If Mort Divine ruled the world

[Dak]

https://www.takimag.com/article/the-hunt-for-the-great-white-male/

Diamond has been popular with tech billionaires and the like, who enjoy Diamond’s scientific arguments for the politically correct position they need to believe in for their own safety, far more interesting than the derisible Theory offered by postmodernist academics.
.......
Diamond is aware that his realism and ability to compare and contrast mark him as a potential crimethinker. For example, he made famous an aerial view of Hispaniola where you can see the national border between deforested, eroded Haiti and verdant Dominican Republic. In his 2005 book about ecological negligence, Collapse, he even dared suggest that the DR dictator Trujillo’s policy of welcoming white immigrants contributes to it being less dystopian than Haiti.
........
So why the distinction between what the very smart Diamond worries about in his own mind and what he puts in his books? Blogger Paleo Retiree offered an acute if uncharitable theory at Uncouth Reflections:

…Diamond revealed that he took up writing the big books for the popular audience when he became a parent…. He’d simply come down with what afflicts so many people when they have kids: a bad case of the Worthies. Where his big books go, his main concern hasn’t been to share his knowledge and his thinking. It’s “What shall we tell the children?” My conclusion: maybe Diamond’s books are best taken as morality fables for overgrown kids.

I hold out hope Ein becomes more realistic when/if he has to worry about the lifespan of his own progeny. Basically all the other progs on the board have given no indication they will have any, which is behaviorally not progressive in a concrete sense. Skin. In. The. Game.

 

[CiG]

Skin. In. The. Game.

Um, he has a cat, so like, get off his back?

 

[Einherjar86]

I do consider animals' lives to be as valuable as humans', but that's probably unrealistic.

 

[CiG]

I do consider animals' lives to be as valuable as humans', but that's probably unrealistic.

Didn't know you were vegan.

 

[CiG]

Dore lighting up Harris very nicely.

"Trump is a threat to national security because he's too nice to NK's dictator who has nukes and takes Putin's word over the word of US intelligence community."

lmfao.

 

[Einherjar86]

Didn't know you were vegan.

I'm a lapsed vegetarian. But then, other animals eat meat too. I simply try to avoid being complicit in the beef/chicken meat cartel (sometimes unsuccessfully, I admit).

 

[CiG]

I'm a lapsed vegetarian. But then, other animals eat meat too. I simply try to avoid being complicit in the beef/chicken meat cartel (sometimes unsuccessfully, I admit).

> "I do consider animals' lives to be as valuable as humans'"
> "I'm a lapsed vegetarian that sometimes eats beef and chicken"

 

[HamburgerBoy]

He fed his doctor his son's foreskin so it balances out.

#SkinInTheGame

 

[Krow]

Tbh it’s pretty easy to hunt/fish for your own meat supply and you’d never be part of “Beef/chicken meat cartel” but i guess most people aren’t up for that. I’ve thought about trying to remove myself from the grid just a bit in that way but I can’t stand raising chickens/would need an egg supply so blah.

 

[CiG]

I love chickens. Best pets ever, especially silkies.

 

[Einherjar86]

> "I do consider animals' lives to be as valuable as humans'"
> "I'm a lapsed vegetarian that sometimes eats beef and chicken"

My cat eats tuna. I don’t get offended by that.

I grapple with my inconsistencies all the time. That doesn’t mean I can’t feel horrible about some of my actions and want to do better.

 

[CiG]

My cat eats tuna. I don’t get offended by that.

I grapple with my inconsistencies all the time. That doesn’t mean I can’t feel horrible about some of my actions and want to do better.

Your cat doesn't hold a principle like I consider animals' lives to be as valuable as humans'.

I don't equalize the value of humans and animals, I'm a speciest. But I have no idea how someone could come to your position while continuing to literally engage in the killing and eating of animals, and the implications this has on your value of human life is amusing. It's just a bit funny to me is all.

 

[Onder]

Tbh it’s pretty easy to hunt/fish for your own meat supply and you’d never be part of “Beef/chicken meat cartel” but i guess most people aren’t up for that. I’ve thought about trying to remove myself from the grid just a bit in that way but I can’t stand raising chickens/would need an egg supply so blah.

Yeah I've known people who started their own egg production with just a few chickens frolicking in the garden and that way they knew what they're eating doesn't come from mass production. That seems very sensible if you care about the animals in our food chain. What we started doing with muh lady is buying chicken from a local small-scale butcher where we know where the meat comes from and stuff, that's another option (it can be costly but hey, we order his meat like once in two months and we're ok).

For political and ecological reasons, I don't go to KFC ever, because I know the chickens mostly come from our prime minister's corporation, and that's garbage on many levels.

 

[Einherjar86]

Your cat doesn't hold a principle like I consider animals' lives to be as valuable as humans'.

I don't equalize the value of humans and animals, I'm a speciest. But I have no idea how someone could come to your position while continuing to literally engage in the killing and eating of animals, and the implications this has on your value of human life is amusing. It's just a bit funny to me is all.

I agree, it's inconsistent as fuck. It's something I announce as an aspiration, even as I struggle to realize it in my actions.

Anyway, as far as my potential progeny go, I don't see any reason why having children should make me more realistic when there are currently-existing children all over the world. Put another way, I don't see why children need to me mine in order to make me care about them.

I reject the implication that my views are unrealistic because I don't have "skin in the game." I believe the things I do because I plan on having children. Actually holding them in my arms isn't going to have some miraculous effect on my ethics.

 

[CiG]

Actually holding them in my arms isn't going to have some miraculous effect on my ethics.

lmao so naive yet confident.

 

[CiG]

"We don't know how much time we have left, it's probably a few hundred years tops because sooner or later you're going to have Putin-like or Trump-like people, I mean I'm sorry I would have a very deep antipathy towards Donald Trump... he's not temperamentally fit to have the secrets of theoretical physics at his fingertips, he just isn't. It's imperative to me that he not be elected in 2020, and that the Democratic Party wake up, get rid of its crazy fringe, so that we can buy some time..."



I'm pretty much burned out on the IDW crowd, I still think Heather Heying was the best gift it gave us, but Eric is usually interesting because he touches on so many unorthodox subjects.

 

[Einherjar86]

lmao so naive yet confident.

The timeless privilege of the child-rearing: to be the bearers of secret knowledge. You’d think having kids is a cult or something.

 

[CiG]

The timeless privilege of the child-rearing: to be the bearers of secret knowledge. You’d think having kids is a cult or something.

Ironic that someone who so champions the knowledge gained through experience of identity groups is so antagonistic to the idea that people who have had children have a kind of knowledge not attainable anywhere else.

 

[Einherjar86]

Ironic that someone who so champions the knowledge gained through experience of identity groups is so antagonistic to the idea that people who have had children have a kind of knowledge not attainable anywhere else.

Well not all people who have children, mind you. I have married friends who have children, and none of them rub it in my face. They also share my political and ethical values. Somehow I’m more interested in what they know—and how they’ve managed to maintain such unrealistic positions.

 

[Dak]

Probably by living in places that have "good schools."