I hope I’m not intruding here but I used to be very into Debord and situationists (my username is actually a reference to one of his films, in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni). Its been a while since I read through all of society of the spectacle, but if you want another opinion on a passage I’d be happy to try to help
Love that this person demands everyone else have a phd to argue with them about a subject they clearly understand less than a middle schooler
The abstract:
Due to chronic high densities and preferential browsing, white-tailed deer have significant impacts on woody and herbaceous plants. These impacts have ramifications for animals that share resources and across trophic levels. High deer densities result from an absence of predators or high plant productivity, often due to human habitat modifications, and from the desires of stakeholders that set deer management goals based on cultural, rather than biological, carrying capacity. Success at maintaining forest ecosystems require regulating deer below biological carrying capacity, as measured by ecological impacts. Control methods limit reproduction through modifications in habitat productivity or increase mortality through increasing predators or hunting. Hunting is the primary deer management tool and relies on active participation of citizens. Hunters are capable of reducing deer densities but struggle with creating densities sufficiently low to ensure the persistence of rare species. Alternative management models may be necessary to achieve densities sufficiently below biological carrying capacity. Regardless of the population control adopted, success should be measured by ecological benchmarks and not solely by cultural acceptance.
As this ecologist notes, hunters are essential parts of maintaining healthy, biodiverse ecosystems.
you’re missing the best exchange from that episode:
Elaine (gifting Ned a shirt, which he says is ‘too fancy’): Just because you’re a communist, does that mean you can’t wear anything nice? You look like Trotsky
Ned (excitedly): Good!
I always thought that pre-Socratic wasn’t really a temporal boundary (after all, Aristotle and Plato were alive at the same time, so pre-Aristotelian also doesn’t work in that regard), but rather one of method. My understanding was that most pre-Socratic (sorry) philosophers were essentially speculative, whereas Socrates (or Plato’s Socrates) was the first to establish the need for a far more rigorous approach, which all subsequent philosophy is indebted to. So the division, while obviously still artificial, is useful in defining certain trends in philosophy. In any case, Plato (or the Neoplatonists for that matter) is hardly the one to blame for Christianity getting co-opted, that’s almost entirely on Paul and Constantine
I’m genuinely curious - why pre-Aristotelians and not pre-Socratic? Wouldn’t they have similar problems as terms?
That last point is definitely something I worry about a lot, and I’ve always thought this Brecht poem phrased it well:
It is true: I work for a living But, believe me, that is a coincidence. Nothing That I do gives me the right to eat my fill. By chance I have been spared. (If my luck does not hold, I am lost.)
They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad to be among the haves! But how can I eat and drink When I take what I eat from the starving And those who thirst do not have my glass of water? And yet I eat and drink.
unfortunately I do not have any actual answers for this lol
I mean, maybe at some level but certainly not enough to make one side worth supporting over the other. Like ElGosso mentioned, the best thing is going to be what minimizes suffering for normal civilians, and I don’t think that supporting Russia is the best way to that goal