Why is 'Natural' better?

[Redleader34]

I'm a Filmaker,and I also disagree with their statements. I have seen Natural living in Africa. It SUCKS. I do not want to be like the vilager, who is horridly Dependant on weather, to produce their crops/. Hell, when irrigation pipes came to them, the farmers were happy. Living like some proto man in the 10,000 BC era is not my idea of a fun time.

[Elaro]

Aaahaha. There actually once was a movement of "retour à la terre" (return to earth) here in Quebec. Sort of a reverse rural exodus. One of my mother's friend participated in it. Her conclusion? It was terrible.

[Darth Servo]

My favorite rebuttal to some "natural is always better" fruitcake is to direct them to some place like this

[Darth Servo]

12 artists and book-writers agree that life needs to go 'back to nature'.

They probably fall into the "starving artist" category and so simply want everyone else to be as down-and-out as they are.

[General Zod]

Just arrange it so that one of these idiots wind up cutting themselves on something and getting an infection. They'll change their minds pretty damn quick once they realize that without technology a good deal of people would die from something so incredibly simple to cure. (Either that or they'll be Darwin award winners due to being ridiculously stubborn. Win-win really.)

[lazerus]

Ever read Niven's "Fallen Angels"

I find a lot of the Green's behavior to be eerily plausible

Love that book, thought I was the only one who's read it.

[Civil War Man]

Also, I might be in the minority in this, by why is it that lots of people dont see machines and science as an extension of "Nature"?

It's mostly a holdover from religious thought (particularly Judeo-Christian). Basically, since many religions afford humanity a special place in the universe, practitioners do not consider humans a part of the natural world in the same way that a tree or a bear is. Once you have that mindset, then something built by humans, who are apart from Nature, would itself be apart from Nature due to the qualities of its creator.

[Redleader34]

I am at a "natural" healing place. Thanks to my mother, who belives in this stuff fullheartedly. I do not like it, as it seems to say all machines give you cancer!0ne0ne!! They seem to sugest that a colon that is "fillled with toxins" are the source of all sickness. They also say that the greeks and romans (anchient) had better doets than most most modern men.

[Broomstick]

I'm a Filmaker,and I also disagree with their statements.

I guess I make Artist Disagreeing With These Jackasses #3.

Gee, that wasn't hard - I'm sure we could find more if we actually started looking.

[Lusankya]

Heh. This reminds me of the time my housemate and I found bottles of "Organic Water" in the supermarket. We decided not to buy them, because we didn't particularly want our water to be organic, but we could only assume that some people would think it was fantastic, because organic is always better.

[PeZook]

I am at a "natural" healing place. Thanks to my mother, who belives in this stuff fullheartedly. I do not like it, as it seems to say all machines give you cancer!0ne0ne!!

All machines? How about a wooden horse buggy?

They seem to sugest that a colon that is "fillled with toxins" are the source of all sickness.

The anti-medicine loons always have a single source of all sickness. For some it's a colon filled with toxins, for others it's "stress of modern living", for yet other it's "modern food" et al.

In my mind, any organization that provides a set of grossly simplified answers to complicated problems is a cult.

They also say that the greeks and romans (anchient) had better doets than most most modern men.

I guess that's why they were shorter than us.

[General Zod]

They also say that the greeks and romans (anchient) had better doets than most most modern men.

When they didn't have a shortage of food, they still had problems with many necessity items (that we have today) being a luxury for those with money. Salt was considered the realm of the wealthy, food poisoning was bound to be considerably more severe, there were limited ways to preserve food, virtually no method of chilled food. There's plenty of examples that dash apart bullshit like that.

[Shrykull]

The American Indians were the best culture ever.
Unless we get rid of science, industry and capitalism, humanity is doomed to go extinct.

Ask them what they're gonna do when a doomsday asteroid comes at them, pray it out of existence?

[Shrykull]

My favorite rebuttal to some "natural is always better" fruitcake is to direct them to some place like this

What an idiotic thing to say that natural is always better. I remember people trying to peddle healthy cigarettes by saying they were made from all natural tobacco. And, oh what about snake venom, that's perfectly good for you, isn't it? Perfectly natural, and perfectly deadly, another poison like those plants.

[PainRack]

I am at a "natural" healing place. Thanks to my mother, who belives in this stuff fullheartedly. I do not like it, as it seems to say all machines give you cancer!0ne0ne!! They seem to sugest that a colon that is "fillled with toxins" are the source of all sickness. They also say that the greeks and romans (anchient) had better doets than most most modern men.

Yikes...... Just get out of there......

[Akhlut]

I am at a "natural" healing place. Thanks to my mother, who belives in this stuff fullheartedly. I do not like it, as it seems to say all machines give you cancer!0ne0ne!! They seem to sugest that a colon that is "fillled with toxins" are the source of all sickness. They also say that the greeks and romans (anchient) had better doets than most most modern men.

That colon idea is inherited from the 1920s, at least, according to Charles Panati, it is. Of course, if one views shit as a toxin, then, I suppose the colon is filled with toxins. However, it does grab some water, electrolytes, and some vitamins before throwing out our shit, so, it is pretty useful, all in all.


Also, I'd probably say that the ancient Greeks and Romans probably had a fairly good diet, as it'd probably be pretty similar to modern Italian and Greek dining, though, without the tomatos. To be fair, what killed them wasn't a poor diet, it was acute disease and hard living. It's not like they were like us (ubiquitous us), snarfing down a lot of fried foods and heavily processed foods (like any Hostess product). However, because of crowded living conditions and the lack of any sort of decent medicine, they did die in droves from the flu, the plague, and any number of diseases we'd consider merely inconveniencing.

[Akhlut]

]They also say that the greeks and romans (anchient) had better doets than most most modern men.

I guess that's why they were shorter than us.

We do, however, have access to much more food than they did and most modern people don't use nearly as many calories on hard labor growing food. We can afford to throw more calories into increased size than they could. So, it's not necessarily an indictment on their diet, so much as on their way of life.

[Broomstick]

It's also a consequence of less disease - illness can and does interrupt growth in children. Thanks to childhood vaccinations, most of us escape many of the illnesses that children in earlier time periods suffered (or even died from). Thus, less energy is spent on fighting off disease and repairing the damage of illness and more goes into growth. This accounts, at least in part, for why even the wealthy and powerful with access to abundant food, incuding high protein items, were still shorter on average than we are today.

[TithonusSyndrome]

Agriculture is the cause of all of this.
We should all be hunters and gatherers.

Why did you even bother watching it after they made this point? What may be the most terrifying aspect of Peak Oil is that lucrative hydrocarbon-based agriculture, the kind we've come to enjoy since the Green Revolution in the 40's and 50's, is what entitles our species to such an abundance of food. Our population, globally and nation by nation, would've never expanded to the point it's at now if we used "natural" techniques of farming and ranching. Take modern agriculture out of the picture and you take as much as 90% of our global food production away, which might be happening anyways. But to suggest that everyone on earth should voluntarily embrace a low-yield hunter-gatherer lifestyle is such a logistical obscenity that the filmmakers should count themselves lucky that they do not live in a society that doles out corporal punishment in response to abject stupidity.

[General Zod]

Agriculture is the cause of all of this.
We should all be hunters and gatherers.

Why did you even bother watching it after they made this point? What may be the most terrifying aspect of Peak Oil is that lucrative hydrocarbon-based agriculture, the kind we've come to enjoy since the Green Revolution in the 40's and 50's, is what entitles our species to such an abundance of food. Our population, globally and nation by nation, would've never expanded to the point it's at now if we used "natural" techniques of farming and ranching. Take modern agriculture out of the picture and you take as much as 90% of our global food production away, which might be happening anyways. But to suggest that everyone on earth should voluntarily embrace a low-yield hunter-gatherer lifestyle is such a logistical obscenity that the filmmakers should count themselves lucky that they do not live in a society that doles out corporal punishment in response to abject stupidity.

The real irony is that the technology they're using to spread their message is the very result of the society they're decrying.

[Nephtys]

Agriculture is the cause of all of this.
We should all be hunters and gatherers.

Why did you even bother watching it after they made this point? What may be the most terrifying aspect of Peak Oil is that lucrative hydrocarbon-based agriculture, the kind we've come to enjoy since the Green Revolution in the 40's and 50's, is what entitles our species to such an abundance of food. Our population, globally and nation by nation, would've never expanded to the point it's at now if we used "natural" techniques of farming and ranching. Take modern agriculture out of the picture and you take as much as 90% of our global food production away, which might be happening anyways. But to suggest that everyone on earth should voluntarily embrace a low-yield hunter-gatherer lifestyle is such a logistical obscenity that the filmmakers should count themselves lucky that they do not live in a society that doles out corporal punishment in response to abject stupidity.

The real irony is that the technology they're using to spread their message is the very result of the society they're decrying.

Or the fact that the filmmakers traveled around the country using trains. Nobody apparently saw the consequences of 'stopping agriculture'. I guess killing off 99.9 percent of the world's population is a great alternative to peak oil, eh?

Seriously, it was just insane. Sure, Fundies can be damned insane, and have a pretty worse average on how crazy they are. But I'm having a hard time thinking of one thing they can say that's worse than 'You know, stuff was way better back in 8000 BC when we had to spear food. None of this earth-depleting 'growing shit' that causes consumerism and materialism."

[TithonusSyndrome]

Seriously, it was just insane. Sure, Fundies can be damned insane, and have a pretty worse average on how crazy they are. But I'm having a hard time thinking of one thing they can say that's worse than 'You know, stuff was way better back in 8000 BC when we had to spear food. None of this earth-depleting 'growing shit' that causes consumerism and materialism."

I'm telling you people, more attention needs to be paid to new age/drug culture quackery. It's on the rise as more people lose hope in religion, and a great number of them see it as preferable to materialistic science. If a mass exodus from religion took place tomorrow, I can guarantee you that most of those fleeing religion would opt for woo-woo-isms most of the time, and unless something is done to preempt it, then most secular activism on behalf of the public understanding of science will pretty much amount to nothing.

[Patrick Degan]

Seriously, it was just insane. Sure, Fundies can be damned insane, and have a pretty worse average on how crazy they are. But I'm having a hard time thinking of one thing they can say that's worse than 'You know, stuff was way better back in 8000 BC when we had to spear food. None of this earth-depleting 'growing shit' that causes consumerism and materialism."

I'm telling you people, more attention needs to be paid to new age/drug culture quackery. It's on the rise as more people lose hope in religion, and a great number of them see it as preferable to materialistic science. If a mass exodus from religion took place tomorrow, I can guarantee you that most of those fleeing religion would opt for woo-woo-isms most of the time, and unless something is done to preempt it, then most secular activism on behalf of the public understanding of science will pretty much amount to nothing.

The difference is that new agers and druggies simply tend to withdraw from the world. Religionists, on the other hand, actually work to reshape the world into a state of impoverished conformity to their faery-tale Invisible Cloud-Being —up to and including the capture of political power to enforce that conformity through police and/or military force.

[TithonusSyndrome]

Seriously, it was just insane. Sure, Fundies can be damned insane, and have a pretty worse average on how crazy they are. But I'm having a hard time thinking of one thing they can say that's worse than 'You know, stuff was way better back in 8000 BC when we had to spear food. None of this earth-depleting 'growing shit' that causes consumerism and materialism."

I'm telling you people, more attention needs to be paid to new age/drug culture quackery. It's on the rise as more people lose hope in religion, and a great number of them see it as preferable to materialistic science. If a mass exodus from religion took place tomorrow, I can guarantee you that most of those fleeing religion would opt for woo-woo-isms most of the time, and unless something is done to preempt it, then most secular activism on behalf of the public understanding of science will pretty much amount to nothing.

The difference is that new agers and druggies simply tend to withdraw from the world. Religionists, on the other hand, actually work to reshape the world into a state of impoverished conformity to their faery-tale Invisible Cloud-Being —up to and including the capture of political power to enforce that conformity through police and/or military force.

I'm sure you'll agree that a culture of withdrawn slackers who think that the world owes them a living and ambition means nothing since, like, material things are fleeting carry their own perils with them.

[Patrick Degan]

I'm telling you people, more attention needs to be paid to new age/drug culture quackery. It's on the rise as more people lose hope in religion, and a great number of them see it as preferable to materialistic science. If a mass exodus from religion took place tomorrow, I can guarantee you that most of those fleeing religion would opt for woo-woo-isms most of the time, and unless something is done to preempt it, then most secular activism on behalf of the public understanding of science will pretty much amount to nothing.

The difference is that new agers and druggies simply tend to withdraw from the world. Religionists, on the other hand, actually work to reshape the world into a state of impoverished conformity to their faery-tale Invisible Cloud-Being —up to and including the capture of political power to enforce that conformity through police and/or military force.

I'm sure you'll agree that a culture of withdrawn slackers who think that the world owes them a living and ambition means nothing since, like, material things are fleeting carry their own perils with them.

And if there was an actual, tangible danger of such a culture displacing the present society, I might be worried about it.