What Do You Think Today?

[Vraith]

Of course, now people are pointing out how easily the rich can get things done when they actually care to...

--A

Yea.
Some pointing out that the big donors get a giant tax deduction for it.
France itself, apparently, the superdonors will get the giant deduction, while ordinary people who donate can't deduct any of it...so ordinary people end up paying most of it anyway...

[Skyweir]

It is kind of an indictment against us as humans though .. that we prioritise THINGS over people .. and human suffering.

I guess some THINGS last longer than people .. and make better investments.

I think iconic world heritage things are important but at the end of the day ... they are just THINGS .. and we have lost iconic historical THINGS before. No one likes losing the THINGS they cherish .. but at the end of the day we move on.

[peter]

I've been thinking about this. At the risk of being pilloried, is it possible that there really are times when things are more important than people. I simply cannot justify such a thought - but I just know that there are circumstances under which I myself (think I) would risk death and would probably think it worth dying, in order to preserve a physical object that either I held dear to a very high degree.......or was perhaps in this case, when something is of such symbolic importance that a community would be rendered that much the worse by it's loss. The closest thing I can give as an example without giving it much deeper thought would be the regimental colours that used to be taken into battle in older times. These represented such a moral boosting point of focus in such situations that they were protected with a far higher degree of care than the human beings around them. Many died protecting or saving the colours and great was the regimental shame attendant upon loosing them.

There are definitely works of art whose value I would place above my own life.

-------------------------- 0 -------------------------------

On a different topic, the Conservative Party have single handedly :-

Orchestrated the biggest blow to our economic security in three-quarters of a century

Jepordised the future prospects of our children for decades to come

Sowed and nurtured the greatest division our society has seen in living memory

Single handedly overseen the incremental and inexorable unraveling of the Northern Ireland peace process and the resurgence of violence and killing in that community.......

And very shortly they will stand on our doorsteps and ask us to re-elect them to government once more, and the chief reason that they will give why we should do so is that if elected, Jeremy Corbyn could severely damage to our country!

[Skyweir]

Indeed

I honestly cant think of any THING that I would surrender my life for ..

In war life is cheap. And as such is a poor example of the value of a THING. Today we would rationally view that as a folly. I am not sure following the example of a folly truly makes your point. To place physical objects as more precious than human life is also a folly.

THINGS only have the value that WE give them.

I mean its a folly to ask what youd really want a great pyramid of Egypt or a nephews life .. or any childs life .. or 10 childrens lives, or 20 or several hundred childrens lives.

[peter]

I agree Sky - but it is a thing you can only talk about in respect of what you yourself might do. I've always thought that people who risk, and sometimes actually loose their lives in the attempting to save the lives of animals, be they their pets or whatever, are misguided. In one case I remember two men drowned in attempting to rescue a dog that had fallen into the sea off a UK pier. This to me seems crazy; but if it were my pet, in my power to help, then all of a sudden it doesn't seem so crazy. There are achievements of art that are above the value of my individual life in my opinion. I hope if push came to shove - and equally I hope it doesn't - that I'd have the courage to do what had to be done in the attempt to preserve them.[/u]

[Sorus]

This to me seems crazy; but if it were my pet, in my power to help, then all of a sudden it doesn't seem so crazy.

Few years back, I was coming home from work and my street was a solid wall of smoke. It looked like the end of the world - there was no one around, just distant sirens. My first thought was that a plane had crashed or a bomb had gone off. My second thought was that my cats were somewhere in there. Adrenaline replaced critical thinking at that point.

Turned out to be a fire about a block away in one of those stores that's jammed floor to ceiling with crap in violation of every fire code - caused an amazing amount of smoke, but nobody was injured.

It was misguided - stupid - of me to run into the middle of it without having any idea what was going on. I'm trained in search and rescue and whatnot, and the very first rule is that you don't go doing stuff like that. But it's absolutely different when it's your family (yes, I include pets in that) - something just takes over - I don't think most people realize how they will react until they're actually facing the situation.

[Skyweir]

Absolutely right Sorus in every respect And like you my animals ARE my family.

Weve all done things in the heat of the moment reacting purely on adrenalin and concern.

I have too .. but not even for my animal family .. we were driving home after work one night and a big red too had been hit and was in the middle of the road .. and it was trying to move .. Trev slowed down but before hed stopped I leapt from the car and run to the roo .. I lifted it from behind and dragged it to the grassy verge on the opposite side of the road. Trev had turned the car and parked a small distance off not to freak the roo out. I asked him to help me move it further onto the grass .. and we struggled to do that together. This was a big roo .. and it was only Adrenalin that enabled me to pull it from the road.

I waited with the roo while we waited for the Wildlife peeps to come .. I sat behind him, with his head resting on my belly and my legs on each side of him .. and gently stroked him and softly spoke to him.

A small crowd of people came to see what was going on .. I just wanted them to move on .. Id been with him for 20mins and kept him calm .. then someone walked up to us and lit up his cigarette .. striking that match startled the roo and he launched up and bit me on my leg .. and wouldnt let go I had to physically force open his jaw and it fkcn bit like a brother. I told the dickhead with the cigarette to back the Fkc up .. about 30mins later the Ranger arrived .. and had to put the roo down

But yes .. its not our rational selves that acts in the heat of the moment .. despite our training. We never truly know how we will REACT till we as individuals are in the situation. Its closely aligned to our fight flight instinct ... but yes as much as we might like to jump in to wild surf to save a loved one .. we need to force ourselves to take a moment .. a split second to assess what we are faced with.

Pete I dont consider animals THINGS .. I consider THINGS inanimate non living objects. And theres not ONE inanimate object that I would sacrifice my life for .. and if I did .. my family and friends I think would be furious.

Though having said that .. I have put myself in harms way countless times .. but not for things .. THINGS can more than often be replaced .. things are most often INSURED .. even for a rare piece of art .. I would not sacrifice my life for it.

If its a piece of history .. we will always have its record. But we humans have destroyed many historical icons and the world itself has not ended.

If you sacrificed your life Pete to save The Mona Lisa .. I would be furious lol and inconsolable ... and likely never forgive you your FOLLY .

Fuck The Mona Lisa, Id far rather you in the world. Few people EVER enjoy that ACTUAL work of art .. most portraits are copies. There are thousands of copies of The Mona Lisa .. theres only ONE you.

[peter]

No Sky - I don't consider animals 'things' either. I use this simply as an example of how our understanding can blur between thinking in the general and the specific. I can't understand the sacrificing of one's life for an animal until I put one of my own into the picture at which point it becomes immediately clear why one would do it.

I wouldn't or couldn't see myself sacrificing my life for the Mona Lisa - but Cave Chauvet, absolutely. Watch Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams and you will immediately understand why.

[Skyweir]

Watch?

Is it a movie or a tv show

Dear one, it would have to MIGHTY compelling to make me change my position on that.

[peter]

Well, I won't hold my breath Sky, but it's a film about what until recently was considered to be the oldest cave art discovered to date, aging from about thirty to twenty five thousand years ago. The sheer beauty and fragility of this unique treasure, sealed off rightly from all but the most limited viewing, is brought to life in Herzog's film in a way that is enough to bring one almost to tears. The art reaches out across the aeons and you link intimately with the minds of men and women who you know we're just like you and me. The artist who stood composed him or herself, and with stilled mind in one ten foot stroke of the brush swept out a lion so perfect that any Japanese calligraphy master would kneel in homage to this day. The artist with the broken finger. The boy and the wolf (did the wolf track the boy, or were they a thousand years apart, or my favourite, did they walk side by side?) They are all there encased in a sheen of glittering crystal. Who says there is no magic in the world when our brothers and sisters of those millennia past can still make our hearts sing with such joy!

[Skyweir]

Sounds lovely .. will look out for it.

I can appreciate the greatest of beauties in this world and still treasure something of infinitely greater value life.

Without life, your life, my life .. beauty is meaningless a thing. Humans are the only species of life, Id say, on this planet that would credit a thing as having greater value than itself or any other of its kind.

And yet it .. the beauty or work that we admire .. is not greater than life, not the life of one nor the life of many.

A thing, any thing ... require humans to give it meaning. It is humans that place a value on a thing.

[peter]

Yes, Sky - and this brings me on to the subject that has been weighing heavily on my mind of late - are we not only the smartest, but the stupidest of species ever to have graced/cursed the world. After all, all we had to do in order to manage the estate we had inherited and of which we were trustees for future generations was ......... nothing! And we fucked even that up.

I recently watched the David Attenborough program, Climate Change - the Facts, on BBC 2 and the program brought the stark reality of what we have done home with a bump. Fossil fuels have pretty much single handedly sealed our fate - or at least that of the vast bulk of humanity (no doubt science will contrive a form of survival for a select few of us but for sure the ones selected to be the spearhead of our renaissance will be called Windsor or Beckham). The one degree increase in temperature that we have already brought about has seen huge changes in our sea levels, the make up and constitution of the various zones into which the planet is separated and the delicate ecological balance that maintains the stability of our environment and within such narrow limits of physical parameters we can hope in any true sense of the word, to survive. Despite the programs best efforts at the end to tell us 'its not too late', I'm afraid that it exactly is too late, not because it couldn't be done, but because it won't be.

London is full of people as we speak chaining themselves to railings, laying on the floor of the Natural History Museum, blocking the shopping streets and thoroughfares. There message is simple - it's time for Government's to act. But ask a single one of them, what they will personally do, what they will actually give up, they themselves who care sufficiently much to go out and get themselves arrested for the cause - and you will see why our fate is sealed. Because the answer is nothing. The change demanded of us, all of us, today, now, is not going to happen. I'm not going to stop driving my car and taking my holidays, and neither are you. We're not going to stop buying new clothes and white goods, we're not going to buy only foods that have been produced and sold within walking distance from where we live and we're not going to throw away our phones and laptops, turn of our TVs and take up reading and weaving as pastimes under the soft light of beeswax candles. This isn't us - and it isn't those people chained to lampposts and railings in London either.

And so we are screwed - and more tragically in my mind, the blue jewel we were given in the vast emptiness of space is screwed because of us. We might limp on in a pitiful imitation of what life was like when it didn't have to be lived inside a biome, or from within a heat protected suit surveying the dead rock that stretches as far as the eye can see - but to what meaningful end? Attenborough's program purported to tell us the facts - but it fell at the last fence for even it failed to acknowledge that the simple truth is that the changes we need to make in the here and now in order to prevent the single degree additional increase in temperature that will seal our collective fate, will provide the soft push that the numerous tipping points illustrated in the program just need in order to roll into irreversible motion, are quite simply beyond us.

[Avatar]

Nonsense, the earth will be fine. Especially if we all die off. But we won't. We'll find a new equilibrium and it will become normal.

But I agree that it's too late to change now.

But 99% of all life that has ever been on earth is currently extinct. That's what happens. It's natural.

Yes, in this case, we've interfered with the timing, but all that's done is perhaps narrowed our window. And we know that sans interference, nature's powers of recuperation are amazing.

--A

[peter]

Fair comment Av - but it will be an equilibrium way different from anything you or I recognize as a normal way of life...........and there won't be seven billion people living in it - not unless we learn to sleep standing on each others shoulders!

But I take my hat off to your unbridled optimism - I'd love to share it with you, for the planets sake if not for ours as a species - but I'm afraid if the program I saw had any veracity in it then alas, the odds of it being justified are slim.

[Avatar]

Funnily enough, I just watched it this weekend too.

My point is that if 90% of the world's population dies, the world will still continue. (And it will be less than 90% I'm sure.)

Yes, it may be very different from what we've known in the past, but that's not the point. It's some special kind of hubris that assumes the point of earth is for people to live the way they have always lived.

We're a mere blip on the geological timescale, and we were simply fortunate that for the last couple thousand years, climate has been condign for our species. That would anyway have changed at some point, and it seems to be changing now.

All change is slow unless you're standing in the middle of it.

--A

[peter]

We both agree then, that we are not going to change - and this is a point I'd be interested to put to the climate change protesters in London. What exactly do they think our governments should *do* in order to bring about the changes the world needs in order to slow down or reverse climate change? Theirs seems to be the age old argument that it's always somebody else that should take the responsibility for making the changes and not them themselves, personally. I'm as bad - I'm not going to change! But neither am I going to blame governments for not doing things that would be ruinous for them both domestically or on the world stage, simply because I am too selfish, or simply not prepared to tear up the life it has taken me sixty plus years to build and go live like a new age woker in a bloody forest clearing! More so because in all likekyhood such a gesture would be as about as futile as the May and Corbyn talks [ had to get that in there] in actually making a hairs bredth of difference to what seems to me is a forgone conclusion anyway. What do they want Governments to do - ban us from using our cars, buying food from our supermarkets. It's bullshit.

But I'm guessing our real departure of opinion is that what we are doing will result in the killing of the planet. I think it most probably could. The bandwidth of conditions that life can survive other than just as a sludge of slime across an otherwise denuded planet is very small - and temperature is a huge limiting factor within this. I think your 90 percent human population figure is best case - tops in the extreme. I'd put this into the optimistic in the level of cloud cukoo optimism, but conceed it is possible, hell desireable even, for us as a species going forward. More likely is I think the increasing level of chaos and instability, war and killing as competition for limited space and rescources becomes ever more vicious, leading to mass death and wastage across huge swathes of the planet. Those with the money and power to survive will weather out the storm and then emerge to pick up the pieces and work out a survival strategy for living in a world changing from a hostile one [in terms od survival, that it has always been] to a drop dead fucking lethal one. I'm talking Fallout 76 is Noddy's Circus here! Wouldn't it be nice.....

[Avatar]

Once enough of us are gone, it will start moving in the other direction. Look at things like the proliferation of wildlife and flora in the Chernobyl exclusion zone etc.

And if it does all get reduced to a sludge of slime...well...a few hundred million years and life will be booming again.

--A

[peter]

And here's another point where we agree Av - even sludge is better than no sludge (well, by a few hundred million years and a shed load of luck running totally contrary to the laws of probability if that happens to be the way of thinking!)

[peter]

Out for a walk yesterday on a coastal path - a lonely but not unfrequented spot popular as it is with locals and dog walkers - I came across a four inch or thereabouts square rock in the path where on the flat upper surface some wag had written in black felt tip marker he words God Eats Shit.

What, I thought, are we to learn about this individual or anything else come to that, from this act. Firstly I imagined this knuckle dragging ape, or was it a callow pimpled youth, probably somewhere in between, walking down the beautiful path, marker burning a hole in his pocket (notice two things, he is male already and the scene is incongruous - what is the lout doing in this beautiful surrounding - he should be pulling on three week old underpants in a Birmingham council house and heading to his local shop for his first crate of cheap lager at this point, not out taking the air with a bracing walk on the cliffs) fighting the urge that slowly but inexorably overwhelms him. With hand shaking with effort - is it last night's lager or the uncontrollable demon of his need to deface, to bring some comforting uglyness into this scene of beauty, that he fights against - he scrawls his missive and angst thus dissipated, steam thus let off, continues down the path.

What need had this act served then? Does our neanderthal (sorry Neanderthals - by current thinking and overworking you were in fact more the cloud contemplating aesthete type than the wife dragging, club wielding cave dweller indelibly printed in cartoon on the surface of our narrow bandwidth minds) Shakespeare get an immediate frisson of pleasure at the thought of the long distance offence his work will cause, such is the power of the written word, or does he shuffle on, no longer giving the matter the smallest thought once the act itself is performed. A little later does he consider the potential danger in what he might have done? From his statement we must consider that in his grantedly slow and low down on the evolutionary scale (about one step up from the amoeba) thought processes, there is the inckling of belief that God actually exists ......... and does it not occur to him that to offer up such gratuitous insult to one of reportedly omnipotent power ......... when one is walking on a narrow cliff path on the edge of a steep drop into a boiling sea........ might not actually be the wisest of things to do.........

Or that at some later point, when standing in front of the celestial court in front of an already decidedly unhappy looking God, sat in front on his ever so raised and gilded throne, the man to his right reading from the list on the long and heavy parchment roll held before him says, ".......and oh yes, remember that time you were walking along that coastal path in Cornwall..........."

[Skyweir]

I completely agree and Av is bang on imv. The planet will survive, life will adapt, evolve to survive. Populations and species wide will be inevitably affected in one way or another. Thats life .. thats our reality. And realities change, perspective changes just like the planet will change.

The planet is a thing that is precious and when I see reports on wales beaches with several 100llbs of plastic in their gut .. such things give me grief, there are tonnes of things humans can do better .. boycott plastic bottled water for starters. My kids all buy this shit .. my eldest son brings a crate of plastic bottled water when they visit cos they wont drink MY water .. I have FILTERED rain water AND 100 pure bore water.. been tested and has trace gold particles and they wont drink it.

We need to put the kybosh on the bottled water industry .. particularly its western market.

We can not litter, I honestly dont know about recycling anymore .. but hey keep at it if its actually being done in your area. I love reading about recycling initiatives re roads, housing and infrastructure from recycled plastic etc. Brilliant stuff.

Do the things you do

And embrace the truth of adaptability and the amazingness of nature.