Regarding the Legacies post, Buddhism inverts the rule beautifully.
A positive result from a negative intent is net positive.
A negative result from a positive intent is negative.
It's worse than useless to keep beating up on the guy who transformed healthcare. It's reinforcing agricultural-age ontology. How's that been working out for the last 12 500 years?
And you're reinforcing the phenomenon of the happy pandit. Obama didn't transform healthcare: a huge number of the American population did. Obama was an obstacle, not a vehicle. His toadying to the industries by the tepid reform of Obamacare justified not going further.
ReplyDeleteIt's the same with the Arctic. The positive effect was generated by activists, not presidents at podiums making speeches. But you give the president the credit? How progressive does that make you? How do you criticize Klein's progressiveness from where you're standing, which is basically a loyalist conservative stance? Not that the distinction should mean much: OOO people aren't supposed to have theories about human nature, or any nature you can generalize about.
This is what I mean by politics corrupting philosophy.
I agree with your Buddhism parallel; I just don't think it parallels what you're talking about.
Agricultural-age ontolgy is such a cool way of putting this.
ReplyDeleteGosh. I'm going to use it today in my pig talk & credit you & underscore why we need philosophers to stand amid the alien corn, riffing the diction.