Mix together conservationists and environmentalists if you must and if you can : but first, please, take the baby steps of mixing together oil and water or chalk and cheese or matter and anti-matter.
Because Rene Descartes' biggest duality was opposing Man and Mother Nature - a motif adopted without reservation by the Conservation Movement in its unstinting efforts to keep bits of the 'unspoiled' natural world away from the 'destructive' human world.
But that was all bright & shiny prewar, Modernity, stuff.
Because in our dark and murky, postwar, Postmodern, world we quickly realized that human-made fallout clouds dropped their poison over Big City and Nature Conservatory indiscriminately - no 1950s style 'separate but equal' nonsense here .
Bread or Bombs : all was (unwilling) open commensality now, on lifeboat earth ....
Showing posts with label postmodern. Show all posts
Showing posts with label postmodern. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
The less you knew of The Bomb and Penicillin the better you understood them
Call it "The Chris Mooney Effect".
Remember when he reported that well informed and well educated Republicans were less, not more, likely to believe the scientific consensus about coming dire climate change ?
I see a similar result among people in 1945 who had too much media-mediated knowledge about WWII's Atomic Bomb and Penicillin.
By contrast, those with little information accurately saw the Bomb as a very horrific weapon, produced by a very big organization in a far off and secret desert location, intuitively connecting the concept 'horrific' with the concepts of 'big' and 'secret'.
And they saw Penicillin as a dramatic new big lifesaver produced by the same hitherto useless and hated but very ordinary & common moldy slime they were always cleaning off the food, clothing and basement walls in their homes.
They intuited that it was a very big and the very badly wanted medical breakthrough produced by the very small and the very unwanted.
Even a kid could get a kick out of such a rebuff to the big and powerful !
We all know how much effort was put into making atomic bombs and atomic energy seem friendly and cuddly - an argument, in the end, most bought by the highly educated.
But we forget about all the effort to hide the fact that most of WWII's penicillin was actually made by women using small bottles of the moldly slime - an operation as low tech and domestic in scale as the Atom Bomb effort was massive mean and secretive.
Instead we saw that the visual imagery released to (and used by) the mass media on wartime penicillin production showed only the high tech deep tank method, done in buildings that looked exactly like ultra modern moderate sized oil refineries circa 1944.
Again, the highly educated bought this hook line and sinker even as they grew exasperated every time an ordinary Joe and Josephine opined 'isn't it marvelous that penicillin could be made in your own kitchen using ordinary bread mold ?!'
For indeed the modern science of the Bomb and the postmodern science of natural penicillin were as un alike as chalk and cheese - and the uneducated instantly sensed that fact --- only the well read were fooled ...
Remember when he reported that well informed and well educated Republicans were less, not more, likely to believe the scientific consensus about coming dire climate change ?
I see a similar result among people in 1945 who had too much media-mediated knowledge about WWII's Atomic Bomb and Penicillin.
By contrast, those with little information accurately saw the Bomb as a very horrific weapon, produced by a very big organization in a far off and secret desert location, intuitively connecting the concept 'horrific' with the concepts of 'big' and 'secret'.
And they saw Penicillin as a dramatic new big lifesaver produced by the same hitherto useless and hated but very ordinary & common moldy slime they were always cleaning off the food, clothing and basement walls in their homes.
They intuited that it was a very big and the very badly wanted medical breakthrough produced by the very small and the very unwanted.
Even a kid could get a kick out of such a rebuff to the big and powerful !
We all know how much effort was put into making atomic bombs and atomic energy seem friendly and cuddly - an argument, in the end, most bought by the highly educated.
But we forget about all the effort to hide the fact that most of WWII's penicillin was actually made by women using small bottles of the moldly slime - an operation as low tech and domestic in scale as the Atom Bomb effort was massive mean and secretive.
Instead we saw that the visual imagery released to (and used by) the mass media on wartime penicillin production showed only the high tech deep tank method, done in buildings that looked exactly like ultra modern moderate sized oil refineries circa 1944.
Again, the highly educated bought this hook line and sinker even as they grew exasperated every time an ordinary Joe and Josephine opined 'isn't it marvelous that penicillin could be made in your own kitchen using ordinary bread mold ?!'
For indeed the modern science of the Bomb and the postmodern science of natural penicillin were as un alike as chalk and cheese - and the uneducated instantly sensed that fact --- only the well read were fooled ...
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
Postwar = Postmodernization , a retrospective look at Forman's "The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the History of Technology"
Memo : to North Americans.
Let us always remember that Boomers are a very small subset of a huge worldwide group : the first postwar generation of children.
This vast global cohort consists of all children too young to remember WWII's peculiarly scientism-tainted spirit.
This cohort effectively consists of all of us born after 1941 and before 1966, whether or not our nation experienced a very large baby bump after the war or not.
The Boomers were but a small part of a global demographic who experienced the wrenching transition from modernization & modernity to post-modernization & post-modernity in their key formative years, from teenager to young adult.
This Transition Generation existed just as fully in nations that never saw any noticeable baby boom.
Postmodernity did not happen worldwide simply because young parents in America, Canada and Australia chose to have a few more children in the 1950s than parents did in the 1930s (but less than parents did in the 1910s).
Let us always remember that Boomers are a very small subset of a huge worldwide group : the first postwar generation of children.
This vast global cohort consists of all children too young to remember WWII's peculiarly scientism-tainted spirit.
This cohort effectively consists of all of us born after 1941 and before 1966, whether or not our nation experienced a very large baby bump after the war or not.
The Boomers were but a small part of a global demographic who experienced the wrenching transition from modernization & modernity to post-modernization & post-modernity in their key formative years, from teenager to young adult.
This Transition Generation existed just as fully in nations that never saw any noticeable baby boom.
Postmodernity did not happen worldwide simply because young parents in America, Canada and Australia chose to have a few more children in the 1950s than parents did in the 1930s (but less than parents did in the 1910s).
Pre-war = modernity ; Post-war = postmodernity
Better, I feel, to credit these postwar kids learning, through films and in school, of the searing science-driven tragedies of WWII, without also experiencing the enveloping wartime faith in scientism as the sole way to win the war.
This caused these postwar kids to experience a loss of faith in scientism and the 'disinterested scientific method' that Paul Forman describes as the hallmark of this era of post-modernization, as detailed in this landmark article.
When children born in 1941 started to get tenure in 1981, postmodernization began to happen in the academic setting where Forman lives and breathes.
Forman seems inclined to discredit the events of WWII and to credit post-modernization's immediate causation to the youthful questioning of relevancy in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
But this questioning was largely the work of members of the postwar children generation, so I remain unconvinced that WWII doesn't lie behind post-modernization.
I think those born before about 1935 finished WWII with their faith in Science higher than it already was , because they saw scientists winning the war the infantry couldn't win alone.
These adults held all the powerful posts from 1945 till about 1985.
Little wonder that science was king in the long decade of the 1950s as I fully remember !
But they started retiring and dying and their postwar-born replacements didn't hold scientism in such high regard.
Ideas burned into us at age fifteen rarely change -- but those ideas' human holders do go through a cycle of new freshman student at university to full prof and department chair to retired prof and then death.
So I do not think Bruno Latour, to take one of Forman's examples, really changed his deepest assumptions about science and technology between the late 1970s and the late 1980s.
He merely bobbed along, as a small intellectual cork, in a demographic tide far far bigger than his powerful mind ...
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Neutrality, not Brutality, WWII hallmark
Only the (postwar : postmodern) grandchildren and possibly the children of the modern adults of WWII have always seen Hitler and WWII as symbols of the ultimate evil and brutality.
But relatively few of the modern world's adults saw it that way during the six long years of the war : even fewer forcefully proclaimed it that way during the war and did so from beginning to end.
If their initial wartime actions speak much louder than their later verbal recollections, almost all of the modern world's adults choose to stand around as bystanders while schoolyard bully Hitler beat up on little primary pupil Poland.
Very few neutral nations (and the neutral individuals within them) changed their minds about fighting Hitler and his Axis over the course of those six years of the war - unless they themselves were directly attacked by Hitler or his Axis.
Even then, few thought that Hitler was the ultimate symbol of evil.
Rather the adults still saw Hitler as just another invader who must be repelled, albeit an highly effective invader and hence a highly dangerous invader, one who must be stopped dead in his tracks.
The modern elites at the top of both the West and in Russia thought it quite possible that either the West or Russia might sue for a separate peace with Hitler at any point during the war - as France had already done.
That hardly sounds like people who saw Hitler as the symbol of the ultimate evil who must be stopped even if it cost all their lives to do so.
The great majority of the people murdered by Germany were killed by its armed forces rather than by the SS.
(I can repeat that sentence slowly and calmly, once you're sitting down, if its all been too great a shock to you.)
Despite that, almost all of the military and political elite in the West still thought of those German armed forces as basically like their own Allied armed forces and treated them accordingly - right up to the end of the war.
And well beyond : for many, that remains a belief until this very day.
From day one, the Allied governments' propaganda insisted that Hitler's Germany was evil but then didn't act like it was evil and so failed to convince themselves, their publics or the peoples in the neutral majority around the world.
They failed to do wartime things differently enough from the Axis to convince most that its actions were truly beyond the civilized ken.
Instead they said it was perfectly okay to go on denying Jews jobs and housing - but it was not okay to mass murder them - but we won't do much to stop that mass murder - beyond defeating Hitler - because he was also attacking us - the non-Jews.
If was as if all the modern world's adults during WWII were nothing more than modern objective W5 journalists, carefully reporting that he says "he wasn't mass killing the Jews", while she says "Hitler was too".
If WWII had in fact been anything like what W5 reporter Tom Brokaw* imagined it to have been (the ultimate battle between good and evil), I doubt whether we'd still be writing and reading about it 75 years later.
We are still fascinated by it, like white mice bait before a cobra, because WWII was in fact so filled with neutral hypocrisy that it almost crowds out all the brutality.
An endlessly multi-layered onion of a melodrama, far more Noirish than anything Hollywood could ever dream up ...
__________
* Tom Brokaw was born in early February 1940 and was five and two thirds years old when Japan formally surrendered.
Born just early enough to still bathe deep in the postwar modernist triumphant glow.
I strongly question whether, if he had been born even just three or four years later, he would have ever written his infamous book, "The Greatest Generation".
But relatively few of the modern world's adults saw it that way during the six long years of the war : even fewer forcefully proclaimed it that way during the war and did so from beginning to end.
If their initial wartime actions speak much louder than their later verbal recollections, almost all of the modern world's adults choose to stand around as bystanders while schoolyard bully Hitler beat up on little primary pupil Poland.
Very few neutral nations (and the neutral individuals within them) changed their minds about fighting Hitler and his Axis over the course of those six years of the war - unless they themselves were directly attacked by Hitler or his Axis.
Even then, few thought that Hitler was the ultimate symbol of evil.
Rather the adults still saw Hitler as just another invader who must be repelled, albeit an highly effective invader and hence a highly dangerous invader, one who must be stopped dead in his tracks.
The modern elites at the top of both the West and in Russia thought it quite possible that either the West or Russia might sue for a separate peace with Hitler at any point during the war - as France had already done.
That hardly sounds like people who saw Hitler as the symbol of the ultimate evil who must be stopped even if it cost all their lives to do so.
The great majority of the people murdered by Germany were killed by its armed forces rather than by the SS.
(I can repeat that sentence slowly and calmly, once you're sitting down, if its all been too great a shock to you.)
Despite that, almost all of the military and political elite in the West still thought of those German armed forces as basically like their own Allied armed forces and treated them accordingly - right up to the end of the war.
And well beyond : for many, that remains a belief until this very day.
From day one, the Allied governments' propaganda insisted that Hitler's Germany was evil but then didn't act like it was evil and so failed to convince themselves, their publics or the peoples in the neutral majority around the world.
They failed to do wartime things differently enough from the Axis to convince most that its actions were truly beyond the civilized ken.
Instead they said it was perfectly okay to go on denying Jews jobs and housing - but it was not okay to mass murder them - but we won't do much to stop that mass murder - beyond defeating Hitler - because he was also attacking us - the non-Jews.
If was as if all the modern world's adults during WWII were nothing more than modern objective W5 journalists, carefully reporting that he says "he wasn't mass killing the Jews", while she says "Hitler was too".
If WWII had in fact been anything like what W5 reporter Tom Brokaw* imagined it to have been (the ultimate battle between good and evil), I doubt whether we'd still be writing and reading about it 75 years later.
We are still fascinated by it, like white mice bait before a cobra, because WWII was in fact so filled with neutral hypocrisy that it almost crowds out all the brutality.
An endlessly multi-layered onion of a melodrama, far more Noirish than anything Hollywood could ever dream up ...
__________
* Tom Brokaw was born in early February 1940 and was five and two thirds years old when Japan formally surrendered.
Born just early enough to still bathe deep in the postwar modernist triumphant glow.
I strongly question whether, if he had been born even just three or four years later, he would have ever written his infamous book, "The Greatest Generation".
Sunday, January 11, 2015
1936 vs 1941 : modern and postmodern kids' birth dates mere 5 years apart
This shaggy shaggy dog story is really - eventually - about climate change, but for now lie back and try to imagine two senior citizens, raised in the same small North American city.
They share roughly the same social class, religion and ethnicity - are even almost identical in age, one will be 80 in presidential election year 2016, the other will be 75.
But their views on such issues as the reality of human-caused global climate change (or the failure of most corporation boards to reflect the fact that the majority of humanity are women) could not be more different.
The child born in 1936 is the climate change denier, a member of the pre-war generation (The Greater Generation) and still a very firm believer in modernity and scientism.
But the child born in 1941 is the first of the post-war generation, the Boomers, a postmodern believer that we are collectively much better off with more diversity of opportunity for all.
Why should this particular and highly peculiar gap of a mere five years so separate these two kids --- even today ?
After all ,why does the child born in 1936 share more social views with her parents born in 1912 , 24 years earlier, than she does with the boy born in 1941 born only five years after her ?
And why does the boy born in 1941 share more social views with his great-grandson born in 2003, that is someone born 62 years later, than he does with the girl born only 5 years earlier ?
Let us go to the city hall of that small city and look there at the several dozen photographs of the young men killed in WWII, hanging along an honored wall.
One name in particular sticks out : a aircrew member killed in a tragic late wartime bomber crash landing in the UK, caused by wintertime bad weather over the North Sea.
Because while this particular teenager's story is known to both our formerly small kids , it is also known immensely differently by each : making one modern and the other postmodern.
Intellectually, the boy born in 1941 can stare at the face of this dead teenager from his own hometown and intellectually feel the tragedy for the boy, his home town sweetheart , his family, friends and neighbours.
But that is it - no real emotion link to this dead teenager : being born in late 1941 left our 75 year old with no personal memory whatsoever that he can tag as distinctly WWII-ish.
Yes, he does remember some events as far back as when he was three (in 1944) but nothing about them says they were wartime events of childhood.
But the little girl born in 1936 was one of the next door neighbours of the teenager killed in the bomber crash landing.
He was part of her earliest memories and when he went away to war, he became her one personal link to an immense social event that otherwise remained so distant and foreign to her.
His tragic accidental death, two months before the European war's end, hit her very very hard and it took years for her to make some sense of this seemingly meaningless death.
For his bomber was taking part in one of the very last mass bomber raids. Flak and fighter resistance from the Germans was very low and the raid was seemingly ordered only 'to move rubble about'.
So combat casualties on this raid had been unusually low and almost all would have returned safely but for a few bombers being so hardly affected by a patch of North Sea winter weather that they arrived over their home airfield almost out of fuel and with some of their instruments frozen up.
His bomber had made a pretty messy crash landing.
All the crew were more or less 'battered but alright', except for two badly injured members. One of the injured, him, died out his injuries two weeks later.
The details of his death arrived about the same time as VE Day.
Now scholars have mostly focused on researching WWI's wartime and post-war emotional response to tragic - useless seeming - deaths such as this teenager's.
What they have showed is that families and friends can only become reconciled to the tragic deaths of war youth if these deaths can be shown to have been useful, as well as heroic.
Invariably, the personnel at the scene of any wartime combat or accident death conspire successfully to ensure that the family learns only that the youth died bravely, stoically, heroically.
No one but them ever learns about the rear gunner hopelessly trapped in the crashed bomber, crying and balling for his mother like a baby in the horrible moments before the flames engulfed him.
But was his death useful ?
The usefulness of any and all war deaths is much more public - lies much more in areas we all free to debate.
Now the teenager's plane had taken part in two earlier bombing raids .
They had encountered heavy flak and fearsome jet fighter attacks - bomber casualties had been high and it took immense bravery for the teenager to go back a second and third time.
These raids had at least been aimed at important and as yet un-targeted war factories, even if the bombs as usual had mostly fallen on near by civilian streets.
In the mind of the young girl born in 1936, if the Allied Strategic Bombing Campaign (including the A-Bomb) can be believed to have both won and shortened the war, then the death of her teenager next door neighbour helped to both win and shorten the war.
He died - yes : but not in vain.
So her criticism of the Allied operations of WWII must be limited, to limit her emotional costs, to what military types call the areas of tactics and operations, not strategy.
Let us switch to WWI because this sort of limited modernist criticism is much better known there.
So a grieving mother in 1924 can explain : 'my son died - bravely - in the mud of Passchendaele - yes the stupid generals should have stopped it much earlier - but this offensive was very a necessity, to give the badly weakened French army time to regroup'.
The British strategy goes unquestioned but operationally - it is okay, even in right wing circles, to ask, 'did it really need to go on and on and on?'
So conservatives historians still share this British mother's viewpoint about 1917's Passchendaele debacle.
But it is possible to accept at least part of the contrasting French view.
After the failure of the Nivelle offensive led to a widespread French Army mutiny/trade action, most of the French leadership preferred to at long last to take up the usual German response to setbacks : go on the defensive and wait for a more opportune moment to attack.
In this case, to wait for millions of fresh (white) American troops and thousands of highly effective Renault FT tanks (the world's first modern tank).
A third view point (mine !) is to say that the French and English empire could have quickly defeated the German Empire on the Western Front, if only they had introduced much more of their colored colonial troops there - from India in particular.
WWI went on and on, in truth, because London and Paris would rather lose to (white) Germans than to win thanks only to efforts of millions of their dark subjects.
We only dare publish such heretical viewpoints about the total strategic uselessness of Passchendaele today because almost no one is left alive with enough energy to get highly emotional about besmirching the sacred memory of a remembered uncle killed in that battle.
Note well my exact words : very few today personally knew the dead of WWII.
After all, to be twelve in 1917 and have a crush on a twenty year old killed at Vimy one must be 110 in 2015.
One day such will be true also about WWII - but for now it is not.
To claim that old fashioned 'Willy and Joe' boots on the ground, not high tech big science Captian America planes in the air, actually won WWII will never be popular with hundreds of millions emotionally invested in seeing their friends and relatives as heroes in a war that Allied scientism won.
And it is WWII era scientism (denying any inability of Man to quickly fix any climate change problem that Mother Nature might throw up) not an inner denial of possible climate change happening today, is what is stalling real efforts to reduce CO2 output...
They share roughly the same social class, religion and ethnicity - are even almost identical in age, one will be 80 in presidential election year 2016, the other will be 75.
But their views on such issues as the reality of human-caused global climate change (or the failure of most corporation boards to reflect the fact that the majority of humanity are women) could not be more different.
The child born in 1936 is the climate change denier, a member of the pre-war generation (The Greater Generation) and still a very firm believer in modernity and scientism.
But the child born in 1941 is the first of the post-war generation, the Boomers, a postmodern believer that we are collectively much better off with more diversity of opportunity for all.
Why should this particular and highly peculiar gap of a mere five years so separate these two kids --- even today ?
After all ,why does the child born in 1936 share more social views with her parents born in 1912 , 24 years earlier, than she does with the boy born in 1941 born only five years after her ?
And why does the boy born in 1941 share more social views with his great-grandson born in 2003, that is someone born 62 years later, than he does with the girl born only 5 years earlier ?
Let us go to the city hall of that small city and look there at the several dozen photographs of the young men killed in WWII, hanging along an honored wall.
One name in particular sticks out : a aircrew member killed in a tragic late wartime bomber crash landing in the UK, caused by wintertime bad weather over the North Sea.
Because while this particular teenager's story is known to both our formerly small kids , it is also known immensely differently by each : making one modern and the other postmodern.
Intellectually, the boy born in 1941 can stare at the face of this dead teenager from his own hometown and intellectually feel the tragedy for the boy, his home town sweetheart , his family, friends and neighbours.
But that is it - no real emotion link to this dead teenager : being born in late 1941 left our 75 year old with no personal memory whatsoever that he can tag as distinctly WWII-ish.
Yes, he does remember some events as far back as when he was three (in 1944) but nothing about them says they were wartime events of childhood.
But the little girl born in 1936 was one of the next door neighbours of the teenager killed in the bomber crash landing.
He was part of her earliest memories and when he went away to war, he became her one personal link to an immense social event that otherwise remained so distant and foreign to her.
His tragic accidental death, two months before the European war's end, hit her very very hard and it took years for her to make some sense of this seemingly meaningless death.
For his bomber was taking part in one of the very last mass bomber raids. Flak and fighter resistance from the Germans was very low and the raid was seemingly ordered only 'to move rubble about'.
So combat casualties on this raid had been unusually low and almost all would have returned safely but for a few bombers being so hardly affected by a patch of North Sea winter weather that they arrived over their home airfield almost out of fuel and with some of their instruments frozen up.
His bomber had made a pretty messy crash landing.
All the crew were more or less 'battered but alright', except for two badly injured members. One of the injured, him, died out his injuries two weeks later.
The details of his death arrived about the same time as VE Day.
Now scholars have mostly focused on researching WWI's wartime and post-war emotional response to tragic - useless seeming - deaths such as this teenager's.
What they have showed is that families and friends can only become reconciled to the tragic deaths of war youth if these deaths can be shown to have been useful, as well as heroic.
Invariably, the personnel at the scene of any wartime combat or accident death conspire successfully to ensure that the family learns only that the youth died bravely, stoically, heroically.
No one but them ever learns about the rear gunner hopelessly trapped in the crashed bomber, crying and balling for his mother like a baby in the horrible moments before the flames engulfed him.
But was his death useful ?
The usefulness of any and all war deaths is much more public - lies much more in areas we all free to debate.
Now the teenager's plane had taken part in two earlier bombing raids .
They had encountered heavy flak and fearsome jet fighter attacks - bomber casualties had been high and it took immense bravery for the teenager to go back a second and third time.
These raids had at least been aimed at important and as yet un-targeted war factories, even if the bombs as usual had mostly fallen on near by civilian streets.
In the mind of the young girl born in 1936, if the Allied Strategic Bombing Campaign (including the A-Bomb) can be believed to have both won and shortened the war, then the death of her teenager next door neighbour helped to both win and shorten the war.
He died - yes : but not in vain.
So her criticism of the Allied operations of WWII must be limited, to limit her emotional costs, to what military types call the areas of tactics and operations, not strategy.
Let us switch to WWI because this sort of limited modernist criticism is much better known there.
So a grieving mother in 1924 can explain : 'my son died - bravely - in the mud of Passchendaele - yes the stupid generals should have stopped it much earlier - but this offensive was very a necessity, to give the badly weakened French army time to regroup'.
The British strategy goes unquestioned but operationally - it is okay, even in right wing circles, to ask, 'did it really need to go on and on and on?'
So conservatives historians still share this British mother's viewpoint about 1917's Passchendaele debacle.
But it is possible to accept at least part of the contrasting French view.
After the failure of the Nivelle offensive led to a widespread French Army mutiny/trade action, most of the French leadership preferred to at long last to take up the usual German response to setbacks : go on the defensive and wait for a more opportune moment to attack.
In this case, to wait for millions of fresh (white) American troops and thousands of highly effective Renault FT tanks (the world's first modern tank).
A third view point (mine !) is to say that the French and English empire could have quickly defeated the German Empire on the Western Front, if only they had introduced much more of their colored colonial troops there - from India in particular.
WWI went on and on, in truth, because London and Paris would rather lose to (white) Germans than to win thanks only to efforts of millions of their dark subjects.
We only dare publish such heretical viewpoints about the total strategic uselessness of Passchendaele today because almost no one is left alive with enough energy to get highly emotional about besmirching the sacred memory of a remembered uncle killed in that battle.
Note well my exact words : very few today personally knew the dead of WWII.
After all, to be twelve in 1917 and have a crush on a twenty year old killed at Vimy one must be 110 in 2015.
One day such will be true also about WWII - but for now it is not.
To claim that old fashioned 'Willy and Joe' boots on the ground, not high tech big science Captian America planes in the air, actually won WWII will never be popular with hundreds of millions emotionally invested in seeing their friends and relatives as heroes in a war that Allied scientism won.
And it is WWII era scientism (denying any inability of Man to quickly fix any climate change problem that Mother Nature might throw up) not an inner denial of possible climate change happening today, is what is stalling real efforts to reduce CO2 output...
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Matter over Mind - Wild over Will , decided WWII
Germany : lost a war it should have won through inefficiency or lost a war it couldn't have won at 110% efficiency ?
The majority of old school (modernist) authors on WWII (men mostly 70 years or older) will go to their graves unbending from a belief that human factors, not material factors , decided WWII.
Because basically they are still modernists at heart and that is what modernists do - or did .
The modernists thought that modern technology had solved most 'natural' issues and so they saw the material world as a largely inert backdrop to WWII's ongoing human drama over unresolved human issues.
Younger writers - post-modernists in spirit - once again appreciate that there distinct limits to human abilities and that natural cum material reality is not something to be underestimated.
So we are more open to evidence that the German Empire used what scant resources it had as least as good as the American, British and Russian Empires used their far more abundant ones.
But the German resource base (conquered lands and peoples and all) was still far too weak to beat off all three of its major opponents at the same time.
It once again lost a long slogging match in a war of attrition.
It had tried and won a war of blitzkrieg on nine of the eleven european countries it attacked, but then tried and failed a war of attrition on the tenth, the UK.
As a result of that failure in September 1940, Germany had to divide its forces between the various UK fronts and the Russia front when it tried to brazen out a blitzkrieg war upon Russia in June 1941 -thus ensuring its ultimate defeat.
It simply could not front-load its Russian effort strong enough to sustain an assault on Moscow against what should Germans should have expected as resistance from Nature and Russian, given their nine earlier risk-filled blitzkrieg experiences.
Too many skilled men and too much good war material had already been lost on various other war fronts since 1938 and the replacements were simply coming in too small and too slow.
But even if Germany had conquered the British Isles and European Russia - what then ?
The Nazis were not racists - defenders of all the White Race or even defenders of just Western Europe.
Rather they were extreme nationalists who couldn't much abide even their own Italian and Hungarian allies or their closest Aryan cum Nordic cousins like the Dutch and the Norwegians - let alone any true 'outsiders'.
They quickly offended all their potential allies - mostly by being forced to be greedy with others' human and material resources, because their own country was too small in population or natural resources to sustain its war empire.
And this was a problem that only got bigger, not smaller, with each new "success" .
Without real heartfelt allies, Germany couldn't have defended an empire the size of the USA or the USSR against the rest of the world for long , not on its own national manpower base.
And your own national manpower base is truly a natural limit - because even an all-out human effort can only increase it in terms of many decades not a few years.
Offending all your potential allies was a human failing of Germany - having too few people and natural resources of its own was a natural failing of Germany : together they doomed its war efforts ....
Because basically they are still modernists at heart and that is what modernists do - or did .
The modernists thought that modern technology had solved most 'natural' issues and so they saw the material world as a largely inert backdrop to WWII's ongoing human drama over unresolved human issues.
Younger writers - post-modernists in spirit - once again appreciate that there distinct limits to human abilities and that natural cum material reality is not something to be underestimated.
So we are more open to evidence that the German Empire used what scant resources it had as least as good as the American, British and Russian Empires used their far more abundant ones.
But the German resource base (conquered lands and peoples and all) was still far too weak to beat off all three of its major opponents at the same time.
It once again lost a long slogging match in a war of attrition.
It had tried and won a war of blitzkrieg on nine of the eleven european countries it attacked, but then tried and failed a war of attrition on the tenth, the UK.
As a result of that failure in September 1940, Germany had to divide its forces between the various UK fronts and the Russia front when it tried to brazen out a blitzkrieg war upon Russia in June 1941 -thus ensuring its ultimate defeat.
It simply could not front-load its Russian effort strong enough to sustain an assault on Moscow against what should Germans should have expected as resistance from Nature and Russian, given their nine earlier risk-filled blitzkrieg experiences.
Too many skilled men and too much good war material had already been lost on various other war fronts since 1938 and the replacements were simply coming in too small and too slow.
But even if Germany had conquered the British Isles and European Russia - what then ?
The Nazis were not racists - defenders of all the White Race or even defenders of just Western Europe.
Rather they were extreme nationalists who couldn't much abide even their own Italian and Hungarian allies or their closest Aryan cum Nordic cousins like the Dutch and the Norwegians - let alone any true 'outsiders'.
They quickly offended all their potential allies - mostly by being forced to be greedy with others' human and material resources, because their own country was too small in population or natural resources to sustain its war empire.
And this was a problem that only got bigger, not smaller, with each new "success" .
Without real heartfelt allies, Germany couldn't have defended an empire the size of the USA or the USSR against the rest of the world for long , not on its own national manpower base.
And your own national manpower base is truly a natural limit - because even an all-out human effort can only increase it in terms of many decades not a few years.
Offending all your potential allies was a human failing of Germany - having too few people and natural resources of its own was a natural failing of Germany : together they doomed its war efforts ....
Thursday, June 28, 2012
97% consensus of climate scientists OPPOSED good evidence of climate change in 1892,1902,1922,1942 etc
If today's climate scientists are united in accepting evidence of climate change it is NOT because the evidence has changed that way.
It is because the scientists themselves have changed - no longer living in (and promoting) High Modernity with its rarified/reified views of the unlimited potential of Man to quickly solve any little problem He himself might create.
Now they live in post-hegemonic times and while most of the population still lives off the values of High Modernity, most scientists in the non-applied physical sciences now reflect the values of low postmodernity and global commensality, with their much more cautious assessment of what Humanity can do to reverse the problems it itself creates.
One can confidently claim that if the case for human climate change via excess carbon pollution of the atmosphere had been put forth forcefully,repeatedly and publicly by a determined but small body of climate scientists during the heyday of High Modernity, it would have been shot down with the same sort of mechanisms that today's modernist , denier, scientists are still using.
Inadequate sets of data, uncertainty of cause versus effect, contaminated data sets - on and on.
If worrying about being able to reverse carbon pollution in time is a pecularily postmodernist concern - and I hold that it is - then we can see how other postmodernist style concerns and beliefs were in fact harshly dealt with, back in the salad days of High Modernity.
The Missoula Floods, Tectonic Plates, bacteria in extreme environments like deep down oil wells, bacterial horizontal gene transfer / biofilms / molecular mimicry / quorum sensing. Bacterial Endosymbiosis leading to the development of all multi-celled life including humans.
All these were introduced by good scientists, using good evidence, to the general scientific world in the 1920s and shot down and often the scientist involved were hounded out of any chance of future advancement.
Later on, in the post-modern era and using the same evidence as was available in the 1920s, their theories were accepted into the general consensus ---- in fact forming the very foundation of it !
All had suffered scientific death earlier, because they crossed a forbidden line in the modernist sand : Modernity's core axiom : that the small building blocks of Reality were simple and stable at the bottom and got ever more complex and ever more unstable at they got bigger.
If I can switch from biology to physics, I need only add that holding that view today would get you thrown out of all grad seminars in any physics department world wide, thanks to the overwhelming experimental support for all the various quantum theories.
And need I add that the quantum theories were at best half-accepted in the 1920s on onward (half accepted until that white knight, Einstein, would return surely proving them wrong).
In any case, they were silently ignored in daily physics work, all through the apogee of High Modernity Science.
Today the modernists are no longer hegemonic dictators but mere 'deniers' and have been pushed into the vast, but academically less powerful worlds of applied and popular science.....
It is because the scientists themselves have changed - no longer living in (and promoting) High Modernity with its rarified/reified views of the unlimited potential of Man to quickly solve any little problem He himself might create.
Now they live in post-hegemonic times and while most of the population still lives off the values of High Modernity, most scientists in the non-applied physical sciences now reflect the values of low postmodernity and global commensality, with their much more cautious assessment of what Humanity can do to reverse the problems it itself creates.
One can confidently claim that if the case for human climate change via excess carbon pollution of the atmosphere had been put forth forcefully,repeatedly and publicly by a determined but small body of climate scientists during the heyday of High Modernity, it would have been shot down with the same sort of mechanisms that today's modernist , denier, scientists are still using.
Inadequate sets of data, uncertainty of cause versus effect, contaminated data sets - on and on.
If worrying about being able to reverse carbon pollution in time is a pecularily postmodernist concern - and I hold that it is - then we can see how other postmodernist style concerns and beliefs were in fact harshly dealt with, back in the salad days of High Modernity.
The Missoula Floods, Tectonic Plates, bacteria in extreme environments like deep down oil wells, bacterial horizontal gene transfer / biofilms / molecular mimicry / quorum sensing. Bacterial Endosymbiosis leading to the development of all multi-celled life including humans.
All these were introduced by good scientists, using good evidence, to the general scientific world in the 1920s and shot down and often the scientist involved were hounded out of any chance of future advancement.
Later on, in the post-modern era and using the same evidence as was available in the 1920s, their theories were accepted into the general consensus ---- in fact forming the very foundation of it !
All had suffered scientific death earlier, because they crossed a forbidden line in the modernist sand : Modernity's core axiom : that the small building blocks of Reality were simple and stable at the bottom and got ever more complex and ever more unstable at they got bigger.
If I can switch from biology to physics, I need only add that holding that view today would get you thrown out of all grad seminars in any physics department world wide, thanks to the overwhelming experimental support for all the various quantum theories.
And need I add that the quantum theories were at best half-accepted in the 1920s on onward (half accepted until that white knight, Einstein, would return surely proving them wrong).
In any case, they were silently ignored in daily physics work, all through the apogee of High Modernity Science.
Today the modernists are no longer hegemonic dictators but mere 'deniers' and have been pushed into the vast, but academically less powerful worlds of applied and popular science.....
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