Actually, david f, it was Huxley who really pegged it when he foresaw a future in which we would be endlessly distracted by trivia and brought to love our own enslavement.

As for grok, I have an amusing mental picture of Rik from 'The Young Ones', twenty years older and with an internet connection. Still, anyone who plainly admires Heinlein can't be entirely useless.

Clownfish wrote: Actually, david f, it was Huxley who really pegged it when he foresaw a future in which we would be endlessly distracted by trivia and brought to love our own enslavement.

Dear Clownfish,

Huxley was quite possibly right in his prediction but did not realise its beneficent effects. One of our social problems is the difficulty of accommodating to rapid technical change. Those like us who are mired in such trivia as posting to olo have our minds distracted from developing technology that creates change and are less likely to exacerbate that particular social problem.

Before I retired I designed MRI systems. They were expensive devices and were not always used well. The governments of some third world countries bought them for the sake of prestige. However, those countries did not have the technicians to use and maintain the equipment so the devices just sit there taking up space. If the money used to buy the devices had been squirreled away in Swiss banks at least someone would been able to use it for having fun in France where I understand one with money can have a great deal of fun.

Now that I am retired and spending my time in trivia like posting to olo and writing fiction and non-fiction which distracts people from producing technological change I am no longer creating devices which although ostensibly useful merely create problems by their existence. I am doing my part to slow down technological change which society has trouble adapting to.

I have asked a few people what they thought about the example of a rabbit population and have got a mixed response. Some agreed with me, some not.

Lets assume of course that we are talking about a closed system with only rabbits and steadily growing grass.

A handful of introduced rabbits will at first proliferate quickly and spread out to eat the long grass. Eventually there are hundreds of rabbits on the small island.

The rabbits eat all the grass, but as the grass supply decreases, the weaker (or less well respected etc) rabbits begin to starve. Before all of the rabbits have died, however, the grass begins to grow back. Perhaps a dozen rabbits survive.

With only 12 rabbits eating the grass, it begins to grow lush again, but this time it is unable to get as long as it was because the rabbits are once again multiplying. This time, the rabbit population peaks at about 100 individuals.

These rabbits once again eat the grass faster than it can replenish. The grass begins to diminish, and the rabbits breeding becomes less successful and some starve. This time 20 rabbits survive the squeeze.

In this way, with decreasing oscillations between too many and not enough rabbits, it seems to me that a relatively stable population of rabbits will evntually be reached, with these rabbits keeping the grass pretty well clipped.

This seems pretty logical to me. If it is wrong, can anyone explain in more detail how or why?

It is wrong Gilbert, because it is an idealised anecdote of how you wish the system you created in head would behave. It does not incorporate anything we know about ecology or animal and plant population dynamics.

In a 'closed' system, with no predators or diseases, all the rabbits are eventually going to die. They will strip the island of grass until starvation of the population starts. Even when the last of them are starving, after most of them have already died, the grass has to grow pretty fast for them to survive. But even given that the grass may in fact grow very fast, the stochastic (random) effects of population crashes mean that you have to have at least one male and one female surviving. The stochastic effects that affect small populations mean that even then, either a bad season or no rain will probably eventually happen and the grass won't grow fast enough or the rabbits will probably suffer severe inbreeding depression from having the population go through multiple genetic bottlenecks. There is no bounce back from a population extinction. Local extinctions happen to many species all the time.

The system is never really in 'equilibrium', that's just an illusion. Patterns exist, sure, but they aren't permanent.

It is an idealized anecdote, but I am still not entirely convinced.

If we think of a slightly larger island, and we say that the sustainable carrying capacity of the island is 1000 rabbits, even though the population could swing wildly, it would be very unlikely that the rabbits would die out altogether. Instead, the population would trend toward the carrying capacity.

The specific example is not so much the issue for me anyway, although I am intrigued by that one. I am more interested in the interplay of the dialectic as I have tried to define it.

Actually, I am far from an expert on Hegel, and while I do respect him for his work on the dialectic, I am not in a position to endorse or not all of his political or spiritual veiws etc.

My own interpretation of the dialectic comes from an interest in polarity. Specifically in this context I look at there being three fundamental polarities. Yin/yang as the underlying polarity, being/non-being and separateness/connectedness which are more related to actual goings on in the world.

Specifically then, I look to there being two categories of dialectic within which all dialectic progressions will fit. The first relating to the being/non-being polarity. Here we can look at whether something is either more or less manifest (such as rabbits). We could also use an example of how much food there is in the pantry. Sometimes there will be too little, sometimes too much, but it will trend toward a balance.

The second category of dialectic progression that I look at relates to the separateness/connectedness polarity. Here we look at interactions and motivations. We have competitive/cooperative, self/community, angry/weak etc.

> Is that the best you can do - assuming what is in issue, appeal
> to absent authority, ad hominem, and nothing else, all in the one
> reply? - a veritable trifecta of fallacies.
> I've really got you pegged, haven't I?
> Idiot.
> Peter Hume

Rest my case.
;P

> If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on
> a human face - forever.
> George Orwel
> david f

Eric Blair was right on the money often enough; but again: the primary intellectual/ideological failure of the petit-bourgeois types on this forum (or anywhere, for that matter) is their accepting the basic false premise of capitalist propaganda that 'stalinism == socialism'. Because it manifestly does NOT. And how this all ties into Hegel and the dialectic of Reality, is in the utter failure of stalinists (or their bourgeois allies for that matter) to actually understand and properly use dialectical-materialism. Which leads back directly to Herr Professor Hegel.

> ...MRI systems... expensive
> devices and were not always used well. The governments of some
> third world countries bought them for the sake of prestige.
> However, those countries did not have the technicians to use
> and maintain the equipment so the devices just sit there taking
> up space.

The problem with thinking like this: while the person presenting it may be getting the up-front and superficial 'facts' of the matter right, their relatively contextless presentation of them (like here) in fact defaults to the logic of the capitalist worldview -- which is in itself highly distorted, superficial and very, very dishonest, in the most criminal sense. Nowhere here, for instance, is any attempt made to demonstrate the very real relations between these corrupt political elites of these neo-colonial countries and the ruling elites of the Western imperialist countries: who in fact not only make this corrupt behavior possible, but even positively *encourage* it.

And proper use of even the hegelian dialectic would allow us and encourage us to properly relate 'facts' to the correct relative and absolute contexts.