Here is the comment "Bear" posted:
We should all be aware of who wants to pick the winners and losers.
Civilization as we know it is confronted with serious issues. It just so happens some think they can determine the outcome. These are not ignorant people, and carbon is a vehicle to the solution in their eyes. The problem is that they equate survival as a species with a socialist (we all know where that ends) state.
relentless growth is unsustainable.
Climate change propanganda is the vehicle to get there, since stating the obvious issues would generate even more populist resistance.
The myth that technology can solve everything is patently false.
this will end badly.
Bear, I’ve been battling with this concept a very long time. Few are willing to state it as you have.
There is redundancy in your assertion “The myth that technology can solve everything is patently false.” It sounds like you want to believe your line so much that you had to call technological solutions both a myth and patently false.
Dare you battle with me over it?
He responded:
good point. I think that there is a (not necessarily) 100% Malthusian solution, but I don’t trust those that think they have it. I’ve always been a champion of the little folkFirst of all, even Malthus backed away from the concept of what is called a Malthusian solution such as associated with czar Holdren and others like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mugabe. The Sinister Wing (radical left) has proven to be and remains ruthless.
Drink and football has slurred my wording somewhat
Pascal, I do believe in technological solutions, I just don’t think we can absorb (socially) the rapid rate of change of technology.
I know the game and how it’s advanced, hence some of my disillusionment.
You are trying to convey the impression that it is the Sinister Wing whom you do not trust. That would be wise given their history of 100 million murders. (I believe the Neo-Malthusians refer to it as “the pilot program.”) Thus “a champion of the little folk” would be wise to keep your distrust.
As an engineer, even I don’t fully back technology alone. Human ingenuity and desire to survive at the individual level is even more important. Ingenuity is clearly the source of technology, but also it knows when it is not wise to go too far. I have personally held back advances because I didn’t trust my clients. Why? Obligation to a Higher authority.
The people who perverted science and co-opted scientists (some all too willingly) to back their goals are the anti-progressive “Progressives” with the end of history “Postmodernist” thrust that is embodied in this AGW scam and inventing the idea of carbon-footprinting as the decisive factor of who may live and who must die.
In Genesis 22, God asked Abe to bring Isaac up as an offering. In a world dominated by human sacrificial pagan religions like Moloch worship, this was quite common. What was uncommon was that the God of Abe said “NO — this is NOT what I want.” It was as Abe had told Isaac, “God will provide his own Lamb.”
In a world where we are constantly told to worry of shortages, the idea of a God we cannot see providing for us sounds illogical at best. Utterly mad even. But it is God-given in human nature to also have that ingenuity of which I am personally familiar. IT IS NOT JUST ABOUT TECHNOLOGY Bear.
Anyway, this fear of sustainability, THIS is the primary reason, IMHO, for the undermining of Judeo-Christianity. Hitler at least had the nerve to call it “that Jewish disease.” Today’s misanthropic megalomaniacs are getting pretty close to saying the same thing, but they don’t need to as long as they have Dawsons and Hitchenses to make the case for them, and the ACLU to threaten every Christian in the US if they so much as bow their head in silence. And courts and politicians who let them get away with it.
And even Judeo-Christian “religious leaders” who think that the world could become overpopulated if they don’t help the “clear thinkers” convince the people that it’s okay to let them “cull the herd” as it were.
Jesus said to Peter “get thee behind me Satan.” I would say a great many of today’s religious leaders do not recognize themselves as Peter in this instance, in particular, do they?
It is also in my ingenuity to fight these haters of my fellow humans. That is the way that these people rub wrong with me — and if God indeed exists, I am absolutely sure it is wrong with Him. IOW, my personal version of Pascal's Wager may be even more onerous than his.
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"As an engineer, even I don’t fully back technology alone. Human ingenuity and desire to survive at the individual level is even more important. Ingenuity is clearly the source of technology, but also it knows when it is not wise to go too far. I have personally held back advances because I didn’t trust my clients. Why? Obligation to a Higher authority."
ReplyDeleteMy sentiments exactly. I find your comment about holding back interesting, refreshing, noble. But at the same time I fear that 'nobility can get you ----' you fill in the blank as appropriate. I worked for a federal contractor for a bit recently. It wasn't very reassuring. The thing that I always take away about being an American is that it always has been that rugged individualist spirit that has defined us and made us successful. Hopefully what we are going through right now is temporary, a needed period of reawakening. But at the same time, momentum is taking us in what I believe is the wrong direction...ignoring real issues while we tilt at windmills. The true villains are hiding in plain sight.
Bear
I'd not call it noble, for a variety of reasons. It was Aristotle who famously wrote "virtue is its own reward." One does what one does for rewards of varying degrees. Mine could not be simpler: being able to look myself in the eye is sufficient.
ReplyDeleteI've been blessed (?) with a skeptical soul, but not one that would be welcome in the Skeptics Society, as I'm not very trusting of that lot. :)
It was Cicero, IIRC, who in a later epoch (the dangerous period where Rome was in its final slip from republic to empire), lamented stoically that virtue was its only reward.
I'm guessing you understand we live in a similar time. I find it very hard to believe it is accidental.
Those who crave power, be it to simply be king or to go the extra step to play god, have been hard at work over generations to undermine American culture and decency so that the republic could pass to their hands.
What a terrible waste of the God-given ego.
The level of ingratitude imbued in such individuals could only be driven by the pursuit of a sexual-like climax they'd achieve but for an instance.
What an awfully insipid creature is any human given access to too much power.
Some years ago I received a book entiteld Entropy by Jeremy Rifkin. I read it, I was in college so I was in my loopy phase (translate loopy as trendy leftist). In it he argued that humanity in reality is not progressing. He highlighted energy. In the olden days humanity had simple sources of energy -- fire and wood to feed that fire. Then we went to peat, and then to coal, and then to petroleum, and then a toe-dip into nuclear.
ReplyDeleteHe noted each energy source proved to be more problematic than the previous source and hence it can not and should not be characterized as progress.
I am not convinced of his notions but it seems his thinking has a lot of adherents.
Those who worry over entropy don't even bother acting on potential energy. It requires they get up off their lazy asses and do something. Even Aesop's fox exhausted himself trying to reach the grapes before he decided they were probably sour. Rifkin simply pronounces them sour.
ReplyDeleteYes potential, put to use, becomes kinetic energy plus entropy, and we move on to the next project. And dark matter has a tremendous gravitational influence, yet the universe expands.
His adherents are pessimists, not optimists like me, and it seems, you. The mission is not to let them sour our grapes.
Bear, who are the villains, really?
ReplyDeleteThe thing that I always take away about being an American is that it always has been that rugged individualist spirit that has defined us and made us successful. Hopefully what we are going through right now is temporary, a needed period of reawakening. But at the same time, momentum is taking us in what I believe is the wrong direction...ignoring real issues while we tilt at windmills.
You might like to peak at this: Dirty Hands