[lit-ideas] Re: Malevolence (Was: The Evil That We Do)
- From: Andy <mimi.erva@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2011 12:43:46 -0700 (PDT)
Mike: Apparently Andy doesn't watch the news.
Andy: I know what's going on because I don't watch the news.
Mike: No awareness of what's going on in Somalia or the Sudan even as we
type. Migrations of starving peoples,
Andy: What's going on in Somalia, etc. is probably a result of reduced global
dimming. Global dimming is caused by air pollution, as opposed to the
invisible greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Air pollution
particulates act as a shield to reflect the sun's heat into space. When air
pollution is cleaned up in the so called developed world, it stops the
reflection back into space and global warming gets worse. Those sections of
the African continent are in areas that for some reason are most prone, for
now, to global warming induced drought, so famine is a consequence. (The IMF
is a player too.) It happened in the 80's I think in Biafra, after cleaning
up air pollution became somewhat of a priority in the so called developed
world. Ultimately, global warming is bad for everyone (Norfolk, Virginia is
even now submerging underwater from rising sea levels and not all that slowly;
it's one of our naval bases). All this La
Nina/El Nino weather (the Texas drought, etc.) is overlaid on a warming
world. So, pick your poison, air particulates that turn the sky murky and
reflect back heat, or clean air and a significantly more rapidly warming world,
and what that means for water and crops here in North America.
Mike: being made whether to abandon a child who can no longer walk for the
sake of the others. These are real decisions, not hypothetical moral
preachments against having more children than one can afford to raise --
Andy: Children have historically been treated like property. In England they
were sent into chimneys as chimney sweeps some as young as four years old.
They suffered horrific consequences. What were the English people's excuse?
That's just one example. Before Prohibition the women who crusaded for reforms
changed the age of sexual consent of children from 10 to 15. And that's here
in America at the turn of the last century. Children are an afterthought just
about everywhere. It's changing, slowly. We're more civilized here in some
ways, when we're not causing extreme PTSD in the places we bomb and terrorize,
which children, later to become adults, pay for.
Mike: presuming, of course, that it was a free choice by the mother,
Andy: Women are also treated as property, along with children. It's power
issues, what else is it. That's endemic around the world. Even here, was
it Anita Bryant, and certainly others, crusaded not so long ago for the right
of women to be treated as pets. Children have zero rights in this country.
Introduce any and a howl goes up about the nanny state.
Mike: assuming of course that "other moral imperatives" are not driving such
decisions, assuming, of course, that social disorder has not destroyed the
fabric of a group that would have managed otherwise.
Andy: Africa had quite a nice civilization before the Europeans got to it, and
that's just a fact. They're rich in resources and the world just decimated
them to get the resources. I'm reading a book called 1493 about the year after
Columbus discovered America, after which Pangea, the one-time one continent
that split into two over hundreds of millions of years. The two continents,
split by the Atlantic Ocean, had evolved two separate and distinct ecosystems.
Columbus reunited them ecologically through globalized trade after he
discovered the New World. That means the Europeans introduced any and every
disease causing microorganism, including malaria, yellow fever, whatever. Many
they brought with them through the slave trade. The Europeans denuded Barbados
because of sugar plantations, stripped it bare and allowed disease-carrying
mosquito strains to take over, among an endless list of ecological disasters
that we're feeling today and
that may even just be beginning. Nature doesn't think in nanoseconds the way
humans do.
Mike: One should not steal, but to die rather than steal is an immoral
decision within my scope of moral priorities. How many thousands of years have
parents left "excess" children on a hillside to die?
Andy: Much easier than not having the kids in the first place, obviously.
Humans take the easy way out, each and every time, no two ways about it. If it
feels good, do it and then, if necessary, write a narrative to get one off the
hook for one's laziness and greed.
Andy
Other related posts:
