Thread: Revolutions And The People

It is rare today that I read something that sparks a large question mark in my mind, but consider this, no revolution has ever helped the people in need of change. Our own founding included slavery, and while in principle it was egalitarian, our history has shown another side. Did women even exist then. The French revolution soon deteriorated into a mass killing of the very people it was supposed to help. Jesus died before he could create a heaven on earth, while he talked a good game, his heaven had to wait, his followers were quickly busy killing each other. The Russian revolution soon deteriorated into Stalinist paranoid communism. Mao's people's revolution killed millions and hardly changed the lives of the common people. Even material or technological revolutions only create problems of alienation, slave labor conditions, and societal disruptions. The Industrial revolution destroyed farming, created cities full of lives of misery, polluted the environment, and may today finally destroy the earth. Out of our contemporary world of such vast promise, autism figures grow, one in eight women encounter breast cancer, and poverty figures increase. Free market Capitalism creates large trails of misery and regularly collapses as the Great Depression and the recent recession testify. Think also of the Katrina failure. Communism failed, Socialism is an interesting concept but like Christianity never tried. And so it goes....

Why is this, are not revolutions the means to create a society that supports the people. Wasn't the enlightenment about Reason and wasn't Reason the answer to injustice and violence? Wars of the 19th and 20th century show how far reason has gotten humanity. Look only at the wars of the moment. It is always the other side that is unreasonable. Look today at the fact most people on earth live on less than two dollars a day. A child dies every few seconds in the world from preventable causes. Revolutions in Africa become killing fields. One hundred and fifty million children in the world work in sweatshops. Even in America the poor grow poorer, this in a wealthy nation that cannot even provide healthcare for all its citizens. British youth rebel. Egyptians have had enough. Maybe revolutions of all sizes have goals of not a better world, maybe they are for some other purpose. Anyone know?

Will humanity ever advance to a state of equilibrium, a state of peace, that only small tribal groups have ever approached or possessed.

Human beings are animals.

Not figuratively but literally.

We're fairly high-functioning animals, and we've certainly crwaled a long way from the primordial ooze, but at heart, and in our head, we're still very much animals.

Will we ever evolve beyond being animals?

No.

That said, as bad as you might paint things to be they're still infinately better today than they have ever been before in the history of humanity.

Certain societies in the past may have been more egalitarian, but they still had life expectancies a quarter of what ours are today. They had no medicine and no first-world nations willing to send them medicine. When there was a famine they all starved. When there was a flood nobody came to rescue them or help them rebuild their village. When they went to war and lost they were either eradicated completly or taken into captive slavery.

As much as we like to bitch I would much rather live in the developed world today than in any other place or at any other point in human history.

Originally Posted by midcan5

It is rare today that I read something that sparks a large question mark in my mind, but consider this, no revolution has ever helped the people in need of change. Our own founding included slavery, and while in principle it was egalitarian, our history has shown another side. Did women even exist then. The French revolution soon deteriorated into a mass killing of the very people it was supposed to help. Jesus died before he could create a heaven on earth, while he talked a good game, his heaven had to wait, his followers were quickly busy killing each other. The Russian revolution soon deteriorated into Stalinist paranoid communism. Mao's people's revolution killed millions and hardly changed the lives of the common people. Even material or technological revolutions only create problems of alienation, slave labor conditions, and societal disruptions. The Industrial revolution destroyed farming, created cities full of lives of misery, polluted the environment, and may today finally destroy the earth. Out of our contemporary world of such vast promise, autism figures grow, one in eight women encounter breast cancer, and poverty figures increase. Free market Capitalism creates large trails of misery and regularly collapses as the Great Depression and the recent recession testify. Think also of the Katrina failure. Communism failed, Socialism is an interesting concept but like Christianity never tried. And so it goes....

Why is this, are not revolutions the means to create a society that supports the people. Wasn't the enlightenment about Reason and wasn't Reason the answer to injustice and violence? Wars of the 19th and 20th century show how far reason has gotten humanity. Look only at the wars of the moment. It is always the other side that is unreasonable. Look today at the fact most people on earth live on less than two dollars a day. A child dies every few seconds in the world from preventable causes. Revolutions in Africa become killing fields. One hundred and fifty million children in the world work in sweatshops. Even in America the poor grow poorer, this in a wealthy nation that cannot even provide healthcare for all its citizens. British youth rebel. Egyptians have had enough. Maybe revolutions of all sizes have goals of not a better world, maybe they are for some other purpose. Anyone know?

Will humanity ever advance to a state of equilibrium, a state of peace, that only small tribal groups have ever approached or possessed.

Yet we continue to stagger blindly down the evolutionary road to certain annihilation.

Christ never promised a Kingdom on Earth, he said, "My Kingdom is in the hearts of men. (meaning men and women)

Slavery wasn't created by our revolution, it was continued as a compromise so that our Constitution could be ratified. We finished our revolution in 1861 to 1865 and eliminated slavery in our Nation.

There are good people trying to find a solution to all the misery you describe.

Originally Posted by midcan5

The Industrial revolution destroyed farming, created cities full of lives of misery, polluted the environment, and may today finally destroy the earth.

The Industrial Revolution did not destroy farming.

At the same time that Britain was the first country in the world to undergo an Industrial Revolution - becoming the world's first mechanised and urbanised country - it was also the first country to undergo an Agricultural Revolution.

Between the 17th Century and the end of the 19th Century, Britain saw a massive increase in its agricultural productivity and net output.

This, in turn, not only supported Britain's huge population growth that it saw throughout the 19th Century by producing food for the populace but, thanks to agricultural mechanisation, freed up a huge percentage of Britain's workforce and therefore helped to drive the Industrial Revolution, making Britain the world's richest country and the world's mighty manufacturing powerhouse.

Just as the Industrial Revolution saw the clever British give the world many important innovations in industry, the Agricultural Revolution saw the clever British give the world many important innovations in agriculture:

1) In 1701, Jethro Tull invented the horse-drawn mechanical seeder which distributed seeds efficiently across a plot of land;

2) In 1730, Joseph Foljambe invented the Rotherham plough, the first iron plough to have any commercial success in Europe. Its fittings and coulter were made of iron and the mouldboard and share were covered with an iron plate making it lighter to pull and more controllable than previous ploughs;

3) Then, in 1763, James Small of Doncaster and Berwickshire invented the 'Scots Plough', which used an improved cast iron share to turn the soil more effectively with less draft, wear, or strain on the ploughing team;

4) In the 1850s and '60s John Fowler, an agricultural engineer, pioneered the use of steam engines for ploughing and digging drainage channels.

5) Robert Bakewell and Thomas Coke introduced selective breeding (mating together two animals with particularly desirable characteristics), and inbreeding (the mating of close relatives, such as father and daughter, or brother and sister, to stabilize certain qualities) in order to reduce genetic diversity in desirable animals programs from the mid 18th century.

As a result of all this British agricultural innovation, the agricultural productivity of Britain grew significantly. It is estimated that the productivity of wheat in Britain was about 19 bushels per acre in 1720 and that it grew to 21-22 bushels in the middle of the eighteenth century. It declined slightly in the decades of 1780 and 1790 but it began to grow again by the end of the century and reached a peak in the 1840s around 30 bushels per acre.

British Agricultural Revolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Originally Posted by midcan5
polluted the environment, and may today finally destroy the earth

Human activity and industry is NOT causing Global Warming.

Sun Causes Climate Change Shock

James Delingpole

James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy, Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is James Delingpole.

The Telegraph
Aug 27th 2011

If Michael Crichton had lived to write a follow-up to State of Fear, the plotline might well have gone like this: at a top secret, state of the art laboratory in Switzerland, scientists finally discover the true cause of “global warming”. It’s the sun, stupid. More specifically – as the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark has long postulated – it’s the result of cosmic rays which act as a seed for cloud formation. The scientists working on the project are naturally euphoric: this is a major breakthrough which will not only overturn decades of misguided conjecture on so-called Man Made Global Warming but will spare the global economy trillions of dollars which might otherwise have been squandered on utterly pointless efforts to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions. However, these scientists have failed to realise just how many people – alarmist scientists, huckster politicians, rent-seeking landowners like (the late Michael Crichton’s brilliant and, of course, entirely fictional creation) the absurd, pompous Sir Reginald Leeds Bt, green activists, eco-fund managers, EU technocrats, MSM environmental correspondents – stand to gain from the Man Made “Climate Change” industry. Their discovery must be suppressed at all costs. So, one by one, the scientists on the cosmic ray project find themselves being bumped off, until only one man remains and must race against time to prove, etc, etc…

Except of course in the real world the second part wouldn’t happen. No one would need to go to the trouble of bumping off those pesky scientists with their awkward, annoying facts and their proper actual research. That’s because the MSM and the scientific “community” would find it perfectly easy to suppress the story anyway, without recourse to severed brake cables or ricin-impregnated hand-washes or staged “suicides”.

This is exactly what has happened with the latest revelations from CERN over its landmark CLOUD experiment, whose significance Lawrence Solomon explains here:

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web (more specifically, the inventor was British scientist Tim Berners-Lee), that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

So if it’s so great, why aren’t we hearing more about it? Well, possibly because the Director General of CERN Rolf-Dieter Heuer would prefer it that way. Here’s how he poured cold water on the results in an interview with Die Welt Online:

I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them. That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.

Nigel Calder, who has been following the CLOUD experiment for some time, was the first to smell a rat. He notes:

CERN has joined a long line of lesser institutions obliged to remain politically correct about the man-made global warming hypothesis. It’s OK to enter “the highly political arena of the climate change debate” provided your results endorse man-made warming, but not if they support Svensmark’s heresy that the Sun alters the climate by influencing the cosmic ray influx and cloud formation.



Read a lot more: Sun Causes Climate Change Shock – Telegraph Blogs

Originally Posted by midcan5

no revolution has ever helped the people in need of change.

Yes they have. But not all revolutions end they way they started.

Our own founding included slavery,

Uh huh...and the revolution itself wasn't about slavery. It was about land speculators and merchants chaffing agaisnt remote authority that didn't allow their interests to be directly addressed.

The French revolution soon deteriorated into a mass killing of the very people it was supposed to help.

When people feel there is a blood debt to be paid, there will be blood and it's always easier to turn on ones own.

The Russian revolution soon deteriorated into Stalinist paranoid communism.

It sure did. Becasue reform came out of the gun not the will of the people.

The Industrial revolution destroyed farming

no it didn't as others have stated already. It allowed for more people to be fed and created a reduction in farming labor needs that encouraged people to be employed in other sectors.

Out of our contemporary world of such vast promise, autism figures grow

We are looking harder, autistic kids used to have ADD, or be slow, or troubled, or awkward nerds or simply considered stupid.

one in eight women encounter breast cancer

Once upon a time in the good old days infant mortality was 40 times higher than now. About 1 in 4 kids wouldn't make it past age five. If infant survival rates were as high 160 years ago maybe they'd have had the same or higher rate of breast cancer.

Free market Capitalism creates large trails of misery and ....

Free market capitalism....where's that?

Think also of the Katrina failure.

It revealed the papert tiger that is the government, didn't' it?

Why is this, are not revolutions the means to create a society that supports the people. Wasn't the enlightenment about Reason and wasn't Reason the answer to injustice and violence?

Some reason and enlightenment bore fruit, some didn't.

Look only at the wars of the moment. It is always the other side that is unreasonable.

Typically the winners write history.

Look today at the fact most people on earth live on less than two dollars a day.

and there are so many we really can't share the wealth equally so everyone on the planet can struggle to get by on $23.00 a day.

Revolutions in Africa become killing fields.

People fight for power over their fellow people a awful lot of the time.

One hundred and fifty million children in the world work in sweatshops.

How many would starve without the income?

Will humanity ever advance to a state of equilibrium, a state of peace,

I hope not, the only peaceful state of equilibrium I've ever known people to experience equally is the peace of the grave.

that only small tribal groups have ever approached or possessed.

Those mythical peaceful tribal groups that were at the mercy of local conditions and were woefully ignorant of the wider world that wouldn't all be considered peaceful at all by modern standards ?

Revolution brings change, it doesn't always bring universal reward.