random political rants
...kind of like a bizarre MOTD. Actually, I was talking with sondy yesterday about how liberal/fruity/leftist/your-adjective-here the SF Chronicle is, and then I got to reading some random columns, starting with a couple that were not at all. Not to criticize too much---there are at least two columns in the "most recent" category reminding us that marijuana should be legal.
The common theme here is that the authors do a decent job talking about specific events, but the events are largely beside the point to their broader conclusions. Physically obstructing military recruiters is problematic, and there's an ongoing debate about whether such tactics are 'non-violent'. There are always embarassing extremists (no doubt I'm one of them) and the author points out a few such cases. But then she sets up a strawman, and tries to present opponents of the war as hypocrites for opinions inconsistent with that philosophy. Yes, some opponents of the war are pacifists. No, those are not the same people who sympathize with the Iraqi resistance. Yes, there are people who believe that all war is unjustified. There are also those of us who are objecting to this particular war---for the will to empire that it reveals, whatever other motivations may be involved. I share the author's admiration for those willing to fight for their country, but only if this nationalism reflects legitimate values. Taking up a gun to protect your neighbor from a robber is honorable; taking up the gun to help the robber is not (assuming the neighbor has justly acquired eir property). In this war our motives appear to be winning an election, breaking the back of international law, and securing steady access to oil---or at least reminding other countries that our military is that size of the rest of the world's. That's not what I usually mean by "protecting the freedoms that I hold dear."
I'll probably end up reading the book reviewed in this article. There is a distressing about of woo-woo in the environmental movement, and most of you must suspect that I have complicated feelings about appeals to spirituality without rational basis. But the author of the column only talks about organic food, and that's an easier topic. If this were not an SF paper, I would not be surprised---the author says what I would have said a year ago about organic agriculture. It's a book review, so I could even forgive the author for apparently not having done any research to speak of. So here's the deal: organic agriculture is not about pesticides. More particularly, it's not about assessing whether the vegetables that I eat are covered with carcinogens or only lightly dusted.
Organic agriculture, like it's near sibling bioregionalism, is about reducing the 13:1 ratio of joules of fossil fuel burned to joules delivered to the home of the average American. It is about stemming the erosion, nutrient exhaustion, and loss of biodiversity that have taken more than half our prime farmland out of production (admitedly, some unreported amount of that figure predates the Green Revolution). It's about growing something other than algal blooms in the gulf of Mexico. Potentially, it's even a good strategy for addressing global poverty, because it's labor intensive, but the labor need not be supplied by First World companies.
Yes, in most cases organic agriculture has lower yields per hectare, but that's completely overwhelmed by the environmental effects of the fossil imputs. The USDA Organic Standards have some issues, but their process-based approach is at least relevant. The hidden truths of the genetic engineering debate seem to be that the most grown strains are optimized for herbicide resistance and single-generation die-off; I've read that yields are about the same. And while the greater labor demands push prices up here (you noticed that we have a shortage of workers, right?) at the going rates in the Third World, they don't come close to the cost of (horrifically underpriced) fossil fuels. The common thread here is that all of my reasons require looking farther into the future---10, 50, 100 years---than the arguments in the article---and (not unrelatedly) that they draw more on biology and less on economics. That's apparently hard to sell. I forget what else I read this week, that finally made me question my assumption that the average American cares as much about eir children's well-being as eir own.
Thanks for bearing with me. I'll go look for some other windmills now....
The common theme here is that the authors do a decent job talking about specific events, but the events are largely beside the point to their broader conclusions. Physically obstructing military recruiters is problematic, and there's an ongoing debate about whether such tactics are 'non-violent'. There are always embarassing extremists (no doubt I'm one of them) and the author points out a few such cases. But then she sets up a strawman, and tries to present opponents of the war as hypocrites for opinions inconsistent with that philosophy. Yes, some opponents of the war are pacifists. No, those are not the same people who sympathize with the Iraqi resistance. Yes, there are people who believe that all war is unjustified. There are also those of us who are objecting to this particular war---for the will to empire that it reveals, whatever other motivations may be involved. I share the author's admiration for those willing to fight for their country, but only if this nationalism reflects legitimate values. Taking up a gun to protect your neighbor from a robber is honorable; taking up the gun to help the robber is not (assuming the neighbor has justly acquired eir property). In this war our motives appear to be winning an election, breaking the back of international law, and securing steady access to oil---or at least reminding other countries that our military is that size of the rest of the world's. That's not what I usually mean by "protecting the freedoms that I hold dear."
I'll probably end up reading the book reviewed in this article. There is a distressing about of woo-woo in the environmental movement, and most of you must suspect that I have complicated feelings about appeals to spirituality without rational basis. But the author of the column only talks about organic food, and that's an easier topic. If this were not an SF paper, I would not be surprised---the author says what I would have said a year ago about organic agriculture. It's a book review, so I could even forgive the author for apparently not having done any research to speak of. So here's the deal: organic agriculture is not about pesticides. More particularly, it's not about assessing whether the vegetables that I eat are covered with carcinogens or only lightly dusted.
Organic agriculture, like it's near sibling bioregionalism, is about reducing the 13:1 ratio of joules of fossil fuel burned to joules delivered to the home of the average American. It is about stemming the erosion, nutrient exhaustion, and loss of biodiversity that have taken more than half our prime farmland out of production (admitedly, some unreported amount of that figure predates the Green Revolution). It's about growing something other than algal blooms in the gulf of Mexico. Potentially, it's even a good strategy for addressing global poverty, because it's labor intensive, but the labor need not be supplied by First World companies.
Yes, in most cases organic agriculture has lower yields per hectare, but that's completely overwhelmed by the environmental effects of the fossil imputs. The USDA Organic Standards have some issues, but their process-based approach is at least relevant. The hidden truths of the genetic engineering debate seem to be that the most grown strains are optimized for herbicide resistance and single-generation die-off; I've read that yields are about the same. And while the greater labor demands push prices up here (you noticed that we have a shortage of workers, right?) at the going rates in the Third World, they don't come close to the cost of (horrifically underpriced) fossil fuels. The common thread here is that all of my reasons require looking farther into the future---10, 50, 100 years---than the arguments in the article---and (not unrelatedly) that they draw more on biology and less on economics. That's apparently hard to sell. I forget what else I read this week, that finally made me question my assumption that the average American cares as much about eir children's well-being as eir own.
Thanks for bearing with me. I'll go look for some other windmills now....