Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
wrt #272, agreed the reuters report read like something prepared by
mckinsey 5-10 years ago...
  

    
"The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to
1,000 times higher than natural background extinction
rates,[9][10][11][12][13] and is increasing.[14]"

<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction>

The rate of extinction is a knock on of the overpopulation of humans
and their chattels. The loss and despoiling of habitat due to human
activity is what's causing this. This is clear, and commonly
understood by environmental scientists. It isn't really arguable. 

The birds and bugs are disappearing. You can see it for yourself.
The chief cause of death of perching birds is caused by a human
introduced invasive species - house cats. #2 is window strikes.
Populations of endemic species in the Amazon, and in places like
Madagascar, are declining rapidly. Killing big elements in the
environment leads to general degradation. This has been proven with
the reintroduction of predators hunted to extinction in places like
Yellowstone. 

How well humans are doing needs to be measured in terms of how well
the whole planet is doing, not by how well people are faring on
average. We are not the purpose of this planet. It hasn't got one.
Believing that we matter most is what got us here. Time to let go of
that delusion.
  

    
My town crier analogy wasn't a great one, in part because written
news exists alongside audio and video. It's not going away. The
other reason is that these days the closest equivalents to town
criers seem to be the scammers, conspiracists and dirty tricksters -
the Alex Joneses. 

Which does bring us to disinformation: one of 2023's existential
crises for every layer of democratically-oriented societies
generally, including their journalism sectors. If there was ever a
period when top-down interventions were going to curb this problem,
it's long over. People need to be inoculated from up, down and
sideways now. 

For instance, the NYT recently reported on how Finnish schools are
teaching children how to spot disinformation. I'll post the link
below.

We need to see stuff like this happening on a big scale in the
United States - is our collage of education systems nimble enough to
do that? Can it happen amid the current reactionary wave of book
bans, moral panic about critical race theory, and white grievance? 
  

    
Ooops - Here's that nasty NYT "gift link" to the story on "How
Finland is Teaching a Generation to Spot Misinformation":

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/world/europe/finland-misinformation-classes
.html?unlocked_article_code=zdsaczeRhyCFZ6recyWenT0dVzxe5pxJQ_n-NwMSkX7pSw3GjH
lsoODGEiVkSvVHsMMrjg5p55faEtrGPU0kbZKxh2ToYx8MsMaWx6HZVT5PbSpX4IpV_M0W89FEMMcr
bATW-yy32IkbW2nndTFxaY9QE9pW_xepLemuYtUMAeRrsoMoDvVidEe7OTXDWf7BK3FvYsTv8HbB5V
z8oRunfUDrM0vygLdPsV5_PnvjlMrzVQWosWtJ6eBVyU0J-4Lp1LVndVGkFKcKA5vM_sBOw81NLmCp
UPiW_FyRkpsu7pqLqvoX9z1MC1Vjw1tDWxl0FcxOjmLgIjBH7frnljSjZvezQlVkXY2-VGt42XM&sm
id=share-url
  

    
>How well humans are doing needs to be measured in terms of how well
the whole planet is doing

And you're welcome to do so. As someone who measures progress in
terms of suffering reduction, the trend is encouraging. But I'm not
a self loathing hominid.
  

    
So you're back to "I'm OK. What are you complaining about?" That's
the Loathsome One we all know!
  

    
As for the planet, I doubt very seriously that we'll summon the will
to take better care of it unless we first figure out how take better
care of each other. We may just be too late. But we're not even
going to do the lifting until we find a way to stop exploiting,
enslaving, and killing one another over resources. We've made steady
progress towards that end, however, and I find that deserves
acknowledgement, if only because it encourages more of the same. 

If we can save the planet it will not be for ourselves, but for
others. We have to start giving a shit about others (beyond clan and
tribe) before that can happen. I rather expect we'll come up short,
though.
  

    
>So you're back to "I'm OK

That'a not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying I use a different
yardstick for measuring progress. Has nothing to do with me. It's a
continuum from suffering to wellbeing. We, as a species, are
enjoying more of the latter and less of the former than at any time
in human history.

I'm not unmindful of the climate crisis and its ominous potential to
disrupt that wellbeing. But I'm not about to be scolded for
celebrating a global reduction in cruelty, ignorance, and want. Nor
for hoping that more compassion, wisdom and abundance for all will
continue to manifest. I don't really see how that qualifies as
loathsome.

Nothing lasts. 
  

    
I guess the suffering of the "average" human is your measure. Is it
okay with you if the cetaceans suffer? How about primates? Birds?
Coral reefs? Ungulates? Amphibians?

All are necessary to the health of the planet we depend on. Thinking
otherwise is delusional. We don't live in nations. We live in
watersheds. We don't need money. We need air, water and topsoil.
Have you ever read any of Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, E. O. Wilson,
Aldo Leopold? 

There's a 20 year old young woman from Sweden who could explain it
for you. Oh wait, she already has. You just need to listen. How we
treat the rest of the planet, and how we treat each other are of a
piece. There's not much point in trying to fix society so it can
survive long enough to "enjoy" running out of air, water and
topsoil. 

I am not self loathing. I treat other people with respect. I also
respect the right of the rest of nature to exist, and think humanity
suffers from the delusion that it has time for things like petty
politics. We don't. That's Greta's point. She is correct. It's math.
  

    
>humanity suffers from the delusion that it has time for things like
petty politics

I don't think it's realistic to expect a species sharing a brainstem
with all creatures in phylum chordata, which will sacrifice the
entire herd to preserve the specimen, to care very much about
cetaceans, other primates, ungulates or amphibians until it adapts
to care about other specimens. 

Humanity may not be the purpose of the planet, but it has evolved a
forebrain, which will sacrifice the specimen (or at least the
offspring of other specimens) to preserve the herd, or the tribe. 

Until it evolves a capacity to sacrifice its current comfort to
preserve the species as a whole, I think expectations that it will
summon the societal will to preserve all others are frankly
fanciful.

The good news -- and it *is* good news -- is that sapiens is
presenting evidence of adapting a more integrative understanding of
its place in the grand scheme of things, if tardily and
incrementally.

But this understanding is confined to the educated classes, which is
why the increase in education is worth celebrating. It's really
Maslovian; you can't really expect people to devote energies to
preserving the planet if they haven't enough to eat, are trapped in
brutal regimes, or are subject to random injustice without recourse.
Thus it is meet that we should celebrate when these persistent
defects in our societies yield to remedy.

I lament the inevitable dislocation and disequilibrium the oncoming
climate crisis will impose (and is imposing). But the survivors of
same, if any, may finally be able to make the evolutionary pivot to
a more holistic waking consciousness. Great leaps in adaptation tend
to result from dramatic changes in environmental conditions, after
all.
  

    
Emily, it’s good to hear from you. Love to you and your dad and
everyone else involved. So glad he’s out of the hospital
  

    

good posts, too, emily, about news and where we stand now. 

earlier in this conversation, folks were talking about the AI Chat thingy
that claims to be able to write. in the following post, i will hide what
musician-writer Nick Cave has to say about that. great fun.

Chat GBT. such a catchy name. 
  

    <hidden>
  

    

if you are logging in via text interface/ssh , type  o 588   at the respond
prompt to read the post above.

if you're on the web, well.com, there should be some kind of "show entire
response" text button.
  

    
That was an odd debate to end on.

I expect there's not much disagreement on the facts? Although I
quibbled about it not being the biggest mass extinction in earth's
geological history, it's still an enormous mess.

The debate isn't really about what to do about it; I don't see any
practical plans being made or any specific calls to action.

It seems to be a moral debate about how severely we should castigate
ourselves? Or how depressed we should be? Is our reaction to the
Dickens quote about "the best of times, the worst of times" that we
need to create a time-series graph of good vs. bad and find the max
and min?

I see no necessary connection between that theoretical exercise and
anybody's morale. Being optimistic (or not), as a way of approaching
life's problems, seems fairly independent of how good or bad things
are in some universal, objective sense.

Looking at things from a cosmic perspective is a nihilist trap [1],
a way of convincing yourself that everything you do is meaningless.
A global perspective can be similarly paralyzing. The world is very
big and you are small in comparison. It's the wrong scale for
individual humans to act on. It's emotionally healthier to pick on
problems closer to your own size.

The state of the world can be interesting to talk about sometimes,
even though at that scale, we are mostly observers. We observe a lot
more than we can do anything about.

[1] https://meaningness.com/no-cosmic-meaning
  

    
I'm sorry I was gone for about a week and this is my over and out.
In many ways, it seems like the state of the world is about "too
much ism", and how do we address that because, honesty, it's burning
our world out. Artists are excited about. Feeling the world with
trillions of images that may not have any meaning, originality, or
whatever… And no one wants to even deal with the grill in the room
regarding overpopulation.

I think Greta Thunberg gets it right; either we're going to have to
make the decision to be responsible for ourselves, or the
responsibility will be taken for us in the terms of a homeostatic
system, it's a simple as that.

I think a good metaphor to this was that in 2020 I was attending a
seminar at the Rem Koolhaas-designed gallery, called Concrete in
Dubai on "the notion of apocalypse". I picked up the mic, and
mentioned how the book "silent spring" was written in the year I was
born, and that it is very well and good in a place where we could
probably do something about all the environmental ills happening in
the world while we are eating our cucumber sandwiches and sipping
our Chardonnay, but if people "like us ", which I was at the time,
don't take the political will to demand change we will merely see an
apocalypse rather than merely talk about one.

I basically got a rather annoyed look from the room, and I got an
"are, yes…" Sort of response. And then we ate our cucumber
sandwiches and sipped our Chardonnay… Which is what this is all
about.

And, in general, what this is really about is that Sultan Al Jaber
the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Corporation, who is stepping
down to head COP28. Comments from the industry are of the sort,
"well, we don't want changes to happen too quickly, because it would
be too disruptive…"

Well, to disturb my Chardonnay sipping friends again, things are
pretty disrupted as they are and it may only be a question of when
the disruption will be.

We should get about it sooner than later.

See you on @realityaugmented, and thanks again.,
  

    
As Greta points out, it's math. Just sorting out something like
inequality(fiscal, gender, racial - pick one) would take decades. We
have one decade to seriously reduce our use of fossil fuels or the
environment we depend on will change fundamentally, in which case
we'll probably go completely tribal/feudal/Mad Max. 

If we wait until there are no more autocrats or war mongers to get
our consumption down, those types will become the rule, rather than
the exceptions. The angry young woman from Sweden has moved the
needle on the discourse more effectively than almost anyone else.
She didn't achieve that by painting a rosy picture. She did it by
shaming others for their blah-blah-blah equivocating and
misdirection. 

There will be plenty of time to make a more just World if we can
avoid ruining the ecosphere. There will be no point in worrying
about building that world if the seas and forests are dead. We don't
matter more than other life forms. Hubris is our original sin. It
got us here.
  

    
Name-checking math is not math. I don't see why you're impressed by
a hand-wavy rhetorical gesture. It's not even name-checking specific
math.

This is a hand-wavy rhetorical zone, so no math is expected. But
someone could link to some relevant math if they really wanted.
  

    




to hell with math. bring on the guillotines!
  

    
what she said
  

    
And do it now!
  

    
It's the same math that Bill McKibben has been banging on about for
15 years now. We blew right past 350.
  

    
Some years ago I would’ve been doomed to spend my last years
experiencing crippling and painful arthritis. However just hours ago
a surgeon removed and replaced my bone-on-bone arthritic hip joint.
Despite the terrible, there are still miracles. 
  

    
Greta Thunberg didn't "name-check math". She used new words to say
"reality bats last" and to point out that the relevant aspects of
reality are not hidden from us.
  

    
"Despite the terrible, there are still miracles." 

I agree with Jon on this. The human tendency is to foreground the
negative and discount the positive  – which is a significant factor
in why news outlets to do the same, just saying. 

It's an innate survival strategy that isn't serving many of us well
in the present.

What I think, though, is that we're at the peak of a roughly
125-year-old struggle to transform human systems (more or less
globally) from a Western-worldview driven Business As Usual, into
systems that are on the whole more just and healing – conflating a
whole bunch of positive outcomes for biodiversity and climate,
decolonization, and racial, gender, and class equity into "just."

Since we're living in it, it can be hard to see that it's happening.
Here's an example:

Yes, an oil executive was just named leader of the world's largest
annual climate change conference. It's so blatantly cynical and
reprehensible that I wonder if the UNFCCC can survive it with any
credibility intact.

However:  
The fossil fuel industry in the United States is the defendant in a
half-dozen major lawsuits with states and the District of Columbia,
for knowingly selling a dangerous product, at the same time the
industry knew it would lead to catastrophic climate change, and
lying to the public about those dangers. 

These lawsuits may do to the fossil fuel sector what the lawsuits
against Big Tobacco for lying to the public did to the tobacco
industry.

In the past, Big Oil has usually succeeded in shifting lawsuits for
climate harms from municipal or state courts to federal courts,
which them dismissed them for varied legal reasons.

With these consumer fraud suits, however, federal judges have
consistently been sending them back to the state courts.