Well, happy christmas, hanukkah, kwanzuh and festivus everyone. Hope it's been swell for everyone.

Some interesting and challenging posts over at Ted's page. Most recently, he asks whether GA/primitivist folks are too serious or not serious enough in thinking about the coming 'end of the world' or whatever you call it or it ends up being.

It's funny- the reason I got mixed up in the anti-civ blog folks I'm most interested in now is because I felt the anarcho-primitivist folks I had been reading were too serious. These past few days, I was looking through old 'Species Traitor' issues, and they are definitely very serious. Now, I certainly understand why and I think a big part of why that is is because writing in these contexts is supposed to be iconoclastic and infuriating and inspire readers to move, to act. But that didn't do it for me. I mean, Derrick Jensen inspires me to act out of love and rage, but I don't think I can ever be militant. And the beauty of what he says is, I, personally, don't have to. There are talents and proclivities unique to me that I can use. The militant actions are probably important and probably need to (or at least likely will) happen, but only a very small subset of people are going to do that. His main point is diversity of tactics- our only responsibility is not to condemn those people or to abandon them. That's maybe uncomfortable for some people- I don't know. Maybe some can condemn them- good cop, bad cop sort of thing. Whatever.

But really, I think the idea of openness and diversity is so important. I know Frank Black really emphasizes dropping out, whatever that may mean. Aaron and Sara address the importance of child-rearing in raising beautiful human beings able to express and experience compassion and empathy, and who will be the trailblazers of the post-civilized world. Ran and Dan I think both deal with mental decolonization and helping us free our minds so our bodies may follow. (And I don't mean to pigeonhole anyone- apologies to anyone offended by these characterizations). The point is- there's room enough for all of this, and lots of ideas and expressions and paths. Obviously. People say that a lot, but maybe it bears repeating.

I feel like my mental space has been so much more comfortable since I stopped trying to find the answer, and stopped looking for the thing everyone out to be doing. The Kantian 'Categorical Imperative' is so foolish and such a civilized vice: act as if what you were doing were to be done by everyone, and thereby determine its ethical nature. Slipped in there is the idea that one's actions can or should be universally repeated. I used to get upset and think that when people advocated different courses of action or different ethical values for different people or circumstances, that they were using a 'double standard.' Nonsense, because there's no double. Situations, obviously are unique and particular, and needn't have hard and fast rules of decorum.

I think that there are certain things that are abhorrent, that are good and bad, as well as good and evil, but I know them when I see them, and don't think too much about them, out of recognition that this ends up being just word games and intellectual masturbation, and I trust myself enough to know I'm able to make judgments and assessments as they come up, and I don't need a blueprint devised earlier for navigating unseen water (sorry-mixed metaphor).

Anyway, that's something that makes sense to me- diversity and acceptance.

Going back to 'Species Traitor' for a minute, it dawned on me just how contracted my thinking was when I first was introduced to it. I think I really felt like I had just found the answer, the new right perspective, and that was what was up. It was challenging and radical, but I didn't realize, still just substitutive, maintaining the infrastructure. I read Omnivore's Dilemma, recently, and in one part, he's talking about 'big organic' versus 'little organic.' With 'big organic,' that is, industrial, massified organic agriculture, they do 'substitutive' farming, simply replacing the inputs of industrial non-organic farms with organic inputs. So, rather than natural gas based fertilizer, they use manure shipped in from hundreds of miles away often. Or, instead of a banned pesticide, they use a non-banned pesticide, or what have you. Little organic, though, the real small farmers, and the ones we like to think are providing us with most of our food, but who probably aren't unless we're very active about making it so, the farmers who really do integrate themselves to their ecosystems, and even in some cases, leave the land more fertile, more repaired, more healed than before, to these farmers the input-output model is irrelevent. They're not simply substituting ingredients and seeing the land simplistically and as a machine. They're rebuilding an ecosystem and a self-managed, almost permaculture-like area of food generation. I think this land is just about always less diverse than what was grazed over to make it, but it's a step away from monoculture in the right direction. And to return to the analogy- I like to think that my thinking is more like the little organic farmer now, for whom simply substituting the appropriate thoughts into the existing framework is insufficient. I like to think that I'm interested in moving beyond that now, and expanding my worldview and all of that.

In all of college, I had two or three 'wow' moments, in which my mind was blown. I mean, legitimately new ideas were offered to me, ones that i never could have come to within the existing logical framework that I'd been operating under. In the past maybe four months or so, particularly reading Ran, I had a half dozen or more of those. That's what's up for me. Just having my mind blown and thinking not so mechanistically. That's inspiring. That's moving.

I still get caught up a lot being resistant to new ideas sometimes, but I try to be more open to them. It helps that, after a while being recalcitrant and being proved wrong by people close to me, I've had to stop being quite so pushy and insistent about my right ideas. But it's also helped me to find people who can both challenge some of the ideas I'm drawn to, and acknowledge the logic of others. It helps show me that anti-civ ideas, in particular, aren't monolithic and that someone can disagree in ways that aren't dismissive. (See also Jason's post about David Abram's 'In the Spell of the Sensuous.')

Elimination Communication

A nice little article via reddit: It's the bottom line: no nappies, no mess.

It's nice to see this practice(alternately called Infant Potty Training or Elimination Communication) getting a little attention. I only heard about it in August, and thought it was great.

The basic principle of EC is that parents can and should be attuned to the bodily signals of their children, and assist them in eliminating waste. Just as a child communicates hunger, and the parent responds with (breast-)feeding, the child communicates their need to eliminate waste and the parent facilitates that. Often that involved a keyword or sound (eg. 'ssss' for urinating, 'hmmmm' for defacating) once the child is in an appropriate place, (over a toilet or sink or bowl, near bushes or whatever have you).

It's great for a few reasons, I think:
1) It dovetails well with attachment/primal parenting and establishing a deep bond between child and parent.
2) So much less wasteful, even than cloth diapers.
3) It'll be really useful in a collapse environment, when we don't have the resources to divert to disposable diapers or even to constantly cleaning non-disposable ones
4) It's much more hygienic for the child, and doesn't involve the self-renunciation and active ignoring of their bodies that traditional diaper elimination does (EC advocates suggest that even infants are fully cognizant of their bodily functions and have to be taught to ignore them in order to eliminate waste and allow it to accumulate beside their genitals in a diaper. Then later, they have to be taught to re-attune themselves to those functions in order to potty train the standard way.)

Here's my favorite EC page: Free to EC!
And a couple of others: Diaper Free!
Infant Potty Training
What is Infant Potty Training?

World's Tallest Man

So anyone hear about this? It's all over the internet.

My favorite ones, though are this one and this one. The latter points out how cruel and awful it is to keep dolphins in captivity (along with all other animals, I'd say). The former points out just how much denial this culture is in by providing a dose of reality:


Meanwhile, an international expedition declared on Wednesday that a rare, nearly blind species of white dolphin is effectively extinct...
The baiji will be the first large aquatic mammal driven to extinction, since hunting and over fishing killed off the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s...
A naturalist who organised the expedition said one or two of the dolphins may still be alive - but the species was effectively extinct.

We're fucking up so bad, and if not you and I, this awful death-obsessed culture.

It's so hard to think about atrocities outside of our "monkey sphere," but reading about individuals makes the situation more comprehensible. Killing a species- almost too hard to imagine. Being one of the last one or two baiji? Heart-wrenchingly imagine-able.

Can you think about that? Being the last white dolphin, (and probably knowing it), and being able to do almost nothing about it.

It makes me hope that one indigenous undertanding of extinction, (that species don't necessarily leave forever, but leave until the conditions are right for their return) is right. But it probably won't be in my lifetime, and damn this system for it.

Masculinity and violence

I may lose some people with this, but hopefully not.

I looked into the organizer of the Deep Green Resistance, Lierre Kieth, in an interview here

There's one part that really made me think:

I think what women are getting at here is a very real fear of how men from rape-cultures behave when the social order breaks down. Which is that they become public predators. They're already assaulting women in private. But when civic society melts down, like during wartime, men rape women en mass. Women are assessing the situation realistically when they respond with fear to the idea of civilization coming apart.

When I was in an English class in high school, something came up to the effect of,' what would we do if we only had an hour to live?' One of the kids said, 'I'd find someone to rape or something.' The teacher of course rebuked him, and we all gave sort of looks of shock or astonishment. And I'm sure that kid didn't say that again, even if the thought crossed his mind. But I was shocked at home much I sympathized with that, that the same thought crossed my mind, and how the only thing saving me ridicule with my lack of courage to speak out when things cross my mind. And it shocked me, because i consider myself one of the good guys, you know? I didn't have any strong sexist influences in my family, no dads saying 'A women's place is prone, or in the kitchen. No one criticizing women in the workplace or chastising them for being assertive.

I did, however, watch lots of tv and movies, and I think that's where the cultural current came from. It's so hard to try to deal with these issues, and I do know that anti-patriarchy discussion groups didn't work for me. I mean, I spent a lot of time learning about queer issues and women's issues and race issues when I got to college, because I wanted to be an informed activist and do the right thing, so I had maybe a bit of a head start on others in dealing with personal biases. But I also feel like so much of those interactions within activist communities are about guilt and trying to force intragroup change as a result of impotence in the wider world. And I'm not saying small-scale change is worthless; instead, I'm saying maybe the white male activist going to patriarchy and white privilege discussion groups is not the person to demonize. Or maybe they are, since I've heard a lot of people complain about activist communities being rife with sexual assault.

It's tough, because I think people get defensive when they're told they're acting the wrog way. Far better is providing an environment where they can discover their transgressions on their own, and feel like it's they, not anyone else, whoa re prompting change.

There's a section in the Bushido, 'The Code of the Samurai' that talks about correcting your disciples or inferiors or what have you. And they say that it must be done in such a way that you make the person think that the change is their idea, and give them an opportunity to change without losing face. I think that's so right on- I feel like so much of our interaction in this realm is about punishment and humiliation firstly and secondarily about encouraging righteous behavior. That's backwards! If we really do want to encourage different behaviors, then humiliating someone into it is both vindictive (and evil), and probably less effective overall, because once the pressure is removed, they may change back (to driving SUVs, to demeaning women, whatever) because they feel like that is a part of their self they're regaining.

Back to male violence- it's tough, I think, but I suspect that the answer cannot be rationalized and made sense of. What is there to make sense of? It's one of those things for me that I can't over-think to escape, and can only step out, and let it fade to relative unimportance, like spiraling depression. What I mean is, I think if we listen carefully to ourselves, to our bodies and emotions, and not to the rational thoughts that cloud our clarity, we can move away from that cycle of oppression and guilt, and work toward interacting on a more human basis, fully acknowledging and embracing people's experiences and being.

Maybe this doesn't work for everyone, and maybe I'm naive and projecting what I think is the case for me onto everyone, including recalcitrant people who will not change. But maybe for some people, avoiding patriarchy and male oppression (and other oppressions, too) is about opening ourselves up to empathy and interacting in a more genuinely human way.

It's such a tangled, tough issue!

Quick shout:

To anyone in the northeast US area this coming April, there's a cool conference coming up,:

'Deep Green Resistance, Confronting Industrial Culture

How do we stop the mass destruction of our planet? We need a world without environmental devastation and social oppression: we need to confront civilization.

Join us for a weekend of exploring long range strategy, direct action, oppression, peak oil, natural living, and the deep questions of how to mend our hearts and sustain our spirits in these hard times. Good fun, great food, and the quiet woods also included.'

I'm thinking about checking it out. If you're around, maybe you should too.

Apologies

To anyone who commented on this blog in the past few months, let me apologize heartily for not publishing your comments until now.

Seems I inadvertantly put comment moderation on, and without an email notification no less, so I had no idea there were twenty-two comments pending publication. Thanks to Devin for pointing this out, and thanks again to everyone who took the time to comment.

Many apologies, and much appreciation to you all.

Nutrition stuffs

So fairly big changes for me recently, as I've really jumped off the vegan wagon, and am trying different meats. So far I've tried wild boar roast (boar's not really wild, but raised in large pens, it seems probably like heritage turkeys, who are actually still capable of breeding without artifical insemination, necessary for commercial breeds), pork sausage and bacon (delicious!), and bison liver. I've also started having eggs almost every day. I feel mostly good, though I need to make sure I have other food around, because mid-day, when I'm not at home to cook for myself, I get hungry and thrown off, and end up eating store or restaurant-bought food, which is not ideal.

After spending a few days on the Weston A Price Foundation page, I was convinced and decided to give something else a try after years of veganism, and a few weeks of veganism + fish. I've even given some thought to eating dairy, though I'm mixed about that. Ran suggests ghee (clarified butter) as a way to get the nutrients in butter without the potentially hard to handle and allergenic parts of milk. I'm thinking about that, but I still have a hard time with the idea of cheese or yogurt. It just seems weird to me, not to mention a fairly recent tradition (the buzz word for the WAP folks).

I ordered Nourishing Traditions, and am waiting its arrival. I suspect that the Price folks are right on with a lot, and really have a good sense of what proper nutrition on the ground for indigenous groups is. But the diets do seem a bit narrow, and very dairy-based. It's certainly plausible to me that pasteurization is awful for milk and causes all sorts of problems, but it's also highly plausible to me that it's "nature's most perfect food," but only for baby cows, not adult humans.

One of their articles, Guts and Grease, on Native American diets, takes to task the 'politically correct' view that indigenous diets were very lean, pointing out that fat, especially animal fat, was highly valued and sought after, ultimately comprising a high percentage of calories consumed. They also make a concession I appreciate, which is that dairy is a good substitute in the modern age for the relatively inaccessible guts and grease of wild animals typical of hunter-gatherer Amerindian diets. If that's their position (dairy is good, but only as a substitute and not as a first choice for optimal health), then I'd be much more sympathetic to them. As it is, I still think they're right on and take a lot of their information seriously, but remain critical. (That's probably a good thing, though- better not to align oneself to any set of ideas so much as take what's useful in all of them).

I'm also still considering the healthfulness of grains. I know they're relatively new in our diets, but souring and sprouting them seems to increase their nutritional content and counteract the phytic acid, one of the anti-nutrients present that are bad for us. I read through Jason's post here, including a long series of exchanges with Shane. It seems to me that, though Jason's mostly right on, he hasn't exactly disproven Shane's arguments on the edges. I think that it's possible that grains are incorporable into a healthy diet for some people, maybe. Should they be the centerpiece of almost everyone's diet? Almost certainly not. But I think he glosses over the fact that one of humanity's most noteworthy traits is our adaptability. Should everyone live in the Artic like the Inuit? Should everyone live off of primarily mongongo nuts like the !Kung? Probably not, but some people can and do. Likewise, I'll reserve judgment about grains ultimate valuelessness. Doesn't Quinn say 'There's no one right way to live." Likewise, I doubt there are hard and fast rules necessarily excluding grains or even dairy. Maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure. But Jason did seem a big ideologically driven in that exchange, which turned me off somewhat.

Back to Price- I'm disappointed they don't emphasize a more varied diet and more fruit and vegetable consumption, at least leafy greens and other accessible non-agriculture-requiring veggies (i.e. potatos and other roots). They also make a point to criticize the pesticide use in industrial fruits and veggies, which is great, but I didn't think they were similarly critical of industrial meats.

The Nourishing Traditions book, also, according to one reviewer, contains its share of doublethink, too. For example: Fallon says: don't eat white flour, because it's only 400 years old, but then defends feeding livestock to each other as an acceptable practice, because it's been done for almost 100 years.

Anyway, the take home lesson for me is: attune yourself to your body, determine what you need and get it. In the meanwhile, avoid poisons like high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils, and try to emphasize whole organic/pasture-raised/wild foods. That seems damn sound to me.