What is the good? What is there? What is knowledge? What is a silly question?

Perhaps simplicity is the shortest path out. — tim wood

I don't think it is. Imparting knowledge, both propositional and 'knowhow' is only one aspect of education. An educational establishment is also a social institution. Children do not in general approach teachers to ask them to teach; rather more so, teachers approach children and ask them to learn. This changes everything. It makes a joy into a duty.

I wasn't, but I am an ageing hippy, so they probably read my mind.

On which note, here's a relevant conspiracy theory.

I don't know, do you have a problem? Do you need a problem to act?

Yet when one criticises the Israeli government one is branded as anti-semitic. Or, if one is one of the many Jews that levy similar criticism against the Israeli government's actions, one is branded a self-hating Jew. I'm not saying that people on this forum, who are mostly a pretty thoughtful bunch, would spray those accusations of anti-semitism or self-hatred around. But there are regrettably very many in the wider world that do exactly that. — andrewk

I'm not sure that there are that many, but they manage to dominate the media, and have undue influence.

Hitler accepted the position of the Zionists as it was his view that founding a state on racist lines was a good idea. — charleton

Ken Livingston, ex mayor of London, was kicked out of the labour party for saying exactly that. His defence that it is a matter of historical record was dismissed as - irrelevant?

But by contrast, this guy is not going to get kicked out of the conservative party anytime soon.

It seems problematic to me that vegan (and possibly vegetarian ethics) hinges on the claim that we don't need to eat meat. — Andrew4Handel

I don't understand. Why is that problematic? If we couldn't manage without meat, then it could not be a issue, one can only make a moral issue of what is possible. Personally, I have a rule not to eat anyone I haven't been introduced to; it's a matter of politeness.

I really don't know what you are trying to say. I lived for 5 years in the Pyrenees in a community in some isolation and surrounded by mountain and forest. When you have to slaughter the pig that you have brought up for a year and that roamed with the wild boar to have food for the winter, your relationship to nature is different. These days I make it a rule never to eat anyone I haven't been introduced to, and that means I am vegetarian at the moment.

There is understanding, empathy, insight, that one can only gain from close contact. But then,

The issue is "how should we act"; — Mariner

So, whether you are connected or disconnected, how will you act?

part of me needs the wild. — frank

Me too, but another part needs the dentist. I do know the difference between farm and forest, I'm just struggling to work out what your point is in relation to eco philosophy.

Well you contrast city dwellers with wilderness dwellers, it seems. I have no dispute about the psychological benefits to humans of living in the wilderness for a while. But as you say, the wilderness may not benefit. One of the questions that might be addressed, therefore is whether in addition to National Parks, where city folk can learn to love, we should not also have human-free spaces, where the wilderness can manage itself for itself, without having to be a resource for the human psyche.

I found it very disturbing, but it's not that graphic. You need the subtitles though.

I noticed that the film had comments turned off on vimeo, which is one reason I was hesitant about the thread. But I think people should look at it (no children though). There are some amazing Jewish Israeli people trying to change things for the better on the film, so though it is indeed one sided, and though there are big issues about Australia and Britain and anywhere, this is this and it needs to be known about too. Hopefully we can avoid the 'your atrocities are worse than mine' arguments, along with the 'you're racist for calling me racist' ones. But probably not. :sad:

I decided it might be unwise to start a thread, but in light of various accusations of anti-semitism against the labour party in the UK, I leave this video here. And if anyone can bear to watch it through, I would ask whether it is just possible that some Jewish people are racist; that the state of Israel is institutionally racist; that the victims have tragically become the oppressors? Am I even allowed to ask?

Love and respect come naturally to people who spend time in the wilderness. It's people who live in cities who may lack love due to nature-blindness. Their visual language is cars and buildings. Put them in a forest and they literally don't see what's before them. More exposure would correct that, but who wants hoards of city people roaming around putting lives in danger? — frank

There is some truth in this, but if it was so simple, farmers would behave differently than they do. Remember that it was the industrialisation of farming that fuelled the growth of the city and depopulation of the countryside as much as the reverse.

Spice up your life! :fire:

I wanted specifically to respond to @Eric's stab. One only needs to inspire a lifelong love of learning after it has been destroyed. It is the natural condition of children.

https://anewkindofhuman.com/creative-genius-divergent-thinking-test/

So, what is the purpose of education? — jastopher

I notice you ask what it is, and not what it ought to be.

Education is an indoctrination into a world that forbids creativity, individuality, and promotes conformity through competition and measurement of 'progress'. It is the industrial production of adults depressed into compliance with a vacuous and self-destructive world of production/consumption.

Well maybe I'm exaggerating a wee bit. But there is a process goes on in schools round here that manages to take endlessly curious explorers and questioners and endlessly enthusiastic creators and actors at 5 yrs old, and turns them by age 11 into sullen resentful disinterested refuseniks. Some few escape...

Here's some homework in case anyone's interested.

A land ethic expands the definition of “community” to include not only humans, but all of the other parts of the Earth, as well: soils, waters, plants, and animals, or what Leopold called “the land.”

https://www.aldoleopold.org/post/understanding-land-ethic/

Consider orthodox Western forestry. Too often it has assumed that activities that fall outside the realm of commercial fiber production are less important than those that fall inside that realm. Yet the latter are precisely the activities that rural women in many parts of Africa and India engage in on a daily basis. Failure to understand the importance of these activities often makes women “invisible”. This invisibility helps explains why many orthodox, Western foresters

literally do not see trees that are used as hedgerows or living fence poles; trees that provide materials for basketry, dyes, medicines, or decorations; trees that provide sites for honey barrels; trees that provide fodder; trees that have religious significance; trees that provide shade; or trees that provide human food.

Because many foresters literally do not see the enormous variety in the use of trees, they frequently do not see the vast number of species that are useful … that men and women may have very different uses for the same tree or may use different trees for different purposes. (Fairfax and Fortmann 1990: 268–9)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-environmental/

The ecocentric valuation perspective says that the vast majority of reasonable people--today's politicians, business leaders, educators, bureaucrats and other decision makers are in fact unreasonable or "unsound of thought and judgement...lacking sense...unsensible, extreme, insane...unable to listen to reason or acting according to lack of reason. This is because their policies of development, growth and progress are destroying the very basis for life on Earth.

http://www.ecospherics.net/pages/MosqFearfulNotion.html

Lessons wot I have learnt.

There is a prudential environmentalism, based on human needs and human desires that seems to me inadequate, because it is merely reactive to disaster - 'oh, perhaps we shouldn't be killing all the insects, because we need them for pollination of our crops.' - dependencies are discovered only when they are lost, because a radical (moral) separation is presumed between man and nature, even though it is 'scientifically' denied.

A critique of this enlightenment presumption, modified by the subsequent death of God, involves a rethinking of identity, a rethinking of the thinker as embedded rather than disembodied. This means that there is a close connection between environmental politics and identity politics. It's all the white man's fault as usual.

So there is an interplay of religion, identity, and science that needs to run to a depth of the human psyche that is beneath rationality at the same time as reaching beyond the psyche through rationality to deal with, ahem, the facts on the ground. Science likes to remind us that we are just aggressive monkeys at heart, but I would urge caution in taking the word of an aggressive monkey about things like that.

As for the religious aspect, note that management can be replaced with "stewardship", an old Christian notion, with no loss. — Mariner

I wonder about that. I see the connection, for sure, and it is certainly claimed that the idea of stewardship can lead one to the principles of deep ecology. And I can see in the monastic tradition - the little I know of it - that at it's best it is a model of good stewardship and living in harmony with the natural world.

But I see also the rather less edifying connection to my own experience of management that has reverence only for the bottom line. This is perhaps what happens to the steward sometimes when the proprietor is absent for a long time; he comes to think he is the proprietor. There seems to be a vast difference between a steward on behalf of God of His whole creation, and a steward on behalf of the Shareholder (a being quite as dubious of existence), who seems to have little concern for the welfare of his property, but much, curiously, for His stewards.

And this is where I want to take a stand, for human stewardship and against human proprietorship. It's not an argument against management as such, but against management become ownership.

It is not so sublime to see people dying of easily preventable diseases because they don't have access to clean (or, cleaner) energies; or to see that they lack good quality drinking water at critical periods of the year, for themselves, their livestock, and their farms. Yet these would be predictable results of any absolute "ban on dams". — Mariner

Yes, such absolutes are ridiculous and offensive. I think one can have a principled preference for small interventions over large, but even there, economies of scale may dictate otherwise. There is a proposal locally for a huge tidal lagoon that would provide flooding defence and power generation; a twenty mile dam in the sea. A huge intervention in the environment that wants careful thinking and management on behalf of the marine, coastal, and human environments. Are we doing cost benefit analyses on behalf of the whole, or just on behalf of ourselves? That is the question that sorts the stewards from the mere managers.

I refuse to shrug.

(By the way, leaving places and resources alone is still management -- at least, and this is quite difficult, management of the human beings who disagree with this goal). — Mariner

Management of management, all is management! Or should that be vanity?

By acknowledging that we are a part of something so much vaster and more inscrutable than ourselves – by affirming that our own life is entirely continuous with the life of the rivers and the forests, that our intelligence is entangled with the wild intelligence of wolves and of wetlands, that our breathing bodies are simply our part of the exuberant flesh of the Earth — deep ecology, or rather, Depth Ecology opens a new (and perhaps also very old) sense of the sacred. It brings the sacred down to Earth, exposing the clearcuts and the dams and the spreading extinctions as a horrific sacrilege, making us pause in the face of biotechnology and other intensely manipulative initiatives that stem from a flat view of the world. Depth Ecology opens a profoundly immanent experience of the Holy precisely as the many-voiced land that carnally enfolds us – a mystery at once palpable, sensuous, and greatly in need of our attentive participation.

David Abram
103
The Trumpeter
ISSN: 0832-6193 Volume 30, Number 2 (2014)

Perhaps pagan Nature worship is not to your taste, yet there must be some connection surely or some reflection at least, between God and His creation? I'm surprised your approach is so resolutely mundane.

1. Natural resources (bear with me for a while here, this sketch is quite old, and it takes for granted some terminology that fell out of favor since) are very often mismanaged. — Mariner

Nice to have you aboard. Allow me to jump down your throat from the get go. Is there inevitably a potential management that is not mis-management? Or is it possible that there are places and resources that we should leave alone - that do not belong to us in the first place? Places that belong to the wild.

It turns out that there is nowhere on the planet that does not suffer from the externalised costs of our mismanagement, to use your language; nowhere that is not already polluted with our waste. And there is nowhere where we do not claim the right to roam, and the right to manage and mis-manage.

Nowhere, including ourselves. We cannot manage ourselves, though we are the first and most accessible natural resource. But we quite rightly do not wish to consider ourselves in that frame at all, though some of us are willing to treat others as resources. It's not that I disagree with your diagnosis and remedy, so much as I think it is - that word again - symptom management, rather than a cure.

We have externalised ourselves from the nature we manage and mis-manage, and our management of nature is then always in relation to our (unnatural) selves. To relate it to the conversation above, if man is the measure of all things, there can be no ethics, because ethics is the measure of man. One is left with a pragmatic, managerial, prudential ethic of convenience. And that is how we arrived at this point in the first place.

So perhaps this is a better approach. Would engaging with the unknown sincerely, authentically, originally - would this implicate any effort of thought at all? Or would any thought about it necessarily send us to the past? Because I feel that there is a sort of relationship between thinking and the past, as all thinking relies on memory, it relies on associations we have formed in the past. Is any authentic thinking, that is entirely new and fresh possible? I don't think so - because all thought seems to be the known... — Agustino

This sounds right to me; effortless observation. But then you don't want your accountant to actually forget all his training and arithmetic. There needs to be an integration of seeing the new problem with a new mind, and that meeting with all the experience that is the past. Your accounts are new and unique, but they need to be sorted the same way as accounts are always sorted.

The point is not everything can flourish. — Pseudonym

Ok.

Your still only looking at ecosystems as static things and they're not, components naturally come and go in response to environmental changes, we can't become obliged to step in and prevent this. — Pseudonym

Ok.

Desert ecosystems are impoverished compared to tropical rainforest, native woodland is impoverished compared to meadows; are we obliged then to turn one into the other? — Pseudonym

I don't think we are obliged, but a bit of desert irrigation and amelioration of desertification might be a reasonable policy in some places, and not in others.

I simply mean that raw materials are not the only assets nature can supply us. There's tranquility, beauty, a sense of place, the satisfaction of million year old instinct. But it must be as we expect it to be to supply these things. A polluted lake full of oil-consuming bacteria won't do the job, no matter how much the bacteria are 'flourishing'. — Pseudonym

Right, I misunderstood, and this is the dispute we have; that you take man as the 'measure of all things' (at least all things ethical and aesthetic). I'm not sure if this is the place to go further on this; we seem to have traced the difficulty back to level 1 in Naess's scheme. Perhaps we should pause for breath at least, before I try and convert you to a 'more religious' view.

Yes, but what of the insects? Do they need bats? Maybe you could argue that they need bats to control their numbers so that they don't succumb to disease, but then do the diseases need bats? Either the insects or the diseases are going to be better off (flourish) without the bats. Nature abhors a vacuum. What about the bacteria currently evolving to live off our pollutants, do they not deserve to flourish? — Pseudonym

I'm not sure what your point is. There is a hierarchy of dependency such that the top predators are the most dependent. On the other hand, I compete directly with the slugs for my lettuces. Diseases are dependent on their host, predators on their prey, plants on soil and sunlight and rainfall. Dependency is opposed to competition, and everything has dependency. An ecosystem consisting of bacteria and pollutants is an impoverished ecosystem; a flourishing ecosystem is complex, diverse, resilient adaptable. You seem to be arguing that everything is natural by definition and therefore anything is of equal value?

We falsely presume nature's utility is as an inexhaustible supply of raw materials and forget that it is neither inexhaustible nor limited to supplying us with raw materials. — Pseudonym

Again, I find little to dis agree with, except that "...nor limited to supplying us with raw materials." seems to contradict "It's not that we treat nature as 'just' what is useful to us, it's that we don't treat it enough that way." The former seems to imply that much of what nature is doing is sustaining itself as a complex system and that if those needs, which are not apparently our needs are not fulfilled then it will become apparent that they were after all indirectly our needs. Rather as leopards are not much concerned about grass, but depend on gazelles that depend on grass. It is fortunate for leopards that they do not have access to herbicides, and unfortunate for humans that they do not understand their own dependencies.

That there is a 'value' to non-human life beyond its utility to us I find deeply problematic. — Pseudonym

Good. I think Deep Ecology is deeply problematic for the current world view, as I indicated in the op. So we are in the right snake pit at last.

Utility is at the heart of all natural ecosystems, it is how they evolved and the reason for their existence, it is not something to be given second place to some esoteric, deeply human cultural attitude. — Pseudonym

I don't think I have to disagree much with this. Wheat has utilitarian value for humans, and insects for bats. But to have utility is already to have second place to the purpose for which they are used, which you would probably call survival. And wheat and insects have their own needs for their own survival too. So to say that bats need insects, and their survival (can I use flourishing?) is dependent on the survival of insects, and therefore is endangered by the excessive use of insecticides is not to indulge in anthropocentric, esoteric human cultural attitudes. It is the way it is.

It is technically impossible for two competing life forms to both 'flourish'. Natural selection ensures that varieties which do not flourish of their own accord die out. — Pseudonym

Well if this is true, then bats are not competing with insects, and in general, predators are not competing with prey. It sets a very tight limit on competition and directs evolution towards specialisation that avoids competition. It suggests that for humans to set themselves up as in competition with nature is a very dangerous thing to do for our own survival. If Dutch Elm disease, in utilising Elms destroys them, it cannot itself survive.

It is an appeal to emotion which is unlikely to work. Where action is needed right now, we cannot afford to persue such routes. The natural environment is worth trillions if properly costed, without its proper functioning we will be wiped out as a species. These are languages which the current social zeitgeist already understands, by talk of human superiority undermines the message. — Pseudonym

Well this is anthropocentric to an extreme. "Trillions of insects?", asks the bat. If the zeitgeist understands and 'properly costs' the environment, then how is it that insect populations are in steep decline, bird populations are in steep decline, the oceans are full of plastic, fish stocks are in steep decline, and so on and on and on.

But the system is as it is, and I doubt it will ever change. The question for me is how can people, once trapped within, find a way out? — Agustino

That is a dangerous question. If I am trapped in a mindset that always deals with the new in terms of the old, then for anyone to give me an answer is to again give me an old method with which to deal with the new. So to come up with a glib homily for answer, 'Feel the fear and do it anyway', perhaps, is actually to build a bigger trap. If I am trapped in the known, unable to face the unknown, the answer is unknown - it must be.

Can you all please go and discuss global warming somewhere else. My topic is Ecophilosophy, and you are getting in the way.

Insects cannot have a right to live (or at least not one that is acknowledged species-wide, otherwise bats would not be allowed to kill them for food. That's what I meant by the analogy of gutting a rabbit which is not met by your reference to mangoes. Nature is not about rights, it's a competition for resources. There are two main paths to survive the competition, be strongest or co-operate. The problems we face in terms of environmental degradation are entirely the result of us presuming there is only the former, in order to undo the damage we must develop the latter. What I find unpleasant about the deep ecology movement is it focusses only on the former. It implies we've won the competition, we've beaten nature and now we have to teach people to love it so that they look after it in a condescending paternal way. But we cannot win this battle we've set ourselves up for, we must either learn to co-operate or die, it doesn't matter if everyone on earth does so through gritted teeth hating every minute of it, it is simply a necessity of the natural world. — Pseudonym

Humans don't have a right to live. They all die. I think you are strawmannirg Deep Ecology, and perhaps uncharitably reading my own loose comments. where in the principles of Deep Ecology do you find the unpleasant focus you complain of?

The Platform Principles of the Deep Ecology Movement

1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.
2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realizations of these values and are also values in themselves.
3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital human needs.
4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.
5. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.
6. Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.
7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great.
8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation to directly or indirectly try to implement the necessary changes.

And you just did it. You wanted to de-hitch the topic from practicality and then you brought up practical concerns (such as the world we inherited).

Disconnecting moral concerns from practical ones is like demanding that we hear about Juliet's family and totally ignore Romeo's. It's a pretty meaningless play. — frank

I'm not wanting to disconnect anything. But my concern here is to change minds, and change the way people think about the issues that the way we think has brought us to. I mention the way things are by way of establishing the problem with the way we think. Let me put it this way we have done what we have done because we think what we think. so in order to do something else we need to think something else. And that is the business of philosophy. Doing something else will follow as politics when we have a new philosophy. but you want to do the politics without having changed the philosophy, and that results in repeating the same errors in a new way.

I think you must be on another planet. On my planet the oceans are choking with acidity, excess heat and plastics, not to mention the radioactive waste pouring from Fukushima. As to forests, see here.

As the song has it, "Where is the love?"

Let's take the relationship between myself and Pseudonym - it is not a serious relationship. Why not? What's making it like that, and what could we (both of us) do to fix that? This is an opportunity for you to investigate your own relationships with others - not only here, but everywhere else in your life. Let's do this - let's do it seriously, not half-heartedly, not disinterestedly - it is YOUR LIFE too that is under discussion. This is what philosophy is meant to be, we are to engage authentically with our experience, and persevere, not settle for easy answers, and displacements of the problem. So are people serious in their relationships with you? Are you serious in your relationships with people? — Agustino

One thing that I see in most of the responses you have had is that they have missed what I see as the point. And the reason for that is that you have given in several paragraphs, several examples of you own encounter with a lack of seriousness in others. And what I find to be the meat of the topic appears in this last paragraph:

So why is it that people lack seriousness? Why is it that people hide behind reputation, authority, and all the rest? Is it because they are afraid? Afraid of actually encountering the real problem, and not knowing how to solve it, having to find out, and instead preferring to rely on what they are familiar with (the past)? And so, with every problem, they are actually not solving the problem, but they are solving some past, previous problem. And if so, how can we transform our relationship, without having to rely on these psychological defence mechanisms, without having to be ashamed of each other, without being afraid of each other, without playing games with each other, without all this nonsense? — Agustino

So you have made it very easy for people to talk about you, and talk about business and management and quite difficult to talk about fear, which we would rather not go into anyway. I think there is an interaction of fear and boredom, if you will allow the Schopenhauerian slant. Repeating the past is boring, and facing the unknown is scary, and this leads to a sullen half-assed bitter response to life in general.

A lot of this is the fault of a degraded and degrading education; I don't quite know how it is done, but schools start with 4 and 5 yr-olds who cannot be prevented from questioning everything all the time and absorbing new knowledge like sponges and insisting in getting right into everything they come across, and in a few short years they turn them into bored, disinterested, resistant, sullen refuseniks.

Also, I'm not sure how this approach helps us to resolve conflict between what different aspects of the ecosystem and wants. How do we consider the wants of both bats and insects when those wants will be contradictory? — Pseudonym

It's not our business to resolve such conflicts at all, if we even need to conceive it as a conflict. Insects have a right to live, (but not in my hair) and bats also have a right to live, and bats eat insects, so they both need insects to thrive.

It it our anthropocentric distance that causes the problems we all seem to agree exist. I think what's needed is not further distancing by abstraction, but getting closer to the fact that we need the ecosystems we rely on. — Pseudonym

Here is the bite: I agree with your diagnosis, but your remedy continues to be anthropocentric.

I think too many people have 'communion' with nature in an abstract way and too few have skinned and gutted a rabbit for dinner. — Pseudonym

I think this is backwards if it suggests that our distance from nature causes poor thinking about nature; rather it is an impoverished thinking about nature that has led us to largely divorce ourselves from it. Skinning and gutting a rabbit is very easy; far easier than preparing a mango.

I don't think it is satisfactory, for a number of reasons, but I really don't want to get bogged down in policies and action, which is what almost everyone so far wants to concern themselves with.

I want to discuss matters of principle and their possible foundation in whatever world view, religious or secular, Western or Eastern, realist or subjectivist wrt morals. The notion of 'stewardship' for example gives a Judeo-Christian root to the ideas presented here - as though Man is the thinking, directing organ of Nature. However, the mainstream of Western thought has diverged from this to the extent that Nature has been conceived and treated as an enemy to be conquered, and a blind and dumb mechanism to be exploited.

As we continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere, aggravate global warming, vast ecological changes (like the acidification of the oceans or spread of parasites and diseases into the northern conifer forests), we are endangering ourselves, as well as many other creatures to whom much is owed. — Bitter Crank

I'm taking this to be undisputed, that our way of life is destructive, and in the long run self- destructive. But what we do comes out of the way we think, so we need to think differently. And that is the business of philosophy to investigate.

The point I was trying to make is that it's not the 'rights' of the environment that get protected or negotiated, it's still what the humans empowered to speak want of it. Some may want the environment to be nothing but a source of raw materials, others may want to enjoy its aesthetics, its potential for future harvesting, its peace, even knowledge of its mere existence, but all the time its still just humans arguing about what they want from it. No-one is really speaking for it. — Pseudonym

Yes, this is all very problematic in practice, which is why I want to really avoid that issue in this thread. Take a couple of steps back. The suggestion is that what humans want, whoever they are, is not the only consideration. At the moment I am more interested in justifying and working out the philosophical implications of this. How we work out in any particular environment, and especially as is usual, one that has been extensively disrupted and degraded by human action, 'what nature wants' which is something that needs some serious philosophical dismantling anyway, is alwaysgoing to be arguable and provisional, but that does not mean we should not do it as best we can.

In this respect, one finds humans in the Amazon, or in Aboriginal Australia or Native Americans, living as a part of an ecology, and it is this very different philosophy that enables them to speak with understanding of the needs of the whole.

Let me put it this way. What is being disputed here, at least in part, is the enlightenment - the doctrine of the rational self-interested individual.

An Englishman and a Scotsman and an Irishman go to a new continent. Each of them takes one thing each. The Englishman takes a gun, the Scotsman a knife and the Irishman a potato. The Irishman asks the Englishman "Why did you take gun?" To which the Englishman replies "to hunt for meat." The Irishman proceeds to ask the Scotsman why he took a knife, to which the Scotsman answers "to butcher the meat, of course." The Scotsman then asks the Irishman: "Why on Earth, laddie, would you take a potato?" The Irishman has a smile on his face and says ”What's a steak without chips?.” The End. Hahahaha.

Paradoxically, the real _____ is _____.

Firstly, I'm thinking this is going to be a problem. If ethics is just a negotiation between subjects, then how does the non-human (non-speaking) world take part in that negotiation? — Pseudonym

It's not a problem with infants. We understand their wants and needs as best we can, and speak and act and legislate for them. Sometimes we do the same for refugees that cannot speak our language We know quite well that bats want insects and cave like roosts and so on. We can see how they flourish.

Something that might be worth mentioning here is the importance in Eco-philosophy of the concept of 'wilderness'. It is an odd notion to pragmatists, humanists and capitalists, that one might conceive of land as being neither common, nor owned, nor available for exploitation, but wild as in free, as humans are taken to be free, belonging to itself alone. It is different in approach from the National Park, which is an amenity for humans. The idea that not everything is ours, or for us in potential if anyone wants it, might even come as a shock if it is taken seriously.

But perhaps that might be worth a thread of its own, Ecosophy is a bit neglected round here.

On the same surface area of Earth live more and more people. We're not yet at the point where we have a land shortage, though in certain parts of the world, this is becoming a problem. — Agustino

Scotland is not an overcrowded place, but most of the land is owned in very large estates by a few individuals. So most of the population is landless. There was a concerted effort to depopulate these estates by evicting subsistence farmers, (crofters), in favour in the first instance of sheep.

And this is how property works as theft. And now get off my planet, peasant! Property is a claim, and theft is an accusation of violation of that claim, and so dependent on the claim. But property is appropriated, and that too can be a violation of other rights, of use of habitation, etc, so Proudhon's paradox has bite.

If pigs could mate with frogs, the world would be full of muppets.

Yesterday's _____ is tomorrow's_____.

Fixing the shower yesterday went rather slowly, because I had to replace the whole unit with a different model and adjust all the plumbing and wiring connections, and I am now extremely clean, and not dead at all, thanks for asking. :P

In Jungian terms, the world appears to be currently in the grip of the archetype of______; this will inevitably lead to ______.

So why would the Russians bother doing this. — René Descartes

1. It plays well at home.
2. It discourages dissidents abroad from telling tales.
3. It probes and exposes the impotence of the West and the weakness of the alliance and generally distracts and confuses.
4. It does what terrorism always does - make people afraid. And fear is a lever for manipulators.

I wouldn't say it cannot have been the Brits, the Trumpets, the antiTrumpets, the Israelis, friend of Cambridge Analytica, or some combination or sub-faction. But my analysis of motive leans towards it being in Russia's perceived interest more than anyone else's. May would probably quite like a small and winnable war about now to make her look 'strong and stable'; that's not going to happen with confronting Russia.

Boredom is the source of entertainment.

The psychology of philosophers tends to be ______. whereas the philosophy of psychologists is usually______.