Comments on: Make Like a Hockey Stick…

By: Eric B

Eric B — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:05:45 +0000

Bumper sticker idea:

HOCKEY STICKS
OF COMPASSION

;^)

By: auntiegrav

auntiegrav — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:40:12 +0000

The missing analogy is Competition. That’s what the hockey stick REALLY represents. People convinced by belief and lizard brains that they have to compete with each other and against nature; OUR nature. We ARE entwined with nature, yet we compete against it.
Another point that we forgot long ago about reCreational sports: The rules are supposed to be followed. The point to the rules is not to protect someone, but to teach yourself how to control your abilities better than you would without the rules. Getting angry is easy; using it to win a game without killing someone is much harder, but it exercises our ability to control ourselves.
The graphs are all missing the rule: “No High Sticking”.
People are all missing the same rule: “Play Fair, Cooperate, and leave the field how you found it.”
We shouldn’t need goalie masks for everything we do.
We have opportunities at this point in time to fight off the oppressions of faith with logic and common sense. Co-operate instead of compete, live locally, build communities that aren’t based upon authoritative rituals and fear, put down weapons and hammer them into tools. Will there be bad people trying to take things that they don’t work for? Of course. That’s what society needs to work to minimize. It doesn’t matter what we believe; Nature will decide if we have something to offer as a species. If we don’t cooperate, then our destiny is sealed.
Species compete against each other, but only within the bounds of nature’s rules. In the long term, they are all cooperating to create more usefulness than was there when they started.

By: Zimba

Zimba — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:22:33 +0000

Economic growth is a pyramid scheme. The dirty secret of the American economy is that it based almost entirely upon the creation and servicing of suburban sprawl. Cutting back on the population growth “hockey stick” graph will cause all other meaningful graphs to respond favorably (”corporate profits” and “concentrations of wealth” graphs deemed irrelevant). I can’t think of any other comment worthy graph that will have such a powerful underlying effect upon all the others. It’s time we as a species cut back dramatically on our baby emissions; either by consensual, or by imposed coercion. All other conservation and activism shall remain impotent if we continue to turn a blind eye to the real plaque of our century. I think most people choose to remain in denial because they can’t be an armchair web activist on this one. They have to actually modify their own behavior, sacrifice personally for the sake of the world by denying it their genes. It is seemingly the most difficult thing for us to discuss and the matter which we most need to be discussing, and acting upon. Thank you for not breeding!

Baby not on board, Zimba

“The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.
The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. “Freedom is the recognition of necessity” — and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.” -Garrett Hardin (1968)

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 12:26:11 +0000

Tim,

Your statement, “The seeds of the next paradigm are being planted today, here in the crumbling ruins of the current one,” is very apt. John Michael Greer of The Archdruid Report has an interesting essay entitled
Civilization and Succession that compares industrial civilization to invasive weeds that may overrun an ecosystem in the short term, but are doomed by their own ’success’. In nature - you know, that ‘thing’ we think we’re apart from, rather than a part of - a more stable climax community inevitably succeeds the weeds. He makes an interesting comparison between societies that maximize production at the expense of sustainability and those that maximize sustainability at the expense of production. As with your seed analogy, he says “…the more efficient … human ecologies of the future have been sending up visible shoots since the 1970s, in the form of a rapidly spreading network of small organic farms, local farmer’s markets, appropriate technology, and alternative ways of thinking about the world, among many other things.” When I read ‘alternative ways of thinking about the world’, I thought immediately of you, Sally, and WAWTG.

By: Gail

Gail — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 21:10:55 +0000

Monday 10/01: While we all are watching the Dow go over 14,000 today in the midst of a financial crisis that could spell disaster for the economy, we also need to watch Oil prices, the falling dollar, peak water and peak food.
Yes food. We habitually think that feeding ourselves is only a grocery store away. For me, going to the grocery store has gotten depressing…not for a lack of thousands of choices of restuarant food…but for the continuously rising prices that don’t go down again, when gas prices go down. Also, the realization that most of the products are junk or unnecessary to have 3 square meals a day. The message is “have some peking duck”, or this or that sauce and make a gourmet meal. How about just making a well balanced meal while we can still do it. Food has become an art form, and eating an entertainment.
And speaking of food, this morning I was up on Stan Goff’s site and watched a video of how we get our meat. I had to turn it off within 30 seconds of watching animals being bashed, tortured, strangled, beaten to death, and so on. It was at least as horrible as watching real shots of the Iraq war. I feel for humanity, but I feel we, as humans have some degree of choice. But animals in capitivity do not, and when they are born into a herd destined for your plate, they are treated so horribly it is beyond words. A spiritual mentor of mine said once that the energy or vibration of fear is left in the meat we eat. In the store it looks reasonably packaged and pretty heading right for our ovens. But the torture of animals is a barbaric quality in humanity. If we are to keep animals for food, don’t they have the right to decent living conditions and a humane death?
My next door neighbor was an old guy who had a 12 acre farm. He kept chickens and cows, and occasionally geese. I once asked him if he butchered his cows, and he said he was so attached to them that he would only kill them once they were very old. And he hated doing even that much. As for me, my denial was shattered. Living harmoniously with nature includes the animals we raise for whatever purpose. But I can’t participate in the factory farms where they torture these poor animals. I am going vegan