Secret History of Silicon Valley

Tree hugging, It leads to you can't cut a tree down on your own property. It leads to $1,000 fine per tree. It leads to $220,000 fine for couple that cleared there own land. The fine was more than the value of the property. It went to court, don't know the resolution. And if there's a little water on the land, your toast. Mikek

Ever read "The Lorax"?

Ever notice that Theodore Seuss Geisel was an old-fashioned Marxist?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Maybe that's why my kids like broccoli and wild critters doing whatever wild critters do out in the forests and meadows and support progressive causes - their minds were warped by Dr. Seuss (We have the entire collection). I even put blue food coloring in the scrambled eggs to make 'em green.

Not the whole story; in Pacific Northwest, salmon runs depend on brush cover and snags in creeks and rivers. Enforcing the treaty rights of natives to the fishery requires that waterways and their immediate surroundings be left un-cleared. Endangered species comes into it too.

Loud squawks from landowners, but cries of relief from fishers.

That's not an ad hominem, silly. If I said he fathered 100 illegitimate children, or had bad hair, that would be ad hominem. Calling him a Marxist (which is charitable of me--he was an apologist for Stalin) is describing his views, not his character.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Could be. The Lorax and the Butter Battle are certainly propaganda, but I've always liked the Cat in the Hat, and I can probably still recite The Sleep Book from end to end. I read those ones to my kids over and over with no misgivings. The Grinch is okay too, though it rather misses the point about Christmas (as one would expect from a Marxist).

The fact that Seuss was a communist doesn't mean that everything about him was bad, but it does mean that parents need to exercise good judgement.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

It would be a similar situation if I responded to a parable written by a conservative with "well, you know, he was an old-fashioned conservative", as if to say conservatives can inherently never have viewpoints about particular issues which are correct due to their overarching philosophy (which would be untrue.)

Or Marxists, for that matter. I don't agree with every word in Das Kapital, for sure, but a few things Marx wrote about capitalist systems were bang-on.

Even broken clocks can be right twice a day...

Your response might be fallacious, but it wouldn't be an ad hominem.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

We flat wore out Dr. Suess' A-B-Cs. "Aunt Annie's Alligator, A-A-A..."

I'm not as worried about preschool books as I am about the next twelve years of text books, teachers, and administrations.

"bad" and "good" are difficult terms, ontologically!

For my part, I'm a moral relativist. I don't think there is any law about human behavior handed down from on high that says this behavior is universally good, or universally bad. It's all culture and context dependent. Mesoamerican people seemed to think sacrificing human hearts to the sun god was "good", I guess it worked out okay for them for a while, until it didn't.

We are often altruistic, at least in great part, because we recieve altruistic training in childhood dependent on our particular society's sociology) and do altruistic things to resolve the cognitive dissonance that would arise if we did not. But I don't see any reason it has to be that way, though I don't deny that sometimes animals do things that could be considered to be "altruistic." But who knows what they're "thinking."

Political philosophies, religions, intersectional feminism, etc. in the end are about power - me having it, and you, not so much. Capitalism and communism are two sides of the same coin, in that their main purpose is to channel wealth from the many to the few. Though they use different types of bloviation to justify it within the historical moral structures a particular society works under.

Lots of great things happened during the Enlightenment, but at the end of the day - new boss, same as the old boss.

I'm not big on free will, either. It seems very likely that it is simply a convincing illusion, and our life trajectories are set in stone from the moment one is born.

And God can't save you, sorry...she's out shopping.

I don't consider myself a complete nihilist, but pretty close. There ain't much meaning to it. Why bother with space exploration? We'll just shit up the solar system like we did here. What's the end goal? Colonize the galaxy, the Universe, until time collapses into another spatial dimension, or the Universe accelerates away and tears itself apart? What's the point?

There isn't one.

One of my favorite nihilist philosophers is the late Emil Cioran, who was also often hilarious in addition to being tortured. "There is no sense in killing yourself, since everyone kills themselves too late."

ent.

You aren't paying enough attention to the difference between the Moderate E nlightenment and the Radical Enlightenment. Under the former the new boss r eally was the same old boss. The latter did manage to install different bos ses, though they did end up looking very like the old bosses, though they w ere constrained to behave a bit better.

Being on more than one planet, when a dinosaur-killing asteroid hits one of them?

Actually, human evolution seems to have been directed at producing a creatu re that could survive and thrive pretty much anywhere on earth. Extending t he range to cover a few more planets is just more of the same.

My late mother was a member of "Exit" which was a society devoted to the id ea that you should be able to kill yourself tidily at the right moment. She got mild dementia, and knew she was mildly demented at at a point where he r judgement wasn't perceptibly impaired, but hung on for eighteen months un til the family had no choice about putting her into "protected accommodatio n" which she didn't much like.

I visited her every few months for the last five years of her life when she was in care, and she talked - quite frequently and sensibly - about killin g herself. The only way of ending those conversations was to point out that she'd been a member of "Exit", and that she'd missed her opportunity, whic h did shut her up (without greatly upsetting her - she was an intelligent w oman, and did recognise an unbeatable argument, even if she did have troubl e remembering it a few minutes later).

What I'm getting at is that it's entirely irrelevant to the price of tea in China whether the human species exists or not. In fact, it would probably be "better" if it had not.

But defining what "better" is, outside the context of any experience at all is definitely another one of those thorny ontological problems.