Childintime wrote:Sorry for the rant. My button got pushed.
Funkstain wrote:Farmers, as a group, are no worse and no better than any other group of humans. Which is to say most of them are selfish and greedy and will prioritise whatever benefits them, individually, over any other concern. Just like almost everyone else.
If you give such people power over the land and its uses, that land will be suborned to the personal desires of those people unless they are virtuous and far-seeing. It happens in town planning and it happens on farms.
All you can do is introduce and enforce regulations and laws that stop us being the worst of ourselves.
However if you take away regulations, and the proper means to enforce those regulations; if you enforce regulations unevenly in a common market; if you let yourself be lobbied by a powerful organisation of selfish interests - then you set yourself up for disastrous mismanagement of land resulting in more flooding, species extinction, antibiotic failure apocalypse, tree blights, food-borne diseases, and environmental catastrophe.
How many of those boxes can we tick today? Fox-hunting is a drop in the ocean, merely a revelatory moral failing and class distinction being revelled in rather than a serious issue.
As in other groups there are great people who only want what's best for not only themselves but also the environment and other people, which sounds like CiT's dad. But my impression of rural management, coming from an ex-farming family myself, is that these paragons are overwhelmingly outnumbered (in acreage terms, not in individuals).
The brand power land-owners have not only in this country, but across Europe (look at the French who consistently block attempts to seriously reform the CAP) is unbelievable. It's time we broke them up, returned to smaller farm holdings, resisted the industrialisation of farming and take individual responsibility for our choices (meat, dairy, out of season fruit n veg, etc).
Plenty of possible explanations for that. There's the recent suggestion what I posted in the science thread about how Earth may simply have had life develop very early. Alternatively, the theory that there is a certain point that most forms of life don't get past (I forget the name) may not mean that all life forms wipe themselves out, it may mean that many life forms do not reach the point that we do. I often wonder if the simple fact that our planet is tilted causing seasons was a significant driver of evolution as early life needed to move to find food.SpaceGazelle wrote:Lack of alien signals is sobering.
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!