Posts by Dennis Frank
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Hard News: The Greens' pretty good new…, in reply to Farmer Green,
That's been the case, but it's a perception/reality thing. Business as usual only perpetuates as mass psychology because it has been the source of employment. That paradigm seems increasingly unsustainable. Once the shift starts there's a good chance voters will act like pebbles in a landslide.
My problem with the Greens is that they present as too mainstream. Green policies are largely sensible. Fear of a non-oil-based economy is reasonable enough but people did learn to live outside caves. Adapt or die...
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Hard News: The Greens' pretty good new…, in reply to Farmer Green,
Exactly, and that's been the situation most of our lives. But now polls show a majority favouring legalisation, the Greens are blowing with this wind, and those stuck in the rut look increasingly out of touch with the zeitgeist.
Political logic says parties most in accord with most voters prosper - let's see if it happens, or if "it's the economy, stupid" prevails again.
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Hard News: The Greens' pretty good new…, in reply to Farmer Green,
There wasn't one. You're right that the issue hasn't been dealt with properly, but that's because all the people with experience are unable to speak publicly from that position. If a law change provides them with freedom of speech, public discourse will acquire an unprecedented semblance of balance.
Mind-altering drugs are potentially harmful to anyone with a vulnerable mind. Children are the most vulnerable group, closely followed by those with a marginal grasp on reality. We can't stop either bunch experimenting, due to freedom of choice. Damage will always be done.
There's a reason humanity always used natural hallucinogens: the world gets a lot more interesting! Subtle dimensions of our collective reality that were not apparent get revealed to users. The downside is delusional thinking, of course, and users with sociopathic inclinations always dramatised that. There is such a thing as natural magic but there's also the black. Shamanism seems mostly to use the former but voodoo the latter. The upside of a sophisticated approach to drug usage is empowerment, insight, wisdom - the downside is mind control (a la Manson) & mass psychosis (Jonestown).
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I was an active contributor to the revision & was pleasantly surprised by how the process developed. We performed major surgery on Kevin Hague's language & phraseology but his plan was a sound basis upon which to proceed. Fair to say the product became more staunch than the basis!
Back in '91 I became convenor of the GP justice policy working group, inheriting the first draft from the initial convenor who had just resigned, and discovered there was nothing re marijuana in the policy. "Typical leftist wimps", I thought in disgust, and promptly wrote a new draft declaring that the Greens would decriminalise cannabis and proceeded to drive it through the consensus process. Once I got regional support, I took the draft to NORML to see if they thought it suitable, met Nandor (who a few years ago confirmed to me that it was the genesis of his involvement with the Greens). I was quite amused to discover that nobody now thinks decriminalisation sufficient - back then everyone was busy rejecting our original hippie legalisation stance from 45 years ago in order to present the Greens as compromisers (not radicals). Full circle, eh?
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to andin,
The new age thing really did turn to custard big-time in the nineties. There was always a large quotient of delusional thinking around the various fields it encompassed since theosophy invented the concept late nineteenth century. Esoteric shit goes back millennia but you can always discover elements of reality under the dross - if you go looking for them.
Likewise the et dimension. Too many credible eyewitness accounts have been proliferating for generations to dismiss them along with the nutters. I ended up using both/and logic just like modern physics: until the observer collapses the wave function, something is real/unreal. I don't believe in them, never having seen any. Neither do I disbelieve.
Re employment & WINZ nazis, yeah, I get why they become targets to people. State agents import a distasteful set of attitudes from both left & right governments. Having retired, I can only sympathise with folks having to endure the crap still, and with employment becoming unreliable there's a worsening trend.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Stephen R,
Yes, Stephen, I did mean community in that more general sense. It's probably happening to some extent via social media, but nowhere near enough. A sense of community will co-generate whenever/wherever folks are in frequent interaction with each other on the basis of common interests, shared values, beliefs, etc.
Once such social organisms start functioning, each will generate a distinctive culture that will become evident to observers. Having evolved as social animals, we need to belong to such groups, and their culture gives us a social ambience as part of our environment. The generic symbol for the holistic relation (of part to whole) is the circle with a dot at its center. Goes back millennia.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to andin,
I've spent a long time trying to figure that out. There's more of a basis for taking the alien thing seriously than you'd think, but that ought not to motivate us to be distracted by it too much. Occam's Razor suggests that mass psychology has deep enough dimensions to explain social complexity without adding the et factor in.
Selfishness seems to have become amplified by capitalist marketing strategy post WW2. The atomisation thesis. Selll more product if you create more choices, so there has to be consumers with many different tastes.
Breaking down traditional social bonds created a looser matrix & greater personal autonomy. Speaking from experience, us boomers had to break free of the shackles because trad society was so repressive. We didn't need to read Orwell - we knew he was just extrapolating from our status quo. Now that the pendulum has swung to the other extreme, younger generations will have to reinvent community as a survival strategy.
Doing so when everyone is into their own thing may seem daunting, but every generation faces a collective challenge that the zeitgeist provides them, so one just has to connect up with others who sense the rising tide.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Rich Lock,
Yeah, you get the impression some of these people just get off on trying to con others with bullshit. Such people have always been around - unfortunately online media gets them a lot more prominence nowadays. Social media is getting so toxic users are disconnecting & I expect that trend to snowball.
It could produce a counter-trend in which intelligent design of social media starts to provide safe havens for those who seek a quality experience? But the race to the bottom still seems appealing to many (probably because freefall is such fun).
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to andin,
Progress, for us here in Aotearoa, would involve Labour, the Greens & NZ First agreeing to form a center-left government so voters have a positive alternative to the status quo. Too bad they think competing is better than collaborating, eh? Clever people would do both concurrently. They said Gerald Ford was an unsuitable president due to being unable to walk & chew gum at the same time. Same problem.
In a more global sense, progress still requires a sustainable economy rather than destroy nature to maximise short-term profits. Trump met with Al Gore - apparently because his daughter is onto it. If he wises up & starts being presidential, some alt-rightist will probably assassinate him.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Farmer Green,
No, much more than just a will to survive (athough I needed that to survive my father's method of parenting). In literature, it has always been described as mystic, or as a sense of oneness with nature. I had it as a child, by virtue of solitary rambles through the local bush not seeing a human for hours on end, just me surrounded by plants.
Jan Christian Smuts described it in his autobiography (from exploring the high veldt in his youth). Bob Marley went to #1 with his song Oneness. Some interpret the mystical feeling as spiritual and I'm not averse to that. Ecospirituality was an accepted part of the green movement long ago - probably can trace it back to the hippies sticking flowers into the barrels of the guns of the troops in their peace protests. Smuts rose to general in the Boer Army.
Winston Churchill made him a Field Marshal in the British Army so he could serve in the War Cabinet (WW2) because he was so good at thrashing the Brits in battle (I presume). A warrior mystic, eh? His book Holism and Evolution (1927) is a gem even now. He also wrote the Preamble to the United Nations Charter (and served two separate terms as PM of South Africa).