As I recently told you UTJ is better than therapy, I share most of your feelings. I keep telling myself it is always darkest before dawn, but I really want to say "Yeah Right Bull Shit"

Sounds like to me you, like all of us, need some time in the forest to replenish....hang in there...you are not alone.

Metta
(loving kindness)
Bill

It is hard to admit I have been having the same feelings. Seeing the changes and tragedies in nature alarms me more than anything else. The floods in places that usually do not have floods should be a loud signal that climate is changing, but it seems no one is really stunned by it.
I also think America has lost its dream and the one world government forcasted in the Bible will soon be upon us. Christians think the evil one will come from another place and the one world government will be dominated from that other place. It looks to me like the evil will come from within....

I have been convinced for a long time that there is no master plan, no guiding force, nobody making sure that everything will be okay in the end. Living things come into existence by adapting gradually to circumstances, and die off when they cannot adapt fast enough. The endless succession of bad news you mention makes me feel more and more like we are one more experiment on our way out. We have failed to make the big jump to becoming a genuinely civilized species that could use its technology sanely, and now we are going down the tubes, and incidentally taking out the less robust half of the other extant "experiments" in the process. We are the only ones who are even going to be sad about it; and I've started already. The good thing is we haven't broken anything outside our own star system.

One of the things that bothers me most is our music. I don't know if anyone else will have quite the right ears for it. To me, most of the rest of our apparatus looks like it would be either easy for someone else to duplicate, or no big loss.

I too have been watching the news regarding the tsunami with horror. One of the most odd and frightening things I've seen on the news are reports of all the debris washed up on the beaches by the waves. Among all the garbage has been found a surprisingly high number of spines and backbones. So don't worry: you aren't alone. You still may be able to claim your lost backbone or to get someone else's and use it as your own.

Seriously, you are an emotional wreck. The way you are feeling has nothing to do with "the world" and everything to do with some sort of emotional imbalance. Death and destruction go on day after day and have done so for eternity. Most of the human race is strong enough to deal with it and move on. If you can't, maybe you should sign up for the baby registry at Babies-R-us and I'll get you a bib. That might help you get through.

Thanks Bushrod for reaffirming my faith in your total lack of relevancy, and the egoism (or is it nihilism) that keeps you consistently in your head so that you don't have to bear the burden of the consequences of anything - including your own penchant for hurting others.

Rowan,

Don't you think you are acting a bit childish? The vast majority of your observations are nothing new, but have been experienced by generation after generation down through the ages. The history of man is, for the most part, a history of war. Yet you get yourself all worked up as if wars and violence indicate something fundamentally wrong or different about today's world. You act like you embrace life, yet the essence of life is conflict and struggle. That can easily be seen at every level of life, from virus and bacteria to humans. WE ARE NOT DIFFERENT. NATURE MAKES NO EXCEPTIONS FOR HUMANS. I don't see any point in crying about it. The best we can do is carve out a bubble of security and work like hell to preserve it. We may well be like Rome before the barbarian invasions. Indeed, when I see how many Americans are too weak-kneed to stick up for their culture and rights against today's barbarian hordes (yes, the islamic fundamentalists are just modern day Huns and Goths), I have to think that we really are in trouble. But it is heartening to see that at least 50% of this country still has balls and will work to stamp out terrorism and spread democracy around the world. It is in our interest to do so, and I applaud the efforts of our military.

As for the environment, I agree one hundred percent that there is cause for concern. But it will have to get worse until it gets better. People will have to truly see and experience the consequences of their activities before they will truly be ready to change their lifestyles. In the meantime, I see no point in crying over natural disasters (the tsunami had nothing to do with America's actions) or bending over to let terrorists give us a spanking just so we can cry some more.

I don't mean to be rude, but you truly are acting unstable. You live a pampered life. Most of humanity has had it far, far worse. The capacity to feel the pain of millions of people around the world is a curse, not something to be proud of. You need to toughen your hide.

Bushrod: Your insenstivity is only exceeded by your arrogance.

Bushrod,
I too read your report of your balls and heart drifting in the backwash of the tsunami. Poor thing!
Insincerely, hegemony cricket

See, we still don't know whether you really believe the stuff you're saying, or are just trying to be provocative. There's a certain incongruity in the idea of someone's being smart enough to construct grammatical sentences and yet believing that the current administration is actually interested in democracy. In case you're serious, though:

-Conflict--specifically, conflict over the resources necessary to survive--is not the "essence of life". What about growth, metabolism, reproduction? Conflict over resources is a very common feature of life; it happens everywhere resources are scarce, which is most places most times. But we already WON the fight for the resources necessary to survive. We as a species now have the power to pretty much run the planet as we please. Any time in the last fifty or a hundred years we could have organized things to support our entire population in reasonable comfort and security, indefinitely. Instead we went on fighting over things not necessary to our survival. This is not because "that is what living things do and will always do"--it's because we were not smart enough to adapt to the circumstances of plenty that we had created for ourselves. A more adaptable species would now be sitting and savoring the fruits of victory.

-Islamic terrorists are not capable of overrunning America. They caught America with its pants down and scored one good hit, killing as many Americans as a month worth of car crashes. Boo hoo hoo. One sane reaction would have been to carefully assess the country's internal security weaknesses and fix them. Another somewhat sane reaction would have been to figure out who was responsible and kill them. It was not a sane reaction to declare a "war on terror", grab a bunch of Arabs and torture them aimlessly, suspend inconvenient parts of the Constitution, and destroy an unrelated country. That is, it was not sane if the idea was to secure America; it may have been sane if the idea was to increase the power of the government and particularly of the executive branch. The jury is still out on that one.

-People are not "too-weak-kneed to stick up for their culture"; rather, they do not feel that it is really theirs. It is true that people who had balls were more likely to vote for Bush than those who had ovaries, but the culture does not even really belong to those who have balls; it belongs to those who have huge piles of money, and they give everyone else just enough bread and circuses to pacify them. Besides, as just mentioned, American culture is not threatened.

-People are not "too-weak-kneed to stick up for their rights"; rather, they think that an increasingly powerful executive branch which is not interested in the Bill of Rights is a bigger threat to their rights than some people who knocked down a building. Skyscraper owners interested in protecting their property rights would disagree, of course.

-That half the voters voted for Bush does not mean they "will work to stamp out terrorism". Mostly they are confident that they won't have to do anything themselves. Remember, he promised not to institute a draft. And he said he was cutting everyone's taxes.

-"The environment will have to get worse before it gets better"--since it's a chaotic system, there's no reason to assume the "getting worse" will be such a steady, gradual process that people can track the decline year by year and stop it when it looks like it's getting too bad. Besides, people aren't experiencing the consequences of their actions; everyone is experiencing the consequences of everyone's actions. We have a tragedy-of-the-commons or prisoner's-dilemma situation, where people are performing actions that are of positive net utility to themselves and negative net utility to humanity considered as a group; it is logically in any individual's interest to do so (assuming they really ENJOY their lifestyle), and everyone goes down the tubes together.
--

Bushrod, did you get the adrenaline rush you were seeking? You know, the one that surges through you when you sneak back in here and dump your negativity and irrelevancy all over UTJ, and then retreat to snicker as you sit in your anonymous den checking the site over and over again to see who you could possibly get a rise out of.

Your psychoanalysis of Rowan would be laughable if it weren't so rude and arrogant. Rowan functions far more effectively and relevantly than you will ever know. Maybe that's what frightens you, an articulate, active, inspirational progressive that you just can't seem to undermine, no matter how hard you try. Your pseudo-intellectual history lesson of bizarre tangents and disconnected concepts says it all. You aren't dealing in fools here, we got it long before you ever appeared to spit in our Cheerios. I, for one, really wish you would go away for good.

Daniel,

Growth: requires consumption of food, which requires killing of life. Reproduction: some form of conflict for mates is widespread, if not universal. The conflict is, moreover, violent in the vast majority of cases. Beyond this, Richard Dawkins has a section in the Extended Phenotype about “selfish sperm.” Apparently some sperm are able to break the tails of other sperm to increase their competitive advantage. Growth is also thought to be Darwinian, as neurons actually fight for space in the brain. The resulting structure is actually the product of conflicting pulls of different cells trying to dominate regions of the network. I’m not a scientist. These are just factoids I’ve picked up here and there. It seems to me that Hericlitus was correct: everything is strife.

“But we already WON the fight for the resources necessary to survive. We as a species now have the power to pretty much run the planet as we please.”

The problem here is that you presume there is a “we,” as if humanity is a united entity. It is not. Humans struggle within themselves over resources. That has never abated for even one minute. Wars are as common as ever, and the need for resources is one of many driving forces.

I'll have to address the rest of this tomorrow.

I said conflict was not the essence of life, merely a very common feature of life. The examples you have just mentioned, drawn from the animal kingdom, are part of a long list of examples of conflict that could be used to show that conflict is a very common feature of life. Whereas the "essence of life" would be, if not the defining feature of life, at least its single most characteristic feature, which conflict is not. You mention that growth and reproduction often require conflict; but conflict virtually always requires growth and reproduction, to produce the organisms to participate in the conflict. Growth, reproduction, and metabolism have been used in serious efforts to list criteria of what is and is not alive; conflict, as far as I know, has not.

But to get back to the earlier point: most conflict in nature is for survival, reproduction, or resources necessary for survival or reproduction. I do not remember Rowan's condemning anyone for fighting for these things. We have all been lamenting about people who kill, or order others to kill, when their own survival is not at issue, and about various behaviors that endanger the survival of our species. This kind of counterproductive behavior is not "what all living beings inevitably do"; it is something beings may do if they have not adapted to the changed situation produced by their own technological power. In our case, the maladaptation seems to be both cultural and biological; with a different culture and the same biology, we might have a smoothly functioning civilization. Of course, nature has produced both us and our culture, maladapted as we are. Nature does not care how messy things get or how many species end up on the junk heap. This is an argument against uncritically worshiping nature and all its works, as opposed to according it a healthy respect.

That human beings are not very good at cooperation, and fight over things even when there is enough for everyone (or would be with proper organization) is another big part of our maladaptation to current circumstances. It is not a justification.

Since this argument is not going to get me food or mates, or even convince anyone of anything, I am trying to keep it brief :)