For all of the environmentalist’s, animal people, and the equal right’s people etc.
It seems to me that the rain forest isn’t slowing in it’s depletion. That we have less and less species every year remaining, and that outside of the western world (and even within it to a degree) rights are a far futured fantasy. Children die by the truckload in wars, or are killed/maimed due to lack of basic food.
To me it seems to be a losing/lost battle already. There are sporadic attempts to rectify some of these problems, but it is always just a little bit worse every year.
Is it just me? Or are there there groups out there that have been sucessful IN THE BIG PICTURE. I realize that there are small victories all of the time, but are there areas where outstanding sucesses have occured?
For example, America went through traumatic cival war and soul searching to rid itself of slavery, which is all fine and right, in my opinion. But now, people have no problem buying clothes etc., made under conditions that are akin to, or even worse than the slavery that we had so much trouble with.
[ul][]Average life span continues to increase.[]Air and water are cleaner than they were several decades ago in many areas.[]Race matters less and less in the United States. []The forested land area in the United States has been increasing.[/ul]
And all of this wondrous bounty flows from saints in suits! Ah, those selfless Republicans, generous friend of the rich, tireless champion of the uptrodden, firm paladin of the privileged!
Who can forget how the conservative right threw itself headlong into the civil rights movement! How they strove to protect the working man from the tyranny of the labor bosses, who sought to undermine thier self-respect with higher wages and benefits, and whose liberal inheritors even now try to foist socialized medicine on the gullible masses, who cannot understand than socialized medicine is so much worse than no medicine at all!
And what of the vision, the depth of Ron Reagan, who pointed out the obvious fact that what redwood tree is so much like another, one is all we need! And didn’t his Interior Secretary advise us that we need not concern ourselves with ecology, now that the Second Coming was so near! Such inspiring words, I gasp with awe.
While it would seem that December’s post was non-partisan and directly on topic, Elucidator’s rant was a partisan diatribe that didn’t, as far as I can tell, contain anything remotely resembling a debate.
So back to the OP:
The reason you think you’re fighting a losing battle is because the special interests fighting these battles have a vested interest in making things look bad.
In fact, the world is cleaner, richer, and healthier than at any time since the turn of the last century. 19th century London was a filthy place. Soot from unfiltered coal burning covered everything.
Most major North American cities are cleaner now than they were 30 years ago.
Whale populations have regrown. The Bald Eagle and Peregrine falcon populations have recovered. The California Condor is coming back.
Modern forestry equipment goes into forests and thins them a tree at a time, leading to even healthier forests. Before this equipment came along, clearcutting was the order of the day.
Modern coal plants put out only a tiny fraction of the pollutants they used to.
Cars are much cleaner and safer than they used to be, despite having higher average horsepower.
The big fear of the doomsayers, out of control population growth, turned out to be not true. All the latest data now shows the earth’s population growth slowing down before stopping completely or even reversing by 2050.
I’m sure we can add many more success stories to the list.
I’m trying to understand if you’re talking about things getting better or worse in the US, in the world as a whole, in 3rd world countries, or all of the above.
It seems like you are talking about the world as a whole. That’s such a big, complicated situation, I can see why you might be confused. Maybe you could look at it a little differently. Ask yourself if you were transported back in time, say 100 yrs, to being an average Joe somewhere, would your life be better or worse? Would you look around you and see more or fewer injustices being committed?
The fact that you even have time or the inclination to ask the questions that you do says a lot about your situation. How many people even had time to think what you’re thinking 100 yrs ago? How many of your counterparts in the 3rd world have the luxury to wonder if the rainforest is being depleted too fast?
Although you started out sounding somewhat pessimistic, at least you ended up saying you were “looking for good news”. If you’re heads pointed down all the time, you’re going to see mostly dirt. Sounds corny, but it’s true.
Forgive, if you can, my partisan polemics. It is clear that I failed to understand that it is the conservatives who led the way to all this bounty. In my confusion, I credit men like MLK for the advances in race relations, when clearly it is Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond who carefully, gradually, conservatively nurtured the path to truth!
The Labor Movement? What nonsense! If only the working man had placed his trust in the men whom God, in his wisdom, had chosen to empower with the privileges of birth, and the wisdom of avarice! All of this needless strife might have been avoided!
Even now, Our Leader strives to lessen the sorrow of the cruelly burdened! How unjust, that wealth be forcibly shared, when it has been so worthily earned! What is a few meager hours of sweat at stoop labor, compared to the onerous duty of an air-conditioned office, poring red-eyed over spreadsheets, only to be cast into gated communities to suffer the martini, the Fox News.
What is the imprisonment of men like Debs, compared to the potential embarrassment of men like Ken Lay, who even now is spurned in the Hamptons, unwelcome in Aspen, he trudges forlorn to his limousine, haunted by lawyers.
You’re the only one in this thread talking about who’s to blame or credit. In fact, that question wasn’t asked at all, and no one commented on it.
The OP asks the question, “Is there any good news? Anything going well?” Everyone else but you has been trying to answer that. You, on the other hand, are going off on some bizarre rant about conservatives and liberals, which has nothing to do with the OP.
Gosh, Sam, I must have misunderstood. Seemed to me that the OP was suggesting that all the terrible consequences that me and mine have been warning about have proved to be mere phantoms, boogy-men. Then your constant ally december pointed out and underlined the truth of that argument. In my liberal fuzzy-mindedness, I took that as something like a challenge.
I regret that I have offended you. Should I succeed in changing your mind, I shall no longer.
elucidator, while I also find the appeal to “Liberals” in the title to be somewhat odd, I saw nothing in the OP text that indicated any more than a request for information: Is there any good news, or is all our knowledge doom and gloom? I would also say that I basically agree with december’s bullet list. I would certainly note that it is a bullet list that should be expanded to provide nuance in several areas, but he did not make any claim in his post that the only good things came about through the stalwart efforts of the Extreme Right. He merely noted four areas in which the world has improved, at least to some small degree, in the last thirty years.
I suspect that you might need to have you knee looked at in terms of this particular thread.
For social change to be immediate, it also has to be somewhat traumatic. If we suddenlly managed to ban all rainforest logging, for example, people who depend on the logging for their livlihoods in poor nations which have few other employment options would be in dire straights, and nations whose economy depends strongly on rainforest exploitation would suffer. In many situations, “baby steps” are the best way to deal with a situation. Continuing on with the rainforest example, utilizing new selective logging methods, as well as other conservation techniques, help ease the stress on the environment without seriously affecting the economics of the situation. Helping developing nations to develop other resources helps to wean them off of what we consider destructive expoitation.
While one small triumph may not seem like much, the cumulative effect of a series of them makes quite a difference. After all, the ocean is made of raindrops. Every small step in the right direction is at least preventing further damage.
But small progress can also prevent big progress. Sometimes this is good, sometimes this is bad. In the 1930s we saw a lot of very liberal programs established not out of the goodness of anyone’s heart, but in a conscious effort to keep people just happy enough not to start looking towards Communism.
The problem with our current progress in America is that all of our wealth and goodness lies on the backs of people outside of this country. Sure, I’d rather be a poor person in America now than a hundred years ago. But would I rather be a Vietnamese girl a hundred years ago farming in my village and raising my family or one nowdays working eighty hour weeks in a shoe factory? Would I rather be an African now or a hundred years. Those questions arn’t so easy.
“all of our wealth and goodness lies on the backs of people outside of this country.”
Wow, that’s a pretty sweeping statement. Got any facts to back it up? Care to explain how all the wealth generated by, say, Microsoft is based on the backs of people outside the country?
Do you know who makes all those motherboards that your Microsoft products run on? It isn’t white folks in Seattle. Does the term “maquiladora” ring a bell? Granted, maquiladora’s arn’t completely evil, but the standard of living they provide isn’t exactly what we think of when we think of the ‘tech boom’.
So you aren’t going to give any credit to the revolutions in industry and agriculture that made that progress possible? Are we seriously to believe that all of the work and progress that brought us into this modern era has been the result of international exploitation?
Are people in third world countries worse off today than one hundred years ago? You paint a pretty rosy picture but I’m inclined to think that starving is starving no matter what era you live in. Exploitation was certainly not unknown back then either, it wouldn’t be hard to argue that it may well have been worse. Productive capacity, however, has undeniably skyrocketed.
Certainly anything seems preferable to “eighty hour work weeks in a shoe factory” (an ugly fact of our own early industrialization as well) but that seems like unnecessary hyperbole when stacked next to the very real net advancements in standards of living. Developments in systems of production and technology have given us the ability to do more with less. They have taken pressure off of the demand for raw physical labor and brought down the price of many of the essentials for life, food being a major example. Though farming in Vietnam might seem like a noble, simple life, new farming technology can feed far more people with less labor than small plot farming ever could.
Investment in third world nations is often demonized through the lens of those who can only see exploitation. Reality shows that such investments help to bring industrialization and all of its benefits to societies that would be locked out of the modern world otherwise. Expecting those benefits to come before expending the hard work of building an industrial base is a bit like putting the cart before the horse. They can’t all be meccas of eco-tourism you know.
[QUOTE] Originally posted by december *
[ul][li]Average life span continues to increase. []Air and water are cleaner than they were several decades ago in many areas. (In areas were liberals make the laws)[]Race matters less and less in the United States. (In areas were liberals set the norms of behavior)[]The forested land area in the United States has been increasing. (as a consequence of liberal forestry policy)[/ul] [/li][/QUOTE]
[sub]I just love a straight man…[/sub]
Look for all of these trends to be reversed (except possibly the first one) If Bush is not defeated.
That’s because neither neither you nor December want to face up to the fact that all of these things have happened in spite of Republican attempts to prevent them.
To crassly dwell on credit is to shame you and what you stand for, so of course you prefer not to think of it. :rolleyes:
The reason things are better now than they were yesterday in the United Sates for health, living, and etc is not because things naturally get that way. Industry has no incentive to stop clearcutting, chemical plants have no incentive to stop dumping chemicals, coal plants have no incentive to stop producing smog… until the problem reaches such catastrophic proportions that business isn’t profitable anymore. In America, we had a huge left wing regulatory state constructed with prevented this from happening.
Agencies like the EPA realized that the market wasn’t preventing problems, so it regulated. We currently have some pretty shoddy Supreme Court cases takign the teeth away from agencies like this, but they’ve done a smashing job of creating an artificial “risk market” where industries DO have incentive to be cleaner, more efficent (when the waste would fall on third parties), etc.
The problem is that we don’t control the whole world. (Well, not yet. Cheney might change that.) So we can’t stop the rain forest from being razed, or China from pumping pollutants into the air.
I’m sure these countries will eventually see the problems coming and avert disaster the same way we did.
While I agree that America itself had to go through some grinding times itself (pre-OSHA work rules for example) to get where it is today, I do think that alot of those negative aspects have been just transfered to less western countries. I guess my main question was, have we really come that far if the idea itself of exploitation of peoples hasn’t changed. It may no longer be happening here in America, and that’s good, but it never really went away.
I also don’t mean to downplay how really far we have come in America, and alot of the Western world. It seems miraculous to me, that despite strong vested interests to the contrary, we have abolished slavery, elevated women’s rights to near parity, and have at least gone from just dumping raw sewage into the drinking water.
It’s just that seeing something like an inner-city school that has no money, poor equiptment, rampant crime etc. not even being considered a priority for fixing, that toubles me. Claims of money etc, really do seem pretty hollow, when we’ll spend 300k a missile to lob at Suddam.
I am not a strong liberal, or a peacenik, but it’s almost like we live in a gated community. Everything is great here inside, so we are all happy. Meanwhile millions of people are dying or suffering from things that we wouldn’t allow to effect our animals. And that makes me nervous.
But actually, we’re debating the opposite of the OP. december claims the world sucks, despite these liberal gains.
If he’s clever, what he is trying to do is get people to say something like “these problems won’t be solved until the whole world agrees with us” or something along those lines, then shout “aha” and say this is an inconsistant theory to hold when liberals also (mostly) opposed war in Iraq. The explaination, though it won’t be a satisfactory one to him, is that a liberal desire to have everyone pitch in to save the rain forest must heed the liberal desire not to shoot people.
