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The Corroboree

paradox

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Posts posted by paradox

  1. Posted · Edited by paradox

    I dunno bro.

     

    in saying that, I'm not judging, I agree with most of what you said & your heart is obviously in the right place but I can't help but mention that I kind of feel that a portion of the attitude you are expressing is actually part of the problem. 

     

    What I mean is that there seems to be a global pandemic of anxious people that are furiously trying to save the world by condescendingly lecturing others about how they should live their lives while simultaneously doing very little themselves to make real change, as though lecturing people will in itself fix our problems.

     

    i feel it's actually the opposite, people in general are extremely sensitive to hipocricy & feel insulted being lectured by condescending hipocrites (I'm def not saying this is what you are, your post just brought this issue to my mind).

     

    Seems to me that this a big part why we've ended up with Trump for example.. it's a reaction to this kind of attitude..

     

    It doesn't matter how right we may be to feel that way, the energy we put into the world when we are extremely anxious & angry & desperate for change is toxic & just adds to the soup of toxicity & bad karma.. do you think you will change someone's mind by putting that out into the world? Do you really think going to Earth Day is what is going to save the world? As opposed to actually working on yourself & changing your own way of life & working on your own consciousness & trying to bring something positive into this world?  I'm not saying earth day isn't a positive thing, I just think it's largely preaching to the converted & is pointless unless you're actually doing the work in yourself well before you start telling others how to be.

     

    other than that I totally do get your sentiment.  Forgive me if you think I'm inaccurate but there may be a couple of flaws in your approach

     

    • Like 3

  8. Posted · Edited by paradox

    i think one person has died in the last 40 years or something from funnel web bites..  i wouldn't be too hysterical.. 

     

    if you've been a gardener for any amount of time in the sydney area i'd be surprised if this has never happened tbh.. 

     

    edit:  cool footage though

  9. Posted

    hey man, where i grew up there is a gully with a really awesome Permian (300-250 million years old) fossil site.  cool thing is, me, my friends & just a few other people are the only ones who know about this specific site..

    a few months ago i went back there for the first time in years & collected some cool specimens..  the deposit dates from a era when Australia was part of gondwana & was somewhere down much closer to the south pole..  the fossils are from a shallow sea which had seasonal sea ice.  most of the fossils are of gastropods, brachiopods & bryozoans like fenestella & crinoids but you can also find trilobites & other things.  A couple of pics from my last trip:

     

    IMG_0572.JPG  IMG_0581.JPG  IMG_0586.JPG  IMG_0600.JPG

     

    IMG_0617.JPG  IMG_0625.JPG  IMG_0678.JPG  IMG_0686.JPG

     

     

    IMG_0581.JPG

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    IMG_0600.JPG

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    IMG_0678.JPG

    IMG_0686.JPG

    IMG_0581.JPG

    IMG_0572.JPG

    IMG_0586.JPG

    IMG_0600.JPG

    IMG_0617.JPG

    IMG_0625.JPG

    IMG_0678.JPG

    IMG_0686.JPG

    • Like 6

  12. Posted

    2 hours ago, hashslingr said:

     

    Because all the other species on the planet don't exist for our own benefit. If you think plants and animals have any intrinsic value you should have a conscience about what our species is doing to them.

     

    Saying that the earth will recover from this mass extinction is a cop out. It's also ignoring the massive suffering we're inflicting on other animals. 

     

    i agree completely but the problem as i see it is that we are not as smart as we think we are.  it's been demonstrated over & over again throughout history that all too often the worst damage we cause come from our poorly thought out attempts at fixing things.. 

     

    in the same way that too much of any one compound is poison & too much of anything in the environment is a pollutant, i feel that anything that humans do by the billions will be profoundly toxic.  Too much vegetarianism without a complete & utter global overhauling of industrial agriculture techniques will be worse for the planet that current factory farming of meat for example..  but unless basically every individual somehow decides to take responsibility for their own ethical food production, there is no way to feed these billions without that toxic industrial agriculture & the toxic global systems that allow it to feed the masses..

     

    so it's all well and good & extremely true to say it's a cop out & it seems vitally important we do not cop out, but there isn't a human alive that truly has any real answers to the real problems of overpopulation, short of some kind of global socialist dystopia where everyone is forced by law to be a small hold organic farmer.  i mean, all i really want from my life is to grow plants & grow my own food & live a simple ethical life but it's a bit of a problem trying to force 8 billion people to do that also   

     

     

    • Like 3

  14. Posted

    Thunderhorse, I understand you are upset but I really think you are over reacting. So what if someone has a different opinion to you?

     

    in my opinion, if you truly believe in the freedom to choose your gender identity or anything else then you should equally believe in someone else's freedom to hold any opinion they like, otherwise you are a hypocrite.

     

    anyway from what I read in that thread, it didn't seem to me that anyone was directly criticising  someone's choice of identity.. More so they were criticising the insidious aspects of the extreme Marxism & identity politics that has now become politically associated with this issue.  Individual freedom of choice & extreme political ideologies that attach themselves to particular issues are extremely different things..

     

    • Like 2

  15. Posted

    27 minutes ago, waterboy 2.0 said:

     

     

    Lol.. You gotta know how it works for it to work now:wink:You are good on the spin mate.

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Nah bro, I think they are saying you have to NOT know how it DOESN'T work.. As long as they don't know that it doesn't work then it works for some small percentage of people..

     

    ie what northerner just said..

    • Like 3

  18. Posted

    Maybe man, who knows what's possible.. It seems pretty impossible to predict how things might swing..  Problem is, 'the average human' is so prone to disinformation & the Internet has been shown to be so manipulatable by centralised power structures & post modernist tribalism (in the worst sense of the word) so easily leads people down  whatever reality rabbit hole they happen to accidentally go down. The carnage is already upon us & doesn't seem particularly controlled except by the ones who understand & manipulate that game for personal gain.

     

    the Internet has some profound potential like you say but I think the problem lies again with 'the average modern human' being inadequately equipped to effectively deal with the huge level of responsibility, intelligence & discipline nessacary to navigate the complex anarchy of the Internet without being sucked down some convoluted tribalistiv rabbit hole.. Which is just another form of institutionalisation.. 

     

    Its sort of the same problem as democracy.  For it to work in any real sense it requires a truly informed & intelligent public.

     

    i haven't given up hope though

     

     

    • Like 2

  20. Posted

    6 hours ago, Crop said:

    I love and share your enthusiasm for anarchy, but your argument is flawed by optimism. You are talking about a negative free society that contains people with positive freedom values and morals. While that may be the case in the beginning how can it last? 

     

    Honestly, it just takes time, quite a lot of time probably.  How do you think the extremely stable long term anarchism of pre colonial Australia came to be? It likely took hundreds of generations of epic trial & error to establish the relative balance between groups & systems of laws which were based on an extremely nuanced understanding of the environment & the fundamental needs of survival & culture. 

     

    Its a big ask to take the millions or billions of effectively institutionalised, spiritually & mentally crippled individuals ie the average modern human & expect that self governance will work in the short term without a great deal of carnage.  I don't think it's a realistic proposition as things currently stand in the world. People seem too far gone & not many people would be on board for that kind of extreme change.

     

     

    • Like 2

  21. Posted · Edited by paradox

    I do not believe in zero government, i feel the best approach to human society is similar to the way i approach gardening & food forest establishment, to allow the inherent natural systems to present their own order & balance among the diverse community of species & the environmental influences that act upon them. 

     

    To achieve a truly long term, stable system which perpetuates more or less indefinitely you must step back & allow the system itself & the individuals in that system to find their own balance based on the natural processes which act upon them.  You only step in as a subtle tweaker of that system to optimize & accentuate certain functions which have become apparent through observation of the natural processes 

     

    Human social systems, just like all systems in nature, if they are not meddled with too much by force (note i do not believe in absolutely no meddling, just subtle meddling based on flow patterns that are inherent in the natural systems), have a way of finding a natural efficiency.

    Another analogy is the difference between traffic in sydney vs traffic in somewhere like Indonesia.  Sydney has a traffic system based on an unnaturally forced set of strict rules.  This works up to a point.  It is very safe but once you get past a certain threshold of population it becomes incredibly inefficient & clunky & very quickly will break down completely.  The system is so unnatural & counter intuitive to the way nature has designed us to move, It's basically just bad for the soul & it leads to all kinds of problems like extreme road rage or the opposite, where you completely adapt to a clunky unnatural system & you become something like a zombie, it's bad for the brain, therefore its bad for society in the long run.

    In indonesia, the population is much higher & the roads are much smaller, their traffic systems are based on natural human flow patterns.  they trust in the natural order that presents itself automatically when many humans are put together doing the same thing in the same place & there is basically zero road rage & everyone is just moving & following the rules that the nature of the system presents.  Considering just how densely populated the roads are, this for the most part works brilliantly, people are happy & friendly to each other, if someone toots a horn its to be nice & let you know they are there.  This system only breaks down when the population is too great for the infrastructure but the ratio of numbers of people on the road vs the size of infrastructure is vastly vastly greater than sydney roads.
     

     

    • Like 1

  22. Posted

    10 minutes ago, Halcyon Daze said:

     

     

    I'm amazed by the whole handout complaint rubbish too, when you consider those receiving  America's biggest handouts were the oil companies, via subsidies.

     

     

    I don't think northerner is defending corrupt corporate interests. It seems to me he's looking at it from a broader perspective of trends over very long periods of time that are responses to specific policy played out over centuries & Millenia. Seems like more like an anthropological perspective than a classically political perspective

    • Like 1

  23. Posted · Edited by paradox

    i disagree, I think it's heaps funny.  It's funny how hopelessly confused these movements have become & I think some of what you posted is further evidence of that.  I have already read the post you recommended.. I am not thinking of anarcho-capitalism.

    Everyone knows that anarchism is associated with the far left, that's what is funny. Pure anarchism is more closely aligned with libertarianism than anything else.. Funny thing is, I have in the past generally felt that libertarianism should be represented from left of centre. Honestly though, this whole mess is hard to take seriously 

     

    We could discuss for months about what constitutes left or right but it remains that pure anarchism is more or less the antithesis of socialism in many respects. These contradictions are funny but I guess funny is subjective so I respect that you find it no laughing matter.

     

     

     

     

  24. Posted

    9 minutes ago, Siggor said:

    fascism is usually placed on the far-right within the traditional left–right spectrum

     

    From wiki if you want to get historically definitive

     

    I quoted wiki to make the point that as unreliable a source of info as it is even the wiki page has the word socialism as the second word on the page defining nazism.

     

    ie you don't have to read a whole library to find such basic information.

     

    my whole point in posting in this thread was to point out that the widely spouted idea that fascism is a right wing phenomenon is blatantly false, even though it is taken for granted by the majority of people that it is so, including myself for most of my life. 

     

    No no matter what side you identify with, anything you define as evil will be attributed to the other side.

    • Like 1

  25. Posted

    Of course not, the whole left & right nonsense is gibberish nowadays but being as literal as possible & according to historical definitions & some of the broadest understandings of what these two ends of the spectrum represent, fascism pretty undeniably falls well on the far left of the spectrum.

     

    Contemporary socialists will strongly deny that nazism is anything close to 'true' socialism & they'd be absolutely right but they also say the same thing about every other socialist regimen in history. Nazism is just like all the other powerful socialist regimens that have existed in that it was corrupted by the whims of power mad psychopaths.

     

     

    • Like 2
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