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Wow


The human mind is very strange, and full of contradictory impulses. The self is just a small part of what is hidden inside the human brain. The conscious self is not fully in control of what humans do. What humans think of as their self, is actually just an accessory, that tries to make sense of the chaotic data coming from the senses. To do that, it has to simplify the sensual data and turn it into stories. Sometimes the stories are so simplified, that they bear little relationship to the reality outside. It gives people the feeling that they are in control. But that is just a comforting illusion.

This implies that you can never change people's behavior by appealing to them rationally. Human beings live in a simplified dream world. The only solution is the keep them in that dream world, and to make sure the dream world is safe and happy. The idea of appealing to humans rationally, and thereby changing them, is pointless.

(From Part 2)

Had this recommended in my feed and it is pretty good so far (I am about 15 min in). Haven't seen a DarkHorse episode in a while but this one parallels various conversations we have had on this forum over the past few years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPJug0s2u4w

sky wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 15, 2021 8:37 pm

This implies that you can never change people's behavior by appealing to them rationally. Human beings live in a simplified dream world. The only solution is the keep them in that dream world, and to make sure the dream world is safe and happy. The idea of appealing to humans rationally, and thereby changing them, is pointless.

Meddling in these sorts of absolutes is what tends to prevent rationality from flourishing. I sometimes like to think of rationality as a method for handling grayness after all the black and white boundaries are established.

@ego
Thanks for linking the Adam Curtis documentary series. I binged over the span of a few days. This helped understand the chaos in the US when I was little and gave me a framework to make sense of the mondo-bizzairo politics and corruption I see locally. Since Rush Limbaugh just died yesterday, the protesters from the summer/fall are ecstatic. (Just for the record, I am not a fan, but he was a person with a family.)

Oops, wrong thread

A couple inspiring shorts on individual efforts to restore the environment:

Moving the Giants:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW9w6eCQQkU

David Bamberger in Texas Hill Country:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSPkcpGmflE

i just finished watching "eating animals"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2180351/

goddamn...

This guy lives outside in a tent in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

The Cost of Moving to the Wilderness. (The Economics of living in the Woods.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYOrPvzws9k

Disclaimer: he never really says how much it costs.

Canadian family with 2 daughters living in a home they built for $1,000 with cob/clay.

https://youtu.be/J94TqEEPp1I

Cool to see this in practice with a family that has kids.

How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhfpmKAEfy4

Shows how people adapted to lack of food and energy following the collapse of the USSR. Very good.

theanimal wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 26, 2021 12:19 pm

How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhfpmKAEfy4

Shows how people adapted to lack of food and energy following the collapse of the USSR. Very good.

Fascinating documentary - just finished watching - not sure how much is true
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.miamih ... 32366.html

My non-specialist understanding is food shortages have continued since the 1990’s but I have never delved that deeply into it

I would like to believe though that community and permaculture is the future of our specie.

Homestead Paradise: got barren land, boosted it at a profit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRPP4Ilpxso

I really enjoyed this one from Kirsten Dirksen. This guy and his wife went in with 3 other families on a barren monocrop farm in Wisconsin. Not long after, the other families left the farm. He and his wife built up a permaculture setup focusing on perennials and developing a system that requires minimal maintenance. Only 3 of their 100 acres are planted with annual crops The end result is very striking.

They live off grid and 1/2 mi from the road, electing to keep their car there and walk the 10-15 minutes to their house, which has no phone or internet. There are a lot of gems in there. Here's one:

"The soil under our feet is soft. It's actually building, increasing in fertility, increasing in thickness. What we're not doing is we're not working our buns off trying to hit some kind of economic targets that we've been told we have to hit in order to be successful. And we're not doing a lot of the things that we're told you're supposed to do because we've learned that you don't and not enough people are experimenting with a more natural method of production that imitates nature as closely as we possibly can. So what we found is our yields may be lower than others but because our expenses are so low, we have enough. We have enough to pay our bills."

@theanimal

That was a good watch! Thanks for sharing. Referring to "How Cuba Survived Peak Oil."

Lemur wrote: ↑

Sat May 01, 2021 10:19 pm

@theanimal

That was a good watch! Thanks for sharing. Referring to "How Cuba Survived Peak Oil."

theanimal wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 26, 2021 12:19 pm

How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhfpmKAEfy4

Shows how people adapted to lack of food and energy following the collapse of the USSR. Very good.

Related is this Vice documentary on DIY inventions during the same time period: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-XS4aueDUg

For those interested in food, farming or permaculture I'd recommend The Biggest Little Farm. Very well done and inspirational. I watched it twice and will probably watch it again. It helps that one of the farmers is a documentary filmmaker.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daB6ync3Ytg

First 10 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXodrO6Ff-A

There is a Rich Roll podcast with the couple that I haven't listened to yet, but I'm sure it is great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRBoXE3pw80

ETA - I had a chance to listen to the podcast and it is a good option to learn about their story if you don't have access to the film. The focus is really on regenerative agriculture. They say they openly borrow from different philosophies and methodologies, such as permaculture, but don't necessarily adhere to one.

Western Red Cedar: I enjoyed the film and the photography is beautiful. But I did find the story a bit hard to relate to. You'd expect them to sell their overpriced condo or whatever, buy a farm and pull themselves up by their bootstraps as it usually goes, but apparently they borrowed $millions (?), made massive up front investments, hired farmhands and relied completely on an external consultant (they of course learn as they go). This rather makes the film more unique but I was so sure I'd hear about self-reliance and incrementalism that I had a hard time absorbing their approach.

Five videos outlining Strong Town's views on the financial viability of different types of development patterns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTB ... LN69ehUTVa

A lot on urbanism and biking more generally on the same channel.

Broad overview of many topics … deep adaptation, ecological overshoot, collapse, etc.

https://youtu.be/iQeK04WOGaA

Why anyone would willingly live here is beyond me

https://youtu.be/Fz4ZMLsPzqM

I finally got a chance to watch The Pollinators, free with Amazon Prime right now. It always stuns me how we (in the US) are deliberately making our food system less resilient.

Food insecurity is my odds-on favorite for the first real apocalypse in the US. OTOH, I also feel like it's an issue I can mitigate more than most others. I can reduce my emissions and limit my use of plastic, etc, and hope that my drop-in-the-ocean effort does some good, but I can grow food, make my yard habitable, and support local farmers right now and potentially see the effects of my own efforts in real time. It's encouraging.

Anyway, interesting film. At least it convinced me once and for all to give up almonds.