patrick.net

Peter P,

I don't believe in evil or good outside of individual cultural contexts, so I don't think of humanity as evil, at least not in the biblical sense.

I'm more worried about the situation of a suicidal culture, as posed by Jared Diamond, because we as a culture are unable to respond to the human and environmental realities of our situation. I fear we might just keep polluting and allow disasterous climate change happen, for human population to keep growing and push our available resources to the breaking point, and then it'll all be too late.

See also Roman Empire, Mayan Empire, Northern China, Easter Island, etc...

Speaking of the evil humanity, a guy at a stock forum pointed me to this: http://www.theepochtimes.com/211,111,,1.html

I am absolutely horrified and disgusted. This is worse than combat-related kills and massacres. It's not just the greedy cadres. It's the police, doctors, unsympathetic press and populace. I guess this is one of the reasons why my parents would never go back to China.

I don’t believe in evil or good outside of individual cultural contexts, so I don’t think of humanity as evil, at least not in the biblical sense.

So you believe in Moral Relativism?

I’m more worried about the situation of a suicidal culture, as posed by Jared Diamond, because we as a culture are unable to respond to the human and environmental realities of our situation. I fear we might just keep polluting and allow disasterous climate change happen, for human population to keep growing and push our available resources to the breaking point, and then it’ll all be too late.

Don't worry, be happy. What needs to happen will happen, good or bad. Human civilization goes in cycles and all good things must come to an end.

All bad things must come to an end too....including housing bubbles.

I’m more worried about the situation of a suicidal culture, as posed by Jared Diamond

Unless you're on an island, that's almost confusing the company for the market. The species itself will survive, though cultures may not. Drawing on the synchronicity of Slashdot and digg threads, I'd like to quote one poster who supposed that a motivated group of 24 (educated) people could, in a resource-rich location, get back up to a pre-atomic level of technology in about a decade. (That unfortunately assumes they don't have to play politics with other groups of survivors.)

Don't worry Astrid... If history is any guide, our wasteful and decadent era will be followed by one or more of the following: massive war, genocide, famine or plague. Have a nice weekend! :)

The species itself will survive, though cultures may not.

How about cuisines? :(

@GC,

Isn't the "Epoch Times" a portal for the Falun Gong movement itself? Not saying the Chinese government isn't evil and repressive (it is), just that I'd be a little suspicious of extreme claims, like coerced live organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners. This story just sounds a little too urban-mythy for me without some independent sources to back it up. Kind of reminds me of the chain email warning about people waking up in bathtubs full of ice cubes in Vegas --minus one kidney.

What the hell……..the sun will be cold one day anyway…….

There are other suns, and other planets. Until every star is dead, and every mass decayed to cold iron, there is still hope for the species.

I am absolutely horrified and disgusted. This is worse than combat-related kills and massacres. It’s not just the greedy cadres. It’s the police, doctors, unsympathetic press and populace. I guess this is one of the reasons why my parents would never go back to China.

Maybe these folks are affiliated with the ones that harvest moon bear bile,

tinyurl.com/k5fe7

or the ones that force very young girls into prostitution by strapping them to a branch and submerging them up to their armpits in a cesspool full of leaches.

tinyurl.com/hqymr

Ahh the middle kingdom, full of history and mystery.

But I digress, the Chinese are world leaders in the finance of American debtors, clearly we can look the other way on such trivial matters as human rights or basic dignity, can’t we? I mean after all, look at all the cheap crap we get in return.

There are other suns, and other planets. Until every star is dead, and every mass decayed to cold iron, there is still hope for the species.

You really believe in ET's? :)

HARM:

Ever read Niven? He hypothesized that offering people life-through-transplants would encourage people to favor such harvesting programmes for criminals. A depressingly possible future, especially if you already have a culture that places a greater importance on the society than the individual.

Which reminds me... I did see "The Island" in the past month. Yummy!

requiem,

True enough, but that's hardly much comfort for me, since I'm highly unlikely to be amongst that 10.

Although the island effect is most obvious in geographically isolated pockets, there's no reason why similar effects cannot apply on a larger scale. Humanity is on an island, we don't yet have the technology to escape the Earth if we mess it up.

If we do make some sort of breakthrough and do continue on (perchance one day to become an enlightened culture of energy beings operating on a couple double A batteries...well, then I demand reincarnation personally and the ability to continue blogging with you all.

Peter P:

There's plenty of time before the sun goes red giant to spread to other systems. Being able to leach technologies from other species (assuming such exist) would be nice, of course, but not required.

requiem@,

Yes, Larry Niven's one of my favorite sci-fi authors, as he writes in the classic tradition (as in more emphasis on actual science). I would much prefer organ cloning to organ harvesting though. As Peter P would say, stealing someone else's organs invites bad karma. :-)

Still holding out hope for someone to invent "Boosterspice" before I croak, though.

GC,

I don't condone such coerced organ donations. However, I'm not surprised - once they start dehumanizing prisoners as less than human, it's easy to justify harvesting their organ to save "better" people. I under you can understand the position, as you're an admirer to ubermensch and as such, you'd agree that most of human society is mere cattle, there for the use and pleasure of the elite (though potentially dangerous and sometimes difficult to handle).

The end result may well be live organ donation, last seen in Monty Python's Meaning of Life.

On the other side of the slippery slope, why restrict such rights to humans. Why are we still eating veal, and boiling lobsters and crabs, and factory farm raising chicken, and swatting mosquitoes?

But if a "taken" organ can give a party hardy boomer another year on the bong, isn't this in itself a good thing? There are what 2-3 billion chinese, surely they won't miss an organ or two. Think of all the good that can be done by prolonging the boomer bong time. Boomer bong time, even sounds kind of Chinese.

Speaking of the Island, anyone read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro? I keep meaning to read it, but haven't quite gotten around to it yet.

I think harvesting organs from freshly executed prisoners is well justified. This is partly why I favor hanging over lethal injection.

@astrid, X & requiem,

Again, I'm a little suspicious about the source of that story. Live coerced organ harvesting seems a tad extreme even for the Chinese government. Shooting dissidents and running over student protestors with tanks, sure, but organ harvesting??

Good grief!

Are you sure you people are Californians? You’re giving me a bummer.

Huh?

@Peter P,

Let me translate in Californian: He means to say you're harshing his buzz with all the totally bogus gloom-n-doom talk.

MA,

You're confusing NorCal with SoCal:) Have you checked out the fog coverage in SF during summer?

HARM,

Though I don't believe the source at all, organ harvesting from condemned prisoners would be something 80+% of Mainland Chinese could get behind. Condemned prisoners are gonna die anyways, so why not let their organs "serve society"? China is the land of historic female infanticides and lots of gender selective abortions (and not few female baby crib deaths) to this day. Is coercing a couple condemned organs really so heinous in contrast?

HARM,

I don't generally follow politics on the other side of the Pacific. So I could be fooled.

Peter P,

I am a cultural relativist, in that I believe every society defines its own rules and adjust those rules over time to suit their conditions. I'm not a cultural relativist in that I think people can disobey on the books laws (eg., no bondage, no female circumcision) of the society in which they live.

I may not like how most governments of Africa run their land, but I sure as hell don't want the US imposing its moral authority (if any remains after Abu Ghraib) on these countries.

GC,

Come on! It's the Epoch Times, can you really not know?

I would actually like to get a job in Shanghai (or preferably, bi-coastal btwn Shanghai and SF). China's not really that bad, if you have money and AC and connections and no uncontrollable impulse for social justice.

However, China proper (excluding HK) has no world class city yet.

I really don't know its actual backing. Seriously.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_Times

It's basically like the anti-CCP version of a Marxist tabloid rag.

I admit the story is plausible enough and I've heard of similar accounts before. But the source! It's like having the National Inquirer unearth Abu Ghraib. Sure it's a deadly serious matter, but it's the National Inquirer!

MA,

Yes, a common mistake for non-Californians. But really CA is like five or six states cramed in together. Most parts of CA resemble neighboring states (or countries...cough Mexico cough) than they do each other.

I figured you were extending the joke from earlier about outsider misperceptions about CA's beach bunny/tanned outdoorsy dude reputation.

I personally couldn't bear to live in SoCal. I was there for college and I hated my first two years there. The next two were kind of funny because I still didn't like SoCal but made good friends with people who were walking valley girl cliches.

Compared to SoCal, BA weather and traffic is pretty nice and you catch glimpses of green here and there. However, BA's natural beauty is a bit exaggerated. The Marin Headlands and Mt. Tam are nice, but otherwise, BA is not a great access point to the outdoors. Pt. Reyes is at least an hour away, Yosemite is at least 2.5 hrs away, and most of the Sierras is 4 or 5 hours away.

google,

To be fair, Falun Gong is a fairly crazy cult modelled on Scientology (no medicine, attracting lots of sick people hoping for a cheap cure-all), so a slightly higher than average incidence of death should not be a surprise.

The other thing that my parents used to bring up about the GLP and CR is how the experience utterly destroyed the Chinese morality and civil society. Chinese people today are on average quite selfish and self centered. According to my parents, back in the 50s and 60s the people cared much more about each other and their community, and venerated the CCP leadership. Nowadays, people are so callous that there are often reports of public rapes and beatings in crowded areas, where nobody in the crowd lifted a finger to help the victim.

MA,

It really depends on when you visit BA. Come November through May and you'll see green hills. Come March through June and you'll see some wildflowers, but it gets brown quickly afterwards. I guess that's what goes for seasons in the BA.

However, PNW summers are particularly glorious. I took a short roadtrip one summer up the 101 to Mt. Hood and Mt. Rainier, and the blooms at Paradise were like a dream. You guys have foxgloves and beargrass and avalanch lilies growing willynilly everywhere, and you have blackberries the size of my big toe just growing in ditches next to the road. B

I hated LA. Maybe it's not so bad on the westside but once you get into the valleys, the smog is just horrible in the summer and there's very little tree cover. The nice neighborhoods with huge water bills look okay, but the rest of the place was just depressing.

And the dust is horrible too. My (fairly new) college dorm got more dust accumulating in a week than my parents' home in VA would get in 3 months.

NorCal also has slightly better roads. SoCal roads are just unbelievably bad and congested

And the dust is horrible too. My (fairly new) college dorm got more dust accumulating in a week than my parents’ home in VA would get in 3 months

astrid,

You're right on the money here. I recall being shocked at how infrequently I could get away with dusting my apartment or washing my car when I lived in Atlanta. In L.A., you pretty much have to vacuum & dust your place at least weekly, or it really builds up and coats everything. If you don't wash your car at least bi-monthly, it starts to look abandoned.

MA,

I don't know what part of SoCal you're talking about (south OC maybe?) but most of L.A. and the Inland Empire is a polluted toilet. You must have visited some very select areas. Certainly not downtown, Hollywood or the Valleys.

The other thing that my parents used to bring up about the GLP and CR is how the experience utterly destroyed the Chinese morality and civil society. Chinese people today are on average quite selfish and self centered.

This is so sad. :(

Umm, you may want to read your history before making such stupid comments. The Great Leap Forward caused 20-30 MILLION Chinese to die of starvation. And the Cultural Revolution, whilst not as lethal, seriously screwed their society up for decades.

These are extreme tragedies but I doubt we can prevent similar disasters from happening again sometime, somewhere. :(

The flu pandemic in 1918 killed 20-40 millions. Are human catastrophes worse than natural calamities?

Peter P,

I think so. Other than famine, natural disasters tend to play out faster and be less traumatic. There's also less bad blood after the fact.