This is a political party based on the following:
1. every problem is ultimately social in nature and it can best worked out by small groups of people in an environment that our bodies were best designed for -- small groups interacting via eye contact, body language, talking on top of each other, fist fights,
2. small social groups naturally run on a hierarchy of sexual selection, and the letters of the language are eye contact and the gestural information that precedes and follows it, scratching to signal preference and the direction of power, and other stuff that has been really carefully documented in primate studies,
3. gestural information is "handed" in that it is performed on one side of the body or the other based on the direction of power
4. A yogic practice should be worked out that teaches people in small social groups to "scratch on the opposite side" than they have an instinct to, thus the "scratch-posite" party. So that once people become fluent with this ability to scratch and gesture opposite to what their instincts tell them, they will be able to reverse the natural direction of sexual selection which is what gets us into limited resource problems and political trouble.
So this political party would be where all political discussion involved the social deconstruction in a small group environment of the real issues at hand, based on this yogic practice, and where not all of the discussions devolved into orgiastic revelry, so that there could be some kind of administration.
The other day I was at a meeting of about 10 people sitting in a circle, and i was between two people, one of whom felt very empowered and the other of whom felt very disempowered. The empowered one was talking and was working up to a very show- offy moment and I felt an itch coming on on the arm that was closest to the empowered one and then I remembered reading that these itches are really social and come from the networked behavior of our symbiont parasites including viral, bacterial and fungal communities that evolved along with us and our neurology. So as the itch suddenly bloomed right at the point of group laughter at the joke of the empowered one, I on purpose lifted the arm with the itch -- instead of the opposite one -- and scratched the arm on the opposite side from the empowered speaker, toward the person who felt the most disempowered in the room. That person waited a second and a half after the laughter and then dropped their coffee. I don't know what that says exactly actually.-- JesusHChrist, Mar 14 2013 (?) About the modern Extinction Event http://www.actionbi...iers/eldredge2.htmlAs mentioned in an annotation [Vernon, Mar 17 2013] On eating the fish in the sea http://www.business...the-sea-2011-6?op=1As mentioned in an annotation [Vernon, Mar 17 2013] Starving Sea Lions http://www.mercuryn...alcoast/ci_12943258The idiot writing this news article doesn't seem to know that humans have been overfishing! [Vernon, Mar 18 2013] I agree with your last sentence. The rest of it loses me.-- RayfordSteele, Mar 15 2013 I agree with the first 15 words in clause 3.-- not_morrison_rm, Mar 15 2013 + Here's a bun for the story. I liked it, esp. the when the person dropped their coffee. I think you have ESP.-- xandram, Mar 15 2013 Come on [nmrm], I can go all the way up to 18.
From there it degrades into complete and utter bunk.-- MechE, Mar 15 2013 That was the furthest I was prepared to wager on, that if you wiggle your arm around, it will happen on one side of your body.-- not_morrison_rm, Mar 15 2013 I will disagree with some of the phrasing in Item 1. Most problems that humanity experiences are caused very simply by overpopulation. Yes, this obviously involves social interaction both before and after extra mouths-to-feed begin to exist, and so Item 1 is not entirely wrong.
But it is misleading, in that the proposed social system is an attempt to get people to get along with each other in spite of overpopulation, rather than directing social interactions toward the actual root of the problem by encouraging reducing and preventing overpopulation.-- Vernon, Mar 15 2013 "Most problems that humanity experiences are caused simply by overpopulation"
I'm sorry, but that's just wrong.
On the topic of the actual idea, the entire thing seems to hinge on the concept that human nonverbal communication is heavily and fundamentally similar to certain behaviors observed in primates, including the power hierarchy and social structure observed, boiling down to "where you stand in the social hierarcy determines your scratching technique, and vice versa." This would appear to be even more wrong than the comment above.
Also something about itches being telepathically transmitted and subliminal communication or something. I don't know.-- Hive_Mind, Mar 15 2013 [Vernon] Welcome to the cross.-- JesusHChrist, Mar 16 2013 Tics are social gestures meant to tell other people things. Stop making the tics that make other people disregard you and more people will respect you and you will get laid.-- WcW, Mar 16 2013 [Hive Mind], I am absolutely correct. Just for starters, consider the amount of CO2 emissions, globally, if the total world population was 1/2 billion instead of 7 billion. Obviously more people are associated with more CO2 and hence more human-caused Global Warming.
Or, consider the fact that as most cities expand, they tend to be paving over farmland. How is it logical to think that that can continue indefinitely, when a growing population obviously needs more and more farmland to support it?
Then there is war, often caused by egotistical maniacs, but also often caused by population pressure. The recent genocides in Africa and even the Balkans was more about getting rid of one group of people so that the other group could take over territory, than it was about ideology.
If you want to claim that MOST problems of humanity are NOT ultimately derived from overpopulation, then I invite you to provide some evidence supporting your statement.-- Vernon, Mar 16 2013 There is a sense in which a very small population would make things easier, but that doesn't make it the best solution to the problem. To be extreme, a world with a population of three dozen would not have any problems associated with carbon dioxide emissions or using up resources, but it would also lack the ability to acquire most mineral resources or the brainpower to solve certain problems. This may seem like a silly example, but a larger population would have more people able to solve a wider range of problems. Having said that, overpopulation is a problem in the sense that the Doomsday Argument seems to make it more likely that we will be alive towards the end of the history of the human race if population increases exponentially simply by virtue of seeing yourself as a random sample.-- nineteenthly, Mar 17 2013 I think we will find an optimized configuration of biomass for the planet and then start to run an increasing number of minds on that network. So maybe its 10 billion people and lots more algae or something like that, and then keep it constant and start to run multiple minds on that platform, which would eventually mean having the 10 billion people do really regular predictable things like alternately running in place, having sex and then falling asleep, in a sort of world wide square dance, with algae inbetween.-- JesusHChrist, Mar 17 2013 It is quite possible to have overpopulation-caused problems without the planet actually being overpopulated. For example, consider the crime rate in the average small town vs just about any city. The large population of the city enables more anonymity than exists in the small town, and some people misuse it.
There is also the aspect of (quote by Robert Heinlein, character Lazarus Long): "Put too many rats in a cage and some will go mad. Humans are the only creatures that voluntarily do this to themselves." So a city can be likened to a cage with an overpopulation problem, in which some people go mad. And as previously mentioned, this is independent of whether or not the world as a whole was also overpopulated.
The mention of biomass in another anno is also relevant. IN GENERAL, the total biomass on the planet is constant; it merely shifts forms between living organisms, dead organisms, and biowaste/nutrients. So, it logically follows that the more humans, the less of other organisms there can be. Is it therefore any wonder that the planet is currently experiencing the greatest Extinction Event, of species all over, since the large dinosaurs died?
So, to the extent we might think that other organisms might be worth having around -- dolphins to play with, for example-- we need to stop breeding like dumb animals, converting limited biomass into an increasing human population. In the case of dolphins, we are in the process of eating all the fish in the sea --the dolphins will eventually starve to extinction, see?-- Vernon, Mar 17 2013 //biowaste/nutrients//
According to Homeopathy, the positioning of water molecules (and other non- organisms) relative to each other and to the earth's magnetic field, could be a substrate for higher-complexity organic behavior. So, on one hand, plants and animals can be seen as wave crests of complexity or stitches between the fabrics of matter and energy, but on the other, they could be seen as cross-sections of something that is going on across multiple dimensions or at many levels of resolution.
Individual viruses may not be very complex but the "programs" that run on the substrate created by the relationships between all of the individual viruses as they attack an animal might have a complexity that rivals the animal.
//greatest Extinction Event// //to the extent we might think that other organisms might be worth having around -- we need to stop breeding//
The periodicity of extinctions may be related hierarchically to the cycles of muscle contraction in the orgasmic phase of sexual response, so overpopulation problems may be directly related to breeding.-- JesusHChrist, Mar 17 2013 The oddity of it is that he still manages to form complete sentences, although I haven't the faintest clue what coherence there really is.
If we had a population of 1 person per continent, most of our problems would go away, although I don't envy the guy who gets stuck with Antarctica.-- RayfordSteele, Mar 18 2013 //According to Homeopathy// I'm assuming you're being ironic, sardonic or rather than moronic.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Mar 18 2013 I've been in a lot of council circles, and when someone begins scratching a lot, thoughts tend to turn not to forming an itch-based political party, but to fears of catching distinctly non-symbiotic parasites. If folk not only dropped their coffee, but kept their distance from you, that might be what you experienced, JesusH.-- CraigD, Mar 19 2013 //the dolphins will eventually starve to extinction,
They can just eat more swimmers, when no one is watching.-- not_morrison_rm, Mar 19 2013 At this point, I'd like to nominate [JesusHChrist] as some sort of highly advanced chatbot. Probably a fork of the same codebase that produced [Treon] and the updated entity known as [beanangel].
While I commend this fantastically interesting experiment in artificial intelligence and "culture jamming", I really would wish they'd open-source the project. I'd love to just have [JHC] running on my computer as a screensaver or something.-- Hive_Mind, Mar 20 2013 random, halfbakery