by BlisteredWhippet » Sun 10 Dec 2006, 18:10:08
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('HamRadioRocks', '
')But the rest of us should be allowed to eat all the meat we want without feeling like we're endangering the human race. Besides, I'd like to see someone tell Nicole Richie to go meatless.
This is a Nicole Richie Straw Man. According to Jevon, the meat she's not eating ends up on
your plate.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '
')My point is animals are an intregal part of a human culture and always have been and so there is a need for respectful meat eating in an integrated agrarian culture.
Define "respectful".
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')The alternative to factory death meat and ridiculous veganism is [fill in the blanks] sustainable, local, integrated, small scale, pasture, grass-fed, free-range, humanely-and respectfully-killed, non-factory-slaughterhouse, non-concentration-camp-caged animalculture.
I am starting to doubt lines of reasoning that suggest such idyllic conditions as possible in this society. We are utilizing 100% of our available "pastureland" for food, fuel, and suburban sprawl.
The more realistic notion I've seen is the spread of permaculture into areas previously unable to support agriculture, re: Lovelock. Imagine Archer Daniels Midland being busted up by a holt trinity of FDA, SEC, amd BOC, chastised into reallocating their F-12 Wheat fields into "All Creatures Great and Small" pastureland. What brand of Lysergic Acid cigarettes have you been smoking?
Sure, farmers are slowly transitioning to no-till, rotating crop schemes... out of desperation over the decades of damage already done. And these small players are now a single-digit fraction of the American agricultural scene. The rest is controlled by banks, biotech, and agribusiness. All they care about is genetic varieties and government subsidies.
The original poster is not suggesting an alternative to his tastes. He wants his meat, period. He gets bad dreams without meat. Ther eis no way in hell 250 million meat-addicts are going to switch over to "sustainable" beef, just like there is going to be no shortage of buyers for the last dwindling stocks of fish.
HamRadioRocker is simply saying that he wants to eat meat. He has a taste for it, and he will consume it no matter where it comes from.
Still, he doesn't seem to realize there is a bounty of free-range European rabbits running around pell-mell that he could eat. The prolific bunny-burger is free-range, and lives a cruelty-free lifestyle. The common deer population is decimating native plants across North America. A case could easily be made for the corrective application of widespread killing here. Other plauge species would include crows, rats, feral cats and dogs. Any of these species could be delicious appropriately spiced and turned into sausage or patties. But will we? No, becuase we don't have an "integrated agrarian economy". On 1 in 50 people are employed in the business of agriculture in this country. The rest shuffle paper, drive their cars, breed, and eat meat- LOTS of meat. More meat than even our ancestors dreamed of.
And we're fat, slow, decrepit. People are
melting into vile tubs of goo, and as a result, the health care industry will surpass all other sectors as we become the world's first "Hospital State". The Surgeon General will "Draft" kids into nursing... We will become a nation of butt and chin wipers, as we cater to the demands of a singularly idiotic generation who believes with every cell in their body that the evasion of death is the greatest social mission...
HamRadioRocks is simply saying that he wants to eat meat. He wants to
consecrate this lifestyle for himself. He is not interested in considerations beyond or between his plate and his stomach. He is not going to consider any other mode of lifestyle. He will eat meat until his organs fail. He will not change, just as many others will not change. Only until he is forced by circumstance to change, will he change. And this change will be in the form of
meat-seeking behavior. Like a zombie with a taste for blood, his diet-religion will compel him to hunt the aforementioned cat, dog, rabbit, or deer. In the absence of meat he will be without his God. He will feel incomplete, forsaken. He will munch bitterly on tubers and remain unsatisfied. He will be resentful, suspicious, anxious, and desperate without his communion. A dangerous, if pathetic figure.
That, I believe, is destiny for most Americans. They will not believe it, though. Not as they sit with their families around a dead bird for Christmas dinner, bought with a weak dollar, wages from a job scavenging the last remnants of value from a society no longer "integrated" or "agrarian". They will gather around in respectful prayer and veneration for the table laden with meat dishes, and give thanks to God- not the millions of immigrants working in slaughterhouses, not the biotech turning agriculture into "food prouction", not the economies of scale that make such flagrantly wasteful practices a bizarre artifact of a fraction of human history- not the billions of surplus humans, without which there would not be such intense pressure on economic and political systems to recreate the entire natural world as depositories for human consumption.
No, meat is the central sacrament in a worldview, a religious practice. It is not a personal, vital practice- it is transcendental. It beggars no justification. Where meat eaters go, they bring their rationale, their worldview, their mythologies. To them, veganism is another religion, its tenets a temple, its followers heretical, threatening, pagan. It stinks of animism- it sounds to their ears like animal
worship. Veganism is of the Earth. Dirt, things that commiserate with worms and fetid creepy-crawlies, beyond the veil.
Meat eaters say that vegetables are food for food. This is a meta-philosophy. Pulling food out of the dirt is unclean. Nourishment from the flank of an animal is purer. It is purified by being ingested by the animal, and still, the stink of life must be washed from it, boiled away, purified. Vegans speak of compost, manure, the fermentation of things, which are precisely the aspects of animals which are cut away in "cleaning" them: the internal organs.
Nevermind that, for native populations, muscle tissues were the
least important parts of the animal. For the psychic forebears of today's meat-muchers, the life force was in the still-beating heart, the hot, bloody kidneys and liver. Meat eaters today carry nothing of the true legacy of the hunter. Neither do today's vegans carry anything of the true legacy of the gatherer.
The mythologies of both veganism and contemporary carnivorism are mere shadows of the truly "integrated" human animal- the hunter AND gatherer. "Free range" was not a
food concept. It was not an
animal concept- it was a
human concept. The hunter-gather was "Free-range", not his
food. He experienced no ethical or religious dilemmas when eating practically
anything that crossed his path. He could drop a bird out of tree with a rock. He would flip it over, put his feet on the wings and, by pulling feet with a jerk, disembowel the animal. The heart was especially delicious. He might take some feathers and left most of the carcass to be overtaken by various other animals.
The eating of muscle tissue was not efficient. In a world where wild game was abundant, as compared to today, "efficiency" wasn't an issue. "Food" was everywhere. It was everywhere because people knew where to look for it. HamRadioRocks is just like this guy, except he doesn't know where to look. The pathways of knowledge have collapsed. Now, he simply knows what his stomach knows- muscle tissue.
Agrarian religion follows agriculture. "Give us this day our daily bread" suggests a human population divorced from the knowledge of where to find food. The church and state monopoly on land and the investment of the bulk of human energy into agricultural societies created a situation where the humans were corralled, no longer "free-range", because the "range" wasn't "free".
This phenomenon has evolved right up to the present day. The WTO, the worlds agribusiness, is focused with laserlike attention on developing a strain of wheat grain to feed the world. Bread is just as responsible for the state of man's enslavement to the system just as much as meat is.
Today, we are not "free". We are as "not free" as the hen in the henhouse laying eggs. Like the hen, we eat what is fed to us. We cannot "range freely". We have only our food religions, our shadowy, simplified folkways that mimic the things we really need.
Permaculture is just another flash in the pan, another religion. Its pedigree is distinctly European and scientific. Its philosophy conveniently mixes producitivity and sustainability, as if the most sustainable method is also the most "productive".
The dilemma I face, as a conteintious farmer, is that for all the food I produce, I make the human population problem worse. The fundametnal assumption is that the land is for production, and that nature exists to serve our own needs. So farming is life-support for an unsustainable population.
I see the food problem expanding in one of two directions- and it doesn't look good. One is the massively expanding population combined with shrinking actual resources (nutrient and otehrwise) will require an unending intensification of agriculture until nature is completely converted from wildness into systems for feeding everyone, and the political system is oriented toward feeding people (and keeping people alive). Permaculture is simply a method for implementing this system with its efficiency and productive methodology. Its not a significant change of course, in fact, its not a change of course at all. It is just another method of keeping 49 people happily stuffed for every 1 person engaged in the business of it. Those 49 people will be simply engaged in some other aspect of life as determined by the social order. Widget makers, paper shufflers,
consumers.
The other direction is revolutionary. It attempts to restore balance by giving back to nature. Restoring land to the point where food grows on the land. Where "food" runs freely throughout the land. No-till farming is a rudimentary analouge of the concept of returning nature to a healthy state, as a natural garden- that will grow us food without us having to do anything.
But circumstances interject. As Norman Borlough, inventor of Hybrid strains put it, "I don't see 3 billion volunteers to leave the planet". And in the absense of a true, contientious effort toward the goal of returning nature to a state of balance, I see the only rationally acceptable course as turning the entire planet into a lifeboat.
The USA leads the way in the effort to populate the Earth, making its moral and economic mission the project of turning the world's starving, teeming masses into apartment-dwelling, PS3-playing
consumers. With the destruction of local, sustainable agriculture, the movement of population from the country to cities accelerates. The growth of cities means more engines for consumer appetite.
The problem with contemporary technologists is that they think they can engineer solutions for the problem. Most engineers are Christian, and they all have the model of Jesus feeding the crowd with loaves of bread and a few fish. Its an engineering problem. Jesus is the food engineer's God.
The fact is, I think the solution IS the problem, because we will all end up enslaved by food engineers, permaculturists simply being another permutation of food engineer. A food engineer saying we can run our our social SUV on bioveggies instead of petromeat. This is not a fundamental reversal of course.
The result is still a nigthmare world where nature is destroyed for the sake of man's fulfillment, and nothing more. We WILL destroy the Earth. Stephen Hawking is a very smart man for suggesting we need to travel to other planets. It is simple deductive logic that arrives at this unassailable conclusion.
When it comes right down to it, HamRadioRocks' consciousness is par for the level of consciousness in America and much of the world. I want what my taste buds want, and nothing more. A meat machine that eats meat. This is what passes for "philosophy of life". This is the "hollow man" T.S. Eliot wrote about. This society and global culture is the "Kingdom" he speaks of. We live in Nature's corpse, stuffed and hollow, destroying the planet. Reimagine Christmas dinner as "stuffed" parasites, "groping together, avoiding speech". Society is filled with the "nonviolent", yet great violence is done. Who takes responsibility?
God will not take responsibility. "Prayers to broken stone" is our ethos, the ascendency of the agriculturalist religions over the animism of hunter-gatherer societies and cultures. Much meat will be blessed by their forebears this season. Somewhere, a future food engineer is being born. Some of us wait for the Kingdom of Death to come render his job obsolete. Until then...
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')-I-
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
! But when you think about it..cows are fucking HIGHLY INNEFICIENT..they eat shitload of land (be it grains or pasture) and need insane quantity of water !!!
..Now the big problem is...where the f*** i can get this land on the cheap while we still can do it 
!
...
