SAVE SPECIES With “NEOLIBERAL” Derangement ECONOMY
Only by making species economically valuable can they be saved. In the present psycho-economic order of the world. Sad, but that’s it:
Trump enabled the return of “trophies” from hunts conducted in two African countries. In some of these countries, the permit to assassinate a bull elephant can cost as much as $50,000, not far from the US yearly family income. Trump’s sons enjoy assassinating large animals, taking picture of their deed, then have some African servants obsequiously cut parts of their victims, and bring back said gory body parts to impress their friends and their plutocratic ilk, on how manly and sadistic they are.
The Politically Correct crowd has retorted with its predictably hypocritical chorus that Trump was killing the elephants. In recent years, under the obscure leadership of the hypocrite in chief, “leading” from behind, it had become fashionable to burn mountains of African elephant tusks. According to the PC crowd, that supposedly would make illicit trade in ivory less profitable.
We kill magnificent animals, thus demonstrating to us that we are magnificent people. Real men, as long as many African servants serve us in our killing rampage!
The activity of burning trophies pretends to use economics to fight illegal behavior, yet it obviously contradicts the basic law of greed doing so. Consider the “Savior of the World” painting of Leonardo da Vinci (and his students) sold for 450 million dollars. Why so dear? Because the artist plus physicist, anatomist, and close friend of Francois I made only 16 paintings: rarity confers worth. If one really wanted to lower the price of elephant tusks, to make their trade unprofitable, one should flood the market with them, not burn them. (There are innovative ways to do that, innocuous for the species, for example by half cutting wild elephants’ tusks; the same has started to be applied to rhinoceroses, by cutting their horns; the horn SHOULD then be sold, be it only to pay for the operation.)
I don’t hunt live prey (only ideas, dead or alive). I think that, as practiced with modern weapons, hunting is unfair and exhibits such an alienating and cruel relationship with the world that it is somewhat demented, considering the present circumstances, when the biosphere is dying. It’s a bit like kicking around a terminally ill patient. I have used force against dangerous animals only in self-defense, or to give them a life-saving lesson, and that involved stones, the truly time-honored weapon of the genus Homo (I have been attacked by bears more than once, but bears hate stones; giving lessons to potentially lethal snakes may sound silly, but it works, they are smart enough to flee in a timely manner, upon next encounter; those who didn’t learn fast enough, got the chop).
Elephant numbers are sharply declining, officially due to poaching and a reduction in their territory. However, in places in Africa, to this day, children have to go to school in fear of being trampled by a wild elephant (the good news is that recently two white trophy hunters got crushed by elephants exacting revenge, and one of them slowly). Farmers, in Africa and India, rightly fear the irascible and highly intelligent pachyderms. Considering the danger and economic hardship, it is clear that elephants pay for much more than their upkeep. Selling their tusks, feet and tails is the price to pay to keep the species around.
The PC crowd, per its simple nature, may howl to the wind, reading this. Indeed, it’s unfair to have just Africans protect the megafauna, or harbor on the continent some of the greatest CO2 sinks (like primary forests, peat and muds). So why don’t we reintroduce in Europe and America wild herds of thousands of elephants. They used to be there. We may even be able to modify their genes to make them more like those who used to roam the temperate zone.
We live in the so-called “neoliberal” economic order. Said order is overstretched to areas, such as health, where it should clearly not apply (the whole idea of Obamacare was to make profitable for private insurers and wealthy “non-profits” to insure everybody). Weirdly, though, some of the PC crowd doesn’t push to apply neoliberalism where it could help people: an example is housing. Not enough decent housing is built. And the reason is not Trump and his ilk (they would be delighted to build), but the NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) syndrome.
Biodiversity won’t survive, if it’s not profitable. Same for CO2 emissions: to be abated, they have to be made unprofitable.
In a society where greed is the ultimate motivation, the so-called “neoliberal” order, survival itself has to be made profitable, in a way greedsters can see, or extinction is our future.
Lofty sentence, but what does it mean? It means that species threatened with extinction should be made profitable. For example the Siberian tiger could be installed in vast preserve where it would be allowed to multiply, and then hunted (photographically or with paleolithic bow and arrows say, to make it glorious). For example, the Amur leopard could be introduced in the Yukon, and applied the same treatment. One could do this on a large-scale, because there used to be megafauna everywhere, and it survives in large,numbers only in pockets of Africa (and even fewer in Asia).
Actually several species of European megafauna were saved just that way, in preserves where they had been kept for the enjoyment of the plutocrats. An obvious tactic is to establish total marine reserves (no fishing whatsoever), and then allow tourist to visit them (that’s already done on a small-scale; such reserve repopulate areas where fishing is allowed, so they have proven popular with fishermen).
The COP 23, the UN climate conference, was a total failure: nothing was decided. A vague consensus arose that the planet is cruising towards a three degrees Celsius rise. Here, there and everywhere the terminal failure of what used to be called “the left”, is glaring: it’s sinking in contradictions, many of them arising from the intrinsic corrupt nature of the “representative” system. This is also true in the media. Not just the plutocratically owned media. Intrinsically, when too few have power, they exert it “unwisely”. Because what evolution knows that wisdom itself, in immoderate amounts, is unwise.
Judokas learn to use their adversary’s momentum to get them where they want them to be. With the political system we have, worldwide (it’s roughly the same everywhere), it’s important to remember this. The Trump sons are keen to show they can kill big animals. That put them in a lesser circle of hell, than those who want all large animals to disappear. Or even those who don’t mind that all large animals disappear, and only Africans can still be eaten by leopards, trampled by elephants.
Those who are concerned are often superior, morally and effectively, to those who don’t want to watch, or know. Even when their solutions look mean. Especially if their solutions look mean. This applies directly to the immigrant crisis, by the way: the PC crowd howled for decolonization, but most of what this “decolonization” did was to put the power of exploiting less developed countries in the now unrestrained hands of plutocrats. PC has turned out to also be the abbreviation for Perfectly Cretinous, of course… And the seven million democrats in the four “blue” states of the “Blue” Wall who voted for Obama in 2012, and for Trump in 2016, giving him the presidency, figured that one out.
The case of Bernard Henri Levy (“BHL”) is the paradigm that way. BHL’s rather shallow philosophy hides well the usual Pluto tricks (government support or complicity being number one). Although physically courageous, BHL is a billionaire with a wealth not far from Trump’s, who cynically used his influence on a corrupt French leadership to get enormous amounts of money then leveraged by destroying African forests in a torrid exploitation of both Africans, their forests, and “decolonization”. All right, that has allowed him to refurbish one of the largest palaces in Morocco (once owned by US plutocrat Paul Getty).
Readers may not see the connection with the young Trumps’ penchant for assassinating noble animals. The common thread is the hypocrisy of the PC crowd: to give itself good conscience, it decries the obvious (bad Trumps assassinate animals, go around flaunting the remnants of their deeds), BHL’s philosophy stinks, but it does not try to deepen what is really going on, and, thus, how to get out of it.
Hypocrisy was initially a Greek word and concept for playing a part, pretending, from (hupo, under, and krinein, to judge, decide). Hypocrisy, in general, is the under-critique of the real, is what lays under the incapability of solving the problems which are gathering as the ultimate tsunami, in full view.
Disappearing species is one the problems. Let the PC crowd foster sharing the planet with the fauna, mega, or not. And if that means spending lots of money to kill species sustainably, it’s better than the alternative, namely, no more species.
We can’t always get what we want,
As we want.
But if we try sometimes,
We may get what we need,
Through less savory means,
Paid with pride, prejudice, lots of imagination.
To save our souls, we shouldn’t hesitate to twist our minds
When nothing else will do.
So let the small minded cretins hunt, and boast of their malevolence, if it is is what it takes to save the biosphere.
Patrice Ayme’
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 