Mr B.
My comments weren't angled at you, but rather soundslike1981's bolt of anti-intellectualism. Particularly riling was his dismissiveness of gek's arguments being akin to someone still at university (which i happen to know he's not...but even if he was, surely that wouldn't make for any good reason to ignore the content of his posts. A solid argument would have been rather more constructive). Actually, I thought the manner in which you brought up soundslike1981's comments and put them forward as having some validity (i.e. that it's foolish to suggest that we're in a worse state than a hunter-gatherer society) was otm.
And to clarify, i was asserting twatish behaviour, which does not equate to actually being a twat. A pedantic point perhaps. Would you not agree that arguing for the sake of arguing without actually trying to be persuasive is not in fact, quite twatish, especially on an internet forum?
Any way...perhaps we should let this go... and get on with more interesting matters.
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As matt b implies, at the crux of this has to be the overthrowing of the gdp model, which requires economic theory to get to grips with external/social costs much better. Perhaps even this is a little bit simplistic, as much of the necessary theory and tools of such an alternative model are very much to hand (i.e. taxation and the marketisation of pollutants, etc. - its the lack of
political pressure that renders the current situation, and the dominance of the multinational over governments.
I hate to have to get all 'the corporation is evil', but i'm finding it to be an increasingly unavoidable position, or at least, under current corporate governance structures.
What's most worrying about all of this, with both climate change and resource crises, is that i have pretty much no understanding of the time frames involved here, and even worse, it seems that nobody really does. Has anyone any knowledge here? It would seem pretty crucial to the question.
bassnation said:
btw, the heat death thing is by no means inevitable. some theories actually have the universe contracting back into a singularity with time running backwards for whatever life remains. that sounds quite cool actually, despite meaning certain death for all of us.
Not quite sure what you mean by this...all sounds very drowned world to me. Time running backwards? What does that mean? (Not really that up on my physics...) How does such a contraction rubbish the heat death thing anyway?