(Part 2) Top products from r/Cascadia

You hit on a lot of good points, yes. But, it is indeed (thought not as our present level of technology) to create such a thing. The "me first" is the most primal, long before monkey, mammal, or vertebrate, programming or our DNA. As life on Earth evolved and became more complex, more layers of code were selected for and passed on. A lot of these systems play of of each other, modify each other, and sometimes play against each other. Cooperation, self-sacrifice, and charity CERTAINLY don't make sense for very primitive organism, but once you start scaling up and you start dealing with mammals it makes a lot of sense. You get new layers of genetic commands piled on top of the old ones, things like "defend kin. Sacrifice for kin. Have attachment to creatures with large heads and large eyes." That for the most part do their job, but also luckily spread outward and let us care about complete strangers and even other species and the planet. There are two really good books to help understand all this

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins goes into the broader category of why life behaves the way it does.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Selfish-Gene-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0192860925

And Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved by Frans de Waal goes into goes specifically into how altruism, morality, and the more noble aspects of humanity came to be in our simian ancestors and cousins. P,us, it's just sort of an uplifting read that will make you feel good.

http://www.amazon.com/Primates-Philosophers-Morality-Evolved-Princeton/dp/0691141290/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419420928&sr=1-1&keywords=primates+and+philosophers

There is a reason for why we humans behave, for good and bad, the way that we do. For why we think the way that we do. But we have the advantage of being self-aware organisms that have the opportunity to look in the mirror and realize what we are doing and why we are doing it and choose a better, more moral course than what biology may demand of us. It is very difficult, many of us won't and of those that do none of us always will, but we can, and that is something fantastic. As far as we know a first for the history of life on this planet.

I think you should read a book called Poor People's movements. It looks at historically successful campaigns for reform. Labor, Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam. There are common threads in all of the ones that are successful, and this applies to Ghandi's work for independence and reduction in classism, and Mandela's work against apartheid.

Successful campaigns have clear figureheads, and clear demands. Rosa Parks is a great example of this. She was a manufactured figurehead. She wasn't the first person to personally boycott the back of the bus, but she was the first one to boycott it and create a cultural movement where other people wanted to join her. The demand was also very clear, blacks get to sit on the bus as equals.

They could have asked for more, but they wanted to win, not feel good about themselves, so they picked a winnable battle, and without having done that, and won in '56, the civil rights movement would not have been possible, because a bunch of naysayers would have said "Do you really think the crackers are gonna give up the rights to put us in separate bathrooms, schools, facilities, stores and give up the right to enact vigilante justice whenever they want?" But King and others already had an answer "We won in Montgomery, and that affected all of Alabama."

Personally, I think the salmon are much more important than anything else, and the risk of extinction for salmon is a potentially millenia long threat. Salmon provide immense ecological and nutritional services, and losing them would be catastrophic.

One oil spill is not going to make them go extinct though, and what I think matters more is setting a precedent where the protestors stop saying "no pipeline," which is an absurd request, and start saying "we'll let you build the pipeline when we see laws coming from congress that will ensure better oversight on safety than we've seen before and serious monetary penalties that make a perfect operation record the only clear way to have a profitable business model."

That is a power we actually have. Congress wants that pipeline, Kinder Morgan wants the pipeline. Lots of folks are invested in KM, so lots of people will want what they want. If we leverage that to say "hey we are willing to negotiate, but we're playing fucking hardball here and you gotta throw us a bone, and if you fuck up, we're taking you to the cleaners, as is only fair," that's a message that is actually sympathetic to the vast majority of the US public.

Link for the book I recommended.

Saw this post on /r/backpacking earlier today. In the thread someone mentioned this book, The Golden Spruce, about the of the area. I'm looking forward to reading it. I bet it will interest some of you too.

Great pics anvilman! I'm gonna have to make the trip up there some day!

Yes. While I've only skimmed through them, I see all of them cover native issues in some form. I don't know how much pre-contact indigenous history there will be, but maybe because they offer a class in pre-contact indigenous history it will be glossed over in this class. also, one not shown there - it hasn't arrived - is Bloodlines was assigned as well.

Definitely on the Cascadian reading list. It is however 30 years old and is an ahistorical view. Little insight into the origins of these nations and because of that little insight into their behavior present and future.

Another book that has to be on the reading list: American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. Colin Woodard ties his description of the eleven regions to the streams of immigrants that first populated them. First settlers make a large impact on the culture of a region.

For everyone that's intimately following this thread, I recommend the book The Righteous Mind . It meets at the intersection of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and theology. If anything; I think Cascadia needs some sort of moral compass that everyone in the region can align themselves with.

The Organic Machine. Learn ya some history about a major river in Cascadia, the Columbia River!

There's at least one free Kindle version of the George Gibbs Chinook jargon dictionary available.

The 1969 Chinook: A Dictionary and History by Thomas is the standard work. It's long out of print but can often be found used at Powell's and other regional used bookstores as it was published by Binford and Mort.

Add this book to round it out.

(2) It’s rather hard to believe that the United States would actually break up rather than, given the extremity of its military arsenal, become a military dictatorship under some Trump-like strongman or other. The Platonic equation, however dubious, would solve our democracy on some manner of authoritarianism, which seems plausible to me. This is even fairly common with presidential republics. The United States is also much more systemically unified than the Soviet Union was, in tradition, culture, and even politics, certainly geopolitics. I don’t think that it’s a good comparison, even concerning this particular issue.

(3) I’m not convinced of this point, for the simple reason that revolutions tend to bring social and moral differences to heightened, emotional extremes. If Cascadia were to secede (assuming now that the United States were still extant), large numbers of Americans, increasingly nationalistic and xenophobic as they are, could easily betray the shallowness, and indeed not even shallow, patriotism that they may hold toward their imagined compatriot Cascadian Americans - for that first qualification would for many certainly be satisfactory for othering them into foreigners and un-American traitors who need to be suppressed or otherwise removed to preserve greater America. This certainly isn't unusual in countries with strong central authorities during times of civil conflict or war and in which paranoia and fear are created, which seems possible since so many Americans are today fearful and paranoid about many others corrupting or harming the 'American way'. Nor is it unusual in geographically large countries that have many constituent parts to have strong central authorities who eventually do these things, because, the larger the country, the more power must be exerted therefrom to preserve the political order from which the central authorities all most benefit.

Nor, given all recent events, is it very difficult to believe that Americans, especially in official and indoctrinated capacity, would have a very hard time abusing and killing each other. Massacres and shootings of any kind, police brutality: American life is cheap and it always has been. My main worry about any possible American dissolution is that significant factions of authoritarians could take control and do truly horrific things - that to Americans proper and indeed to Cascadians. Trump could of course easily be such a figure to commit atrocious acts against the American and Cascadian peoples in the name of ‘conserving Americanism’ or something like it. For a decent record of ’othering’ and dehumanizing people and brutalizing and murdering them thereby for political reasons, see Jonathan Glover’s Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. Americans are as human as anybody, and as susceptible to political indoctrination for the oppression and murder of many peoples. If this is pessimistic, it’s at least egalitarian.

(4) This point, too, I have a problem with. For any political and economic system to succeed there are social preconditions. While I agree with your claim that corporations, and indeed all hierarchical institutions of business, are parasitic, I don’t believe that it’s at all practical to expect even Northwesterners, a relatively liberal people, to accept such radically different systems of economy that, unlike at present, aren’t dependent on the outsized powers of big business to employ and provide for them. They would have to be convinced of abandoning two-and-a-half centuries of economic tradition (however falsely perceived that tradition might be), which I don’t think is very feasible. Supposing that Cascadia were to secede, I think that this would be one of those things that the Cascadian revolutionaries would have to moderate on, or else offend the public and lose power to the conservatives completely. The conservatives would certainly have a misinformed history of socialism and other left causes on which to draw to delegitimize any anticapitalist policy and its proponents. In short, I don’t think that it’s practical, however much I would like to do it, to discount the role of privately-owned businesses and corporations. The public will have to be trained out of the capitalist mindset over a very long period of time before they can be more economically self-reliant and indeed self-governing.

Nor am I convinced that businesses and corporations wouldn’t leave if the United States and the rest of the international community were to lay significant penalties on Cascadia, thereby incentivizing them to leave. They can’t exploit a place if there’s nothing there, nor would they stay if exploiting Cascadia means losing assets everywhere else.

(5) This point relies on a gamble that, after revolutionary Cascadia were to settle, its moderation wouldn’t include the continuation of essentially American politics, in which Tea Party-like politicians, who would certainly remain and likely take votes, wouldn’t try to thwart any environmental progress. The gamble is whether Cascadia would be able to do anything at all, whether it had the political will, and even the organization and resources (and with (4) in mind), to protect the environment and avoid the worst effects of coming environmental catastrophe; whereas it seems at least likely that, longterm, America will do at least very little. I’m neither convinced nor certain.

But I agree with you on general points.

>Do you not believe in human kindness?

Some people are kind, some are not, some are straight up cruel, most are cattle.

>Do you not believe that we actually can create enough resources for all, with all the resources we have on Earth?

No, because resources are finite. For example my house in Seattle cost more than one in say, South Dakota because Seattle only has so much build able land. On a larger scale with rapid population growth we are looking at quickly running out of such simple necessary resources as water and arable land. I suggest reading UW professor David Montgomery's book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization

>Also, perhaps people are greedy and self-centered because the current political and economic system makes them that way?

Competition and greed are a unfortunate part of human nature, it is part what pushed out ancestors to new lands, and what lead us to invent new technology. There are some tribal civilizations that lack the idea of property and possessions between their immediate social group, but these civilizations also live under a strict hierarchy.

>I believe in restorative justice. Instead of forcing them into slavery, which we call prison, I believe they should still be able to live among us, but also make sure to pay their penitence.

While I agree that more effort should be made towards reform in the criminal justice system, I also do not think you have much experience dealing with criminals. Many are just as brutal and manipulative as any "capitalist" is not more so, many simply lack the mental capacity for empathy. Though Norway's prison system seem promising in the regard of reformation

>we are the working people, your average, everyday, ordinary people.

So you work, what's your skill set?

You seem to want to deny me of my property that I worked for so I do not think we constitute the same "we." Keep in mind that I hate the banks as much as you do, if not more due to owing them a large sum of money.

>So many innocent black people are shot, but the white cops get away with it most every time. Maybe there's a black cop who shoots a white kid, but you know what the difference is? In a majority of the former cases, the white cop is never convicted; in a majority of the latter cases, the black cop is.

Citation needed.

However police do kill a disproportionate amount of white people when compared to murder rate.

Police killings of blacks down 70% in last 50 years

In 2012, 123 blacks were killed by police with a gun

In 2012, 326 whites were killed with a gun

(Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, CDC)

In 2013, blacks committed 5,375 murders

In 2013, whites committed 4,396 murders

Whites are 63% of the population blacks are 13%

(FBI, Census Bureau)

>The politicians and the capitalists are never hungry. But many of us get to starve to death.

In the US one must want to starve to death. Again who is "us?"

>Fortunately, I'm not starving. But millions die from that every day.

This has more to do with weather patterns than capitalism. Also food aid breeds dependence because populations quit growing their own food.

> I believe it's that power corrupts.

And the corrupt seek power.

EDIT:Hit send too early