Refugee thread!

[Shell B]

He's not going to suddenly die, but the forum wouldn't close even if he did.

Well yeah, but who would keep the machine purring like it is now?

Someone wuth the right skill set and investment. Don’t worry, y’all.

[Shell B]

He's not going to suddenly die, but the forum wouldn't close even if he did.

That's sounds like you already have his death planned out!

That happens when you’re married and have shared assets.

[Shell B]

Word. There’s a good team here remember! Including his wife!

I wouldn’t take over. I’d take care of what had to be done, though.

[The Valkyrie]

That's sounds like you already have his death planned out!

That happens when you’re married and have shared assets.

I told you I wouldn’t take that contract...

😉🤫

[I_am_not_mafia]

I wonder what value silver would really have in an apocalypse.  Seems like silver would have little to no value and seeds would be the new commodity.

That would be my question.  As I see it, people who had survival skills would bargain with those.  They wouldn't have any use for silver.

If you read first hand accounts of countries that have suffered an economic collapse, which is the more common reason for hoarding gold, what happens is that gold gets traded as if it is junk gold. This is because people have no way of telling what quality the gold is. So people that thought that they were keeping all the wealth ended up losing it anyway.

I was always planning on hoarding silver anyway because it has far more industrial uses from which the silver cannot be reclaimed. But I'd be hoarding that only after building up a stock pile, buying useful equipment, paying debts and building a library of useful books.

[vulcanlogician]

I read Walden when I was a teenager, and it altered the course of my life.  It changed my choice of a profession, my relationships, and my interests -- for better or for worse.  Thoreau's influence has been perhaps the most consistent feature of my thinking ever since. 

My avatar is a picture I took at Walden Pond.  The colors in the background are the pond itself.

I am still a lifelong private student in the Thoreauvian mold, although I have modified Thoreau's assumptions as I have learned on my own.  I have kept a journal on and off for most of my life.  I am deeply concerned about how climate change is altering the face of the natural world.  And I am a member of the Thoreau Society as well, although I sometimes consider them Thoreau trivia collectors.  

I was never as attracted to civil disobedience and activism as I was to the ideas presented in Walden, most likely because I'm an introvert.

In what ways do you consider yourself a Thoreauvian?

I mostly take intellectual cues from Civil Disobedience. I am rather interested in what MLK and Gandhi did with Thoreau's ideas. But one must also remember that they blended his ideas in with passive resistance. At its root, civil disobedience is to be differentiated from passive resistance or any activism of that kind.

By itself, civil disobedience works according to the recognition that your encompassing society is able to do evil because you allow it. It is our participation in society that has allowed things such as unjust wars, slavery, and exploitative capitalism to transpire. We, through our participation and tax money, not only allow these things to happen, we are instrumental in their coming to fruition. So the main idea behind Thoreau's disobedience is to drop out, and stop participating if your society is unjust. If you add to that Gandhi's passive resistance (stand in the way but do no violence) you make the idea even more powerful.

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

Aside from that, Thoreau was an early critic of capitalism. Anyone who is familiar with Karl Marx's theory of labor alienation will see it reflected in this passage from Walden:

---

The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.

---

[Alan V]

By itself, civil disobedience works according to the recognition that your encompassing society is able to do evil because you allow it. It is our participation in society that has allowed things such as unjust wars, slavery, and exploitative capitalism to transpire. We, through our participation and tax money, not only allow these things to happen, we are instrumental in their coming to fruition. So the main idea behind Thoreau's disobedience is to drop out, and stop participating if your society is unjust. If you add to that Gandhi's passive resistance (stand in the way but do no violence) you make the idea even more powerful.

My problem with Thoreau on this score is that, according to his transcendental metaphysics, he considered himself a law unto himself.  Yes, there were indeed plenty of obvious injustices in his time, but he went to the contrarian extreme in denouncing them.  Perhaps this was just the rhetorical tradition to which he was trained in Harvard, but he apparently found it very difficult to see the many gray areas in life, where pluses and minuses are mixed together in different proportions.  That made him dismissive and superior as well as insightful about the shortcomings of those around him.  Personally, I have become much more moderate than when I was first influenced by Walden, and for good reason since I was married and had to work at a regular job to make my living.  

Thoreau's system was too much of a castle-in-the-sky, so it made better literature than philosophy.  Nevertheless, his critiques were important for delineating the costs as well as the benefits of industrial societies, and his writings were influential because of them.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

That happens when you’re married and have shared assets.

I told you I wouldn’t take that contract...

😉🤫

I could use a fiver, do you want it to look like an accident?

[vulcanlogician]

My problem with Thoreau on this score is that, according to his transcendental metaphysics, he considered himself a law unto himself.  Yes, there were indeed plenty of obvious injustices in his time, but he went to the contrarian extreme in denouncing them.  Perhaps this was just the rhetorical tradition to which he was trained in Harvard, but he apparently found it very difficult to see the many gray areas in life, where pluses and minuses are mixed together in different proportions.  That made him dismissive and superior as well as insightful about the shortcomings of those around him.  Personally, I have become much more moderate than when I was first influenced by Walden, and for good reason since I was married and had to work at a regular job to make my living.  

Thoreau's system was too much of a castle-in-the-sky, so it made better literature than philosophy.  Nevertheless, his critiques were important for delineating the costs as well as the benefits of industrial societies, and his writings were influential because of them.

I think I give Thoreau more credit than you do. Since the time of Socrates, one of the chief defining characteristics of philosophers has been "gadflyness."

[Alan V]

I think I give Thoreau more credit than you do. Since the time of Socrates, one of the chief defining characteristics of philosophers has been "gadflyness."

So you see my problem vis-a-vis the Thoreau Society, of which I am a member.  They want to celebrate Thoreau, and do so primarily through collecting Thoreau trivia.  I want to build on the best of his ideas and adapt them to what we have learned since his time, which requires a critical attitude like he himself had.

I am a Thoreauvian the same way I am my father's son.  I started with the assumptions he taught me, but adapted and changed them as I learned on my own.