This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff

oh man 100th page soon what are we going to do.

we need to celebrate in a manner that doesn't consist of heated social debates.

Let's celebrate with heated social debates!

we could talk... about the rich history... of eagletime forums...

Let's celebrate with heated social debates!

More like REheated social debates!

truth be told, amongst the people on this forum I am probably in the best position, financially/otherwise to take this information to heart and redirect a greater proportion of my resources toward more productive things. I'm just also bad at arguments so my only contribution is a dumb pun ok toodle pip

we could talk... about the rich history... of eagletime forums...

A long time ago, Jesus descended upon a G*dless land known as MSPA. Miracles were performed, a select few saw the Lord's Glory, and that's how the Eagle Time Forums came to be

That's me I'm the Scheezus of MSPA

i read your posts wheat

Show Content

SpoilerIs this a sound rebuttal? I lost my train of thought like 5 times composing my argument.

It is sound in the debate sense, in that you choose a value and take a stance based on that value and explicate how and why. I don't agree with it, but I don't have to; it's a logically consistent argument if you consider 'the right to the pursuit of happiness' to be universal or true. If we were going to keep this going I would respond with why I don't think that value is a valid one and why that interpretation of that value is flawed or unhelpful, but that's kind of beside the point by now.

Let's say you're already making your contribution to society. Is it wrong to try and make some money on the side off of what you're doing for fun?

I don't think there is, and in fact would encourage it in a socialized-capitalism scenario. People are going to create whether they're compensated or not, but some amount of compensation allows them to do so with less pressure or without sacrificing other things, which means a wider variety of creative output will be available for others' leisure consumption.

Of course, advertising itself is a wholly separate beast, and probably not within the purview of this conversation.

All I'm saying is that people shouldn't spend ALL their free time and money on things that serve no purpose but temporary enjoyment

you complain about strawman fallacies and yet you characterize everyone disagreeing with you as contradicting the above

Nnn... No? I neither explicitly nor intentionally-implicitly do so. Inasmuch as I said I don't think anyone who has ever been involved in a conversation like this has ever advocated "Do only charity forever", I don't think anyone (or few people) thinks that anyone should focus solely on hedonism or escapism or fun. Real people are rarely at one extreme or the other, and I don't mean to say they are. All I was pointing out is that the kneejerk reaction to most conversations that stray into this territory is to misrepresent the stance I took in the manner I described, or to interpret the suggestion that most people spend too much of their time and energy on frivolity and themselves as a personal insult (Which it's not! A criticism of a lifestyle, certainly, but no more of an insult than anyone with a held ideology pointing out when others don't conform to it and suggesting it would be best if they did.); nowhere within that exchange is supposed to paint people on the other side of the conversation as mindlessly self-indulgent or that disagreement with me is tantamount to uncaringness.

maybe the reason you suffer misinterpretation is because you frequently start on this favorite argument track

I feel like you may be conflating me with wheat to an extent here. It's certainly a subject we've both mentioned on occasion, but I don't think I've done it in any sense describable as "frequently". Maybe I have! I am more than willing to admit to cognitive biases, or that conversations I feel are distinct from this one don't read that way to you or others, but I honestly don't feel like I talk about this very often, and even more rarely initiate the discussion. I mostly avoid talking politics and economics and so forth with internet people because I know I have a tendency to get irritated and make the conversation unpleasant. Or I think I do, at least! You're your own biggest blind spot. I could well harp on this; I know others do.

p.s. what is your view on housework/child-raising/familial affective labor re: "making good use of your free time" and also re: being compensated by th' gummint for such

That one is... tricky. I have yet to form a solid personal ideology there, which I realize is a pretty sizable gap in an already-extremely-idealistic Utopia Plan. I do question the value of the family as the unit of child-rearing, but I know that I'm even less likely to find much support for any kind of redistribution of child-rearing labor than I am for radical socialism. I certainly am not against people having babies or making a home. I feel that the reduction of working hours by the consolidation of services and removal of competition and superfluity will give a much better chance to do those things and do them effectively, which is great.

If you mean "What do I think about those things in the actual real reality we have right now", I think they are important and necessary roles, and in no way think that having a family is a waste of time, if for no other reason than the positive externalities that come from children raised well and in stable situations. Sure, ideally things would be such that it would be reasonable to expect more from someone whose primary duties were in those realms, but that's not how things are now.

That said, I don't think that in the hypothetical society we're talking about that the government would be compensating family groups that chose to have children; homemaking and child-rearing and the like primarily benefit just you and your immediate family, in much the same way that choosing to landscape your property does slightly benefit others by raising the value of the area and making it more pleasant to live in, but it is primarily a task done for your own gratification and satisfaction. If we're talking about creche-workers, that's a different story, of course, but a family for its own sake falls more into the leisure than labor category.

truth be told, amongst the people on this forum I am probably in the best position, financially/otherwise to take this information to heart and redirect a greater proportion of my resources toward more productive things. I'm just also bad at arguments so my only contribution is a dumb pun ok toodle pip

I'd hardly call "educating the childrens" an unproductive thing to be doing

@Slorange: fair enough, I guess I misread you there. also sorry for conflating you with wheat, I only see these arguments and such occasionally and had the general impression you agreed enough that my point could apply to both, but I guess you're not as dogged about bringing it up so a lot of it doesn't make sense in regards to you. oops
at least you replied to it, though

the history of how eagle time came to be is actually a far more heated and unpleasant discussion

you're a huge nerd wheat

truth be told, amongst the people on this forum I am probably in the best position, financially/otherwise to take this information to heart and redirect a greater proportion of my resources toward more productive things. I'm just also bad at arguments so my only contribution is a dumb pun ok toodle pip

I'd hardly call "educating the childrens" an unproductive thing to be doing

Mmm, but

I'm educating the children, within a framework which I believe is very damaging, and very ineffective at raising kids with the capacity to go out and learn stuff for themselves outside of the 9-4. Even under the pitch of "cultural exchange" or "internationalisation" to this rural part of Japan, I'm not doing as thorough a job of that as I could. I'm doing this on Japanese taxpayer money, which when you factor in the thousands of ALTs around the country becomes a not-inconsiderable cost.

The selection process as well excludes anyone who hasn't completed a bachelor's degree at a college/university, which is a whole 'nother shitty system I've supported by patronising it. ON WHICH NOTE

My degree was done mostly for self-indulgence purposes; beyond the nice scroll of paper that qualified me for this current job (in conjunction with what genetics and a stable household gave me) it's not proven relevant to my capacity to better society.
Heck, I'll admit conservation has tangible benefits to humanity, but the kind I'm into? Not so much. Octopi, corvids, and kakapo aren't keystone members in economically important ecological systems, and the reasons to preserve their habitat and populations can and will come in conflict with the push to get all the humans the resources they need.

FUck, FUCK, I've been wrecked

the history of how eagle time came to be is actually a far more heated and unpleasant discussion

you're a huge nerd wheat

Online Quiz: Which Big Bang Theory Character Are You? You scored SHELDON. Bazing

a

Shit, the shantytown's leaking.

NNOOOOO
now page 100 is topped with my wreckage
I'll never live this down

Octopi, corvids, and kakapo aren't keystone members in economically important ecological systems, and the reasons to preserve their habitat and populations can and will come in conflict with the push to get all the humans the resources they need.

Then screw humans. Conservation efforts are, if anything, more important than social efforts.
I mean, what, like humans aren't going to have severe issues getting the resources they need no matter what?

No.

Nononononono.

I just woke up so I'm not in a position to tell you why that is very wrong but I will school you so hard if that was anything but facetious

Oh? Interesting!
I think what I said was fairly sincere, if somewhat off-the-cuff, so by all means, school me.

Yeah uh
we can without a doubt sustain the human population

Although many animals show evidence of intelligence and feelings and deserve some rights because of that, we know for certain that all humans are sentient beings capable of suffering and despair. The alleviation of human suffering has to be put first, especially since so much of it is inflicted by human-created, human-sustained power structures that we can dismantle. A more enlightened, better-organized and more equal society would be much more able to protect the Earth's environment than we are now. You can't expect people to care about preserving wild lands or not contributing to climate change when they don't have access to nutrition and medical care. Environmentalism is altruistic, sure, but like any act of "giving up" it's fundamentally a luxury and honestly the amount of people who are well-off enough to do silly things like buy solar panels and organic food is too small a fraction of the population to change anything anyway.

Sorry if this sounds angry, I promise I'm not mad. I just felt the point needed to be made.

I mean, what, like humans aren't going to have severe issues getting the resources they need no matter what?

Arrigh', so

I don't know beans from bean-counting, so this post in general is going to be vague, and anyone bringing the STATISTICS is welcome up ins.

For convenience's sake, we'd need to divvy up conservation management into a couple categories - namely, management which benefits an economically important taxa (pollinators like bumblebees, food species like fish, wild-type subspecies/cultivars of economically important crops for genetic diversity, plus an unknown factor in poorly-studied organisms which may have applications in the pharmaceutical industry), and economically unimportant taxa (taxa which humans feel a moral obligation to prevent the decline of, i.e. all the charismatic megafauna like pandas, tigers, elephants, rhinos, gray wolves, whales, kiwi, badgers, etc etc). The "unimportant" taxa, granted, do have benefits associated with their continued non-extinction, but I'll break that down when I break it down.

From some kind of standpoint which I suspect Stij or Wheat or the like could stick a label on, you need to consider conservation programmes like any other thing which costs resources. I'm not talking about hay for Przewalksi's horse being taken straight out of a domesticated beef cow's feedlot; I'm talking time, labour, land, and public attention. As well as money.

You then need to factor in the cost of all these things relative to the value gained from the management practice. In the case of a pest species that negatively impacts a species of low economic value (e.g. Kakapo, Kiwi, , you could quantify it as how much damage you've mitigated to the invaded ecological system, and the value of said ecological system. In New Zealand, eradicating rats from an offshore island will be expensive and time-consuming, but a full eradication gives you a place to cache populations of vulnerable species. Of course, the losses associated with an incomplete eradication are pretty drastic, so you need to be extremely thorough. Bigger islands can support larger populations but are tougher to properly clean out; islands more proximal to the mainland are cheaper to access and thus can be serviced more often, but the risk of recolonisation by the pest is higher. Economically unimportant pest eradication mostly feeds into benefits for economically unimportant taxa, so I'll explore the benefits accrued when I discuss the taxa saved by the pest management.

For vulnerable economically unimportant species, all the stuff you find in zoos and the like, the key difficulty in quantifying the cost to humanity of their extinction is trying to put a discrete monetary value on something that's value-based, in the more moral/ethical sense. Part of how ecologists quantify that is by focussing conservation efforts in a way that preserves as much biodiversity as possible. If you have two taxa, and only have the resources to prevent the extinction of one, the argument goes that you should pick the two that most thoroughly represent Earth's biodiversity. For example:

New Zealand invests more money into conservation than other countries, because we have a much longer history of geographic isolation and many of our terrestrial species are found nowhere else in the world. Two such (critically endangered) animals would be the Black Stilt (the world's rarest wading bird, probably no more than 120 individuals alive, survival in the wild is reliant on captive rearing of eggs), and the kakapo (128 individuals, restricted to offshore islands and requires humans to transport them around and pair them up properly to keep the population's genetic health up). If we had funding cuts and could only save one of these species, which is more worthwhile? Assuming for argument's sake that the projects cost the same amount for a similar amount of output in terms of birds saved, ecologists would look at the taxonomy.

Code:

Rank          Kakapo          (notes)                           | Kaki             (notes)

Order         Psittaciformes  (parrots)                         | Charadriiformes  (waders, gulls, and auks)
Superfamily   Strigipoidea    (Kea, Kaka, Kakapo, some fossils) | N/A
Family        Strigopidae     (One genus containing one species)| Recurvirostridae (avocets and stilts, three genera total, 9 species total)
Genus         Strigops        (kakapo, one species)             | Himantopus       (disputed taxonomy, but at least two species, maybe six)
Species       habroptilus                                       | novaezelandiae

Jesus that was a lot of spacebar mashing. Anyway. From this, you can see that if the kakapo were to go extinct, we'd lose a family's worth of biological diversity. In contrast, if the black stilt went extinct, its family and genus are both still represented by Himantopus himantopus, the black-winged stilt (of Least Concern as determined by the IUCN). Quantifying animals to figure out what's worth saving is calculating and shitty, but hey! Life's shitty. We can't dedicate 100% of our resources to preserving every single threatened species, and sometimes that means picking our battles.

So that's how scientists/conservation ecologists/management choose where and how to spend their limited funds. This process will also factor in all the other benefits accrued, like tourism and the good vibes and how much bird you'll get for your buck. The black stilt, for instance, is captive-reared, but adults are released back into the McKenzie Basin and are free to breed, and then the scientists'll come and pinch the eggs and raise the chicks/juveniles in fenced enclosures. Predation of adults does happen, but the cost of housing that many birds is impractical so they have to release adults back into the wild. The Kakapo may be the more taxonomically critical species to preserve, but its overall value is decreased because it's restricted to offshore islands, which can only be accessed by DOC rangers or scientists. They're not accessible to the public, and unless I got into that line of work I probably won't see one in the wild in my whole life. By contrast, the black stilts (on the mainland) can be seen by tourists at the captive breeding facility, and I was even lucky enough to see one with coloured ID bands out in the wild during my trip up to the basin.

--

BUT that only covers critically endangered species! I'll get onto the economically important biodiversity management in a second post, but I'll respond to Clocktocks there.

For some taxa like cetaceans, certain birds, apes, there's certainly a less negotiable moral/ethical aspect to preserving the safety+culture of people who happen to be a different species, but I'll concur that we're likely to do a much better job of that when we sort out our shit as a collective species first.

What I will counter though is that there almost certainly are not enough resources on Earth to support our population. Western countries give developing countries shit for destroying forest, but we totally did that when we started on the route to an industrialised society. That's how we got the lucre! The Canterbury Plains, hell, the general areas of flat farmland east of the Southern Alps, that used to be the Canterbury mixed-podocarp forest! We can't tell countries like Indonesia or Brazil to stop cutting down forest because they're acting as carbon sinks to mitigate man-made global warming, but refuse to compensate them for said resource and deny them industry and economic independence. I really don't think, with our current technology, let alone mindset, that the Earth can support 7 billion people living a first-world middle class lifestyle, and we need to address that issue before telling subsistence farmers in the Congo to stop destroying the gorilla's habitat.

@Schazer
I don't think we're in disagreement. What you're saying is exactly my point- although we possess (at least some of) the technology for a more sustainable relationship with the environment, people just can't afford it as things stand. It is really unreasonable for people in developed nations to expect billions of people with a lower standard of living to make sacrifices for the environment's sake because civilization screwed up.

addition because I ran to class halfway through typing:
We don't have the economic capacity to support 7 billion people in the lifestyle I grew up in, certainly. But industrial farming can feed everyone and there's no real reason that we can't give everyone medical care and, like, public transportation and apartments with electricity except that the world is socioeconomically screwed up. While there is an absolute cap to the amount of resources on Earth, I don't think we're there yet. I suppose that my "core point" is that we have a gigantic population and they are dependent on a resource-exploiting economy to live, and we can't just stop or millions of people will die, so humanity needs to focus on fixing our own society until we don't need to cause environmental damage anymore rather than conserve without addressing the root cause.

addendum: if society were raised to a certain average standard of living, they might have the freshly unshackled manpower to collectively figure out how to make that standard of living higher, to a point (as we are limited by the amount of resources we have in general), if we weren't all fixated on currency

however, the desire to compete for the sake of itself may or may not make this situation possible

Quantifying animals to figure out what's worth saving is calculating and shitty, but hey! Life's shitty. We can't dedicate 100% of our resources to preserving every single threatened species, and sometimes that means picking our battles.

This, I don't disagree with, as much as it sucks that it's true.
Picking battles based on taxonomy makes sense to me. Picking battles based on whether or not tourists have a fair chance of gawking at the pretty birdies only makes sense to the extent that the tourism money can then be put back into extending conservation efforts, so I hope that's what the logic is there.

I really don't think, with our current technology, let alone mindset, that the Earth can support 7 billion people living a first-world middle class lifestyle, and we need to address that issue before telling subsistence farmers in the Congo to stop destroying the gorilla's habitat.

What I was basically trying to get at was that we're going to need to address that issue whether those subsistence farmers in the Congo destroy the gorilla's habitat or not, and I'm not convinced that letting them destroy it is going to be much help to anything.
But I do think this is a fair point:

You can't expect people to care about preserving wild lands or not contributing to climate change when they don't have access to nutrition and medical care.

It's a complicated issue, to be sure. Looking back, "conservation efforts are, if anything, more important than social efforts" is a pretty simplistic point of view when you take into account how much the latter impact the former. (I did say it was off-the-cuff.)
So I guess, basically I don't disagree.

On the other hand, in response to TickTickTockTock, I'm not so sure it's reasonable to say we need to get humans sorted out before we turn our attention to other species. I'm not sure that's a luxury we have. Yes, we need to address the root cause, certainly, but conservation efforts are still super-important.

we can't just stop or millions of people will die

...is true, but meanwhile, how many animals are dying? How many species are going extinct? That's important, too. Why should we expect them to make sacrifices for humanity's sake because civilization screwed up, either?

Prioritizing the needs of humanity because that's important for making conservation efforts work, sure, I get that. But I'm not willing to put humanity's needs above those of other animals as a general principle. Sentience is a vague and fuzzy concept, and to the extent that it means anything at all, there's no reason to think it's binary - that either a species has it or they don't. And I don't think it's reasonable to say that it's significantly less certain that other animals can feel suffering and despair than it is that humans can feel suffering and despair.
So I think it's morally necessary that maybe yes, billions of people with a lower standard of living SHOULD make sacrifices for the environment's sake. Just as people in developed nations should make sacrifices, for the environment and the lower-standard-of-living people both.

Speaking as a human, I'm pretty sure human lives hold the most value

I'm on my phone right now but remind me to talk a bit about the Convention on Biological Diversity, and double-check their provisions on migratory birds and resources that don't belong to anyone, like open ocean fisheries.

Also in a value-based assessment system to decide where your biota-protecting money goes, "do people think it's cute" is totally a valid input value! Taxonomy is only one metric and it's no more or less valid than other metrics, especially because taxonomy is a nuanced and fluid system. Again, phone, though, so I'll word this better later.

Speaking as a human, I'm pretty sure human lives hold the most value

No, Loather, it's bitcoin.