ST Frontier Fleet: Personal Logs

Chief Editor's Notes
by Bram Peeters

December, the month of snow, traffic jams, last minute shopping, and a bunch of holidays. It's also the month where a new Chief Editor has taken over from Rob Verlinden, who stepped down after having provided us with the monthly newsletter for about two years.

To find out what our readers expect from the Tribune, I sent out a survey, and I would like to thank everyone who took the time to fill it out. Full details about the results will be in next month's newspaper, but most people seem to like the way the Tribune's been done so far, however people did indicate they would like to read more about Frontier Fleet's behind the scenes things, and therefore starting this month the Tribune will contain status reports from the Council as well, and there's also a new way to read this newsletter: through our member blogs (or the tribune blog directly)

In this month's edition:
- Council News, by the Council
- Update from the USS Calhoun, by Kelley MacKinnon
- Update from the USS Valkyrie, by Rick Clogston
- Update from Yeager Colony, by Rob Versteegt
- Starfleet Academy Status Report, by Rear Admiral Charles D. Clark
- Crew News, by Bram Peeters
- Keiri Jones: Christmas Time, by James Jackson
- Elves Exist!, by Rob Versteegt
- A Legendary post, selected by Rob Verlinden

Plain text version (members only)

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

The coding is confusing me, so I can't post this here. So here's a link to what I wanted to say.

Sir Paul McCartney is [url=http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5h4Z1sVCFYUNwtkLV9CXcjCCHzchg]urging people to stop eating meat one day a week[/url], for environmental reasons. Predictably enough, Internet readers are reacting with blubbering anger, both in English and in French; comment sections in the news are filled with their moronic, furious and irrational rejection of the idea. Part of the press are doing the same; an opinion piece in [i]The Telegraph[/i] is whining about McCartney "taking the meat out of our mouths". Yet another example of the idiocy of the masses; no big surprise there. The meat-eating fundies are out for blood.

In this particular case, however, idiocy takes the familiar form of selfish denial. Denial of the obvious environmental benefits of vegetarianism is oh-so-similar to climate change denial. Along the lines of "the truth would force me to make sacrifices in my selfish and unsustainable lifestyle, so the truth can't be true". The ability of irrational and selfish minds to convince themselves of the absurd (or rather, to reject the obvious) will never cease to amaze me, or appall me. It's basically the same mental mechanism as the one behind literal creationism: reject the truth if it challenges one's irrational preconceptions or intrudes on one's comfort zone.

Philosophers used to say that human beings are creatures of reason. I think not. Some of us are, or try to be despite our limitations; most human beings are not, and make no attempt to be.

No wonder our planet's future looks bleak.

As a reminder, McCartney is, of course, entirely correct. The impact of the meat industry on the environment is devastating. And not only because of methane gas. Animals for the slaughter are produced in their billions, and need to be fed. Forests are chopped down to use land for agriculture - not to feed human beings, but to feed animals destined for the slaughter. Deforestation is due, in great part, to the meat industry.

And there's another tragic irony. Agriculture produces more than enough food to feed every human being on the planet. Yet people are starving. Why? Two reasons. The first is economic: there's no profit in feeding them, so the capitalist "ethos" dictates that they should starve. The second is that we prefer to divert food away from them and use it on cows and other animals instead, to keep meat production going.

Leaving aside, for a moment, the horrific cruelty of the meat industry -in which cows sometimes have their hooves chopped off and their skin boiled off before they're actually dead- ; eating meat destroys the ozone layer, increases global warming and accelerates deforestation.

McCartney was well aware that he wouldn't be heard if he suggested vegetarianism. So he's simply pointed out that cutting back on one's meat intake just a little bit would be a positive step towards helping the environment. It's not much to ask, and it should have appealed to every rational person's understanding of the obvious.

Instead, it's brought the frothing morons out to whinge.

I spend most of my time these days working on my thesis. I've written close to 650 pages now, but I'm only on chapter 6 out of 9. I had initially set out to finish my thesis by June or July 2009; I'm way, way off the mark. I have a massive amount of work left to do, and I just can't see the end of it. I'm going to have to ask for an extra six months or a year to do it in, which I was really hoping not to have to do. Added to that is the problem that it's going to end up being ridiculously long, despite my leaving out many things that I'd have liked to include. It's... frustrating.

Equally frustrating is a presentation I've agreed to do at an international conference in Paris, where I'll be talking about the evolution of the perception of non-indigenous New Zealanders on Maori (basically; I'm calling it "From the 'white Maori' to biculturalism?"). I found out, belatedly, that I would have only twenty minutes to talk in. I've been struggling for ages to condense my notes into something that I can present in that short amount of time, without it becoming devoid of all meaning. My notes now are, for the most part, pages of crossed-out text, and I still can't find a way to cover the topic meaningfully with so little amount of time at my disposal. Either I'm going to run out of time while talking, or I'll just be giving brief mentions of vague facts and trends without figures or quotes to back them up. GAH!!

Anyway... As you may have guessed, I'm feeling frustrated.

And I've got nowhere else than this blog to vent my frustration.