“why not dogs?”

This is a rambling response to a question someone I respect posed in her blog:

How can you advocate for a bill to “protect animals and their owners from harm” and eat another animal that night for dinner?  How can you allow another animal to go through the terrifying, horrendous, oppressive, and murderous process that it takes to get its body or its products onto your plate?  Because it’s not as cute as a dog?

domestication itself is oppressive.  we shouldn’t “own” anything.  we shouldn’t have “pets” — that’s just another euphemism for anthropocentric system of the enslavement and control of other species.  and we shouldn’t be thinking in inherently abusive and exploitative terms such as “resources” (“sustainable resource management” is an oxymoron). [all that begs the question, what SHOULD we be doing?]

Assholes, baboons and collapse: The ABCs of human sustainability

Premise: Modern industrial civilization is rapidly depleting the land-base on which most animals depend, even though it has existed for a fraction of the time of past civilizations (which all similarly collapsed).  We surround ourselves with an ever-increasing imbalance of technomass (things of our own handicraft) away from biomass (things we coevolved/were cocreated with), creating an unprecedented and interlocking matrix of metaphorical mirrors.  How could that do anything except breed excessive narcissism?

Waiting for industrial civilization to bring itself down will nearly completely destroy the ecosystems on which we depend. Consider also the fact that the ability of so-called “civilized” humans to make effective, sustainable use of our local land-bases has atrophied (and I think I’m being generous here) to near-complete non-existence. Acorns? Milkweed? Cattails? These are edible? How? What about these berries — they taste sweet…what do you mean they’re poisonous?? You mean you want me to squat and poop where?

Conclusion: The decline if our land-base coupled with our relative inability to subsist directly on what little land-base remains will present us with a perfect storm of effective scarcity. This means that the human herd will need some serious thinning. In other words, the human herd will thin itself one way or another, and we can either be intentional about it or just let it happen.

Implications: If we aren’t intentional about our thinning, then the sociopathic, narcissistic assholes will divide, conquer, dominate and prey on the vulnerable, and we’ll all have a much more miserable time of it than is necessary.

living history, thinking strategically

The first official news announcing the historic occasion came to my email inbox:

News Alert 11:05 p.m. ET Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Barack Obama Wins the Presidency

Barack Obama defeats John McCain to become first African American to win the White House.

McCain’s concession speech was eloquent, full of high rhetoric about honor, integrity, devotion, and perhaps most importantly, unity.  In other words, the complete opposite of his campaign rhetoric.  I doubt it will be enough to overcome the fear and hatred his campaign tactics have fomented.  I hope I’m wrong.  At least it was a return to the McCain that I knew and respected when I supported him in 2000 against the disaster that has been George W. Bush.  I also hope Obama’s decisive victory means the death of the terrible, oppressive race-baiting tactics that Bush and Rove used against McCain during the 2000 Republican primary — tactics (along with the same advisors) that McCain ironically decided to use in 2008.  May they Rest In Hell.