The WELL: pre.vue.149: sustainable politico-economic ethics

#19: olin.k-g or olin (olin36) Wed 18 Jun 08 15:43

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:43:00 PDT

*being*

for one, we must consider the nature of natural reality and context of real personal, political, economic, and social reality.

this is the sort of reality we are referring to when we discuss the physical properties of the physical world. i do not think that it is particularly useful to talk about the *material* world, in that such usage implies much too broadly that the physical world in general is made up of matter.

for me, the physical world is made up of patterned energy that can be observed in a wide array of forms and combinations of patterns and effects. it is the action of these and their interaction with each other that matter most. it seems to me that matter makes more sense before we get sophisticated enough to break up its structure and disperse the energy condensed into its mass. all the stuff we study about matter is primarily the effects of the concentrations and interactions of the energies involved. i think that it probably distracts our students from the real features of matter when we only concern ourselves with those features that are consistent with the atoms of the old uncuttable, unsplit-able kind. the energy of matter looks a lot different to us since the atom bomb and its successors.

What is very important to us about the so-called material world its physical stuff, how we use it, how we get ourselves in bad habits about the various interactions of physical stuff.

we occupy land to live on and to live by its products. .some of the products we generate when we are manipulating the physical world are necessary for sustaining our lives, like food.

some of the stuff is what we use to make our buildings and our transportation systems.

we exploit the natural world in many ways simply to get energy for our own use to sustain ourselves.

some of the ways we sustain our

current livestyle happen to have consequences that can threaten the sustainability of the natural ecology. we have come to dominate that natural ecology in an often thoughtless and destructive way.

as Daniel Quinn and his wonderful fictional character Ishmael put it, we are the animals who are the takers. too many of us are irresponsible about the consequences of this cultural trait to the point that we are threatening the more reasonable life on earth that is characterized by taking only what is really necessary and leaving the rest for the good of the greater ecology.

this is of course a parable, but it is a parable that can help us take a look at many of our unexamined assumptions and our habits which we ignore the effects of.

it does not take a lot of time to explore Quinn*s websites, ishmael.org and ishmael.com

but it is very easy to see the point that DQ is making. .if it makes any of us uncomfortable, that may be more useful than wasteful or harmful.

the facts seem to point pretty clearly to our coming to see that the population of us human takers on this globe is probably already too big for the safety of the ecosystem that supports us.

in addition, the effect that our wastes are having on the waters and on the temperature on the earth is probably already beyond the harm threshold that we should have been trying to study and measure more adequately.

that is why i feel that we should all be trying to help each other and especially those who seem to be about to imitate us on an increase of scale that could bring some terrible consequences for the sustainability of the ecosystem to we depend on for our survival.

i am not making any judgements about just how much time we do or do not have.

i believe that whether or not we have put our climate under serious threat already that is on or past the cusp of serious damage, the life style of energy use that we have adopted and which huge nations that make up great chunks of the human population are so admiring of that they are going ahead full tilt to catch up with and surpass our energy use.

Since the way we obtain the fuels for that level of use, especially in the universe of turning coal into energy and using vehicles with a noxious degree of carbon emissions to use for convenience, pleasure, and necessary transportation * that lifestyle is not compatible with such a huge usage factor we are racking up: (we as the rising populations of our own culture and the even larger ones of other cultures hungry to imitate us)

this is already more than is useful on the theme of our current human population and the potential for an accelerating ecological disaster scenario.

what this is all leading into is perhaps an even more challenging problem:

how we are going to bring our current collective behavior to what amounts to a screeching halt?

how are we going to teach and persuade ourselves to move firmly and fast to bring on a general upgrade of human culture?

and how are we going to get the even huger masses that envy our current style to make some sort of drastic cultural and industrial revolution that will be compatible with a practical, human, and livable world? [Read entire topic]

#18: olin.k-g or olin (olin36) Wed 18 Jun 08 14:58

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:58:00 PDT

Background Problem: the agenda of *being*

.i hope that i will be able to avoid getting bogged down in the agenda of *being*.

This is the territory of what is real and/or less or more real than some other kind of phenomena, or noumena, or whatever.

.thinkers and such have not been able to make much progress on the battles that rage around this sort of topic.

i am not particularly concerned about who believes what unless, as the famed lady said to G B Shaw at a party somewhere around a century ago ** unless it scares the horses.

.in this case, we are concerned about who will and who will not cooperate in the struggle to generate a new general canon of human behavior that has the potential to be useful in facing up to and seriously trying to solve the problems that we face now, here in 2008.

in a very real pragmatic sense, the issue of *being* has two primary senses that are of enormous practical importance and that have extremely important effects in our lives. [Read entire topic]

#17: olin.k-g or olin (olin36) Wed 18 Jun 08 14:51

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:51:00 PDT

AGENDA items

towards describing the agenda for human ethics and values

Background Problem: the agenda of meaning: the notion of *good* and *better* and the *evaluation* of the good and the better

Issue: the current agenda in our culture of everything being *relative* _versus_ the competing traditional agenda of *The Truth* and the truth about goodness or the good;

the background issue of both the limits on relativeness and the opposed notions of THE TRUTH and THE GOOD.

the notion of *real* philosophical, logical, and common language TRUTH.

the competition for the notion of THE REAL as an ultimate unchangeable TRUTH which is _more real_ than the existence of the changing world of nature and the natural, a world which Plato characterizes as the world of *coming to be* as opposed to the world of eternal stability and reliability, the world of a permanent and stable truth which does not come to be but which simply is, permanently and unchangeably.

This Platonic sort of truth is absorbed in western theology within the godhead.

.polytheism and many versions of pantheism and animism do not require this sort of infallible, ultimate, omniscient overseer and director sort of truth.

In opposition to this sort of understanding of reality and truth, i firmly believe in the world of pragmatic truth of the sort which can be found in Charles Sanders Peirce and his students John Dewey and William James.

.the earlier of these was a famous natural scientist (re the earth*s magnetic field) and influential logician, whose symbolic logical notation was essentially adopted in the monumental _Principia Mathematica_ (by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell).

Dewey is famous for his notions about democracy and the kind of education on which the maintenance of a healthy democracy depends; William James wrote a book entitled _Pragmatism_ which shows his version of Peirce*s notion of pragmatic truth.

This short period of interest in the pragmatic understanding of truth seems to have been blown away by WW II when the so called neo-orthodoxy of Reinhold Niebuhr or the more Calivinist Karl Barth came into considerable attention. [ Richard Niebuhr, as far as i got into him seemed to me to have a much more interesting approach to Christianity than his more famous brother. ]

.but i do not want to get involved in logical disputations. .a simple way to phrase what i am concerned about is that *what works* and *what has practical uses and implications* is what matters about the *truth* about something, so that what matters about ideas and the description of processes is that their usefulness is worked out in a practical context by empirical testing; we should never stop this empirical evaluation, for contexts are in a natural state of change, much of which is unpredictable.

.Contextual changes may require adjustments in what we consider to be the case. .the disciplined pragmatic approach is the most reliable and useful way to monitor the effectiveness and the appropriate operation of processes.

.thus if we are going to minimize error and mistakes that generate bad practical consequences, we must never stop re-evaluating our programs, our procedures, and our processes.

.what matters is their practical outcomes, the pragmatic results. [Read entire topic]

#16: olin.k-g or olin (olin36) Wed 18 Jun 08 11:02

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 11:02:00 PDT

outlining the challenges

the challenge of population growth.

so what?

more population growth means more forests cut.

implication?

we are already accelerating the number of species that are becoming extinct.

maintaining a very rich variety of species in the ecosystem on which we are dependent is critically important to the health and persistence of that ecosystem.

our current rate of population growth and of the growth of human consumption looks certain to have a disastrous impact on the ecologies of our forests.

maintaining a very high degree of variety among species is important in two major venues:

1. maintaining the high degree of variegation among species supports the capacity of complex systems to resist disastrous damage. if one subset of interdependent species is seriously damaged and threatened, the loss of the required richness of variety will increase the probability that the whole rain forest, for example, will NOT be able to adjust and will NOT be able to provide the necessary opportunity to develop new sets of interactive species that can fill the function of the damaged set.

2. food crops must not replace the wild varieties of the type, such as a wide variety of wild tomatoes, wild grasses, wheats, ryes, maize, wild potatoes, wild fruit, and so forth. we are headed toward so damaging the ecosystem that provides sufficient complexity to maintain most of the species in our ecosystem that its capacity for self-renewal and self-correction is threatened.

there will be a tipping point. we are accelerating towards whatever that tipping point is.

using our current approaches to feeding humanity, the growth of the population is such as to continue increasing the degradation of the ecosystem that sustains us. cutting down forests to allow more food production by human agriculture will degrade the ecosystem. this degradation of the ecosystem is certain to risk generating irreversible damage.

we cannot assume that whatever other changes we make in our life styles other than reducing the population will be adequate to stop the shrinking of our forests.

shrinking forests mean more loss of species.

humans currently cutting the rain forests are causing so much damage to that land that replacing the rain forest may not be possible in time to compensate for the loss of such a huge amount of highly variegated species habitat. [Read entire topic]

#15: olin.k-g or olin (olin36) Mon 2 Jun 08 14:37

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:37:00 PDT

sorry, karish, but i just got this thing to come up in a new window and found your response. I am trying to get some one at the Well to help me get out of a Forgotten state that seems to reemerge for me every time i have to start with a fresh window. i just stumbled across the detailed url that i am using above, whereby i discovered your comment!

so i will try for a quick and dirty answer so that i can return to trying to find out how to kill the old Forgotten state that keeps coming up after i log off and come back later.

i have been in touch with the culture of NPR. PBS, the NY Times, Washington Post, the Raleigh News and Observer, and at least some teenagers and college aged persons of both sexes, and some of their parents. .my grandnephews still represent the child development stages that i studied in the fifties and sixties from time to time, that is ~4 to 6 year olds.

I was quite familiar and even involved in the culture of high school kids and young adults in the sixties, with the culture from prekindergarten through the ancient in Biloxi in the late sixties and the early '70s.

i returned to Berkeley in 1972 to observe that final wave of the great cultural movement that was poisoned by the events of 1968 and the extreme reactionary period that followed.

.i pulled out of Berkeley and moved down to the Stanford neighborhood where i was very involved with persons from 5 to at least their late sixties in various contexts and subcultures from the "main stream" as it became less vital and more conservative and all sorts of variant sub groups of the sort that one can interact with in the environs of a University such as Stanford, but even more so the culture of silicon valley as we stumbled from 8080/z80 chip s100 buss machines through the tote-arounds like my Ozborne (sp?; prob'ly s not z) to which i glommed on a regular size CRT monitor for then and a *HUGE* 5 or 10 megabyte hard disk [my current older hard disk machines have mirrored 60 and 80 gig hds and my i20 Mac that i am working on has only 250 gig, but is now backed up with the new Leopard OS 10 with something wonderful called Time Machine which backs up to an external disk with 500 GIG.]

.any way, after the 1980s being filled with manufacturing management consulting, which familiarized me further with, extending from way back in the early '60s IBM days, and i was able to study the corporate culture once again for another time slice.

.i was involved with a lot of graduate students at the turn of the nineties, but then i returned to the south in 1993 to a somewhat more progressive and contemporary culture in the so called Research Triangle territory, a much more with-it culture than i found in Biloxi just past the cusp of the middle 60*s * anyway, here in the *really new* cultural enclaves where i continue to interact with students, tho mostly only university students and where i have tended to get to know mostly upperclassmen and grad students, the latter being mostly pursuing various medical pursuits from MDs to Public Health to dentistry. .i also get to interact with the young to fairly young waitperson and bar and restaurant types when i sup at the counters of my two favorites places.

I was much more involved with the funkier side of culture between 1967 and around 1974, but i think that i am equally open to it, if not making a frontal assault past the wonderful family folk that take care of my 96 year old mother who can*t talk or really walk or feed herself. .she had taken care of a very large chunk of my time and energy over the last ten years, until it was clear that she needed 24 hour care, tho i am right across the hall at night if anyone should need me.

.the above may give you a little better basis to answer the question you asked me.

.tho i do believe in truth in packaging, up the point of a significant involuntary foray into my privacy.

.perhaps this response will satisfy you. .i hope it is either useful or interesting to some of you out there who might stumble across this.

Now i had better pursue the Forgetting of this topic at times when i do not want to forget it or interfere with its availability.

.i hope this takes [Read entire topic]

#14: If gopod's on our side s/he'll stop the next war (karish) Sun 1 Jun 08 21:01

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:01:00 PDT

So, exactly how long have you been completely isolated from popular culture? [Read entire topic]

#13: olin.k-g or olin (olin36) Sun 1 Jun 08 14:56

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 14:56:00 PDT

damn! ant i a slow learner! .i just now wrote a longer paragraph than i intended, launching into a riff on my ridiculous typo of keying *metal* when i meant to key _*mental*_: a word with a very strong *n* in it. .i get embarrassed enough just reading my failures to monitor my tendency to generate run-on sentences * and worse to occasionally run them on so carelessly that i lose track of the appropriate positioning of subjects such that they rule the appropriate objects. .i find it absurd when in letting one thought-image-notion generate such a flood of thought that provokes an easy side-slip until some sub notion pivots into another thought such that the more dramatic imagery that my mind was tracking too sloppily such that the later predicate notions point back to some subjugated subject whose rule was supposed to be temporary, the focus properly shifting back further in the ranks, or perhaps more properly, the succeeding waves of notional crests * as now i have managed to string out my critique until one may as well simple emit a big strong dash and finish the whole thing off with some clause that can claim legitimacy in its own right.

such are the prose problems of such a neuronal brain as mine, which simply goes its own way when i write or talk. .talking is safer, in a way, for with vocal emphasis pointing out high-lights, the meat manages to be processed more successfully in the receiver*s mind. .and commas become much more crucial for sorting stuff out in the welters of notions and imagery that can pour out unintentionally.

.now that i have made such a verbal fuss, i might as well go on and comment more appropriately on response 3, which leads off my page for todays start and review session.

.There i am reminded, though i have tried to ignore it, that today*s repeated display of *Piercenukemdick*s* riff re fellatio seems to me to be confusing the grammar and implied substantial subject of *sucks*. surely the proper substantive element in the subject role has nothing to do with the subject demanding fellatio at all. the speaker who says that something *sucks* is merely trying to lower the prestige of whatever is being implied to be practicing *oral stimulation* (as the Oxford American dictionary would have us understand it) on something, as karish would have us understand that abstract entity that Spencer generated to heighten the drama of stress in the society of us human folk should be performing. .that is, whether he is intending to or not, karish is implying some generalized instantiation of human society acting out the competition [to the death?] of animal against animal in the eternal struggle to dominate. .thus the abstracted Social Darwinism is relegated to a shameful role. .this is a reasonable level of despising due the abstract set of ideas in question, even if quite crudely put. .but having grown up in the cotton fields in the middle of the Mississippi delta in a day when abused workman were just as good as any rapper today at invoking such insults, and having further spent three years living in the barracks with other enlisted men in an army full of draftees who eagerly learned the most vivid flourishes of the crudest language that such an institution elicits from us, not to speak of my rich exposure to the freest exercise of free diction that the free speech movement that teed off the increasing active phases of that movement as it morphed into both the civil rights movement and the ant-war movement, i am almost never impressed with the language of humankind. .further more, i think here in my ancient age, that i still agree that there is no such thing as a dirty word, nor should any word, as such, be unspeakable.

.this only becomes worth serious consideration when we wrestle with the appropriate allowances for constitutional free speech and for the universal rights of freedom for all the world*s folk, even the most disenfranchised and weak.

.but for those of us who really believe in freedom * freedom of speech, of assembly, of association, even the freedom to demonstrate peaceably and non-destructively * this all becomes more serious.

.but this is not trivial, nor is it easy. .we should all be striving to help move the world towards respecting human rights much, much better than it does today.

it may be appropriate to quote Wikipedia*s summary of the basic facts about the enacted documents that summarize a very thorough and theoretically binding set of documents:

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (10 December 1948 at Palais de Chaillot, Paris). The Guinness Book of Records describes the UDHR as the "Most Translated Document"[1] in the world. It consists of 30 articles which outline the view of the General Assembly on the human rights guaranteed to all people. The International Bill of Human Rights consists of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its two Optional Protocols. In 1966 the General Assembly adopted the two detailed Covenants which complete the International Bill of Human Rights; and in 1976, after the Covenants had been ratified by a sufficient number of individual nations, the Bill took on the force of international law.

.isn*t that interesting: the Bill took the force of international law more than thirty years ago.

.what many Americans, Europeans, the countries in South America, the countries in Africa and Asia * all of us know that this sort of ideal should be taken seriously, but many ideologies interfere and trump real human and cultural rights with ideological theories that have clearly moved, mixed with various supposedly religious positions, towards a far too highly wide-spread tendency to make a mildly mistaken faith called *free trade* and * especially in the sense of so-called laissez-faire, the specifically stated notion that we should let business people do whatever they want to do * that freedom of trade trumps all.

.this remarkable theory, held by many since before the Declaration of Independence in America, is the most inadequately challenged super powerful theory in the world.

.what are the most important _HUMAN_ values? .even the primates generally take their societies more seriously than many big business and financial types do. and many much smaller business folk also tend to claim that this doctrine may be the most important belief in their value systems.

.many of these people if not aroused about some political or economic issue that they see as a threat to their status, will under calmer conditions and among mellower sorts of folk, admit that Allah or Yaweh or Jesus or The Buddha would not rank money matters over the real commitments that real religions usually require.

.but the people who claim to believe in these religions, especially when demagogs have stirred up their fears effectively, are capable of setting these values aside when they believe that their financial interests are as threatened as the demagogs try to convince them that they are.

.well, since i lost a big chunk of typing to the entry box monster that lurks in the Well once again, i find that i have been trying to get back to whatever my original intentions might have been this noon, now that it is well after 5:30 and my bottom is cramping and i am getting hungry, i had better set this aside, as soon as i can give it a cursory check out.

.so later. Aloha. [Read entire topic]

#12: Olin Beall (olin36) Sat 31 May 08 16:42

Sat, 31 May 2008 16:42:00 PDT

well, i just lost a good chunk of energy writing my response directly into the Well*s reply box. Having typed longer than i can remember now (i just spent a big bunch of time creating my back-up version of this discussion as it has actually been sequenced). Now i cannot remember hardly anything about what was on my mind; maybe it will come back, maybe not. i sort of remember that i was discussing truth * yes, i was teeing off on balloonman*s comment on *one*, by some method i might imagine, but which was only identified as being *the one who can find peace amid shrill conflict*, an enviable capacity. .he wrote that such a one *is endowed with the ability to weigh the truth.* i leapt on this introduction of the truth, assuming, i hope not too unreasonably, that he meant what i often cite as THE TRUTH. .i only use the caps here because i find that the Well as executed in this web html/xml universe does not seem to be accepting my Safari Mac browser*s mode of emphasis, just as it does not seem to accept my preference for using a serif-style normal type face but rather insist on a typewriter style face. .at least it*s not Helvetica, or one of those faces which do not distinguish *l*s from capital *i*s, and on top of that is not as readable as Verdana. .i prefer Century Schoolbook, but i have to admit that i am a typeface fanatic, moreso the older i get and the less flexible my pupils get. .meanwhile, back at the branch *

i basically have grown over the years to become less and less able to put up with the notion that i am typing as THE TRUTH. .the problem with this notion, and more precisely, this concept, is that it is one of those crowning cases that we have inherited from Parmenides and Plato and friends where some of the Greeks came to essentially worship the purest super-refined abstractions that they could they could thinks of. .not sure about the older guy but i am quite confident that i have accrued solid enough info on Plato that i will simply evoke his wonderfully appealing, to those disposed towards intellectual delights, notions of, first and foremost, his notion of good, or the good * or even the idea of the good. .i was a desultory student of classical greek for 7 years way back in the 1950s, and i never got good at it. .i went back to it starting before the solstice holidays in 2007. .my goal was to revive and extend my knowledge of Plato, but more importantly, to reassure myself that my knowledge of Plato from both the ancient fifties and from the intervening decades in such media for the most part as the literature sections of the NY Times and the SF Chronicle and the mags like Harpers and Atlantic, with occasional forays into even such as Irving Kristol*s little mag _The Public Interest_. . invoking Kristol implies, in a way, the elite Leo Strauss, the mentor of Irving and his formidable wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, (the family seems to me to have a serious obsession with open sexuality and with all hints of sexual license, particularly if not well hidden) and the literary Allan Bloom, but more horrendously, some of these are intellectual ancestors of those whose elitism knows no bounds. .such were the group of the folk that were gathered for the core controllers of right wing policy; they joined together to present the claim of democratic concerns gathered in Bill Kristol*s pseudo-idealistic ad and called up all who were happy with the neocon label to go to war. Somehow, it seems to me that Cheney became the agent to call the enthusiasts together and make sure that Bush did not falter in his role of leader of the war.

.i always find a tendency for various kinds of highly educated elite folk or celebrated intellectuals to move their political emotions to the right as they identify more and more with their celebration as being a part of the intellectual or literary elite. I used to find some of Irving K*s specific analyses, comments, or recommendations fairly sane and reasonable, even when mixed with other matter. .as one somewhat obsessed with political, economic, social, and psychological ideas, i have often plunged and lept about like a sort of metal dolphin in the seas of ideas, but since 1958 i have tended to put more and more energy into getting various idiosyncratic agglomerations of mentation, notions, and ideas clearly related to the concrete issues of real people and real settings.

.such settings must be studied as they are, not as we may think we know that they ought to be. .i am not an enemy of complex thought nor of intellectual thought, but i hope to maintain my sense of real people and their needs, real political and economic conditions and their problematic complexity.

If we cannot use our thinking and our capacity for complex thought by applying it to the solutions of very mundane political and economic problems and challenges then we may well be wasting some vital human resources for the solutions of the threats to the people alive today and the well being of those being born and growing up continuously behind us in time. .we are threatened and we are challenged.

.but more importantly, we must act without much more time to chew on our challenges and imagine that those challenges are out far enough in the future such that we do not have to begin * begin to take effective actions that will address the most urgent problems.

.unfortunately, one of the most urgent needs our current human civilization has today is to critically analyze and restructure much of our value thinking.

.value thinking involves beginning to appreciate more clearly and understand more sympathetically the emotional structures that contribute most to the misunderstandings that most keep us from our getting ourselves and those who are in less fortunate situations than ourselves together on the truly [in the loose sense] important job of ranking human values in such a way that the compromises imposed upon us by the pragmatics of triage do not deflect us from ideals and standards that must not be thrown out with the wreckage of those parts our culture which we by sheer necessity have to remodel.

.with this paean and exhortation i must pause and rest and deal with some of my other matters that call for attention and action.

.i will have to get back to the THE TRUTH problem later * [Read entire topic]

#11: Piercetheballoon (balloonman) Fri 30 May 08 21:18

Fri, 30 May 2008 21:18:00 PDT

Eco-ethos-symbiotic-organo-mechano-cerebro-kinetic interface, Let he who holds the biggest gun decide who will live. Or, the one who can find peace amid shrill conflict is endowed with the ability to weigh the truth. [Read entire topic]

#10: olin kent-gordon or olin.kg or olin (olin36) Fri 30 May 08 12:02

Fri, 30 May 2008 12:02:00 PDT

on sustainability and a structured, disciplined, and maintainable set of human values, i.e., ethics at a usefully inclusive level.

I strayed off prematurely onto a discussion of the maintenance structures of a broad enough management system for implementing an inclusive ethical system, that is, effective enough, practical enough, and maintainable enough to be useful across most organized forms of human culture.1

Reviewing all this stuff, I notice that I teed off referring to my *anti* *ideologistic* perspective. Perhaps it would be useful to accept the probability that dictionary and word processing word lists are not going to recognize such a word as valid; that, of course, is merely their being silly and/or limited.

The word *ideology* should be able to take any variant form that English offers, such as *ideologist*, ideologistic, ideologism, etc. There is no reason for a writer to have to pause and use write-around phrases, wasting effort to make them fit the flow.

It is hard enough for a mind like mine to stop linking phrases that to me make a clear set of reasonable understandable relations, though I know that this is not a very useful style if one if going to keep most readers.

For this reason, since I am not likely to have enough time to rewrite everything I write, I may have to find a way to edit some of my earliest postings in this environment.

Meanwhile, I should probably use my preferred crutch when trying to rewrite or make up for some of my most indigestible or opaque writing.

My best luck has been with writing in a format to has the look of pseudo poetry, using carriage returns to separate phrases and clauses and such by constant use of the *carriage return* (as we used to call it).

This method isolates sub bits of my prose flow Strongly enough that I notice Just what stands naturally by itself and Emphasizes to me when I have strung things Out quite enough, thank you.

This encourages me to hit the return and Pay closer attention to the sentence structure As distinguished from The linkage associations that flow so Naturally when I am trying to think More than consider how Graceless or ungainly My prose might have become. However, this system looks much Less absurd when I properly Adjust the Preferences on my Word processor so that my Capitalization auto-correction system Is crippled like this: so that i switch to the contemporary style of hardly using any capitals at all. .now one thing that does is to disguise the beginnings of sentences to the degree that one is likely to have to stop and read over mush more than is desirable.

.so i am considering and here beginning to use a new convention of indicating the beginning of a sentence in a new way, a way that i truly hope may turn out to be very useful and be very easy to convert my typing habits to, specifically, i will try indicating new sentences after a period by merely hitting the first natural period like this (end.) and striking a space, which i do anyway, and then another period. .this will make the proper period pause and its implied linguistic logic quite clear. .whether or not the reader thinks that it looks odd. .a reader that objects to clarifying devices in the communication of thought seems to me to be acting a bit uncooperative, if not somewhat petty. After all: human civilization finds itself cresting the cusp of a dramatic and definitive change and definitive challenge such as we have never faced before, at least in recorded civilization.

Here is a simple, but, i think, very important point:

we are very likely to have exceeded the number of human beings compatible with our human capacity to appropriately respond by adapting appropriately to the challenge that we have set up for ourselves.

.we may theoretically have the intelligence and the adaptability to solve the challenge of our human population growth exceeding the carrying capacity of the ecosystem that is the only ecosystem we know much about * or at least that we can successfully adapt to in time to save the current system with its millions of species maintaining and managing SO FAR to adjust to our ravages of our ecosystem*s ADJUSTMENT capacity. .in other words, we may be, for example, unable to change our international pan-human social system fast enough to arrest the destruction of our ecosystem*s critical level of whatever sorts of forestation are required to prevent a world wide version of the disasters that struck the society that built the cities that built Angkor Wat or the disasters that struck the Mayans when their warring city states tipped the limit of sustainability for their great culture. We know that if the great Asian nations that are trying to catch up with our rapacious way of life are not only going to find it hard to help to limit their generations of various pollutions and even their increasing levels of meat consumption in time to save forests such as those of Indonesia and of South America, not to even consider the ecological problems of Africa.

etc****. [Read entire topic]