated. And so ‘democracy dies in darkness’, the motto of the Washington Post.

  And so the horrors of authoritarianism and the zeal and brutality of fascism are visited upon them. Minorities, LGBTIQA people suffer and die. Women are disempowered, subjugated. Feminism is crushed. Atheists are persecuted. Nationalism is central to the religion.

  There are far more guns than Americans in the US.

  And feminism is of cardinal importance in the preventives to this descent into madness. So is critical race theory, secular humanism, universal human rights, and understanding of intersectionality.

  Discourse. And a fearless, principled press and media, and academic community is rather vital to democracy.

   
  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/13/african-american-studies-republican-ban-florida
   

• Feb 14, 2023 at 6:09 pm

  Zeuglodon Beta says:

  Strato, at #38
   
  We shouldn’t be surprised. Judge a movement by its attitude towards science, and thus of honesty-in-practice. Most obviously, the strongest anti-science attitude tends to come from the Republican side (allowing that some left-wingers can show such an attitude as well). Without careful fact-checking, flexibility, and caution around the possibilities of bias, ideologies become little more than tribalistic PR agencies.
   
  I mean, there’s no grounds for seeing e.g. LGBTQIA+ people as any worse than anyone else, and no one’s going to be taken seriously if they say, “I bully them because I just don’t like them, OK!?” Surprise surprise, mostly they have to resort to reality-escaping religious reasons for persecution (e.g. declaring it “sinful” or “unnatural”, as if Nature were a distant god who cares what we do), because reality’s not helping them out either.
   
  So when you start by treating reality as subservient to some other cause, and reality starts contradicting you more and more, the only way is down.

• Feb 15, 2023 at 2:18 am

  Strato says:

  Zeuglodon Beta #39,

  I certainly take your point about attitude to science, able to be generalised to attitude to reality, or, in regards to the sexuality spectrum, what is, in biology.

  And yet societies which are scientifically advanced can manifest discriminatory policies and attitudes. I’m thinking of Russia, and China.

  I see a fundamental driver in male dominance, reactive and proactive aggression, primatologist Richard Wrangham identifies in The Goodness Paradox: the Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Hunan Evolution, 2019.

  This resulted in fierce patriarchy as the essential distinctive in the Abrahamic religions.

  And so Ron de Santis is of that mindset.

  The ‘disgust reflex’ is worth examining. I’m not sure there is any inherent predisposition to it in humans. We do recoil at halitosis which is adaptive, because pathogens cause disease.

  But I wouldn’t be quick to endorse any suggestion that we have an innate predisposition to classifying others as objectionable, unless one is an alpha male bully psychopath like Andrew Tate, the concerningly popular influencer. Then everyone is contemptible.

  It can be effectively neutralised by education and experience, remain dormant in an enlightened individual, or it can manifest as obsession, inculcated by upbringing and culture, ‘nurture’, the societal mindset.

  This paper, below, by a female social scientist with the British army studying Afghan society is quite a revelation indeed. I have no reason to presume things have changed at all since it was written up.

  She doesn’t openly declare it, but of course it begs the question. I am free to say it though. This culture is as wretched as it gets and I have no problem at all with homosexuality between consenting adults. Women are victimised. Boys are perverted.

  New South Wales is debating whether to ban ‘gay conversion therapy’, an incredibly abusive practice, christian, or orthodox Jewish, Islamic also, I can only presume.

  It is interesting how the disgust reflex is so malleable, able to be determined, or defeated.
   
  https://info.publicintelligence.net/HTT-PashtunSexuality.pdf

• Feb 15, 2023 at 5:58 am

  Zeuglodon Beta says:

  Strato, at #40
   

  And yet societies which are scientifically advanced can manifest discriminatory policies and attitudes.

   

  This resulted in fierce patriarchy as the essential distinctive in the Abrahamic religions.

   
  I think that proves my point. Societies may be scientifically advanced, but that’s not the same as saying their ideologies have no anti-science leanings. Even in the West, mainstream scientific understanding is riddled with basic errors (I remember a poll Richard quoted in The Greatest Show on Earth which showed an abysmally high portion of the population had no idea what a “month” is). To say nothing of how many misunderstandings of evolution by natural selection there are. And you don’t need me to point out that our politicians are PR agents to the extreme.
   
  Why do you think science is so often stereotyped as a nerd’s game in modern society? It’s a generator for technology, not a crucial reality check. A servant to another ideology, not a master.
   
  That shouldn’t be surprising, either. Compare, for instance, the early warning advice of the scientific community versus how politicians actually handled the COVID-19 outbreak.
   
  Patriarchal cultures certainly aren’t exempt from the charge of denying reality when it suits. I’d speculate the reason there are so many “Angry Men” around is precisely because reality isn’t playing along with their male-dominant power fantasies.

  So it’s like I said: when you start by treating reality as subservient to some other cause, and reality starts contradicting you more and more, the only way is down. It’s an open question what that “cause” specifically happens to be.

• Feb 15, 2023 at 7:10 am

  Strato says:

  I’ve been getting a bit burdened lately by what I’m reading about.

  Climate depression is a thing, afflicting young people.

  That conspires to bring me down too.

  But so does the war, racism, the resurgence of the religious and nationalistic right, gun culture in America and police homicides mostly on Black people, environmental degradation, unsustainability, consumerism; troubling matters on many fronts, fellow travellers in the contemporary world.

  But here is a gratifying story. A much welcome relief. I keep saying women can save us.
   
   
   

• Feb 15, 2023 at 7:54 am

  Strato says:

  Zeuglodon Beta #41, 

  I agree. Cognitive dissonance is the conflict experienced from the disconnect between what one believes – religion, ideology – and reality, or justice, or flourishing.

  And in including justice there, I would add to the scientific lens to reality, and the understanding of the universality and diversity in humankind, such as through the field of genomics, the social sciences also, including psychology, philosophy and ethics, anthropology, history, the archaeological story, and the Bayesian method in historiography.

  Also qualitative data has its valid place in informing us, and isn’t waiting to be simply supplanted by quantitative data, necessarily.

• Feb 15, 2023 at 8:11 am

  Strato says:

  The face of evil.

• Feb 16, 2023 at 3:54 pm

  Alan Appleby says:

  The deeply indoctrinated just don’t deem to be able to recognise that reality is unimpressed by their faith in mythological stories!
  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-64659798

  A pastor in Mozambique has died after trying to fast for 40 days, emulating what Christ is said to have done in the Bible.
  After 25 days without food or water, he had lost weight to the point where he could not stand up. He was aged 39.
  He was rehydrated with serums and an attempt was made to introduce liquid foods, but it was too late and and he died on Wednesday.

   
  It seems he is not the only victim of this self-inflicted stupidity and the have been other cases!

• Feb 17, 2023 at 1:59 am

  Strato says:

  It takes a human to do that.

• Feb 17, 2023 at 9:27 am

  Marco says:

  Something I read online once (here, probably!) – I didn’t make a note of who’d posted it, though, unfortunately:

  Both religion and science build up towering hypotheses and philosophical houses of cards. Science is the one that says, “Now let’s see if it’s true.” 

• Feb 17, 2023 at 10:00 am

  Strato says:

  And why didn’t the poor fool do his homework?
  A healthy young person can fast for forty days and forty nights. Maybe.
  But one has to keep well hydrated. Or it’s a horrible death.
  There is a precious water source on the Mount of Temptation.
  But I think the account of Jesus is fiction, although asceticism and renouncers have been around since religion.
  With inflation, giving up consuming altogether, starting with food, is the Royal road to saving.
  Become a breatharian. And it doesn’t get more spiritual than that.
  But then Our Hero tried that.
   

• Feb 18, 2023 at 7:21 am

  Strato says:

  Eminent historian Mary Frances Berry’s recent discourse in the Lincoln’s Dilemma series.

  I’d be interested to hear her response to Ron de Santis’s recent legislation as leader in the wider Republican campaign to outlaw the teaching of the historical oppression of Black and Indigenous people and how racism is perpetuated and embedded institutionally in America.

  Derecka Purnell acknowledges Mary Frances Berry in her confronting  and deep account of Black and Indigenous, and also Latinx, and LGBTIQ+ experience and action, Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests and the Pursuit of Freedom, 2021, Verso Books, quite a profound education for me.

  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IsE9B1TtgRk
   

• Feb 19, 2023 at 5:24 am

  Marco says:

  Love the link at #42, Strato. 

  It’s certainly easy to fall into doom and gloom – I do it myself quite often. The crises facing the world seem so huge and so intractable, or at least, intractable as our economies and societies work now – and let’s face it, that seems intractable too. 

  So it’s good to be reminded that there really are good people out there doing the right things for the right reasons, and often bringing enormous ingenuity to their local challenges. And yes, they’re often women, though not always, obviously.

  Here’s an example that cheered me enormously when I first came across it a couple of years ago, not least, actually, because it challenged some of my preconceptions – a hospital winning an international architecture award? In Bangladesh? What an absolutely fantastic thing to happen – and it’s been built with the climate very much in mind too: a-hospital-in-bangladesh-wins-riba-international-prize-2021 

• Feb 20, 2023 at 9:26 am

  Strato says:

   
  Marco #50, 

  That’s beautiful. And therapeutic.

  In Young Matthew Lawrence’s recent powerful piece in the Guardian about the consequences of Thatcher’s aggressive program of privatisation of utilities, the commons, neoliberalism, globalisation, the mantra, ‘the market is righteous’, in the UK, Lawrence advocates for reversing it all, and more, as a democratic socialist, and so inspired me to order

  order the book, a collaboration with

• Feb 20, 2023 at 10:08 am

  Strato says:

  Here is that Matthew Lawrence article mention in previous post.
  It’s positive. It’s rational, and just. He’s young.

  The book was written in collaboration with Adrienne Buller.

  They work at Common Wealth.

  https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/17/energy-sector-gas-shareholder-profits

• Feb 22, 2023 at 12:19 pm

  Marco says:

  Thanks for those links, Strato, and apologies for the slow response. We’re not even at the end of February yet, but already 2023 is turning into a bit of a bugger. For me, anyway. Still, “Things can only get better”; or I hope so, at least!

  Changing the subject rather (though still very much in the realm of irrationality and resistance to every attempt to make the world a better place), I keep seeing references to a “15-minute city conspiracy” of late. Somehow, the unhingederati have managed to turn a perfectly laudable endeavour to ensure that everyone has the basic facilities they need within 15 minutes of their homes, thereby making cities more livable and more eco-friendly, into a monstrous scheme to BAN people from travelling more than 15 minutes from their homes.

  This article explains all, including the transparent connections with the same old, same old, far right conspiracy nut jobs. Though “nut jobs” makes them sound far too harmless. In reality, this stuff is evil and dangerous; and I don’t for one minute think the people responsible for starting this nonsense actually believe it themselves. Why are they so afraid of every single attempt to make us healthier, happier, fitter and less stressed; and to give the natural world half a chance of survival? Why do they portray every single attempt to make the world better, as an act of evil? What do these people want? And what do they gain by exploiting people’s gullibility in this way?
  https://bylinetimes.com/2023/02/22/manufacturing-discontent-the-15-minute-city-conspiracy/ 

• Feb 23, 2023 at 4:52 am

  Strato says:

  Marco #53,

  What’s going on Marco, you alright? 

  But perhaps you’d rather not go into it here, make it about you, be stoical. I can understand.

  Thanks, that’s an excellent article and website. They’re out there. Solidarity. Respek.
  I read about this in the Guardian.

  I have just read This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, Peter Pomerantsev, 2019.

  He covers a lot of ground, St Petersburg troll farm, China, the ‘disinformation war’, in the digital age of social media, how it is gamed.

  This is an outstanding book, deeply disturbing. Now I am about to start Pomerantsev’s earlier book, Nothing is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures In Modern Russia, 2015.

  Its title is from Hanna Arendt’s classic, Totalitarianism.

  Although we are 7 years on from when it was written, it’s still relevant, another classic exposé. Peter Pomerantsev is such a great writer, succinct and penetrating intellectual, progressive, contributor to the Guardian, which is where I discovered him.

  His forebears had deep lived experience, being Jewish, fleeing Nazism, as has Peter deep lived experience. He was born in Ukraine. Spent several years in Russia as a journalist and academic. He has travelled widely, as an academic, investigator.

  I see two themes in all this. One is the general profound unwillingness to read and get informed, educated, to address the ignorance ongoing, leaving people open to being coopted or at least passively acquiescing in their exploitation, or doing the exploiting, because after all, those are hardly enlightened, are they? Cynical, corrupt, totally selfish, amoral.

  But both the gamers and the gamed don’t care about being educated. Those who echo and amplify conspiracies think they care, and are in fact the enlightened, the cognoscenti, the alt-woke.

  Jordan Peterson holds his hapless followers in contempt. All these influencers do, like Tucker Carlson. Peterson has no idea. He will end up barking mad, is already manifesting real signs of that.

  And the second theme I identify is male aggression, ‘Will to Power,’ domination. Some women can be disposed to this too. But it’s a male orientation to be fascinated with shock and awe weaponry, love combat, competition, and how far that can go. Libertarianism is implicitly aggressive. But women get sucked into conspiracy theories too, and can be real zealots, anti-feminists, libertarians, Putinists, Trumpists, ultra patriots.

  But male aggression and disposition to domination is biological and is a big problem in the modern era with our fifth industrial revolution. The dark and ambitious side of human nature.

  Peter Pomerantsev is male. A great humanist, highly educated, an educator.

  But another book just arrived, Owning the Future: Power and Property in An Age of Crisis, Adrienne Buller and Matthew Lawrence, 2022, Verso Books. ‘A roadmap to a better, more equable world.’

  Reverse neoliberalism.

  One can at least read this stuff, support those who write it, and share it. But I don’t do social media. I’m not an activist’s bootlace. I just read a bit.

  But ‘hi’ to those who surreptitiously trawl my online activity data to profile and target me. Get a life.

• Feb 23, 2023 at 10:06 am

  Strato says:

  Marco #53,

  Nothing really beats satire.

  First Dog on the Moon on the conspiracist hysteria over the completely rational concept of the ‘15-minute city.’ The solution.

  He lived in Brunswick, just north of Melbourne city, where the hipsters and students rent. They moved to southern Tasmania, up the Huon valley. Beautiful. I picked apples there.

  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/22/are-15-minute-cities-a-good-idea-or-the-work-of-un-greenist-devils
   
   

• Feb 25, 2023 at 9:26 am

  Marco says:

  Strato #55

  Nothing really beats satire.

  Ha – that’s very good! I especially like this bit: “Why do you have to make up pretend terrible things when there are already so many real terrible things?” 
  It’s a very good point – except that I suspect that’s the whole point, really: it’s far easier for certain types of power-wielders if we’re all getting our knickers in a twist about stuff that isn’t happening, because it leaves us with no energy/time/inclination to start kicking up a fuss about stuff that really is.
  Anyway, I’ll be back again soon – though probably not before tomorrow – with a longer post. Just wanted to swing by so you’d know I haven’t been abducted by aliens or anything 🙂 

• Feb 25, 2023 at 9:05 pm

  Strato says:

  Marco #56,

  Things are quite dire in America with extreme wealth inequality and individual debt, late stage capitalism. 
  I have, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: the Case For Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition, the Debt Collective, 2020.
  The statistics reveal an appalling state of affairs, suffering and insecurity.
  ‘The average American dies $62,000 in debt.’
  But it impacts Blacks and Latinx and Indigenous people the hardest by far.
  Black graduates have over $25,000 in student debt. Defaults are very common. People are in despair. You can’t get ill.
  And it’s getting worse each year. Bernie Sanders quotes these numbers. But Americans have been ever lead to believe, or post-FDR’s New Deal era that socialism is evil, ‘unAmerican.’ One has to take personal responsibility. Rich or poor, you deserve your lot. Libertarianism.
  And so Fox News has a giant viewership. It’s not news at all. It’s the propaganda arm of the Republican party, serving the agenda of the wealth accumulators, and conservative white supremacy.
  Their viewer turns it on and gets lost in the slick production, the alluring set, the bombardment of disinformation and vitriol. The strategy is to keep them infuriated. That’s when they feel alive. And they are addicted to it.
  Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity et al and their owners, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch hold their followers in contempt.
  And they are doing serious, irreparable damage to democracy and America.
  Although they are facing a $1.6 billion law suit for repeatedly and fraudulently claiming that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged their polling machines to hand Biden the presidency. And they will lose, which will necessarily rein in the disinformation somewhat, at least.
  But yes, ‘why do we need to make up pretend terrible things when there are already so many real terrible things?’
  It’s very lucrative. Or online conspiracists just do it for fun, or they’re  alt-right fascists. Or certain rogue states aim to get America and the west generally, polarised and paralysed, openly in violent war, through spreading disinformation.

• Feb 27, 2023 at 5:27 pm

  Marco says:

  It’s nice of you to be concerned, Strato (#54), but I’m ok, really. Everything’s just been more full-on than usual since the start of the year: nothing that would have been particularly wearing on its own, just a bit much when it’s one thing after another after another without any respite in between. I’m also feeling a bit run-down due to some issues with one of my meds, though that should improve soon. So yeah, all in all it hasn’t been a great start to the year. But Spring’s just around the corner and at the time of posting it’s just 27 days, 2 hours, 47 minutes and 42 seconds till the clocks go forward again – so it’s not all bad 🙂 
   
  An interesting and, for some of us, rather concerning situation has arisen here in Scotland over the last couple of weeks. You may have heard that our First Minster, Nicola Sturgeon, has done a Jacinda Ardern and announced her intention to step down as leader of the pro-independence SNP (Scottish National Party) and therefore also as FM. I voted No in the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 but converted to Yes after the EU referendum, when I saw a) how very differently Scotland had voted (strongly Remain) from the rest of the UK and b) how very dismissively the UK government engaged (or more accurately: refused to engage) with the Scottish government in the wake of that. Nicola Sturgeon was a factor in my conversion too, though: consistently professional, business-like, clear, calm, thoughtful, not afraid of press scrutiny, honest and empathetic. The contrast with the Tories at Westminster couldn’t have been more obvious. 
   
  So it was a blow when she made her announcement, though perhaps not a huge surprise: there had been signs from time to time, I think. I’m very sorry to see her go, but the independence movement had been at something of an impasse since the Supreme Court ruling that we couldn’t even hold an advisory, non-binding referendum on independence without Westminster’s consent – which Westminster consistently refuses, of course – so I was open to the idea that perhaps a fresh face at the top might inject some new energy into the campaign and gee us all up again. Unfortunately, though, my preferred candidates to succeed her have chosen not to stand, and 2 of the 3 who are standing … well, let’s just say they don’t impress me. 
   
  One of the two who I definitely don’t want to win is, it turns out, a seriously fundamentalist member of a seriously fundamentalist church, the Free Church of Scotland (“Wee Frees”, as they’re not-so-affectionately known). A calvinist, presbyterian church, ultra-traditional (Wee Free strongholds are known for chaining up the swings in the children’s playgrounds on the “Sabbath” …), biblical literalists, evolution deniers, 7-day creationists, the works. This particular candidate is the current Scottish Finance Minister, and I have to be honest: she had impressed me in that role. She is undoubtedly intelligent (has a degree in History from Cambridge and an MSc in Diaspora and Migration History from Edinburgh), had a great handle on the detail, was articulate and a good communicator, and came across well. And, crucially, she had managed to do the role without drawing attention to her religious beliefs at all – which I can handle: provided politicians leave their religious beliefs at the door when they go to work, it’s a personal matter that needn’t concern me. 
   
  But then she launched her leadership campaign by coming out with the most extraordinarily regressive stuff, stating that, had she been an MSP at the time, far from leaving her religion at the door, she would have voted against Equal Marriage because her faith told her that marriage was between one man and one woman. As an encore she then added that she didn’t approve of sex outside marriage or of children being born “out of wedlock”. 
   
  Well! The SNP is a progressive party with socially progressive policies. It sees social justice as a big deal. Not surprisingly, her comments caused a furore, with a number of senior members of the party who’d previously expressed support for her candidacy now withdrawing it, and of course the (almost universally unionist and therefore anti-SNP) media milking the controversy for all it was worth. At which point the churches – the Free Church of Scotland especially, though it wasn’t the only one – started milking it too, trying to claim it just showed that “liberals” were totally illiberal when it came to religion and it was clearly no longer possible for Christians to hold high office. (The fact that this particular Christian had made it to the pretty high office of Scottish Finance Minister seemed to elude them.) Even more disappointingly, the candidate herself tried this line too, first hiding behind her faith (as though abhorrent views became less abhorrent the moment you stick a “Faith” label on them) and then claiming, in effect, that she was being persecuted for her faith. (Christianity in the UK is not, on the whole, fundamentalist: this candidate’s views are not mainstream, even among the majority of UK Christians. So it wasn’t her faith that was the problem: it was her views. The only person making an active link between them was her.)
   
  The whole thing was utterly bizarre and – to me, at least – wholly unexpected. It’s true that Scotland is probably still rather more religious than much of the rest of the UK, but even so, religion really doesn’t (normally!!!!) play much of a part in public life. There’s a Scottish Christian Party that makes a point of standing in most elections but invariably loses its deposit because it never gets more than a handful of votes. We are a secular country. And the SNP is an open, modern, progressive, social democratic party. So this kind of thing is just … weird! 
   
  This particular candidate is popular with a lot of members, though, precisely because she is (normally 🙄) so on the ball, so articulate, such a good communicator and really has handled her job as Finance Minister well. Before all this blew up, she did seem to many members to be the most impressive candidate to succeed Nicola Sturgeon. Her socially regressive attitudes have lost her a lot of support, though: but it will be interesting to see how members balance the different issues when it comes to voting. I’m a member myself, but I can assure you that I, for one, will not be voting for her! 
   
  Anyway, alongside the silliness of the churches wailing about how persecuted they are, it has also provoked some excellent articles about secularism and how faith cannot be used to avoid scrutiny or criticism – this one being one of the best of them, though it might be behind a paywall. But this one’s good too, and definitely not behind a paywall.  
   
  Lots of other things I still want to reply to, but I thought this might be of interest. I’ll be back! 

• Feb 28, 2023 at 6:27 am

  Strato says:

  Marco #57,

  Indeed, I think one can presume that Kate Forbes believes humans have a soul and that one continues on in the afterlife. And that one’s thoughts, words and deeds are consequential to one’s fate in that afterlife. But it’s OK, Jesus saves, except those whom he has foreordained to salvation, the elected great minority, of whom she is one, a Calvinist puritan, by faith through grace.

  But Hindus too believe in the soul, in karma and how it determines subsequent endless reincarnations, until one finally pursues enlightenment. And so do Muslims.

  I think probably our early palaeolithic ancestors came up with the notion. And it was utterly seductive as it answered a number of conundrums.

  We’ve only had science and empiricism, falsifiability, for around two and a half centuries. Descartes in the first half of the 17th century was bright enough, a good mathematician and who was much exercised in expounding dualism, the ‘mind-body split’ with his notion of the deux ex machina, ‘the ghost in the machine.’

  The pineal gland directs the thinking apparatus, mechanistically. He was an early rationalist. But terribly confused.

  With the evolution of the brain, consciousness emerged and the language faculty developed. And I’m sure this was selected ‘for’ in sexual selection. But it was conducive to, well, essential for our survival.

  And so we could cognise causality, connections, contemplate the past and the future and recognise individual personhood in oneself and in others.

  And also we could contemplate our mortality, often a mortifying thought. And we think we are unique in possessing this capability. Although Indigenous people might not think this way at all, about the other animals.

  And cattle very likely can contemplate their demise when they’re being horribly butchered in ritual slaughter houses. 

  And so in with our early stone-age ancestors it was only a matter of time until someone asked ‘where does one’s personhood and consciousness go?’ Or more like, “Where did Og go?” A conundrum, ‘a question to be asked.’

  And in their prescientific cosmology they only had the imagination to deploy to answer the begged question. And it was motivated reasoning. To propose the afterlife is terror management. A very seductive meme, irresistible.

  We are a highly social species and so we have the moral sensibility. We can make our own mores and meaning.

  But I don’t know about Genghis Kahn and morality. The Mongols slaughtered about 80 million. He sired at least a thousand children, was raping as many young women as he could. His genes are superabundant in Eurasia today. They just kept going, on an orgy of butchery, genocide to Europe’s door. Might is right.

  But morality seems integral to the afterlife fiction, to the fate of one’s ‘soul’, in religion.

  Kate Forbes might be rather intelligent and capable, but she hasn’t applied critical thinking to quite a few received albeit ancient, but anachronistic beliefs and dogmas, a creationist no less, believes in inherited sin nature from Adam and Eve, and she wants to be Scotland’s PM?🤔
   
   

• Feb 28, 2023 at 9:26 am

  Marco says:

  Kate Forbes might be rather intelligent and capable, but she hasn’t applied critical thinking to quite a few received albeit ancient, but anachronistic beliefs and dogmas, a creationist no less, believes in inherited sin nature from Adam and Eve, and she wants to be Scotland’s PM?

   
  I think you’re absolutely right about how these beliefs came about, Strato: as solutions to questions our early ancestors were able to ask but not answer. I think there’s something about our inherent need for justice, too – something that (if we rename it “fairness”, at least) is also well documented in many other animal species, and for much the same evolutionary reason as in humans. If there is a survival benefit to the group in individuals abiding by certain codes of conduct, then it’s not hard to understand the importance of rewarding those who behave accordingly and punishing those who don’t. And since the individuals most likely to break the rules are also the ones most likely not to care about consequences, or to be able to find strategies to get round them, you can see why it might have served a social or even survival purpose to up the ante, as it were, and proclaim a divine imposer of justice who cannot be either deceived or dodged. Though I suspect it’s not just about upping the ante, but also about our sense of rage, frustration, impotence, etc., when someone gets away with something they shouldn’t. The idea of a god who’ll right all wrongs in the afterlife takes care of that too. And of course there’s the power-structure issue too: the enormous power and kudos accruing to the person assuming the priest role, acting the intermediary between us and this unseen god. Not to mention the fact that few of us are entirely happy at the notion of dying.
   
  The power and control motive is of course still strong today, as is the fear of death; but so is our sense of right and wrong, even if our ideas of which things fall into which category change as our sense of society evolves. The problem with religious morality, as I’ve said many times before, is that it has been fossilised: it reflects ideas of right and wrong (i.e. what was and was not believed to be beneficial to society) from thousands of years ago and from societies that were very different from our own. To be fair, there are many many religious people who manage perfectly well to combine their core faith with a very modern sense of what constitutes morality. Most Christians, for instance – here in the UK, at least – are not biblical literalists: they believe the Bible containsTruth rather than that every word of it is Truth. More and more Christians here approach the Bible as metaphor and allegory, something to be interpreted rather than taken at face value. And actually, the majority of people who think of themselves as Christian in the UK don’t actively practise religion at all: they’ve pretty much just been brought up with the idea that religion=goodness and that goodness is rooted in doing to others as you would have them do to you. For them, their Christianity can basically be summed up as “I try to be a good person”. 
   
  The real problem arises with the fundamentalists, the ones who do believe every word literally and who are therefore unable to question or challenge any of it, because to do so would be to question or challenge God himself, which for them would be the ultimate sin. There is no reasoning with such people on these issues. 
   
  But – and it’s a very important but – I do just mean on these issues. We have an unfortunate tendency here to say: Religious people believe this nonsense, therefore they can’t be trusted to think clearly on any other subject either. And actually, that itself is nonsense, and unfair nonsense at that. 
   
  Even the most fundamentalist of fundamentalists is perfectly able to think clearly on other subjects. It’s just when it comes to the teachings of their holy book that they have a total blind spot. Just about every British PM has professed religious faith, but some of them have been really serious about it: just looking at recent history, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Theresa May were all deeply religious. I may have had my differences with all of them, but whatever their strengths and weaknesses, they weren’t determined by their religious beliefs. The one exception I can think of is Tony Blair’s expansion of faith schools, which I obviously strongly disagreed with. There, he clearly was allowing his personal religious beliefs to drive political policy, and I strongly disapprove of that too. But on other issues, issues where religion just didn’t come into it, his religious beliefs were irrelevant and his ability to do his job was unaffected by them (which isn’t to say I always agreed with what he did). Back to the Scottish issue, there are other senior MSPs who are members of Kate Forbes’ horrible, fundamentalist church, but they still voted for equal marriage because they were able to differentiate between the religious sphere and everywhere else.
   
  For me the problem with Kate Forbes is not her religious beliefs as such (much as I dislike them), but the fact that she has made it clear that she would have allowed those beliefs to determine how she voted on decisions affecting the rest of us. As you know, there are 3 candidates for the leadership: unless something dramatic happens between now and voting day, I shall be voting for the Muslim one. Not because he’s a Muslim, obviously (I don’t like his religious beliefs any more than Kate’s), but because in my view he is by far the best of the 3, and he has stated very clearly that he does not believe in allowing religion to influence public policy – and that stance is reflected in his voting record too, and in his speeches in the Scottish parliament. As it happens, by far the most irrational of the 3 is the one who, so far as I know, has no religious beliefs at all: what she is proposing is, in my view, bizarre, undemocratic, unprincipled and doomed to failure. If she were to be made leader, I’d have to resign my membership because she really doesn’t have any redeeming features at all. Kate does, though not enough to overcome my concerns about everything else. Humza is experienced, decent, democratic, secularist (in its true sense) and committed to social equality. For me, it’s absolutely clear who the best candidate is. 

• Mar 1, 2023 at 4:51 am

  Moderator says:

  MODERATOR MESSAGE

  THIS THREAD IS NOW CLOSED – PLEASE DO NOT ADD ANY FURTHER COMMENTS HERE.

  PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTINUE THE DISCUSSIONS, OR START NEW ONES, ON THE MARCH 2023 OPEN DISCUSSION THREAD

  THANK YOU

  THE MODS

• Mar 1, 2023 at 7:33 am

  Moderator says:

  Hi Strato – we’ve moved your reply to Marco to the March Open Discussion thread.

  The mods

• Mar 1, 2023 at 7:52 am

  Strato says:

  To that advocacy for legitimate law I would add, ‘sound scholarship and science.’

• Mar 1, 2023 at 7:53 am

  Strato says:

  Thanks mods.