Discovery Channel Bomber Modivated By Anti-Humanist “Green” Views
September 2nd, 2010
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You may have heard by now that a man entered the Maryland offices of Discovery Communications, the parent company of The Discovery Channel, Investigation Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet and several other television channels. The man carried firearms and had explosives strapped to his body, which he threatened to detonate. The standoff ended when police sharp-shooters managed to shoot and kill the suspect.
The man, James E. Lee, had been protesting the programing of the Discovery Channel and its other networks, including programs which documented children and families. These include reality tv shows like “Kate Plus 8” and “19 Kids and Counting.” You can read more in this LA Times Article.
What is especially disturbing about this incident is the motivation of Mr. Lee, which he made very clear on his website savetheplanetprotest.com Lee had previously protested at the building and elsewhere and had been arrested for disorderly conduct related to his protest activities.
There’s a good liklihood that the website will be taken down in the near future, so I am copying the entirety of the site, which consists of one page of text. The page is titled “My Demands”
The Discovery Channel MUST broadcast to the world their commitment to save the planet and to do the following IMMEDIATELY:
1. The Discovery Channel and it’s affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn’s “My Ishmael” pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other’s inventive ideas. Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order. Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. Do both. Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed! MAKE IT INTERESTING SO PEOPLE WATCH AND APPLY SOLUTIONS!!!!
2. All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.
3. All programs promoting War and the technology behind those must cease. There is no sense in advertising weapons of mass-destruction anymore. Instead, talk about ways to disassemble civilization and concentrate the message in finding SOLUTIONS to solving global military mechanized conflict. Again, solutions solutions instead of just repeating the same old wars with newer weapons. Also, keep out the fraudulent peace movements. They are liars and fakes and had no real intention of ending the wars. ALL OF THEM ARE FAKE! On one hand, they claim they want the wars to end, on the other, they are demanding the human population increase. World War II had 2 Billion humans and after that war, the people decided that tripling the population would assure peace. WTF??? STUPIDITY! MORE HUMANS EQUALS MORE WAR!
4. Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn’t, then get hell off the planet! Breathe Oil! It is the moral obligation of everyone living otherwise what good are they??
5. Immigration: Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it. Call for people in the world to develop solutions to stop it completely and permanently. Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek jobs and therefore breed more unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH! (The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant jobs!)
6. Find solutions for Global Warming, Automotive pollution, International Trade, factory pollution, and the whole blasted human economy. Find ways so that people don’t build more housing pollution which destroys the environment to make way for more human filth! Find solutions so that people stop breeding as well as stopping using Oil in order to REVERSE Global warming and the destruction of the planet!
7. Develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people’s brains until they get it!!
8. Saving the Planet means saving what’s left of the non-human Wildlife by decreasing the Human population. That means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies! You’re the media, you can reach enough people. It’s your resposibility because you reach so many minds!!!
9. Develop shows that will correct and dismantle the dangerous US world economy. Find solutions for their disasterous Ponzi-Casino economy before they take the world to another nuclear war.
10. Stop all shows glorifying human birthing on all your channels and on TLC. Stop Future Weapons shows or replace the dialogue condemning the people behind these developments so that the shows become exposes rather than advertisements of Arms sales and development!
11. You’re also going to find solutions for unemployment and housing. All these unemployed people makes me think the US is headed toward more war.
Humans are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around and are wrecking what’s left of the planet with their false morals and breeding culture.
For every human born, ACRES of wildlife forests must be turned into farmland in order to feed that new addition over the course of 60 to 100 YEARS of that new human’s lifespan! THIS IS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE FOREST CREATURES!!!! All human procreation and farming must cease!
It is the responsiblity of everyone to preserve the planet they live on by not breeding any more children who will continue their filthy practices. Children represent FUTURE catastrophic pollution whereas their parents are current pollution. NO MORE BABIES! Population growth is a real crisis. Even one child born in the US will use 30 to a thousand times more resources than a Third World child. It’s like a couple are having 30 babies even though it’s just one! If the US goes in this direction maybe other countries will too!
Also, war must be halted. Not because it’s morally wrong, but because of the catastrophic environmental damage modern weapons cause to other creatures. FIND SOLUTIONS JUST LIKE THE BOOK SAYS! Humans are supposed to be inventive. INVENT, DAMN YOU!!
The world needs TV shows that DEVELOP solutions to the problems that humans are causing, not stupify the people into destroying the world. Not encouraging them to breed more environmentally harmful humans.
Saving the environment and the remaning species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.
The humans? The planet does not need humans.
You MUST KNOW the human population is behind all the pollution and problems in the world, and YET you encourage the exact opposite instead of discouraging human growth and procreation. Surely you MUST ALREADY KNOW this!
I want Discovery Communications to broadcast on their channels to the world their new program lineup and I want proof they are doing so. I want the new shows started by asking the public for inventive solution ideas to save the planet and the remaining wildlife on it.
These are the demands and sayings of Lee.
I find events like this very disturbing. There is a very powerful and vocal political and social lobby which is pushing a message that could lead to more individuals taking up arms. The message is anti-technology, anti-humanity and anti-freedom. We are repeatedly told that the world is teetering on the brink of doomsday due to the actions of mankind, whether it be pollution, overpopulation or consumerism. We’re being told that the only way to save the planet from our species is to forcibly stop these offensive behaviors by whatever means necessary.
At the same time, organizations are breaking the law and even committing acts of violence, while avoiding prosecution. They’re wrapping themselves in the banner of environmentalism in order to validate these actions as being just, honorable and proper. The message is clear – there is a war brewing for the future of the planet and all tactics are fair. It is, if anything, surprising that there have not been more fertile minds buying into this rhetoric to the point of committing such acts of violence.
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 at 12:11 am and is filed under Announcements, Bad Science, Culture, Enviornment, Events, History, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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September 2nd, 2010 at 12:50 am
well, he got one thing he wanted, sorta. Now there’s one less filthy human around.
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September 2nd, 2010 at 1:19 am
Misanthropy has always been with us, even Socrates and Aristotle commented at length on it. However the current state of affairs in the world, and the magnitude of the problems we are facing has given this attitude (I will not grant it the status of a philosophy) new impetus. At the root of this is contemporary Green ideology.
One singular fact stands out in all Green propaganda and permeates all the legislation and other programs they sponsor. It is a contempt and disdain for the Earth’s human population: The leaders of the movement hate humanity. Obsessed with population growth, anything that can reduce it — disease, poverty, famine, or lack of energy is pursued as part of the Green agenda. The real message they voice speaks to a hatred of humanity and the many technological, medical, agricultural, and other achievements that have enhanced, improved, and saved the lives of millions.
Is it a surprise then, that some deluded moron, convinced that there are no solutions to our problems, snaps, and does something like this? Actions like this are what the Green agenda reaps when they sow the seeds of hopelessness and guilt, rather than look to technology to save us. People like this bomber are the true acolytes of the Green religion of self-hatred. I’m afraid he is just the beginning.
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September 2nd, 2010 at 2:43 am
If he hates humanity so much, what’s the point of spreading a message? We’re going to blow ourselves away anyway, and I am looking forward to it, albeit not for the same reasons.
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September 2nd, 2010 at 5:21 am
Jeremy said:
He does hate humanity, but blowing ourselves up would hurt all the cuddly animals.
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September 2nd, 2010 at 5:24 am
To a good approximation all species that have ever existed have gone extinct and in the long run exactly everything that has ever lived will go extinct. I care deeply about the environment, but not in the sense of that this douchébag did; I care about the environment for the sake of maximizing human enjoyment and wellbeing.
I don’t even know what it means to protect the environment for its own sake if not done in the interest of human beings or some other hypothetical intelligent beings who apply value judgements.
All animal life is merely plant parasites; so does protecting nature mean wiping out all animals? If maximizing species diversity is the goal, shouldn’t we create lots of artificial barriers and selectively erradicate some species to maximize the rate of speciation? I think you have to believe that “mother earth” is not just a silly reification, but a real, godlike entity, with wants and wishes.
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September 2nd, 2010 at 5:56 am
Here’s an interesting article in this context. It suggests people should work less and become poorer to help the environment:
http://www.euractiv.com/en/sustainability/working-shorter-hours-protects-climate-job-market-news-497346
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September 2nd, 2010 at 6:19 am
Jeremy said:
Just like we did with that unstoppable oil well drilled all the way to the center of earth and inevitably causing everyone to die?
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September 2nd, 2010 at 6:35 am
Wam said:
While the linked article is a bit wishy-washy in that it suggests that: “A new economic model is emerging out of the debate, based on self-provision. People who work less in the formal sector can dedicate their spare time to reducing their dependence on the market via small-scale activities that do not put a burden on the environment in the same way that industrial production does…” based, it would seem on, “Growing vegetables, generating renewable energy or manufacturing goods in small laboratories (sic)…”, the idea that a lower GDP is synonymous with a lower environmental impact is not backed up by reality. One need look no further than the slash-and-burn subsistence economies of the Amazon basin, or the rape of Madagascar to see that poverty is harder on the land and its resources than the Western standard.
This is not to suggest that there is not room for considerable improvement in the First World in this regard, however with us the driving issues are political, and not shear necessity, and with some work we could reduce our ecological footprint to a fraction of what it is now, and improve our standard of living in the process, not reduce it.
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September 2nd, 2010 at 8:59 am
“And of course, the squirrels”
Where will it all end?
Why squirrels?
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September 2nd, 2010 at 9:29 am
Chimp said:
He had probably seen (and been terrified by) the slides in Jim Hansen’s travelling roadshow, such as the presentation named “The Threat to the Planet” (PDF). See slide 33.
Dr. James Hansen: “It’s time to take a stand on global warming.”
Careful, Jim. People might take you seriously. Apparently, this guy did.
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September 2nd, 2010 at 10:07 am
wow, this guy sure hated people. And children even more. Can’t say I sympathize with him, given my own filthy procreating habits (2 kids).
Nevertheless, I’m not sure his philosophy is “green” as such. Whilst I of course don’t know about the American green movement (whatever form it may take, NGOs, party, whatever), I am quite certain that the European green parties I know of (Germany, Austria) are, whilst quite misled in large parts of their programs, very much of the “we have only borrowed the Earth from our children, so we have to protect it” school. And their voters are procreating quite a bit, as can be seen in all the well-off quarters of the bigger cities, where they are strongest (apparently strongest party in the city of Berlin now).
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September 2nd, 2010 at 10:33 am
Michael said:
Yes, I have to agree with you that there seems to be a difference in that regard between the European, and North American Green ideologies. I suspect that the European movement’s dogmas have been tempered by the fact that it has spawned legitimate political parties that can get candidates elected. To do so they have had to tailor their message to appeal to a broader number of people.
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September 2nd, 2010 at 12:12 pm
*Another* nuclear war? Did I miss something? You’d think the first one would have made the papers or something.
I’m glad he was the only one who died in this incident. Can you imagine being held hostage by a man who believes that the problem with the world is that there are too many people? Given his railing against children and procreation, I’m glad he didn’t go open fire at a preschool or a maternity ward or something.
Item 2 is also very worrying – I don’t have cable, so I’ve only rarely watched Discovery Health-TLC, but it seems like every time I happen to see it, it’s a documentary about someone -usually a child- with a serious birth defect and how modern medicine helps them cope or corrects the problem. His talk of “parasitic human infants” and particularly “false heroics” seems to indicate a truly inhuman view of birth defects and the handicapped.
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September 2nd, 2010 at 12:15 pm
DV82XL said:
I suspect also that American radical environmentalists in some way long to return to the sparsely populated environment of the Old West (which played such a big role in the American national mythology), and that this makes them more misanthropic than their European opposite numbers.
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September 2nd, 2010 at 3:13 pm
DV82XL said:
I disagree. I don’t think it can be broken down into saying there are different movements in North America versus Europe. Basically I see more of a gradient that exists in both areas. You have a number of organizations which may all believe the same thing, but which vary in their aggressiveness and how much they temper their message depending on who they want to appeal to.
The Sierra Club is much more tempered and puts on a more mainstream front than Greenpeace. However, even Greenpeace seems tame compared to the Earth Liberation Front. In many countries the Green Party takes a less radical approach because they need to in order to remain a viable political party.
It all depends on the market and I’d note that many of these groups focus on different issues in different areas depending on what they see as being palatable to the local market. It’s very slick, really. For example, Greenpeace opposes modern agriculture in both Europe and the US, but they seem to focus more effort on it in Europe. Why is this? I think it’s because they have determined one market is more receptive to that than the other. Also, note that these organizations are more anti-corporate now than they were ten years ago. Why is this? I think it’s again a demographic decision. People are angry over the “bailouts” of companies and see corporations as having been miss-managed. So the movement tweaks the message to fit the popular mindset.
But there’s something else to note. I’ve always seen the movement as being very anti-humanist. They don’t trust human technology or development and feel human-related changes to the environment are always negative.
Yet NEVER will you see a mainstream organization say outright that they are against humanity. Some fringe ones will, but even that is rare. They wrap themselves in apparently honorable intentions and even paint themselves as being pro-human. They talk about people being healthier and happier and more equality and try to equate this with their message of a kind of localist psuedo-socialist system of small subsistence communities with limited consumption and resources.
It often comes in the form of using quaint descriptions that appear attractive. “Wouldn’t you rather get your goods from an honest hard-working craftsman than a big ugly dirty factory.” “Wouldn’t you rather get your food from a local family-owned farm than a big chemically-treated industrial farm?”
It’s a very Disney-cartoon-like image that is often painted. They won’t say they want mud huts. They’ll say they want nice little cottages that are small and modest but comfortable and good places to raise a family in a wholesome environment. Nevermind the fact that it’s never so idealistic – that thatched roofs look cozy from a distance but rot and become infested with bugs. Nevermind the fact that the idealistic farmer breaks his back to scrape together enough food to survive. Nevermind the fact that without modern drugs and vaccines many die of preventable infection.
Some of their typical phrases:
“Honest work that provides exercise and brings us back to the days of living in harmony with the land we work”
Translation:
“Back breaking labor and near slave-like conditions”
“Less consumption”
Translation:
“More poverty”
“Local-based communities”
Translation:
“A return to the days when poverty and lack of mechanized transportation prevented travel”
“Less big agriculture. Agriculture that creates more sustainable population levels”
Translation:
“More people dying of starvation”
“Smaller, more sustainable housing made from natural materials”
Translation:
“Mud huts”
“Living in harmony with our climate and not trying to change it with artificial heat and air conditioning”
Translation:
“Suffering in the heat and cold and many dying of hypothermia or heat stroke”
“More natural-based healthcare that encourages our bodies to heal themselves”
Translation:
“If you get an infection either your immune system wins on its own or you die, which is just as well because it keeps the population down”
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September 2nd, 2010 at 3:19 pm
George Carty said:
The American West, back in the frontier days was really not as great as it is made out to be in films and television. People began to take interest in the Western culture because they respected the toughness and resourcefulness it embodied. This is for good reason: You had to be very tough to live out there in the Wild West before the area was really settled. It was a VERY hard existence and those who did well really accomplished something.
If you take, for example, cowboys. Cowboys didn’t spend much time gun slinging and chasing down stage coaches, defending towns from cattle-rustlers and bank robbers and that kind of thing. They herded cattle across the plains from the grazing fields to the railroad depots or slaughter houses. It was weeks in the middle of nowhere, in rugged terrain and with mostly boring work. It did pay well, but it had to, given the conditions and labor involved. Also, it was dangerous. Cowboys died from being trampled by herds or falling off a horse and getting an injury that got infected.
When there were fights and crime in the old west, it was rarely, if ever, as idealistic and adventurous as it was made out to be. Cattle rustlers were generally just common thieves.
Yeah, it was an interesting culture that developed and had some pretty amazing history and very strong characters, but it wasn’t that much fun.
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September 2nd, 2010 at 4:10 pm
drbuzz0 said:
I didn’t want to imply there were different movements per se, however the degree of direct political engagement by the green movement is much greater in Europe, and thus a requirement by the Green Parties there to maintain a broad appeal. This can be seen even in Canada where the Green Party is becoming less doctrinaire in its message as it comes closer to winning seats.
However that is not to say that among the NGOs there is not a full spectrum of ideologies from conservative to radical to choose from, but then these organizations show no interest in soiling their hands with the electoral process.
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September 3rd, 2010 at 7:26 am
drbuzz0 said:
I think this list should be turned into a poster or something.
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September 3rd, 2010 at 12:55 pm
I think this guy (and much of the environmental movement) has been mired in the thinking of the 1970s for far too long. Birthrates are declining in much of the world, the industrial nations have largely cleaned up their act, technology has marched on, etc. I think what is needed is a new focus, one on making the world a cleaner place by making the world a more prosperous place.
Sustainable ain’t mud huts and slave labor; it’s towering skyscrapers, nuclear plants, and novel means of recycling. I think that’s what seems to be lost on Mr. Lee.
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September 3rd, 2010 at 9:57 pm
In some of my darker and slightly alcohol driven periods of thought I’ve often wondered if Soylent Green or Futurama style suicide services might serve a useful function in society.
Not to actually control the population or anything like that, god no.
What I mean is that if indeed every person on the planet is some sort of evil resource consuming monstrosity that we absolutely need less of, then the best thing you can do is kill yourself. Bam! You won’t have any kids, your resource consumption ceases immediately, problem solved.
That way monsters such as this that aren’t even deserving of the title ‘person’ can do their duty to reduce the strain on the planet and the rest of us can be rid of them before they finally snap like this.
…
And nothing of value would be lost.
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September 4th, 2010 at 10:03 am
drbuzz0 said:
In my view Green ideology is not 100% poison — if it was, it wouldn’t be able to gather enough followers to be a serious threat.
On the subject of agriculture, is there any good reason why it should be dominated by enormous agribusiness corporations? As I see it there is no reason why small family farms could not use the main productivity-enhancing technologies (synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and GMO).
It’s a similar story in some areas of manufacturing. Clothes (for example) are still made by one person sitting at a sewing machine, and their manufacture was only historically dominated by big firms for logistic reasons, which no longer really apply thanks to the Internet. Check out threads here and here on how eBay has allowed clothes-makers in India and Pakistan to sell directly to Western consumers, cutting out a whole swathe of predatory middlemen.
Big capital goods (like airliners or nuclear reactors, for example) will always be best made by industrial methods, but this may not be true of many products. And couldn’t advanced computer-aided manufacturing techniques give us the best of both worlds: the quality of traditional craftsmanship with the quantity of industrial production?
Doesn’t the ugliness of modernist architecture also turn people against progress? Traditional architectures (whether they be Classical, Gothic, Islamic, Hindu or Far Eastern) have fractal geometry which is psychologically appealing because it resembles the natural world, while modernist architecture tends to use simple geometric shapes that make people feel uneasy (because such shapes do not exist naturally on those dimensions). In pre-modern times the only buildings built to simple geometric shapes were those which people were meant to keep away from (tombs such as the Egyptian pyramids, and military fortifications).
Modernist buildings do have the advantage of being faster to build, but unlike in the early 20th century (the heyday of modernism) we are not confronted with unprecedentedly rapid rural-to-urban migration which trapped millions in filthy overcrowded slums (or in the mid-20th century the need to rapidly rebuild war-devastated cities), so can we now pay more attention to quality of life. Zoning laws which separate residential, commercial and industrial areas (and worse, restrict density in residential areas) could also be considered obsolete — they made sense in the early 20th century when most industry was heavily polluting, but this no longer true in the Western world, and zoning laws just cause needless automobile dependency.
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September 4th, 2010 at 10:26 am
George Carty said:
Ultimately, we will have to provide food and textiles for the globe at or around the same level enjoyed in the West or face conflict. To attempt to do so with anything less than the economies of scale that can be realized through mass-production will fail. So ultimately we are left with the choice of using these techniques, maintaining the current disparities via the projection of military might, or radically reducing the human population. The latter two are not easy to do, or easy to sell to the majority, and at any rate involve large-scale bloodshed.
Some things may be made on demand, and to measure, but bespoke manufacturing has a long way to go yet before it can be used for any but big-ticket items. However I agree that this should be the ideal we should shoot for.
As for post-war Brutalism, the era has largely passed as an an architectural style, and current designs both in buildings and neighborhoods are trending more or less towards a more synergistic philosophy.
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September 4th, 2010 at 1:15 pm
DVX82XL, note that technology might afford you significant leway in where you have the economies of scale.
Today making the factories themselves doesn’t exploit economies of scale particularly well, but the products of these factories have very large economies of scale.
It might be possible to turn this on its head and have massproduced “clothing factories”, highly automated machines the size of a small room, capable of producing low economy of scale custom designed clothing from a design specification.
They used to do super-expensive embroidering on clothing when they wanted some pattern. They they figured out that they could make repeated patterns with dyed rollers. Now we just print arbritrary images on T-shirts and things like that.
I see no fundamental reason why it would remain impossible to eventually develop a machine the size of a small room that can “print” out clothing designs from a design specification with a minimum of human interaction. It would still need a small amount of staff to keep it fed and repair any breakdowns.
3D printing of various kinds is also comming along nicely; if you can print this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boq_621R5Jg, I don’t see why you can’t print toys, keyfobs, eyeglass frames, replacement bicycle parts, fancy doorknobs, jewelry, keys, utensils, whatever. All that has to happen for it to take off in a major way is cheaper machines, faster machines and easier to use software. That might be realized by a combination of technological improvement and mass-manufacturing of the 3d-printers themselves.
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September 4th, 2010 at 7:01 pm
Soylent said:
Nether do I, but it is a question of timescale, and unit cost. Right now 3D printing is fine for prototyping, and for making custom prosthesis, and the like, but these technologies are equivalent to computers of the 1950’s. Recall that those were reserved for problems that were considered critical, and CPU time was several thousand dollars a millisecond. It took fifty years to get to the point where these are now a consumer item, and still they are only such in First-Word economies.
The time will come, no doubt, for on-demand production to take the lead. But for the moment the greater issue is how to create a global economy that will provide the opportunity for all (or a significant majority) to enjoy a minimum standard of living, and at this point mass production is the only mature class of technologies that have a hope of succeeding
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September 5th, 2010 at 9:21 am
DV82XL said:
This reminds me of the extremism of Ingrid Newkirk of PETA:
http://www.peta.org/feat/newkirk/will.html
During a radio talk show, she was asked the question “If you could cure AIDS but it meant the killing of one rat, would you accept that?” She said no.
That pretty much says it all.
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September 5th, 2010 at 9:57 am
DV82XL said:
Well, we do not actually need to go to full blown 3D printing to produce clothing. Most clothing is made out of a single layer of fabric. Basically all you’re talking about, in terms of automated production is just cutting out two dimensional patterns from stock fabric – a comparatively easy task, and then sewing it together at the appropriate seems. Automated sewing by CNC sewing machines is a mature technology.
You’d probably be talking about a system where there are various reams of fabric of various types and then a system to cut them out and sew them together.
The textiles themselves can be produced on relatively automated weaving machines.
Why is this not already the way most clothing is made? I’d imagine it’s a simple issue of there being cheap enough labor available that it’s not worth the bother of going to full automation. That’s an issue in a number of areas. It’s not necessarily beyond technology to fully automate certain things, but as long as there are parts of the world where humans can do the grunt work for next to nothing, why bother?
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September 5th, 2010 at 6:07 pm
drbuzz0 said:
I agree but this is the technology of mass production, what I thought was under discussion was on-demand custom tailored production where one would pick a design, then get scanned by lasers, and the finished outfit UPS’ed to your home a day latter. This may be within our grasp right no, but not at the price this sort of service would need to command.
Right now though the tools of mass production are what we need to use to raise the global standard of living high enough so that everyone has something to loose – usually a good driver of peace – and not inconsequentially, a driver of lower population growth as well.
Within this context, I see any push to return to some fantasy vision of the past, ether in agriculture or manufacturing as a narrow-minded, utterly selfish, move, that would see millions condemned to penury, starvation, and death, to satisfy some aesthetic desire of those that even now live with comforts unavailable to most.
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November 20th, 2010 at 3:23 am
Returning to this thread…
DV82XL said:
Some people of the “free market anti-capitalist” persuasion would argue that economies of scale are a myth, at least once a firm progresses past the relatively small size needed to take advantage of division of labour.
Is it possible that the Luddites weren’t absolutely wrong, just about 200 years ahead of their time? Henry Ford’s original assembly line only cost about half a million dollars in today’s money, but modern mass production setups are so phenomenally expensive that it could conceivably be the case that all the gains from increased productivity are swallowed up by oligopoly profits (as the cost of the machinery provides a formidable barrier to entry), so that neither the workers nor the consumers will benefit.
The comment on the Making Light blog about “clothes still made by one person at a sewing machine” suggests that giant manufacturing firms in this sector make their money by exploitation of the workers, rather than by genuine economies of scale. Perhaps textiles are an exceptional case though — see below.
DV82XL said:
I was thinking of the larger modernist architectural trend, not just concrete brutalism. I’ve read an article suggesting that flat roofs and the extensive use of glass (to name two modernist features) were the result of early 20th-century notions of health care. This is backed up by the fact that in the Britain of the interbellum era, the Miners’ Welfare Committees were among the greatest grassroots patrons of modernist building — obviously coal miners would have an even greater longing for sunshine and cleanliness than the average Brit.
drbuzz0 said:
Indeed — using 3D printing to make clothes is the proverbial “atom bomb to crack a nut”.
drbuzz0 said:
Textiles do seem to be the first rung on the ladder for Third World countries seeking to industrialize, suggesting that it is a low-productivity and labour-intensive endeavour. Is this because this industry is less amenable to automation than others, or is it simply less skill is required for making clothes compared to other low-tech manufacturing?
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November 20th, 2010 at 11:08 am
George – The concept of economies of scale are no myth, one only has to look to the computer you are front of right now to see that this is so, nor does the concept depend on automation, or division of labor per se, although it is mostly realized through them.
Technologies like 3d-printing, nano-assembler swarms, and such, may permit a return to bespoke manufacturing, but that is a in distant future, and does not address the issues of raising the world’s standard of living now. Within the context of this thread, the Green argument that we should return to a time when most grew and processed their own food and manufactured their own textiles. Given the current state of technology, this is a leap backwards. Taking such a path would only reduce the globe’s relative carrying capacity, leading to starvation and death.
While the needle trades are still labor intensive, it is mass production. A worker that can make 2000 seams an hour on an overlock machine is not in the same class as your Grandmother on her Singer taking up a hem. Nor are those working on the spinning frames and high speed looms producing at the same pace as those that do this manually. To suggest that these are low productivity industries, is simply wrong. What makes textiles attractive to new economies, is the fact that the skill level of the workers need not be high, and that they can be pushed to produced at much higher levels than a Western worker would stand.
So while you are right that workers are exploited, and indeed there are practical limits to the degree of automation that the textile industry can enjoy at this stage of development, it is mass production, that could not be replaced by some bespoke system. Yet.
It’s the same with many manufactured products. Despite the fact that it is a lively industry with many competitors, the prices of hand built cars are far greater than those off the big production lines, and will remain so, as long as highly skilled people need to do the former, while semiskilled people are needed for the latter. This is to say nothing of the fact that major car manufacturers can produce components by the millions as well.
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October 8th, 2011 at 12:10 pm
More generally, on the issue of Malthusian ideology motivating terrorists, did you know that Oslo gunman Anders Behring Breivik was also a radical Malthusian? From page 1202 of his manifesto:
So much for claims that Breivik was some kind of fundamentalist Christian.
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October 8th, 2011 at 6:56 pm
George Carty said:
You’ve bought up the point that a lot of Germany’s grand strategy in World War II was based on Malthusian nonsense so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised if he though that.
George Carty said:
The entire planet could support more than 10 billion if we just used the best technology we’ve got so even if we were to implement a population cap we don’t need levels that low (though I’d be interested in knowing which continents he thinks are living outside their means as it were, somehow I suspect I already know).
George Carty said:
Being a Malthusian doesn’t stop someone from being a Christian or even a fundamentalist Christian (it just so happen that Breivik was both).
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October 8th, 2011 at 9:16 pm
Perhaps slightly off topic, but I frequently see the phrase “We’re using eight Earths worth of resources!” thrown about as if there’s a magical pot of ‘resource’ somewhere that fills up at a certain rate and we’re sucking it off faster then it replenishes which strikes me as a bit…simplistic.
I’ve been trying to figure out a breakdown of exactly WHAT these resources are.
Some things are going to be actual hard limits, like the ability of the atmosphere to dilute pollutants such as we see with rising C02 levels.
Some are things that while vital should realistically cap out at some level, such as arable land. If we’re using farming practices that don’t destroy soil fertility over the long haul or at least find some method of combating that and if population caps out at around 10 billion or so as is projected, then eventually you’ll be able to figure that X percentage of the Earths surface will need to be devoted to crop land. A figure that might be improvable through technology such as a greenhouses that allow farming further north and engineered crops that give greater yields.
Others are problems now but SHOULD be solvable if political will could be found. For example energy, I’d imagine that most people on this site would agree that full application of nuclear power would give us abundant energy with a supply measured in millennia at least.
Finally, some things we would have a hard time running out of even if we tried. Iron, aluminum, silicon, those are all a significant percentage of the Earths crust and as long as we have energy to refine them they should always be available.
I guess why this topic kind of bothers me is that the same people who bandy about the “We’re using eight Earths worth of resources!” line are the same people who also hammer away that “Therefore, we need to cap resource consumption rates and switch to a steady-state economy!”
The mental disconnect for me is:
First there are certain resources we’ll effectively never run out of, so if the material economy grows with these effectively inexhaustible resources I have a hard time seeing where the cap would be.
Second, not all economic growth has to be material. The code monkey computer programmer who writes a hit indie game that nets him $200,000 is now that much richer, but isn’t consuming any more resources than he was before.
Third while in abstract I agree that no exponential growth can go on forever, the Steady-State economy people are driving for capping things NOW NOW NOW, and in the long run cars will be banned, mass air travel will end and we’ll all only be allowed two or three pings worth of space per person and we should be thankful to have that, you evil planet raping resource consuming b@stards. While on the other hand I expect that with the proper application of the correct technologies (along with improvements in technology) things will top out somewhere more around us all living like the Jetsons.
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October 9th, 2011 at 4:56 am
Anon said:
Where did I bring that up? (I’m asking mainly for the benefit of others reading this thread here.)
I was enlightened on this matter by Adam Tooze’s book “The Wages of Destruction”, and I’ve only mentioned it twice on this blog — once on the issue of WWII strategic bombing, and the other time on the issue of German peasant support for the Nazis. Was it that second mention you’re thinking of, or was it a mention on some other blog or forum?
Nick P. said:
I don’t think anyone claims that we’re using “eight Earths’ worth of resources”. Perhaps they’re claiming that we’re using two or three Earths’ worth of resources, or that we’d need eight Earths’ worth of resources to give everyone on Earth an American standard of living…
Nick P. said:
According to this article (admittedly from an AGW-sceptical site) it’s mainly down to the ability of the planet to deal with our CO2 emissions.
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October 9th, 2011 at 5:39 am
George Carty said:
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the eight Earths figure before, but it might have been from a particularly hysterical and out-of-touch website and I might be attributing it more widely in my mind than I should.
That’s the problem with writing posts off of the top of my head rather that going and double checking my facts…
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October 9th, 2011 at 6:26 pm
Nick P. said:
As you mention it is rather simplistic although how much of the limited resources we’re using is very much worth knowing (now we’ve just got to figure it out).
Nick P. said:
Though even there technology could possibly help us increase the limit by taking CO₂ out of the atmosphere or moving the Earth away from the sun (or even reducing solar output (useful side effect is that the sun lasts longer)).
Nick P. said:
I think that land usage for farming (mainly, our cities won’t take up much land in comparison) is probably going to be one of the limits although that’ll depend on technology and we may end up trading resources we’ve got plenty of to reduce land usage (the extreme would be vertical farming though I don’t think we’ll be doing much of that).
Aquaculture could also help a lot with increasing the food supply and allowing people to continue to eat fish without sending them extinct (overfishing is a pretty serious problem at the moment and needs a solution).
Nick P. said:
Quite true there (nuclear fission should give us enough room to trade increase energy usage for reduced limiting resource usage and fusion and space solar have a chance of also making a decent contribution).
Nick P. said:
That brings up the question of which elements we could call rare and should be worried about running out of?
Pretty obviously not Fe, Al or Si but what about the rare ones?
Also what could we possibly substitute should we manage to make them run out?
More far out would be whether it might even make sense to import from space (certainly not for steel or aluminium (and I don’t see space agriculture to feed earthlings being worth doing) but possibly for platinum)?
Nick P. said:
Is a steady state economy even possible? All it’d take is a slight change for the economy to then grow or decline (and with the way economies work you’ll likely end up in a cycle).
Nick P. said:
A cap on only the resources we could run out of would tend to shift the economy to using more of what we can’t run out of.
Nick P. said:
If he spends that money on a new computer that uses more electricity than his old one then he would be consuming more resources.
Nick P. said:
When you look at the universe and how vast it is our exponential growth really looks like it could go on for a very long time.
George Carty said:
IIRC it was over at Nuclear Green.
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