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hmm, last time I checked, food grows on trees. (It really does! ... and each tree makes lots of food)

BUT MOST IMPORTANT: the food supply defines our population, not the other way around.

see
http://media.anthropik.com/pdf/hopfenberg2003.pdf
http://www.potluck.com/offerings/increase.shtml
http://www.ishmael.com/Education/Science/index.sht ml

Now I'm confused, how does haggling give dignity to anyone in the process?

It makes the other person a *person*, instead of just a consumer or a worker or a businessman. The extended conversation of the haggling means that you see your "opponent" as a human being, instead of merely a faceless number.

If my abilty to get the best price (or a fair price) depends on my ability to negotiate, I don't ever want to live in that society.

I'd probably be at a bit of a disadvantage also- being autistic. But that would come back to doing business with people I KNOW, vs people I don't.

I'm not sure how you can expect to buy say a bushel of wheat for a different price from two vendors, all the free market requires is that you can not buy wheat, that several vendors sell it (perhaps two grades or brands), and that you can substitute barley or corn.

But with certain things you can't- which goes back to my other argument on rarity of the item. How easily can you suddenly go from gasoline to biodiesel? Not very easily, though both are fuels that do exactly the same job. That's what I mean by a captive market, rather than a free one. Price gouging exists in captive markets simply because it CAN. Under a truly free market, price gouging will never exist- because you can get the exact same product from a different vendor and/or haggle for a different price.

Markets can transact in security (I'm thinking of several ways to do it now), but by design they cannot be security. Human nature cannot offer you security no matter how it's organized.

Incorrect- for the first several thousand years on this planet we granted every human being some measure of security. All it takes to grant people security is local production to the consumer, and ownership of one's own means of production. Security does NOT require price fixing- in fact, price fixing is against human security. See Daniel Quinn's writings for more information on how tribal societies create security.

I choose a market based system because they are the that works well knowing that all the other actors are flawed and selfish, rather than a system that depends on them not being selfish. I wish they weren't but barring the Mellinial reign I don't think human society will find that on it's own.

And yet, we have, in the past- sometimes for tens of thousands of years at a whack. We expect such security because we evolved to expect it. We're called to not be selfish- we evolved to form small societies that do work. Expecting larger societies to work is the mistake; and a rather new one at that, at least in geological time scales.

This is the first time I've seen anyone really discussing this. I'm glad to see it. This is going to be an extrememly important issue in our lifetimes.

Good reading: http://www.ishmael.com/Education/Writings/The_New_ Renaissance.shtml

And some great books: http://www.newtribalventures.com/ntv/market/catego ry.cfm?Category=11#72

I have friends who positively hate Pearl Jam that love this album.

I didn't like Alpha Centauri because I disagree with most of the ideology that the game is based on. I don't personally believe in the Gaia hypothesis (i.e. the planet itself is alive) or that the ultimate goal of humanity is to leave our bodies and become one with some machine, and that the only way to keep order is through blatant mind control of "drones". It had an elitist feel about it that really left a bad taste in my mouth.

Oh I can answer that. We probably have 20 to 50 years left of civilization before it completely tears itself apart at the seams. If the end of cheap oil doesn't kill us, then our overly aggressive, competitive, and consumptive habits will finish the trick. These patent based "attacks" by Microsoft serve as a warning about a much deeper malady of the human condition. If human greed continues unchecked, we have no chance at all.

Good Luck

crulx

This is the kinda thing Genetic Engineering and Modification should be going into, not for Cheaper prices in the supermarket, or Glowing fish, Lets see more food in starving country's, Less Landmines, and other ways to improve life,

Of course, thats whats been said about just about any new or improved technology in the last what, 30 years?

No let's not see more food. Let's see more contraceptives. The problem isn't that there isn't enough food, it's that there are too many people for the land to supply. Sending food on temporarily solves the symptom of the problem. The problem being overpopulation. It sounds harsh, but in the end fewer people would starve fewer children especially.

Unfortunately I can't take credit for this idea, I read it in Ishmael.

the only degree you get if you don't pay attention
is a degree of stultification and culture too poor to mention!

mod me up down or sideways, it doesn't really matter;
better get your RSI on, baby, and indulge in mindless chatter!

While the details surrounding the choices that humanity made 10,000 years ago or so may never get unearthed, we can surmise the nature of the mental change they made by the way it effects human society today. First, we must point out, as you did in your post, that the change that humans made involved thought. Humans before this had very similar genetics to us and non-civilized peoples our culture has met certainly have our intellectual potential, if not the huge knowledge set our culture posesses. So knowing this change has an intellectual basis, we should look for its root ideas. I wish to set out the basic Memes of our civilization.

Meme 1: Humans have a special place in the universe before all other forms of life.

We feel that we no longer need to obey the laws that other animals follow. We feel that we have a âoespecialâ place in the universe, given to us by God for the religious or Reason for the atheist. Our legal system carefully systematizes this distinction between Human and Animal. It pervades most peoplesâ(TM) thoughts without them realizing it.

Meme 2: Our particular civilization has the TRUE way to live.

This way involves a totalitarian form of agriculture in which we constantly choose humans and food for humans over all other forms of life. Chickens must live so foxes must die. Cows must live so wolves must die. Wherever our civilization has gone, we have robbed the local environment to produce food or space for our human species.

Another part of this involves the notion of a âoejobâ. We feel that everyone should make products to sell so that we can buy products. This make product/get product habit encompasses every aspect of life and we have developed many theories to handle it, ie economics. A more realistic understanding of âoeeconomyâ would include the resource limitations put on the system by our environment.

Meme 3: All other humans must live this way.

Humans in this civilization always defend aggressively to the death their system. Even very minor deviances from the current cultural system, be it economic belief, religious belief, or even particular habits can cause massive wars. Whenever we encounter another group of humans, âoemissionariesâ flock to the location in order to indoctrinate these people and give them âoethe one true way.â

The agricultural system ties into it power on this planet. By constantly pushing the Food side of the population equation, we consistently have increased our human population. For 10,000 years we have grown âoemore food for a growing population.â From the look of it, we intent to do that right to the point where we completely outstrip the global environments ability to replenish itself.

Most of you who read this believe these 3 things, even if reading them separately causes you to âoefeel above that.â Please make an effort to rid yourself of these ideas because within them contains the destruction of all of the lifeforms on this planet.

From animist perspective:
Daniel Quinn's Ishmael site

From the enlightenment perspective:
J Krishnamurti

From the pop culture perspective:
The Matrix

link ...by Daniel Quinn - no other book changed my life and perspective on it. Seriously amazing and unbelievable.

The greatest mistake we could make as a species would be to short-circuit this cycle for the sake of our own greedy, short-sighted interests.

What do you think we are doing now? Were we really meant to transplant hearts, kidneys, etc? Were we really supposed to use radiation to kill cancer?

Ishmael explained it best when he suggested the "Takers" don't want to be at the mercy of the Gods.

I will list what I know of population dynamics, in order to show you my point of view.

1. Humans beings belong to the animal family. We obey laws of population dynamics like all other animals. That we can effect the situation to take better advantage of biological laws doe not make us immune to their effects.
2. All animals have a population size that food supply appears as a principal functor. Any "win" on the amount of food produces a "win" in the population size. "You are what you eat" does not only have meaning as a cliché. It speaks a truth about animal populations. The more we have to eat, the more of us we can make.
3. Through our agricultural processes, we have embarked a journey of converting all biomass into human and food for humans. We did this by denying our competition any food. Chickens must live so foxes must die. Cows must live so wolves must die. Corn must live so bugs must die. We currently consume about 200 species a day to make room for humans and food for humans.
4. Each year, on average, we produce more food. Each year, on average, we had more children. Our outlook on Nature as an infinite resource meant for human taming covered up the dynamic nature that species depend on each other.
5. We require several biosystems to survive. We need oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen to form our atmosphere and grease the wheels of us and other life forms we depend on for food. We need dense plant cover to prevent erosion and facilitate temperate climates. We require fungus and bacterial systems to dispose of waste. Without these systems, we will not survive.
6. The only variable of the food/population cycle that we have the strongest control over seems like the food side. Extra food always brings a win on the population side, if not where the food grew then where that food got shipped.
7. Thus to reduce the human population in order to stop the consumption of our life support biosystems, we must produce less food.

Even if a 50-year limit seems like an alarmist position, many conservative scientists agree that 100 years looks like the maximum timeframe. Change must happen quickly for us to save a habitat that humanity can live in.

Some possible research materials for you:

http://www.ku.edu/~hazards/foodpop.pdf

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/10/011 02 6074943.htm


http://www.ishmael.com/Education/Science/

---
Jt
crulx@iaxs.net

We don't need better weapons, we somehow need better people.

It's agraculturist nature.

The caveman was perfectly willing to live off the spoils of the land. What good is more land, after all? It's only when you need more land to grow more crops to feed your increasing population that the "elimination of everything in your way" becomes important.

How many different tribes of Native Americans are (were) there? Why wasn't there only one? Because they lived off the spoils of the land, and had no reason to eliminate their neighbors. Pick any tribal culture that lives off the land. You'll find the same cultural diversity living in relative peace.

Sure they had skirmishes. If you don't keep your neighbors off balance, they might think you are weak.

It's not caveman nature. They were far less violent than us. It was only with the agricultural revolution that humans decided there is "one right way to live".

Daniel Quinn has some pretty interesting books on where (he belives) we came from, and where we are headed. One of my personal favorite articles (actually the transcript of a speech) is here.

It's agraculturist nature.

The caveman was perfectly willing to live off the spoils of the land. What good is more land, after all? It's only when you need more land to grow more crops to feed your increasing population that the "elimination of everything in your way" becomes important.

How many different tribes of Native Americans are (were) there? Why wasn't there only one? Because they lived off the spoils of the land, and had no reason to eliminate their neighbors. Pick any tribal culture that lives off the land. You'll find the same cultural diversity living in relative peace.

Sure they had skirmishes. If you don't keep your neighbors off balance, they might think you are weak.

It's not caveman nature. They were far less violent than us. It was only with the agricultural revolution that humans decided there is "one right way to live".

Daniel Quinn has some pretty interesting books on where (he belives) we came from, and where we are headed. One of my personal favorite articles (actually the transcript of a speech) is here.

I don't think that it's humans in general. If it was, we wouldn't be here, as we would have wiped ourselves out eons ago.

More it's our society. We encourage conformity, and discourage diveristy. This idea is not new, and certainly I did not orignate it, but I am doing my part to spread it.

Read it with an open mind. Pass it on if you find it insightful.

But it's an interesting article all the same.

Essay on UNschooling.

This 'noble savage' theory is as intellectualy bankrupt as social darwanism. Their are no 'good' guys, the vast majority of people throughout history are mean, nasty, and brutish no matter their location or race.

It has been the work of my life to pin down and demolish the lie that is at the root of this mythology in our culture. It's to be found in the way we tell the human story itself in our culture. You can see it perpetuated in textbook after textbook, and if you keep your eyes open, you'll see it repeated weekly somewhere---in a newspaper or magazine article, in a television documentary. Here it is, the human story as it's told in our culture, day in and day out, stripped to its essentials. "Humans appeared in the living community about three million years ago. When they appeared, they were foragers, just like their primate ancestors. Over the millennia, these foragers added hunting to their repertoire and so became hunter-gatherers. Humans lived as hunter-gatherers until about ten thousand years ago, when they abandoned this life for the agricultural life, settling down into villages and beginning to build the civilization that encircles the world today." That's the story as our children learn it, and it has just this one little problem, that it didn't happen that way at all. Ten thousand years ago, it was not HUMANITY that traded in the foraging life for the agricultural life and began to build civilization, it was a single culture. One culture out of ten thousand cultures did this, and the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine went on exactly as before. Over the millennia that followed, this one culture, born in the middle east, overran neighboring cultures in all directions, finally arriving in the New World about five hundred years ago. At which point it began to overrun the native cultures of THIS part of the world as well. It is a truism that the conqueror gets to write the history books, and the history our children learn is history as WE tell it. And the central lie of this history is that HUMANITY ITSELF did what WE did.

So basically they've decided to erradicate an entire species because they 'got in our way'.

You betcha. As Daniel Quinn has pointed out at length, the idea of wiping out anything that gets in our way is central to the majority of present-day human culture. Somewhat grim, and definitely not sustainable, but true.

Read Ishmael. Shudder. To mis-quote Ellison, sleep well, my heavy-metal babies.

the Net has been a great influence on bringing the American ideas of freedom to the rest of the world.

The problem with Americans is they live under the false impression that they live in a free, democratic society, which is fundamentally a weakness. Democracy is a tired ideal and nearly 300 years of democratic idealists have failed to make it work.

Ok.. so the people of USA, UK and other Western/European countries have large Jewish electorates, larger than the Muslim electorate, and therefore democratically our leaders are right to support Israeli genocide etc. Right democratically, but it seems a little immoral. I am aware I'm not the first person to notice this.

The problem is, you look at other nations and think you're completely different, but to an outside observer you would look like identical twins -

In the red corner, we have the USA. They mostly believe that they have the best governmental system in existence and hopefully one day every one else will use the same system.

In the blue corner, China. They mostly believe they have the best governmental system in existence and it woud be nice if every one else used the same one.


An alternative perspective

Sorry. It isn't over yet.
Jt

Err, no, it's not. There are better systems, and have been around for 3 million years. Look here if you don't believe me.

BTW, to say that capitalism is the most successful economic system in history shows that you don't know much about it. Especially when 90% of the population is enslaved to the other 10% under such a system.

How much time do you have to devote to your wealth building? Eight hours a day? I would guess that it's probably a lot more than that.

All I have to say to you is congratulations on your ascent to the top. You're a better person than I am. But don't think for a minute that your story is the rule and not an exception.

-- Shamus

Bleah!

Would hierarchy nod its head and vacate its throne? Who knows.

When the Israelites escaped from Egypt in the 13th century B.C., they were literally a lawless horde, because they'd left the Egyptian list of prohibitions behind. They needed their own list of prohibitions, which God provided--the famous ten. But of course ten didn't do it. Hundreds more followed, but they didn't do it either.

No number has ever done it for us. Not a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand. Even millions don't do it, and so every single year we pay our legislators to come up with more. But no matter how many prohibitions we come up with, they never do the trick, because no prohibited behavior has ever been eliminated by passing a law against it. Every time someone is sent to prison or executed, this is said to be "sending a message" to miscreants, but for some strange reason the message never arrives, year after year, generation after generation, century after century.

Naturally, we consider this to be a very advanced system.

When the Israelites escaped from Egypt in the 13th century B.C., they were literally a lawless horde, because they'd left the Egyptian list of prohibitions behind. They needed their own list of prohibitions, which God provided--the famous ten. But of course ten didn't do it. Hundreds more followed, but they didn't do it either.

No number has ever done it for us. Not a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand. Even millions don't do it, and so every single year we pay our legislators to come up with more. But no matter how many prohibitions we come up with, they never do the trick, because no prohibited behavior has ever been eliminated by passing a law against it. Every time someone is sent to prison or executed, this is said to be "sending a message" to miscreants, but for some strange reason the message never arrives, year after year, generation after generation, century after century.

Naturally, we consider this to be a very advanced system.

Did you read the whole essay? The Stone Age idea was a brief tangential thought-experiment, not a serious proposal. His proposal is "unschooling": that you let kids learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it rather than forcing them to sit at a small desk in a large room and be talked at for 6 hours a day according to a fixed curriculum. Unschooling is a valid method; it works.

If you're interested in these ideas you might also want to look at the Sudbury Method, which is basically Unschooling in a school setting .

He does raise the issue that if we gave these teaching positions the pay-level and respect they deserve it would be much easier to attract Doctoral-level people to fill them.

I agree. Of course, this whole fiasco will probably be coming to an end soon.

While this may work for a short term solution, it would be better to "infiltrate" these companies, and change them from the inside. It seems to me a better thing to convince someone that some way is the right way than to force them to go a way that they don't want to go. If a significant majority of geeks refused to work for these companies, they might back off. However, that is just because they have no other choice. If we can get a geek to work for them and convince them that they can make money without overcharging, extorting artists, et cetera, then I'd say we should do that. I recently read an article which relates to this idea to some degree. It can be found here.

Speaking of culture, Daniel Quinn's book Ishmael discusses Culture and How Things Came To Be The Way They Are. Fascinating read.

darren

if you didnt understand the article or what he was saying take a step back. try dropping all the prejudices and ideas that have been embedded in your brain and really take in what he is saying. killing deformed and retarded babies? it may not sound good but it is an idea that people should talk about. after hitting the 6 billion point we need to look at the way we are reproducing because soon enough there won't be enough room for all of us. if you really want to understand and dont see the ideals embedded in your brain maybe you should read ishmael by daniel quinn.

another good place to go and read that deals with over population and gets lots of the shunning i talked about visit the voluntary human extinction movement.

want to write me about this post? click here.

Is there some intrinsic value in keeping endangered animals locked up in unnatural surroundings? I say there isn't. Creatures become extinct because other creatures like to kill them, or because their habitat changes too drastically. Their place in this world simply went away. It pains me to be so blunt about it, but it's true. Instead of covering up our mistakes, we should try to raise the value of life in our culture.

YOU should try to raise the value of life in our culture. Go tell somebody that the animals on our planet are precious, and anything we do that hurts them unnecessarily should be stopped. That's what will turn things around.

Finally, read stuff by Daniel Quinn, and visit the Ishmael website.