Vacation

Great ocean windsurfing today but no one took pictures of it.

On a different note I happened to see a special on CNN about some beetles eating spuce forests in Alaska. The framework of the report was that it is a travesty. I tend to agree, yet I find it interesting that people often project their subjective values onto Nature while assuming that they are objective. From the beetle's perspective it isn't a travesty, and in so far as beetles have a perspective it is probably more sentient and intelligent than the perspective of a tree. (For if a beetle eats a tree and the tree cannot feel it, etc.) At any rate, it's from our perspective viewed through our aesthetic values that spruce beetles eating away forests is wrong.

Ironically, if one believes the Darwinian creation myth then beetles and humans share a common ancestry and there is no transcendent basis for a difference between them. So we are left with the survival of the fittest, i.e. those organisms that best fit into Nature in the Darwinian way. Darwin also had some things to say about a sort of will/strength and survival but such notions do not "fit" with natural selection in which the driving force is Nature and not the organism. It seems that if we want strength, will and the willful organism that we must look to Nietzsche. In the case of Darwinian philosophy there isn't much of a reason to draw a distinction between our attempts to garden the Garden based on our vision of how things ought to be as if there is some (non-existent) divine mission or standard to do so. So there's little reason to condemn the beetles or "impose" our values on them. Like the little Darwinian fellows who tell stories about their evolution, they're just fitting into Mommy Nature by her natural selections. Nietzsche is more interesting to me, as he sees the organism as capable of an act of will that will help define its own evolution. He is the philosopher of creativity that tried to believe in the Darwinian creation myth. So when it comes to the beetles I supppose he'd say that to the creative, to the intelligent, to those organisms that can manufacture values by an act of will goes the right to do so.

As for me, it seems to me that people are assuming that there is a transcendent and objective basis for values that would be subjective and so "imposed" by an act of will without one. The Leftist mind often murmurs of the supposed "imposition" of morality and religion or the things of transcendence, yet ironically it constantly tries to assume the existence of spiritual things and works to impose them itself. Nietzsche and the fascists were more honest about their assumptions and did not live as intellectual parasites on Christianity because they openly believed in the Darwinian creation myth and began their philosophy from there while rejecting the Christian narrative as being from the Jews. In contrast, the Leftist mind usually wants to maintain the Judeo-Christian ethic in various ways (as they slowly do away with it) while rejecting any historical or factual claims made in Christian texts.