Actions Speak Louder than Words

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Gregory A
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Re: Actions Speak Louder than Words

Post by Gregory A »

Sy Borg wrote: April 22nd, 2022, 5:50 am I am reminded of action man, Mae Zedong. The nringer of China's Cultural Revolution. Mao did not bother with the advice of boring scientists and their black hat views. No, he rolled up his sleeves and made things happen, unencumbered by do-nothing committees. He heard that sparrows were taking a portion of farmers' crops.

So Mao the strongman sent out a classic strongman edict. He was not mucking around.
Mao Zedong undertook several massive campaigns in an attempt to modernize and improve life in China. The Four Pests Campaign was one of these drives, part of the Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1962. Killing all the sparrows was part of this campaign.

People were mobilized to eradicate the birds. They used beating drums to scare the birds from landing, forcing them to fly until they died of exhaustion. People tore down sparrow nests and shot sparrows down from the sky. The result of the campaign was to push the birds close to extinction in China.

There is no information on how many sparrows there were in China in 1958. But if there was one for each person, there would have been more than 600 million. Hundreds of millions were killed. This lead to a problem the next year. It was noticed that insect infestation of crop fields had soared. Sparrows ate pests such as locusts, and after the campaign, the locusts lost their major predator. This meant that killing the sparrows was counter-productive. The sparrows, it seemed, didn’t only eat grain seeds. They also ate insects.

Locust populations boomed and they ate everything in their path. Grain production in most rural areas collapsed and a massive famine began. People ran out of things to eat and millions starved. The official number of fatalities from the Chinese government was 15 million. However, it’s estimated by some scholars that the fatalities were as high as 45 or even 78 million.

The Great Famine remains a taboo topic in China more than 50 years later. People started to eat other people, parents ate their kids. Kids ate their own parents. Thousands of people were murdered for food. In his book Tombstone, Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng estimated the deaths at over 36 million people. His book was quickly banned in China.
https://www.thevintagenews. com/2016/09/26/1958-mao-zedong-ordered-sparrows-killed-ate-much-grain-caused-one-worst-environmental-disasters-history/?firefox=1
Meglomaniacs naturally have meglomanically grandiose schemes to solve problems, Trump's 'Great Wall' project in some ways parallels Mao's sparrow counteroffensive above. They want their solutions to be as big as they picture themselves as being and to be there as symbols of their own perceived greatness.
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Sy Borg
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Re: Actions Speak Louder than Words

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Gregory A wrote: April 23rd, 2022, 8:07 am
Sy Borg wrote: April 22nd, 2022, 5:22 pm
Gregory A wrote: April 22nd, 2022, 7:53 am
Sy Borg wrote: April 22nd, 2022, 5:50 am I am reminded of action man, Mae Zedong. The nringer of China's Cultural Revolution. Mao did not bother with the advice of boring scientists and their black hat views. No, he rolled up his sleeves and made things happen, unencumbered by do-nothing committees. He heard that sparrows were taking a portion of farmers' crops.

So Mao the strongman sent out a classic strongman edict. He was not mucking around.



https://www.thevintagenews. com/2016/09/26/1958-mao-zedong-ordered-sparrows-killed-ate-much-grain-caused-one-worst-environmental-disasters-history/?firefox=1
I hope school-agers are shown this as an example of what can go wrong when messing with the natural environment. Drastic actions can lead to drastic outcomes that's for sure. It's the unelected part of government in a democracy that helps keep stability, advisors doing their bit too.
That is the concern. The one positive aspect of disasters like these is that they provide such a stark lesson. However, if the lesson is ignored by vainglorious leaders more intent on dominating the society they aim to lead than to understand it, such mistakes may be repeated.

We need to stop worshipping leaders as though they were more than human and leaders need to take advice, even when it's not convenient to their ideals.

If, in some bizarre alternate multiverse where I was competent enough to achieve national leadership, I can envisage times when I would be forced to pragmatically enact policies that took me away from my preferred policies. If the west is to thrive again, it needs pragmatic leadership (but not me haha) grounded in science, Realpolitik. A leadership that is not corrupt(!), agile and adaptive to the times to rather than aiming for strict ideals, religions or to appease one megalomaniac's opinions and pockets.

Yet megalomaniacs are popular today, despite the fact that they always do damage. I suspect this stems from some deep-seated instinctual understanding of entropy's role in reality. Humans not only have a drive to create, they have a drive to destroy. The shadow side. This is in line with reality's dance of creation, destruction and re-creation.

Without entropy, there is stagnation. That is where the world lies now, ever more stuck in a quagmire of stagnation as fiat currencies run their course, with systems designed for simpler times no longer fulfilling their functions as intended.

So it comes to this - the battle between agents of change and agents of stability. Each imagines they can win, but that is short-sighted. There is no winner, just a back and forth, with each side playing its role. Without change, stagnation brings slow decay and delays potential renewal. Too much change too quickly brings chaos and potentially causes pointless irreparable damage to useful systems.

One side tries to drive the changes, the other tries to slow them. The best possible outcome from a utilitarian POV is a "soft landing" - change made with minimum damage done.
It is part of our human nature to want to worship leaders. And the best way to deal with that, the natural way, is to have monarchs or presidents, a-political persons out front, there as figureheads. Scotland for example could have princesses or princes, nominees for the positions of King or Queen still, but then respected in their own right regardless. The United Kingdom could that way have a Scottish King or Queen at some time in the future.
Is it part of human nature or a tradition? I have no urge to worship any human. To me, it's absurd and childish, like teenage girls screaming at The Beatles. Further, worship actually harms the objects of adoration, because the key word here is "object". Worship is objectifying, turning complex human beings into a symbol, a metaphor. That's why Supreme Leaders always go insane. That is why the Greeks invented democracy - they were sick of people being tormented by the increasingly erratic whims of leaders driven insane by power, ungrounded by the veneration they crave.

Gregory A wrote: April 23rd, 2022, 8:07 amAnd despite what we may think, mislead by advances in technology and the availability of cheap mass-produced goods as we are, society is in decay internally. Marriage in the USA lasting only eight years on average that trend set to spread and as an increasing divorce rate part of a register of decadence.
The issue is overpopulation/overconsumption and loss of the ecosystems that on which societies relay, and take for granted.

The stress, competition and scarcity caused by humanity's "excess success" naturally has harmful impacts on most people's lives. Inequality ensures that, while most suffer, some will still be leading wonderful lives, better than any Supreme Leader of history.

Gregory A wrote: April 23rd, 2022, 8:07 amThe political, social and physical structures that we build can halt the ongoing processes of entropy to an acceptable degree. But things don't look good admittedly when nuclear war could destroy so much of that we have already built, complete cities and whole societies at risk. A Nature wins God loses outcome if there was one.

Stability can be had with an effective 'Crown' there as a mediator allowing the rights, wishes, ideas even, of society and individuals to be represented in another way than present straightforward democracy allows.
If Putin drops a nuke, that will be the end of Russia. A nuclear exchanges will cause a nuclear winter. Russia, Canada and Scandinavia would be the most affected. They would lose all agricultures and their ports would freeze. While Putin is showing signs of the madness and hubris that inevitably infects dictators, but I am unsure whether he and his posse are quite that far gone at this stage.
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LuckyR
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Re: Actions Speak Louder than Words

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Pattern-chaser wrote: April 23rd, 2022, 7:51 am
Gregory A wrote: April 22nd, 2022, 7:53 am It's the unelected part of government in a democracy that helps keep stability, advisors doing their bit too.
The "unelected"? The parts of the government that the electorate cannot hold to account - they're the ones who maintain stability? Or is that a typo?
Correct. The bureaucracy. The professionals. The State Dept is lead by the Secretary of State, who serves at the whim of an elected politician, the President. But the work of that department is done by professional diplomats who are unelected and carry the collective experience and departmental "memory" (of what has worked and failed in the past). They serve under both Left and Right administrations.
"As usual... it depends."
Gregory A
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Re: Actions Speak Louder than Words

Post by Gregory A »

LuckyR wrote: April 24th, 2022, 4:30 am
Pattern-chaser wrote: April 23rd, 2022, 7:51 am
Gregory A wrote: April 22nd, 2022, 7:53 am It's the unelected part of government in a democracy that helps keep stability, advisors doing their bit too.
The "unelected"? The parts of the government that the electorate cannot hold to account - they're the ones who maintain stability? Or is that a typo?
Correct. The bureaucracy. The professionals. The State Dept is led by the Secretary of State, who serves at the whim of an elected politician, the President. But the work of that department is done by professional diplomats who are unelected and carry the collective experience and departmental "memory" (of what has worked and failed in the past). They serve under both Left and Right administrations.
The British TV political satire series Yes Minister/Yes Priminster highlighted just how much control the top civil servants have and how necessary that can be. They do have the experience and the memory of what works and what doesn't. The party political contribution is really being able to allow a choice, the swing from left to right, back and forth allowing something of a balance.

https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=xzfNEF0e-y4
A Very British Democracy | Yes, Prime Minister | BBC Comedy Greats
Last edited by Gregory A on April 24th, 2022, 7:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Robert66
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Re: Actions Speak Louder than Words

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Gregory A wrote: April 23rd, 2022, 8:25 am The Treasury set interest rates in some countries independent of elected government (even though I'm not sure that is a good idea).
I am sure it is not a good idea to allow governments to set interest rates.
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Pattern-chaser
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Re: Actions Speak Louder than Words

Post by Pattern-chaser »

Gregory A wrote: April 23rd, 2022, 8:25 am The Treasury set interest rates in some countries independent of elected government (even though I'm not sure that is a good idea).
Robert66 wrote: May 8th, 2022, 3:12 am I am sure it is not a good idea to allow governments to set interest rates.
Now I think you are drifting toward ideology, which is fair enough, but it compromises our ability to discuss the matter. Ideologies are savagely defended, even in the face of factual evidence. The comments above are surely nothing more than a declaration of allegiance to American free-market infinite-growth Capitalism, yes?
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