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I Wish I Could Laugh
The recent thread on ecosexuals really disturbed me. I know from the comments that the topic amused many Ricochetti, since, on its face, it is ridiculous that women have intercourse with dirt or snow or trees. Nutjobs are nutjobs, right? Well … no. Not at all. Not even a little. And here’s why:
Ecosexuality is merely the next step in the devolution of society, back to the basic pagan idol worship of the ancient world, back when people sought to live in harmony with nature, finding meaning in worshipping natural forces through rituals that, though they may start with words, sooner or later devolve to promoting baal peor celebration of defecation and animalistic/Dionysian sexual rituals, and then, eventually, end up with human sacrifice. And that is not all, of course. Pagan societies are inherently different from free societies, from Judeo-Christian ideas about morality and private ownership of property and personal and societal growth and change.
Pagan societies see the entire world as cyclical, all things as cycles. Only Judaism and Christianity chart an arc, believe in and are positive actors for the idea of historical progress. A society that worships nature necessarily condemns anything that improves upon nature. And it is thus a society that craves returning to the natural human-as-animal in every sense.
The signs are all around us if we just take a step back and view things with a little historical perspective. Human life only has inherent value to Judaism and Christianity because our holy books tell us that we are made in the image of G-d, that each and every person contains within them a divine spark, unique to people, and in sole contradistinction from the rest of nature. Without the Torah’s illogical and counter-empirical assertion that all human life is valuable, eugenics is a perfectly rational way to order society. What started with abortion leads to euthanasia, and then the ability — nay, the virtue — of culling the herd just as nature does.
You might think that I am being a bit dramatic. Sure, there are pagan nature worshippers out there. But nobody really believes the sun or the earth is a deity, right?
Right?
Before you are quick to conclude that nut jobs really can be safely ignored, remember that even as Greeks made fun of their gods, and were not sure whether they really existed; they still killed and sacrificed people in the names of these deities. Remember that believing in a Star Wars-like “life force” is what drives so many within Asian cultures toward eating or drinking parts of animals so as to obtain their essences, or at least their sexual vigor. To this day, native tribes like Inuit prize still-beating caribou hearts as the ideal spiritual feast and physical delicacy. This is precisely why most native peoples ate parts of their conquered enemies: to absorb their spiritual energies along with their blood or other organs.
And look at the open and massive death festivals, on the rise across cultures around the world, orgiastic celebrations of everything that is dead. More cycles; the cycle of life, even especially death itself. This stuff is not harmless fun.
It is all creeping back. And I wish I could really find it funny. Paganism is dangerous and evil and against everything that Judaism and Christianity have spent millennia fighting against. Left unchecked, it threatens progress and civilization.
Here’s the thing: there is no simple way to fix the world. But I can share what I do personally to fight back against this creeping unholy spiritual revolution, and I mean this in all seriousness:
1: I treat animals like animals. Not people. Thinking that there is a soul in an animal (when in fact any animal is nothing more than whatever spiritual energy we invest in it) makes people crazy. When people care more about pets than humans, the world is in danger. I know people who have mortgaged their homes for a kidney transplant for a 14-year-old cat. It is more than eccentric: this kind of behavior tells us that something is very, very wrong.
2: I deliberately and publicly throw trash in the recycling and vice-versa. Recycling is nothing more than a religious ritual, and I only have One G-d. I buy plastic straws on principle. I avoid all “natural,” “non-GMO,” and “organic” products. I generate as much CO2 as I can (CO2 is plant food, and I am in favor of more life).
2b: In keeping with promoting life, I absolutely adore children, and revere mothers. I am writing this from an airplane seat, sitting next to a five-month-old babe in arms whom I stole from her mother under the pretext that I could make her stop crying. I could, and did: but I really just love kids, and I was glad for the excuse.
3: That Rico-thread on ecosexuality got one thing very right: we must use ridicule as well as logic when we want to defeat stupid ideas. We must laugh at everything that deserves our derision, and we must do it in a way that attracts more laughter and fun. Anyone who cannot take a joke needs to be smothered in them.
4: I treat every new idea, especially things like health scares, natural diets and “new discoveries” with deep suspicion. Society is being swept by popular idiocies, and it is only a matter of time before the villagers with pitchforks start re-enacting classics like the Salem Witch Trials, Edward Scissorhands, and pogroms. “Smear the Queer” is the most popular social game in human history, and all it needs right now is one spin of the bottle. Every new idea is a fad until it passes the test of time. Don’t owl or plank or selfie. Get off my lawn!
Most people do not do something because they think it is the right thing to do: they do it because someone else is doing it. This is because most people are followers, and both crave and need the security of believing that the Right Path resides in the safety of numbers or of authority figures or experts. It is human nature to follow the herd. But seeking holiness requires us to figure out what is right, to understand that we, not our herds, are responsible for our own actions.
It would be a terrible shame to throw away this incredible civilization by letting it be pulled, gripped by humanity’s instinctive need to find meaning in all things, back into pagan earth-worship, back into cyclical conformity with the natural world. Ecosexuality is not just silly – though it is that – it is another step toward child sacrifice and open barbarism.
Published in General
Surely we don’t send our trash all the way to China to be sorted . . .
No. We’re supposed to sort it here. The problem lies in that so much trash is thrown in with recycling that it has to be dealt with in China when it was supposed to be sorted in America.
JRH from here
You, sir, are a peach of a guy!!!
Yeah, we tried that for a while. Maybe it was the intercontinental moving that made us stop. I don’t remember. It was less fun than a barrel of monkeys.
Is recycling conservationist?
Economically productive activity is conservationist, and an act of religious devotion for the religiously devoted.
Recycling is in principle economically productive, but not all applications are economically productive. There’s nothing productive, conservationist, or right about spending so much time saving a sliver of aluminum that we fail to manage all our other resources well.
Yes!
Not this topic again!
Seriously, another day, after I get more of my notes and post drafts together, we may have to talk about that again.
Excellent.
Yes.
Oh, that was new to you? My office several years ago installed 3 bins: compost, recycle, and trash. Accompanied by signs showing pictures of dozens of examples of which products go in each bin. I see them all over the place these days.
Seperating out cans and bottles in a separate recycle bin I could handle, but this is way more complex.
This is hogwash.
I spent several years setting up a recycling program for my employer. I carefully examined different vendors and went through data on disposal and resale costs of recyclables. I also promoted a recycling program without ever offering sacrifices to Gaia or reverence to the Earth.
Metal recycling pays for itself. Aluminum in particular is a major commodity. Aluminum plants are sited based on the cost of power generation, after all.
Certain plastics are readily recyclable – thermoplastic resins can be melted down and remolded. They actually do this in the factories already – scrap is melted down and dyed black to mask previous colors. I’ve used recycled plastic shelving before, and it is no less durable.
Cardboard is decently recyclable, especially when it is low in contaminants. Paper products have a limited cycle time – you can make cardboard into office paper or newsprint, but newsprint or office paper is only really good for toilet paper or tissues. Purity and high volume are issues here
Mixed paper and certain types of plastic are very low value products. It would make more sense to convert them to fuel if you want to keep them out of the landfill.
Glass is easy to recycle, but you don’t really save anything other than landfill space. You can get glass pebbles for your yard, and other applications
My program was single-stream, but used selective bins designed to not look like trash cans. We collected lots of OCC from the receiving dock, office paper from the admin building, etc. As much as I would like to screen out less valuable plastics, I wanted to avoid making it any more difficult than necessary. We made some significant progress toward reducing landfill waste, although most material was not recycled. Thankfully we did not have many saboteurs like yourself, outside of some lazy government union janitors who pushed back hard.
Ask yourself the following question: if recycling (by which I refer to curbside or other small collectors) is such a great idea, then how come nobody pays you for your garbage? If your waste was such a great value, then private recyclers would outbid the government (which already has to waste taxpayer dollars on extra pickups, etc.).
But they do not. Because the value of waste cans and paper and plastic is so low that the only way municipalities can do it is by forcing taxpayers to subsidize the programs. And they bury the hidden costs of the extra pickup runs, etc.
Recycling works on an industrial scale, of course: cars and machine shop waste and old appliances and tires. People will pay you for those things the world over, because they have actual value. But home and normal business recycling programs have to be subsidized. Which means they are not valuable – on the contrary.
If you value TIME – then recycling is a net negative for almost everyone.
Here is one example that most people think makes sense: Aluminum cans. We all know about energy costs, etc. So what is a recycled can worth? 35-40 cents PER POUND. That is 31 cans or so. And that value is only after it has been sorted, picked up, transported and delivered. Which takes fuel, vehicles, and time. What do you bill per hour?
It simply makes no sense. Which means that people recycle for non-economic reasons. Which brings me back to my post.
As for worshiping the dead (since you mention it), I have never understood the enthusiasm for horror/slasher movies in general and for Halloween in particular. Halloween is a bigger and bigger deal every year. Why the fascination with blood, skeletons, ghosts, and being scared in general? Will someone please explain this to me?
Not me. I don’t get it, either. Halloween has never gotten much emphasis at our house, other than carving a pumpkin back when there were young children at home.
I don’t understand why business offices hire janitorial services and install septic systems. They are unproductive, economically. If this work was so important, people would pay to come and clean the windows and empty the chamber pots. A lot of this material that people don’t want around them is plant food, which will find its way into the oceans soon enough where it will feed the life there. I chalk up this irrational cleaning behavior to Gaia worship. But it’s unnecessary. Any stuff that isn’t taken care of by the natural action of rainfall will be removed by plate tectonics without any need to take action on our part.
:-)
Halloween is mostly a kids’ thing here, and kids love dressing in costumes and playing pretend. Rewarding them for doing so with candy is, for them, a double-plus-good. But I do not understand the proliferation of kitsch surrounding the holiday now, or the elaborate parties and decorating involved, save that it gives my neighbor an excuse to put up several large inflatable spiders on his house.
Yeah, but what about the middle-aged adults of an age with no children at home who are making big plans, weeks ahead, saying that for them it’s more important than Christmas or any other holiday? I have heard this with my own ears.
In that case, the men’s room ought to be the greenest place in the shop. I mean, it is already, but not that way.
Thankfully I’ve not encountered that myself, though I have certainly heard of it.
Except for cardboard and newspaper, the entire recycling craze is a mystery to me. Almost everything I throw away is a mix of materials or it is made of some material I can’t identify.
The environmentalists don’t like to talk about one of their epic failures–epic because it was so obvious that this would happen–when they started insisting people and businesses recycle newspapers. The ink that came out of the newspaper washing process was a far greater river polluter than any substance manufacturers were putting into the rivers.
Even composting is complicated. Whether an organic (meaning derived from plant or animal) substance can be or should be recycled depends entirely on what is to be done eventually with the composted waste. And wherever food waste is being accumulated on its way to the composting pile will be a germ factory for airborne fruit flies.
The environmentalists need to come up with and articulate some crystal-clear objectives and ways to measure their progress toward their objectives. Then I’ll listen to them.
Eventually packaging standards will be imposed, and, bless them, the regulation-beleaguered private sector will figure it all out.
This is the time of year when fruit flies start to hang around any garbage that isn’t taken to the composting bin in the garden soon enough. They don’t hurt anything, but they are a reminder to get the compostable stuff taken out frequently.
We use it as plant food in our garden. It has been a family practice since the 50s. Other families back then used their kitchen garbage to slop the hogs, but we weren’t farmers and never had any pigs, so it went to the garden. Anything else would have been considered wasteful.
You are missing some of the transactions in the economy. In my city, the recycling and green waste bins and garbage cans – and their contents – belong to the city. All food waste and food contaminated paper is supposed to go in the green waste can, including meat, fish, and fat. Some people freeze this stuff and dump it frozen in the can just before collection, some don’t. The bins are supposed to be ratproof and raccoon proof. Uh huh.
The aluminum and deposit bottles are supposed to generate revenue for the city but they are generally
stolendivertedrecoveredwhatever by organized gangs and homeless people (or homeless people working for the gangs.) They are then sold. The city’s unionized workforce still goes out and collects both undiverted cans and other recyclables and “recylables”; basically what is not worth the freelance collectors’ while. The city’s facility is conveniently located near major homeless encampments; the city buys aluminum. I don’t know whether the city or someone else offers the best price. It recoups at least some of the cost by selling cans brought in by its own trucks and by illegal collectors.The size of the waste stream going into landfill has been reduced, which does save the city money.
@Iwe‘s contention that we have plenty of unused land for dumps is short sighted. The locations that
• are geologically suited to keep leachate out of the water table (i.e. impermeable substratum and seismically stable) without costly, constant ongoing hands on management and
• are within cost effective transportation range of the cities producing the garbage
are not as common as all that.
R’ Levi Yitzhak was a profound man, and I don’t want to oversimplify his views, which were heavily influenced by the mystical tradition; the dominant view there is that continuous creation is the case, but that G-d now refrains, for our ultimate good, from violating the laws of nature in a gross way.
That means that at every moment we are a newly created being that exists because the Creator still wants us to exist. The real consequence is that if in one of those moments we put our transgressions behind us and whole-heartedly attach ourselves to His will (which of course includes dealing with the consequences to other people, including restitution and whatever else is externally required) our of love for G-d, we are no longer the person who distanced himself from Him.
Simple, not easy.
This reminds me of the “Henrietta Mall” in Hubbard County, Minnesota, just south of the source of the Mississippi River. It’s named after a piece of Henrietta Township that was made the location of the county recycling center just outside the town of Park Rapids. I’ve been there several times, and wish we had something like that in our own community in Michigan. There are staff on hand to direct the tossing of trash in the proper piles and bins, and it all works efficiently for those who are cleaning out their garages, old electronics, etc.
Locals call it the “Henrietta Mall” because scroungers go there and pick through other people’s trash and construction debris and find things they can use, fix up, sell at yard sales, accumulate in their pole barns, and maybe sell on eBay for all I know. The problem is not that this reduces business at the local WalMart, although perhaps it does. This re-use of old materials is great in that it really gets things recycled. The problem is that it also messes with the economics of the recycling center, because it removes materials from the recycling stream that would otherwise be sold to finance the operation of the system.
So periodically there are bans and restrictions on scroungers, which you can read about in the local paper, and then because the place really does try to serve the community, it allows reasonable levels of scrounging again, and those levels then increase to the point where they get out of hand, which then causes a new ban on shopping at the Mall.
Sorry, but I don’t have a moral for this story.
Great post. I’m far more sanguine than you are about the reluctance of normal people — that’s most of us — to embrace such flakiness as this. But that we’re moving backwards, however slightly, in important ways I don’t doubt for a minute.
I’ve noticed this as well, more and more businesses are putting up elaborate Halloween decorations at the start of October. Part of it is just commercialization, they must think it helps sales.
I think there’s a deeper reason, though: we live in a deeply materialist society that denies the reality of spirits, souls, life after death, and anything else that can’t be measured by scientific instruments. Americans are ever more obsessed with health, youth, and beauty. We’re terrified of growing old, and even more terrified of death.
Halloween is one of only remaining culturally-sanctioned excuses to ponder these things, confront our own mortality, and wonder if there’s an afterlife (as suggested by the idea of ghosts). To that extent I think it might actually be a healthy corrective to our overly materialist philosophy.
Ah! Bit like Al Ghazali.
Klavan!
Hallowe’en used to have a connection to All-Hallows’ Day (All Saints’ Day). The costumes and candy have a bit of a connection to Purim – with its concealment/revealing of identity and merry-making. I never did – and still don’t – give the Adversary any place in Hallowe’en. All Hallows’ Eve is the start of an Autumn Triduum; along with All Saints and All Souls’ Day, these three allow us, should we choose, as (usually High-Church) Christians to contemplate: time/eternity, life/death, punishment/reward. That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it. (Yeah, I know, some polymath will trot out the Celts and Samhain…Nuts to that! :-).)
Some of us still care about Reformation Day, actually.
My thought, precisely…I momentarily mislaid the name, thanks, Augie! Though isn’t Al-Ghazali considering a more directly-active Creator than the example from Jewish thought cited here?
A nifty bit of rebranding on that former Augustinian’s part, if I do say so, myself. :-)