Secretary General and Loving Father Stalin, who only sends those who really need it to Siberia to be worked to death. Photo taken by CCCP, public domain for all good comrades. Here"Someone in the crowd said to him, “Liberal, tell my brother to divide the tax money with my solar power company.”
"14 Comrade Stalin replied, “Individuals, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you? Can't you tell I have the general will to look out for...” 15 Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; you might turn in to a conservative! But for now you're just a useful idiot...”
16 And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain country yielded an abundant economic harvest. 17 He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no way to prevent the world from changing.’
18 “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my coal power plants and build bigger solar panels across miles of beautiful, open Desert, and there I will have my electricity. 19 And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of power laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’
20 “But the general will, now extended to include the cute, furry creatures of the forest, said to him, ‘You fool! Yellowstone will erupt this very night, cover the Western United States with lava and block the sun for 50 years. Then where will this stable world you have prepared for yourself go to?’
21 “This is how it will be with whosoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich towards the general will."
16 comments:
So you think people who are concerned about environmental degradation are Stalinist? I assume that you're aware of what Stalin did to the Aral Sea.
I'm sorry Dennis but that is so far removed from the point of this post that I'm not sure I should even dignify it with a response. Suffice it to say, read it again.
Its hard to tell if you are glorifying stalin or going the other way.
The best tht i can understand from it is that the post supports the green initiative, regardless of the circumstances.If there is even little doubt, success will be a delusion.
@TruthChariot: The post is farce as opposed to satire so it does not take a particular ideological angle but simply shows the full irony of the truth. However, this is the punchline of the post:
"But the general will, now extended to include the cute, furry creatures of the forest, said to him, ‘You fool! Yellowstone will erupt this very night, cover the Western United States with lava and block the sun for 50 years. Then where will this stable world you have prepared for yourself go to?’"
In other words, success will be a delusion regardless of how the green initiative is handled and regardless of how little doubt there is, because like all individual beings, society too must someday die.
Replace "Grain Silos" in the original Parable of the Rich Fool with "Green Energy," and you have the same message: live your life for money (resources), and see it all taken away by your greed. All resources run out one way or another.
Understand that life is work, and that no gain is permanent (or sustainable), and you can be rich towards God and your fellow man as you discard such petty concerns as whether you will have energy from the same power plant next decade.
Hey, Jeremy; it's spot on!
Anastasia, you have done it again!!!
Mankind has deluded himself into thinking that he can control nature by technology, taxation, regulation, deregulation, and funding, or the lack thereof.
I am with you too Jeremy.
On your post I posted a response based on a comment from the same Bible I also hold sacred:
In the book of Ecclesiastes, written by King Solomon, in the New International Version, we find the following:
" 14 I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
15 What is crooked cannot be straightened;
what is lacking cannot be counted. " -- Ecc. 1:14 - 15, NIV
Cordially,
Dan the Yank
Mankind has deluded himself into thinking that he can control nature by taxation, regulation, deregulation, and funding, or the lack thereof.
On your post as well as Ana's I would post the same comment from the same Bible I also hold sacred:
In the book of Ecclesiastes, written by King Solomon we find the following:
" 14 I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
15 What is crooked cannot be straightened;
what is lacking cannot be counted. " -- Ecc. 1:14 - 15, NIV
Cordially,
Dan the Yank
@ Jeremy: Very realistic. However, being realistic has a downfall. a realist may be ignorant to possibilities.
The concern here would be if one makes an effort or just sits back thinking its all in vain.
@ Ana and Daniel. you are correct as to the entire world being a delusion, but, we all know that we have to perform our duties. Accumulating wealth is delusional and hence not recommended.
Do you apply the same to charity and goodwill?
@TruthChariot: Effort to what? To creating a stability that cannot and has never existed? And what precisely is your "effort" but destroying life and liberty for millions of people, for wasting the time and effort of all, for ruining entire lives and dreams. And for what? To be wiped out by the next cosmic storm rippling through space or explosion of a supervolcano?
"Accumulating wealth is delusional and hence not recommended."
Take the "Parable of the Rich Fool" and switch "Barns" for "Power Plants" and you have the Greenies. In fact, that's precisely what I did.
"Do you apply the same to charity and goodwill?"
When one is speaking of taking the bread out of the poors mouthes with ethanol subsidies, or destroying millions of acres of pristine public wilderness to put up Solar Plants, or telling China and India that they can't be as well off as us because that would hurt the environment, "charity" and "goodwill" are not exactly what comes to mind.
Well, you are talking with respect to USA alone. I lived most of my life in India. The green movement there isnt imposed, however, practised voluntarily by all citizens. I have seen businesses adopt to solar thermal and solar photovoltaic power to save the environment and their costs.
After reaching the american continent, I realised that the people here do not value resources equally. Computers are left ON and we can see a lot of electricity wasted on lighting, when it is not required. It isnt a matter of just a few cents, the bigger picture changed with a few cents.
Your wrath is towards government policies not the initiative. If you visit my blog chkout a post named The Washerman.
Stability in our universe is evident. However stability in our society is what you are pointing out at. Whose responsibility is it?
Truth Chariot: I am with you!!!
If we eat ourselves poor, it is we ourselves who have eaten, not another.
If we spend ourselves poor, it is we who handed off every bloody dime.
We have only ourselves to blame.
As Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill once said "We have met our GREATEST ENEMY. Our greatest enemy is US."
Unfortunately, with all the hype and conjecture about global warming and ozone holes (which mimic the eye of and the flow patterns of a hurricane) the future is at best anyones guess.
Unfortunately a LOT of debt is going to Research and Development of unproven methods for a situation such as Global Warming that is also YET UNPROVEN.
Companies keep lights on because they deter criminals - seeing an office lit and, thus, cameras able to record your crimes safeguards whatever is inside the office. This said, it would be nice if they would, when they can, lend those office spaces to nonprofits at night, though I do understand that the corporate espionage potential makes that difficult. As for the computers, they actually don't take that much power. In fact, they can't - too much electricity running through a computer will burn away its hyperfine wiring. Further, boot up times can be a major inconvenience, especially with older machines. Now we could throw away all our older machines, but that wastes something else, doesn't it?
"Stability in our universe is evident."
No it isn't:
"The Lake Toba eruption plunged the Earth into a volcanic winter, eradicating an estimated 60%[11][12][13][14][15] of the human population (although humans managed to survive even in the vicinity of the volcano[16]). However the coincidental agreement in above sources about percentage value of extinction is contrary to differing estimates of human population size at that time."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano#VEI_8
Supernovas likewise have been known to decimate whole swaths of the galaxy. The Earth varies from interglacial maximums to extreme Ice Ages regularly. Supermicrobes, A NATURAL THING, have often destroyed entire species of crops and plants, what makes you think humanity is that different?
Species, like individuals, must someday die.
BTW all, thanks for the great conversation. This is probably the best comments conversation I've ever had on this blog.
Jeremy,
Well said!!!
Somehow mankind has mentally and delusionally put himself above the processes of nature, also one of the lesser points of my blog the other day where I said that we think we can regulate nature with laws, funding, etc.
What we do not see is a lot of pointing at the ice ages, and major geologic events, because they happened so suddenly and catastrophically, perhaps.
Another reason that there is not a lot of reference to them is that recent technology has overturned a lot of the foundational premises to belief systems that try to explain away our beginnings with science only.
Excellent examples of this are the discovery of numerous Archaeological sites in the Holy Land that discredit the far left in the university systems that claimed that the Biblical and Judaic history were fables and that people like Abraham never existed because places like Ur of the Chaldees were nonexistent.
Another excellent example of this is the dating methods including and since C-14. Every new dating method opens wider disparities in all of the previous dating methods. One of the reasons for this is "extrapolation beyond the known." They can only guess what happened prehistory.
Man has elevated science in some cultures to the point of delusional infallability. But at every turn, we are stabbed in the back by the forefathers in our scientific communities in whom we have trusted, at the discovery of something new.
One of my first clues to this was in 1992 when I entered the Earth Sciences consulting industry. I soon found out that the paradigms of prehistorical research, the widely known strata of the earth as classified by Paleontology, and the C-14 dating methods are not allowed to be used in any reports pertaining to a geologic investigation that will go into a court of law in the United States. In fact, each state (as classified by Government Agencies such as DEP, DNR, EPD, EPA, USGS) in the United States has a separate geologic classification of the strata with totally different names and descriptions than strata like "Jurrassic" or "Paleozoic."
It is plain that mankind does NOT have a clue.
Regards,
Dan the Yank
@Dan: Indeed there are those who do, I myself do love science and mathematics but I also understand that they are limited. I think that the adversity and room for progress that mankind faces, including in his understanding, is part of what makes him beautiful. There's something very adventurous in all of it.
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