Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

Please use this thread to discuss the July book of the month, Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World. If you have not started reading the book yet, please wait until you have started reading it to join the discussion.

You can check out the short review of the book that I wrote a few years ago. Basically, Globalize Liberation is one of my favorite contemporary non-fiction books. I will post a few comments on each essay in the book when I have finished re-reading them.

Please post your comments now, both on the book as a whole and on any specific essay in the book.

What do you think of the book? With what do you agree and disagree? Which is your favorite essay in the book?

How do you feel the ideas in Globalize Liberation differ from the ideas in last month's book, Liberty and Tyranny?

Thanks!
Scott

[hilda]

I have read your review of the book Scott and the sounds a bit spotty. It is just too much like hard work squeezing the puss of delinquency out of the spot of activism or the puss of democracy out of the spot of identity or the puss of globalisation out of the spot of its defeat.

[hilda]

...the puss of eurocentrism out of the spot of progress and the puss of marginalisation out of the spot of neutralisation

[fettahism]

for scott
I would like to tell you something that you should bear in mind and dont forget it whenevr you are talking with someone you don't know : the meaning and the message in the language we use are much more important than the channel or the way whereby we communicate them to the other .therefore your advice keep it to yourself since we have another strategy in which you dont have meaning

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

hilda and fettahism, I do not know what either of you mean.

ur advice keep it to yourself

What advice?

[Juice]

http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2 ... corp2.html

“The site of this concerted spiritual work is the same remote highlands where the U"wa, who number roughly 8,000, retreated in the 1600s to avoid being enslaved by the conquistadors to work their gold mines. According to the U"wa's oral history, in the face of the ferocious advance of Spaniards and missionaries, several U"wa bands chose a "death of dignity" by committing collective suicide rather than a life of slavery that would keep them from fulfilling their culture's true purpose of existence: to preserve the equilibrium of the world. Nearly 400 years later, the appetite for black gold presented the U"wa with the greatest threat to their existence. Harkening back to their ancestral history, the U"wa threatened to commit collective suicide if Oxy proceeded with oil drilling in their territory.”

One of the questions I have asked myself in the course of my life is, “What would I be if I had been a healthy 20 year old German male in 1939?” Once aware of the history and pervasive culture of the time consideration of the possibilities are frightening. I don’t think I would have ascribed to the murder of noncombatants but I assuredly would have been a strong supporter of the wiermacht. The question begs concern once one considers how ordinary Germans participated in wholesale slaughter. Then again how is it that I can qualify a different standard to the value of life as a soldier in a standing army and a soldier in a death camp?

I have decided to respond to each chapter independently as each chapter offers different commentaries rather than offer a collective view. Since the response to the last book waned I feel it important to participate in this selection even though I would in all likelihood never have allowed this book anywhere near me. Alas, I am an ardent supporter of meaningful discourse and do not allow for selective imprisonment of ideas.

I have been to the rain forests of South America and can attest to the fact that life in that part of the world respects no boundary. Dig a hole in the ground, walk away and in a matter of days the hole would become invisible having been over run with life. Building a road is almost futile as its topography changes daily do to encroachment and the whether conditions. The saying in that part of the world is “put a stick in the ground and it will grow into a fruit bearing tree”.

What astonishes me is selective concern for the environment. If one follows the U”wa rational then anything on the earth is an integral part of a life form (Gaia) and should be respected as belonging to that life form which would make basic human survival impossible. That everything on earth has a purpose and use which can be defined by man and can be considered a cultural belief in itself which should be equally respected would not cross environmentalists’ considerate concern for cultural respect.

I am relieved that I never had to make the kinds of decisions a young German did but I am doubly grateful that time and progress allows me to evaluate that time for my own improvement. I am also glad that U”wa’s progressed to the point that they did not commit mass suicide and found it more beneficial to see the benefits of approaching problems with man made laws.

[hilda]

This story starts Spring 2001 and on 30 April '09

Occidental Petroleum Corporation (NYSE:OXY) announced today that its Board of Directors has increased the company's quarterly dividend from $.32 per share to $.33 per share for an annual rate of $1.32 per share, compared to the previous annual rate of $1.28 per share.

The dividend will be payable on July 15, 2009, to stockholders of record as of June 10, 2009.

Oxy has raised the dividend every year since 2002.

So a good buy since 2001

[Juice]

I always become extremely wary when someone uses the word "Utopia" (pg 12) especially in relation to any expression of collective reasoning. I always get the impression of someone who is willing to share left over icing but only after he's licked the spoon.

This becomes even more worrisome when someone applies the term to some form of political structure when such proclamations beg the question of whose idea of Utopia should we support.

What is remarkable of the piece is that the writer titles it giving the impression that it is rational to "mentalize" a utopia since the standard of a utopia in the failed USSR has made room for such musings. Such double indemnity is typical of radical thinking much like that heard from Obama today who seems to always have a plan that was always part of the plan that he was sure was the plan in any eventual failing to which the previous administration is to blame.

[Juice]

Chapter 3:

When one thinks of activism and all its manifest divisions and forms one cannot help but notice the recurrent theme and underpinnings of misdirected disdain for capitalism. I can't help but feel this rejection of capitalism is also the fomentation of anti-religion (Christianity) invection. If we are to take into account the purposes by which we see the invention and development of civilization which of all the creatures on earth only man is capable of directing then the ideas which come to man further separates him from beasts. Higher order reasoning is the providence of man. And its determined progress is also his to command.

The life of the individual is enhanced only by his desire to enhance it and seeing that the products of reason which belong to and are owned by the individual and cannot be extracted by force then those products are his to do with as he pleases and for the purposes by which grant him the greater good. Whether he decides to sell them or give them away it is either a matter piety or commerce neither of which can be delegated by force.

The labor of the mind is no different than the labor of the body. Both will do well if used to grant one the greatest happiness and wealth. When one is weaker of the other then it is by his design and purpose that the other should compensate in oder to provide satisfaction to the individuals’ duty to self. No government or agency can decide what belongs to me and how I should dispense or distribute what belongs to me.

That the wealth put into the earth, either by design or some natural process, and the wealth put into the process of an individuals ability to reason and determine a use for that wealth should in some way be determined to be equitably distributable contradicts the very nature of humanity.

Recognition of abuses provides nothing new in the ways of man and that those abuses are the results of greed is also nothing new. But when the organization in the form of the United Nations whose principle function is to unilaterally end such abuses when they appear can be bought by the same principles by which those abuses manifest which are based on the same greed then it is not the flaw of capitalism which is based on individual accomplishments but the flaws of collective reasoning.

Since the end of WW2 where ever we see a US presence in the form of either the Peace Corps and like programs or the garrisoning of US military forces then those nations have risen above such collective idealism, which started so many wars, to prosper and as such have seen the growth of the individual. When such organizations have left then we see the resurgence of despair and the rape of the individual conscious.

In the case of Bangladesh where we see the emergence of commerce, industry and spirit of the individual not as the result of collectivism, radicalism, or activism but from capitalism.

[hilda]

Juice: "That the wealth put into the earth, either by design or some natural process, and the wealth put into the process of an individuals ability to reason and determine a use for that wealth should in some way be determined to be equitably distributable contradicts the very nature of humanity."

The earth' s bounty or wealth is an English poetic euphemism like for instance "the human race".
It does not mean there is any wealth in the earth. The stuff in the earth is merely oil not fossil fuel. It is not necessarily greed which converts oil into fossil fuel and, although there exist subsidiary commodity markets, the value of oil is derived wholly from the retail markey for the fuel derived from oil.
The A'wa were unlucky in so far as the exploration well whose rights were acquired by Oxy/Shell from the Columbian government who sanction and recognise various A'wa confederations and from whom Oxy?Shell legitimately acquired the exploraion rightsd was dry. Obviously you cannot become wealthy or contribute to the wealth of nations by happening to live on top of something with a value derived wholly from a market. The value of oil derives wholly from the demand created for oil based products, the supply to those markets and the markets and this is why OPEC (as the main world supplier confederation) is careful to preserve demand for oil by supply and price management.
There are many separate industries involved in wealth creation from oil. These are broadly extraction, crude commodification, refinement, wholsaling and retailing and these are all specialisms in themselves.
The wealth is not put into the earth at all in any respect, merely the oil, and the only principle which the equitable distribution of the wealth created from oil breaches is that of common justice.

If the A'wa had been lucky enough to have been sitting on Columbian oil, and Oxy/Shell had struck oil and the whole operation had been profitable how much of its value would thay have been entitled to (ignoring the complexities surrounding the realtionshop between A'wa and Columbia similar to that between Yorkshire and the UK governemnt), by virtue of the fact that they lived above oil?

[Juice]

I'm sorry I didn't make myself clearer but sometimes I like to write a little ambiguously. But, my point was that humanity is driven to progress and oil, (and not just oil), is a substance available to man for a purpose in the same way man has a reasoning mind which expresses purpose.

I believe that the A'wa do themselves a disservice and deny the purpose for which man is designed by not progressing out of their primitive state.

That environmentalists exploit the ignorance of the A'wa to advance their own selfish goals is what needs to be exposed. I think it is more inhumane what they do to these people than any oil company does to the earth which has proven time again its restorative and healing powers and the willingness to share and take care of people with what it has to offer which took millions and billions of years to make for us.

[hilda]

As the song said "God did not make those little green apples".