Canadian Political Events

I wouldn’t be caught dead in a Walmart or a dollar store.

I buy organic fruits and veggies.

I only eat meat from local, ethical sources. 

My coffee comes from a local organic roaster.

I catch my own fish. 

Life is too short to eat shitty food and animals deserve to be treated without cruelty.

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A drop in market share is not “failing”.  The title of this thread is hyperbolic.

It's a god damned travesty that those things come at a premium when they should be the standard practice.

Also, those are sins of the past. 

I'm not sure I follow. Monocropping is still the dominant mode of agriculture today. With it comes a whole slew of issues, only briefly touched on by the OP. Consider the economic impact of literally designing crops so that they're more easily farmed by machinery. The goal was to eliminate manpower to make the accumulation of crops more profitable. The key issue being accumulation and the market economy. Before the nineteenth century accumulation was done in order to redistribute and provide provisions communally under poor crop seasons. Consider as well that monocropping makes it far more likely to experience crop failures, due to a lack of variety in the yields. If a monocrop fails, the entire crop fails. If a species of insects attacks and prefers a  particular plant, it has an entire field of it to feast upon. This leads to the creation of chemicals to combat problems because what might have once destroyed a portion of the yields (since a variety of specimens were planted) now destroys everything. Just like antibiotics, these combat techniques create superbugs by killing off the weak ones, while the resistant ones survive to breed. Modern agriculture i constantly chasing demons. So now we have genetic engineering, in order to alter the crops to make them even more resistant to problems because the chemicals of the past started failing.

These aren't sins of the past. They're current issues. They're also intricately tied with the economic organization of society. There's a free-market mentality around farming, despite agriculture being the fundamental social organ of subsistence. That we allow a so-called "self-regulating" free market to dictate our survival is an abomination to humanity. Crops should never have been treated as a commodity. Subsistence should be publicly-owned and controlled. Mass agriculture should have never been allowed to be private property, save for householding. The Great Enclosure and the parcelling off of property into private hands that preceded the Industrial Revolution was the biggest disaster humanity has ever faced.

I've been thinking about veganism and vegetarianism.  These folks see meat eating as unethical.  But is it more ethical to eat vegetation, where in farming there's absolutely massive portions of once-natural grasslands and prairie ecosystems across the continent and worldwide that have almost become extinct and in order to be farmed must be completely destroyed with machines and then replaced by a single plant species as far as the eye can see?  Imagine how many animals had to be killed to produce these farmlands?

A quick look on Google maps satellite view and you can see huge portions of North American wilderness destroyed and transformed into this quilt-work of mono-crop farmland.

Is this more ethical than eating animals? (which isn't arguably very ethical most of the time either)

Monocropping is a modern invention to allow machinery to increase production efficiency. I suppose ethicist variety of vegans and vegetarians would probably argue that more traditional methods of mixed crops would be preferred. It would also employ far more people, provisioning for their needs as well. Consequently, there's an argument to be made that it's economically more ethical as well.

Also, those are sins of the past.  And they happened in an era where the buffalo was hunted to near-extinction so it's somewhat akin to applying the morals of one generation to the past.

They want to admonish the framers of western democracy for owning slaves.  Fair enough, but their greatness is still remarkable. 

Why is it to me that a lot of these qualitative discussions seem so similar, and similarly impossible to discuss in our broken public sphere ?  I feel like if we were able to come to a resolution on one of them, then we could do so on others too.

I'll have to work this into an upcoming episode.   I'm suspicious of this new guy. Maybe he works for Ooblik? 

Sorry to hear you're on unsteady ground.

 -k

I have 2 other interviews and I have never been in more demand.  It's more the sadness of having to leave again... and of being shunned.  It really does hurt.