Well, I should amend that some yodeling is alright. If it’s not out in the woods, so much the better.
Of course, I also like this …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLVIICWRbjM&index=8&list=PLF1D807EAC06AD96D
… so maybe I’m not the best judge of things. Or sane, I forget which.
Yodelly goodness:
OK, adding this artist to my Spotify list now …
Thank you!
A serious contender for best album of all time, IMO.
[quote=“popobawa4u, post:59, topic:80725, full:true”]
Based upon what? Even if all humans agreed upon this, they would still comprise a minority. It is fine to argue for consensus, but I am skeptical that a consensus between humans would be compelling for anybody else, the vast majority of non-humans.[/quote]
[quote=“popobawa4u, post:59, topic:80725, full:true”]
It is not contradictory in itself, but it there is no way to support how a group of organisms unilaterally choose to define their relationship with others. Demonstrating its lack of empirical basis can reveal its lack of presumed universality, that it may or not be actual, applicable, or actionable in all situations and circumstances. And it can be empirically demonstrated that humans living apart from all other species is biologically untenable, regardless of popular opinion.[/quote]
You don’t need to “demonstrate” the lack of empirical evidence for a concept like private property, for the same reasons we don’t to demonstrate the empirical existence of good composition, punctuality, comedy, or empiricism itself. Doing so is essentially a tautology.
Humans are the measure of all things. You can’t exactly ask a bear how they feel about compromises in, say, drawing up borders of territory, or how much pollution is “too much” as far as global habitat destruction goes.
It’s pretty difficult to shake the feeling that you’re the one governing things, when you’re the only one making decisions - and you can’t change that relationship even if you wanted to.
Whether you like it or not, we are the lifeforms on this planet that have to ask these kinds of questions and make these kinds of decisions - no others species is burdened with this responsibility. In other words, we are dichotomous from all other species, in fundamental and important ways. In this sense, we both stand in and out of the natural world, depending on how we want to define it. We seem to be a recursive loop, the universe contemplating itself, as Sagan put it.
This is why mixing concepts like private property with the presumed desires of the rest of the animal world can’t be addressed - ever.
Ownership is fundamentally a legal concept, which obviously has it’s roots in how we determine who is allowed to do what, and in what context. We can posit that “laws”, in some form or another, are something that any sufficiently advanced, intelligent, and social species will have to come up with to deal with it’s own needs. Again, for better or worse, “the law” is determined by which forces are powerful enough to exert it. Power, ultimately, determines who and what is owned, and what is not, or whether or not we even adopt the concept of private property.
Animals are our property because we desire it…and they’re not powerful enough, or even capable, to do anything about it. This will continue to be the case until we don’t desire it anymore, or we all get killed. Similarly, a prisoner is a prisoner whether they deserve to be or not. This is the “justification” for the concept of ownership, of all things large and small. It exists for the same reason that “national parks” do - because we will it into being. The only consensus necessary is amongst those that wield power, and that doesn’t include bears, in this scenario, and never will.
[quote=“popobawa4u, post:59, topic:80725, full:true”]
I am not sure that it might be a different conversation. Humans asserting that they “manifest power over” their environment is itself problematic, because this posits them as a superset of it. If humans are a subset of this environment, which seems easy to demonstrate, then it seems more probable that they exist with many interdependencies. A superset categorically affects you more than you affect it. But what is arguably humans greatest strength - symbolic reasoning - becomes a possibly fatal weakness here. Being able to use abstractions such as economics to act upon the delusion that one can destroy their environment without destroying themselves does not make that relationship actual. Never mind my skepticism about whether or not “dominion” represents a real concept, it sounds like the problem of an organism rather than an ecology.[/quote]
How things are and how they should be are always going to be two distinct concepts. Again, if you want to talk about some kind of post-private ownership world that’s fine - but that’s NOT the world we live in right now. This can’t simply be ignored, presumably, for being inferior. Arguably our biggest influence here, Marx, was saliently aware of this point, even if his predictions were…wrong, to say the least. You have to focus on how exactly we’re supposed to transition from the shithole we live in to a hippy-dippy utopia, and part of that deal is going to be working with the constraints of our time. How can we give a fuck about bears without the hypocrisy of our daily lives burning us into cinders in the face of real world politics?
Whether or not you perceive humans having power “over” our environment, or simply the ability to change things around them, will obviously not change the end result of those actions. The world is as it is.
I don’t think there’s much debate to be had that certain consequences of our actions will have potentially dire ecological ramifications.
I don’t think you can pin the cause of the “problem” of encroaching on bear’s habitats on our preconceived notions that it’s an understood and acceptable thing to do. Something brought us to those habitats in the first place, before we had any notions of them whatsoever.
As I alluded to in my first post on the topic, it’s very difficult to say where we’d ever draw this line, and why. What’s so special about bears? Isn’t it possible that we are fundamentally beyond some point of no return, where it’s impossible to live in anything remotely resembling ecological balance without a massive, involuntary drop in our population?
That being said, if we don’t want people “trespassing” inside a bear’s territory, inside of Glacier National Park, it should be closed off to tourists. Otherwise, we can’t blame people for using a democratically mandated public resource in the manner in which it was intended, which might include the unfortunate consequence of shooting a bear that attacked human beings.
When I speak of consensus, I’m referring to our system of laws, which, by and large, govern our behavior as far as property rights are concerned.
Obviously passing a law that does too little to protect the environment, or prevent catastrophe, isn’t a very good thing to do. However, as many, many, many people have said before me…
Do you have a better idea?
It’s a simple cognitive problem, that of the classic self-serving bias. It happens with individuals also. “My life is more important than others because I am ME, and thus special.” Saying that my decisions are predestined because my life appears to be a movie of which I am the star could be used to excuse anything, it’s a poor rationalization - whether used by an individual or a species. Using it to “manifest destiny” over others is simply subjecting them to one’s own delusion.
Well, that seems “convenient”! Funny, but I thought that I was addressing precisely this, among other things.
Saying that you will some arbitrary desire into being and others can’t stop you can be considered several ways, but a basis for civilised society does not seem to be one of them. Yes, such a definition of ownership is a tautology, but that I think is precisely a reason for discussing, rather than avoiding doing so. Asserting that one has real relationships with objects that others must recognize “just because” does sound a bit simplistic and naive.
It’s funny that you say this, but offhandedly dismiss whether or not property and territory have any objective basis, or are merely self-serving delusions. That was my point, the utopia of ownership IS the unrealistic way that most humans apparently wish that the world works. I doubt if it even matters how many people believe it.
I think that we are here still laboring under the notion that the habitat “belongs” to either bears or humans. This very much misses the main point I was making in my prior post. The bears do not make the territory exclusive to bears. It is an ecosystem which is healthy because bears exist there as part of it. So I am in no way suggesting leaving it to the bears. Organisms and species alike survive through adaptation, and those who can’t or refuse to adapt are effectively suicidal, and limit their own capabilities. Key to this process of adaptation is living amongst other organisms. When humans decide that it is “unthinkable” to live in an environment which is not tailored to humans alone, then they are so failing to adapt. Mostly because of a petty insecurity that they are afraid to be the one eaten by bears.
One could frame it like that, although it does once again sound like a rationalization for not doing anything differently. And what is wrong with a drop in population?
The supposed lynchpin of capitalist society is that market equilibrium occurs automatically as a balance between supply and demand. So the more scarce a resource is, the more it is valued. The more abundant, the less it is worth - to the point that oversaturation can make something have negative worth, making it a liability. We can easily see this ecologically with the populations of organisms. Nobody complains much about hunting a huge population of rabbits or elk, for instance, who have exceeded their ecological niche. There are too many of them, so the excess will soon suffer and die anyway. It isn’t anybody’s “fault”. No matter how much humans may wish they were an exception to this, they aren’t. They are still subject to epidemics and starvation when they greatly exceed an optimum population.
So how I think, and what I propose, is that the value to place upon the life of an organism is based upon how plentiful or rare they are. I can afford to lose some humans, because they are overpopulated. Grizzly bears are scarce, so I favor the grizzly. If a tiger slaughters 100 people I agree is still tragic, but it is the merest drop in the bucket of the human population. While in contrast, killing that one tiger would put a significant dent in an already rare population. Such a simple supply/demand scheme seems that it would be easy to understand and work with. The only difference is that it involves the empirical reality of ecology in place of the wish-fulfilment of utopian human markets.
That’s a very loaded question! Better for whom? Also, you are framing this as me and my ideas not against you yourself, but against all of human society. That’s not very honest, as I am not clear that you are actually speaking for anyone else’s position but your own. You almost exclusively use a collective “we”, “our”, and “us” as if it is me arguing against 7,000,000,000+ people.
My experience has been that on those occasions that some decide to ask “Do you have a better idea?” that the rhetoric behind this includes the condition “…which will allow us to keep doing the same thing”. It is simply argument “by fiat” that if there is already some rationalization, however insubstantial, that it triumphs over any other possible course of action. Or - it might be an example of compulsive behavior on a vast scale, where people refuse to decide what they do or why, and instead prefer to be swept along by arbitrary happenstance, because it seems easier and involves less responsibility.
So yes, I do think that I put forth some ideas which are “better”. If by better we mean more realistic and more sustainable. But you have specifically stated that you have made up your mind that your rationale are inscrutable and that nothing else is possible “because reasons”, so I don’t expect you to be convinced.
Are you familiar with the deep ecology movement?
You’ve, seemingly, avoiding my point.
When I say that we can’t ask a bear for it’s opinion on how the world should work, that’s not a veiled statement as to it’s relative importance to us. It’s a statement illustrating our fundamental existential differences.
I don’t follow your statements regarding determinism, sorry.
Again, I’m not making claims as to what a “civilized” society should be, just what our society is, based on reasonable predictions of consequences. I’m under no pretext that private property is infallible as a human concept, or anything along those lines.
People absolutely can stop “arbitrary” concepts that have been willed into existence from effecting their lives in specific ways. Sometimes this is called politics. Another time it might be called “secularism”. And so on. Essentially I said that the rules are made up by whomever has the most power. That can change. Power, as well, takes many forms.
The reason that people recognize the relationship between humans and objects is due to the understood consequences of certain actions, from other humans. It’s not a thing people “must” do, it’s a thing they choose to do. It’s not a great mystery.
Private property isn’t any more or less real than the territorialism of a nesting bird, it’s just filtered through the abstract reality of the human condition. Any technique you might use to distinguish the two concepts any further is only going to stand to make an exception of human beings, as far as our relative place in the animal kingdom goes.
Of course, unlike a nesting species, we can consciously change our behavior, which certainly appears exceptional.
It’s not so much that the habitat needs to “belong” to either of us, it’s that humans need concepts in place to guide our actions, because we don’t act on instinct alone.
There’s a certain ambiguity to some of your statements…
If an ecosystem is “healthy” that means it can be “unhealthy”, right? As humans, are we supposed to be stewards of these ecosystems, keeping them in a “healthy” status…essentially making us governors of the world? Or do we take a metaphorical laissez-faire approach, under the assumption that the planet will work things out for itself, best, free from our interference?
The first case seems to be a pretty strong argument for human exceptionalism, and the second conclusion is seemingly self-contradictory…because the planet made us, ex nihilo. It fucked up, big time, in other words, and obviously can’t be trusted any more than we can. Good job evolving nukes, planet earth, you fucking idiot!
That being said, all configurations of a possible environment, no matter what we choose, will always be “tailored to humans alone”, meeting our desires of what the world should be like.
The human condition is inescapable.
Besides, I think your description of the evolutionary process is a bit of a poetic oversimplification. For example, I don’t think dinosaurs were “effectively suicidal” when they were wiped out by a meteor 65 million years ago. Their “key” ability to live with other organisms had nothing to do with their total mass extinction, and the chain of events that led to our own existence. There are other forces at work in the universe, and one of them is called “shit happens”. It explains a lot, like the big bang, as well.
[quote=“popobawa4u, post:66, topic:80725, full:true”]One could frame it like that, although it does once again sound like a rationalization for not doing anything differently. And what is wrong with a drop in population?
The supposed lynchpin of capitalist society is that market equilibrium occurs automatically as a balance between supply and demand.So the more scarce a resource is, the more it is valued. The more abundant, the less it is worth to the point that oversaturation can make something have negative worth, making it a liability. We can easilysee this ecologically with the populations of organisms. Nobody complains much about hunting a huge population of rabbits or elk, for instance, who have exceeded their ecological niche. There are too many of them, so the excess will soon suffer and die anyway. It isn’t anybody’s “fault”. No matter how much humans may wish they were an exception to this, they aren’t. They are still subject to epidemics and starvation when they greatly exceed an optimum population.
So how I think, and what I propose, is that the value to place upon the life of an organism is based upon how plentiful or rare they are. I can afford to lose some humans, because they are overpopulated. Grizzly bears are scarce, so I favor the grizzly. If a tiger slaughters 100 people I agree is still tragic, but it is the merest drop in the bucket of the human population. While in contrast, killing that one tiger would put a significant dent in an already rare population. Such a simple supply/demand scheme seems that it would be easy to understand and work with. The only difference is that it involves the empirical reality of ecology in place of the wish-fulfilment of utopian human markets. [/quote]
Are you asking me what’s wrong with the idea of a bunch of people dying so that others get to live? I just want to make sure I’m understanding your question, because that’s what I meant by “population drop”.
First off, I don’t think you’re going to win too many converts by making a calculated indifference to human life a central tenet of your philosophy. A whole lot more people than 100 are going to have to die to approach anything remotely like the ideal I think you’re proposing, of worldwide sustainable ecosystems. How, exactly, do you propose we get rid of these people? Do we just wait it out, or what? If waiting is the key, I think we’re going to have a very close shave with planet wide destruction. We can’t even get off our asses about global warming, let alone forge some hippy utiopia. Once the water is here…it’s here.
If I’m understanding you correctly, human rights, and an individuals worth, morally, should be based on our census count, not inalienable properties?
It’s not a good sign if “truly” adopting a moral philosophy requires us to suppress or compromise some of our deepest basic instincts, such as valuing the relative worth of a grizzly bear, or a California condor, over our children, due to ecological technicalities.
I think this model falls apart, at least for me, upon further examination, for a variety of other reasons, as well.
Do we care about valuing the rarity of all life, at a flat rate, or do put a priority on the ones that are in trouble due to human interference? Shouldn’t we be putting all of our effort into cloning extinct species, and reintroducing them into the wild? Doesn’t cloning kind of upend your entire basis for value in the first place, since nothing could ever be truly “extinct” if we willed it so?
Also, we could genetically engineer an entirely new species the universe has never seen. By your philosophy, this new lifeform would be one of the most valuable entities on earth.
You certainly can’t make the case, very convincingly, that such a species isn’t a byproduct of the natural world, just like any other species that’s ever existed, again, unless you want to claim that humans are some kind of “special” species, who have different rules that apply to us and the things we do. We could even take the concept to crazy extremes, building a machine that randomly assembles and brings to life unique species through algorithmic sequencing, built primarily for the purpose of destabilizing your economic model of a lifeform’s worth. How many Mona Lisa’s could it generate before Mona Lisa’s were seemingly worthless? What would a cloud of 200 million, unique insects do to our relative valuation of other species?
I suppose you could refine your description, by adding an extra attribute to a species’ value estimation, which is it’s “worth” to a given ecosystem, but as humans we could easily account for things like this, in an infinite cat and mouse of intelligent design, and purposeful market distortion.
If you have specific instances of supposed misuse, for terms like “we”, you’d like to address, feel free to do so. Otherwise it’s a bit difficult to respond to a vague and general insinuation, sorry. I don’t think the assumed scope of my arguments should do much for them anyways.
Despite your presumptive suspicions, when I said “better”, I meant for humans and bears. This entire conversation was sparked, so I thought, by a possible conflict between the two species. That being said, I do believe you’re made an earnest attempt to espouse what you think is a “better” way to frame the issue of our species’ interactions through your rarity-as-value proposal. I had proposed that we rectify the problem through political means, if we perceived the problem to be worthy of action. You have proposed that we change our framework of understanding of the encounter, so that the biker’s life is understood to be worth less than the bear’s, seemingly obviating the need for human reprisal given that the bear is currently a superior species.
I agree that sustainability is an ideal to strive for, but I will not accept that the price of that ideal is payed for with moral indifference to human suffering. I can’t accept your worldview that human life is so disposable. Simply being “more realistic” (whatever that means) and “more sustainable” isn’t worth it to me, if that’s the cost we pay, as a society. Back to the drawing board.
As for the rest…I kind of explicitly said the opposite here in places. I said I’m totally open to debates around a post-property world, for example. I think plenty of other methods of human relations with nature are not only possible, but even likely, if we work for them. I just don’t think your radical ascetic proposals are going to be part of that world, in any major sense, due to a lack of appeal or political power. That genie is already out of the bottle.
What about Zeitungsentenwahrwerdung (newspaper duck coming true)? A Zeitungsente is a fake/untrue/hoax news in a paper, and while it’s not exactly fitting to the translation request it transports the “what, this is real?!?” bafflement.
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