> Obviously, you're irritated; you admire Pollan's work and take these
> criticisms personally. It's one thing to disagree with shag's critique
> but quite another to hand wavingly declare it to be a "mess". And I'm
> not 100 percent sure, but I think you called me an "asshole" a few
> posts back.
No, I signed "asshole". You know, like "bitch"?
What I take personally is being expected to take stuff like this seriously:
> I really think one of Joel Saletin's expressions would sum it up for Pollan:
>
> "Mimicking natural patterns on a commercial domestic scale insures moral and
> ethical boundaries to human cleverness."
We start with something she imagines him agreeing with. Well, Christ, she's the one with the whole goddamn book at her disposal, let her find something Pollan writes, instead of imagining what he thinks! Building on that granite foundation:
> IOW, the cognitive niche? We're kinda fallen coz of that. Human cleverness
> knows no bounds. It's propelled us right out of the cognitive niche of an
> ecological system and we aren't properly disciplined and bound by moral and
> ethical strictures.
Where does he -- Pollan -- talk about being "fallen"? As opposed to something shag dreamed up? Where does anybody talk about "human cleverness knowing no bounds?"
> Yes. You read that right: human cleverness must be kept in check by the
> morality and ethics of nature.
Really precise reading there.
> You don't find humans on the covers of ecology books because we have no
> ethics or morality, only nature brings that to us.
"The covers of ecology books"? What the fuck? We've gone from Saletin claiming that natural scales impose ethical boundaries, to those being the only boundaries on human cleverness, to those being the only source of ethics and morality. To the covers of ecology books. Which is what Pollan thinks.
> That is a fucking trick, lemme tell you! Humans aren't ethical and moral;
> nature is.
And there we have it. Airtight like a plastic bag over a baby's head.
Dwayne, I seem to recall you bailing out of threads honorably out of disgust for the sheer mendacity. I beg you to grant me the same privledge.
-- Andy