Heaven and Hell

[ironbark]

Hell is a great grand banquet hall. The architecture, furnishings, art and fittings are exquisite. Cosy not intimidating, plush carpets and rich rugs, a masterpiece of comfort and design. The banquet table is not too large. It is festooned and arrayed with the most delectable food and drink imaginable. Anything your palate desires appears and is replenished. Delicacies abound, Haute cuisine and Moms best meals, all there in abundance along with divine fruits and flavors never previously experienced. Wines and juices the mere scent of which would make one weeping drunk with joy…

If not for the fetid stink from the piles of moldering decomposing food and the unbearable noise of wailing and gnashing of teeth in frustration…
For none of the denizens of Hell can bend their arms at the elbow…and all desperately flick food and drink into the air from flapping hands at the ends stiff arms and run mouth agape to catch a scrap or drop or tiny morsel.

Heaven is exactly the same environment as Hell in every regard…even down to the inability to bend arms at the elbow.
But in heaven there is a gentle whispering murmur as its denizens offer each other- “Would you like to try some…”…
“May I pour you a drop of…” May I wipe your chin for you…”…..with food and drink and serviettes proffered to each other with outstretched arms.

It doesn’t stink and there’s no mess and they can hear Elvis and Janis sing their duet ;-)

[patrice]

1. You made me cry. I was okay, until the last line.

:grouphug:

[skepticscott]

2. And in Hell

you give the after dinner speech, yes?

[ironbark]

3. Oh hell no…I get to shovel the ice and snow as the place freezes over...

waiting for your “intellectual argument” to demonstrate its capacity for “sustaining itself under real scrutiny”.

;-)

[RC]

4. Heaven is socialism?

People helping each other?
And Hell is the Republicans utopia? Everyone for themselves?

[ironbark]

6. Socialism.......... or The Golden Rule?

“Putting oneself in the place of another,”
Buddhism.

“Blessed is he who preferreth his brother before himself.”
Baha’i faith

“Do to others as you want them to do to you.”

“In everything, do to others what you would want them to do to you. This is what is written in the Law and in the Prophets”
Christianity

““That which you want for yourself, seek for mankind.”

“None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.”
Islam

[vixengrl]

5. I appreciate the distinction--the difference is the company.

The Hell described is "every man for himself" and the Heaven is a place where people can see not just what they want, but what others need, and by making that connection, make their situation better by mutual cooperation. It's an analogy that relates I think more to how we can sometimes make our lives here a little better by changing our perspective--that much I can dig.

I think the "Heaven and Hell" setting loses a lot of people who don't have a literal belief in the afterlife, or who would find fault in a god who would so arrange things such that we aren't self-sufficient--it's not a pretty image, and it does imply that those the conventional church would damn, would be in that fetid place of noncooperation,etc. Even if we all are trying the best we can, and do understand the application of what the analogy teaches here and now.

No man is an island. You are your brother's keeper. Etc. It's formulaic, and trite, and aphoristic, and maybe true enough that I'll admit I get it.

For me it isn't Elvis and Janis--it'll be Roy Orbison and Patsy Cline. That would have been a duet. Or Freddy Mercury and Dusty Springfield. Those are voices for the ages.

But not in Heaven--in the mind. And our unbending arms--we don't always know ourselves, but we can still serve others. I have no hopes or expectations about the "way up yonder"--but I understand we are all in it together in the here and now.

[Silent3]

7. Or Hell is an orange bicycle...

...and Heaven is a self-retracting steel tape measure, marked off in cubits.

Less in line with traditional notions, sure, no more or less grounded in reality.

[laconicsax]

9. +1

[rrneck]

11. You have a gift for imagery. Run with it. nt

[ironbark]

13. It’s not Haiku….but it’s getting there ;-) n/t

[rrneck]

8. Looks like there's a poet in the house. Nice work.

Lots of places to go with that. The first thing I thought about was the horrible waste caused by overweening self interest. The erosion of the commons is there. If we would help someone but an arms length away, the world would be a much better place.

But I lived in Memphis too long to dig Elvis. A little Thelonious Monk would be nice.

[struggle4progress]

10. ... I sent my Soul through the Invisible, some letter of that afterlife to spell

And by and by my Soul returned to me, and answered I Myself am Heaven and Hell

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
http://classics.mit.edu/Khayyam/rubaiyat.html

[ironbark]

15. Thanks Struggle….that took me back a ways.

The Rubaiyat was the first poem that (at nerdy 15 ;-) I attempted to memorise.
Got as far as the first verse
“Awake, for morning in the bowl of night
Has flung the stone that sets the stars to flight
And Lo the Hunter in the East
Has caught the Sultans turret in a noose of light”

Struck me at the time as a non economical way of saying- “Suns up, get up”!

Thanks for the memory prod.

Last night,
I saw the realm of joy and pleasure.
There I melted like salt;
no religion, no blasphemy,
no conviction or uncertainty remained.
In the middle of my heart,
a star appeared,
and the seven heavens were lost in its brilliance.
Rumi.

[laconicsax]

12. Stop it! The irony is killing me!

:rofl:

[ironbark]

14. So you’ve seen the news that atheist meetings invite Scientologists to explain E-Meters?

:rofl:


I always find that ‘irony’ is best served large and cold with clear crisp display rather than a vague luke warm oblique reference to a morsel that never comes in sight.

[laconicsax]

16. Well, you served up a nice one. Well done! n/t

[ironbark]

17. “Bon appétit”………… “Napkins”……..? n/t

[dmallind]

18. Except there are no decent musicians in heaven

Even if in some strange world the two mentioned should be called musicians, they were both hedonistic druggies and fornicators. Hellbound for sure. Along with Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven, Liszt.

Heaven gets Elgar if they are lucky.

[ironbark]

19. I am endlessly fascinated by atheist certainties. n/t

[laconicsax]

22. They're just like agnostic certainties. n/t

[dmallind]

29. I'm endlessly fascinated by pseudo-agnostics' lack of humor NT

[ironbark]

35. Ah!...the Theist in the Closet meme/theme...that's funny ;-)

[dmallind]

41. No - "somebody who thinks agnosticism is an ontological position not epistemological" 'meme' NT

[ironbark]

45. Can you say what “certainties” are held by ontological position of agnosticism

?

;-)

[ChadwickHenryWard]

21. What really got me was how awful Janis and Elvis would sound together.

Even if you liked both of them (I personally despise Elvis,) who would want to hear them both at the same time?

[ChadwickHenryWard]

20. Why don't the people in hell just help each other?

Then they would get to enjoy all that great food.

[JerseygirlCT]

23. Exactly

That's the point, isn't it?

When people think of other people and seek to help them, everyone is in a better place.

[ChadwickHenryWard]

24. Yeah, I know cooperation is better.

I'm just asking Ironbark why the people in hell are so comically inept. What prevents them from helping each other like the people in heaven other than over-the-top stupidity? I can't gain any understanding from the metaphor if I can't get through it without laughing. And not to put too fine a point on it, but I already know that helping people is good. I didn't learn anything from it anyway. I was hoping that maybe there was something more there that I had missed.

[ironbark]

26. Why is Wall St "comically inept"?

“I'm just asking Ironbark why the people in hell are so comically inept.”

Have you been following the food price crisis in caused by the rise in the price of wheat? The wheat price has been stable for about 150 years, no dramatic spike. Then suddenly it went up over the last few years, millions slipped under the hunger/poverty line, major unprecedented (modern era) food riots in several countries.
No one could work out what happened…at first they thought it was drought related, or drought in combination with the shift to bio fuel crops….now they have worked it out.
Fucking Wall St.
The Masters of the Universe worked out a scam for making shitloads of money by driving up the price of wheat…another sub prime/ponzy scheme rip off only this time people don’t lose their houses they starve.

“I'm just asking Ironbark why the people in hell are so comically inept.”

What would you like me to tell you?....FUCKING GREED AND STUPIDITY….or FUCKING STUPIDITY AND GREED?


"Destabilizing influences, including indiscriminate lending and real estate speculation, led to a crisis in January 2008, and eroded investment in food commodities.<4> The United States, specifically, had been facing an economic crisis that eventually lead to recession.<25><26><27>Financial speculation in commodity futures following the collapse of the financial derivatives markets has contributed to the crisis due to a "commodities super-cycle." Financial speculators seeking quick returns have removed trillions of dollars from equities and mortgage bonds, some of which has been invested into food and raw materials.<28> That American commodities speculation could have a worldwide impact on food prices is reflected in the globalization of food production. It represents the concentration of wealth throughout the world, which Frances Moore Lappé equates to a weakening in fundamental democracy. In a recent article for The Nation, she suggests that there is no food shortage but that "as long as food is merely a commodity in societies that don't protect people's right to participate in the market, and as long as farming is left vulnerable to consolidated power off the farm, many will go hungry, farmers among them—no matter how big the harvests."<29>
Wiki (outlining the basics...more has since been revealed)

[Jim__]

27. I found the link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_world_food_price_crisis

I want to read more on that story. - Thanks.

[Jim__]

28. You can label it greed and stupidity, but the problem is more complex.

Peter Singer challenges us with an a somewhat well-known example that demonstrates the problem:

Imagine you come across a small child who has fallen into a pond and is in danger of drowning. You know that you can easily and safely rescue him, but you are wearing an expensive pair of shoes that will be ruined if you do. It would be wrong–monstrous, in fact–to walk on past the pond, leaving the child to drown, because you don’t want to have to buy a new pair of shoes. You can’t compare a child’s life with a pair of shoes!

Yet while we all say that it would be wrong to walk past the child, there are other children whose lives we could save just as easily–and yet we don’t. UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, estimates that nearly 9 million children under 5 die each year from causes related to poverty. That’s 24,000 a day—a football stadium full of young children, dying every day (along with thousands of older children and adults who die from poverty every day as well). Some die because they don’t have enough to eat or clean water to drink. More die from measles, malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia—diseases that don’t exist in developed nations, or if they do, are easily cured and rarely fatal.

Human nature is such that we react to immediate problems, visible problems, and, unfortunately, are unable to react to all the problems in the world. If I am aware, intimately aware, of all the children in the world who are starving, and try to react to that, I will probably cause my on children to starve, because the problems are overwhelming, and my contribution to resolving them is necessarily small.

Singer does give us ways around this problem, e.g. contribute 10% of your income toward resolving this problem. He is right. We ought to (are morally obligated to?) follow his recommendation. This will help, but unless the percentage of people contributing to the solution is large, the problem will remain.

[ironbark]

31. I think that misses the point of the specific case Jim.

We have always had poverty and hunger as a consequence of inequity and indifference…possibly always will.

But the global food crisis was caused directly by an act of profound greed and stupidity that drove millions under the poverty/hunger line.

It was a Wall St scam and rip off…a very nasty piece of straight arm knocking the food out of others mouths.

It was not walking past the pond and ignoring the drowning child….it was picking him up, throwing him in and holding his head under with a stick.

[Jim__]

36. IMHO you're still oversimplifying.

Here's the opening paragraph from what I believe is the article you got your information from:

Systemic causes for the worldwide increases in food prices continue to be the subject of debate. Initial causes of the late 2006 price spikes included droughts in grain-producing nations and rising oil prices. Oil price increases also caused general escalations in the costs of fertilizers, food transportation, and industrial agriculture. Root causes may be the increasing use of biofuels in developed countries (see also food vs fuel),<1> and an increasing demand for a more varied diet across the expanding middle-class populations of Asia.<2><3> These factors, coupled with falling world-food stockpiles all contributed to the worldwide rise in food prices.<4> Causes not commonly attributed by mainstream views include structural changes in trade and agricultural production, agricultural price supports and subsidies in developed nations, diversions of food commodities to high input foods and fuel, commodity market speculation, and climate change.

The paragraph on food speculation causing this crisis is not explicit as to exactly what the mechanism was, exactly how this speculation caused this large increase in the price of food. And, at the very least, there were other factors involved.

[ironbark]

38. No oversimplification at all, unregulated Wall St is as guilty as hell..

26# (and Wiki quote) provided background and the uncertainty at the time-
“at first they thought it was drought related, or drought in combination with the shift to bio fuel crops….now they have worked it out.”

It is now clear and simple, unregulated Wall St took 150 years of stable commodity prices and, through greed and stupidity, drove the price of food >up< in the face of ample supply.



“FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Yeah, this is really—it’s really outrageous. And on a certain level, this reform bill is really a sham, because it does not cover, in any way, shape or form, what Goldman Sachs—and really, let’s be honest here, it wasn’t just Goldman; it was Goldman, and it was Bear, and it was AIG, and it was Lehman, it was Deutsche, it was all across the board, JPMorgan Chase—what these banks were able to do in commodity markets, really which reached its peak from 2005 to 2008, in what is now known as the food bubble. And as Juan points out, this is unconscionable what happened, in the sense that their speculation and their restructuring of these commodity markets pushed 250 million new people into food insecurity and starving, and brought the world total up to over a billion people. This is the most abysmal total {“fuckup”?}in the history of the world.”

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/16/the_food_bubble_how_wall_street



"The food crisis shares many characteristics of the financial meltdown ‚ it was exacerbated by the deregulation of the commodity markets (including agriculture) that encouraged a tidal wave of Wall Street speculation‚ leading to further increases in already rising food and energy prices.
Over the past two decades, the safeguards that prevented excessive speculation from distorting the futures markets were eroded or eliminated.

•The commodity markets that provided an arena for producers of raw commodities like corn, wheat, oil and metals to find buyers were largely transformed into markets that traded new financial products.

•The New Deal-era regulations that were supposed to prevent excess speculation on food commodities were weakened to allow more Wall Street investment houses to pour money onto the commodity exchanges and new, unregulated or self-regulated electronic markets cropped up outside the authority of government oversight.

•As the housing and stock markets stalled in 2007 and 2008, more money migrated into the commodities markets."

http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/report/casino-of-hunger-how-wall-street-speculators-fueled-the-global-food-crisis/

[Jim__]

39. Almost everything I read includes speculation as*a* factor, not *the* factor.

For example(https://www.aplu.org/NetCommunity/Document.Doc?id=867):

Additional pressures have emerged recently.

Using corn to produce biofuels increases the demand for corn and appears to increase its
price as well. My understanding is that this is roughly the view held by the USDA’s
Chief Economist. It is not easy to sort out biofuels’ impact on food prices. I note that the
International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook states that biofuels account for
almost half of the increase in consumption of major food crops in 2006-2007.

Higher fuel prices have increased food production costs. For example, high energy costs
greatly increase the costs of producing fertilizer, transporting food and operating farms.

Troubled bond and security markets have increased the money flowing into commodity
markets. Liquidity and depth in the commodity futures markets are generally forces of
stability over time and therefore positive influences in the longer term for
users/consumers and farmers/sellers of grains. Accordingly, we have to take care in
imposing regulations of these important markets so we do not distort their positive
contributions to the stability of commodity trading.

Grain reserves have declined from a high of 100 days of global consumption in 2000 to
55 days currently and that has created a greater sense of market risk and an inability to
buffer market fluctuations.

There is drought in Australia and new export restrictions by a number of governments
that do not allow markets to function efficiently.

And:

A number of immediate factors include the following:

•Droughts in major wheat-producing countries in 2005-06
•Low grain reserves (according to Holt-Giménez and Peabody, we have less than 54 days worth, globally)
•High oil prices
•A doubling of per-capita meat consumption in some developing countries
•Diversion of 5% of the world’s cereals to agrofuels.

The above range of issues have been the subject of much mainstream media attention. For example, there has been some debate as to how much of an impact the recent rise in biofuels has actually contributed to the rising prices.


However, as Holt-Giménez and Peabody importantly add, all these causes “are only the proximate causes of food price inflation. These factors do not explain why—in an increasingly productive and affluent global food system—next year up to one billion people will likely go hungry. To solve the problem of hunger, we need to address the root cause of the food crisis: the corporate monopolization of the world’s food systems.”

What the authors are alluding to is the following:

The dominance of the richer nations and companies in the international arena has had a tremendous impact on agriculture, which, for many poor countries forms one of the main sources of income. A combination of unfair trade agreements, concentrated ownership of major food production, dominance (through control and influence in institutions such as the World Bank, IMF and the World Trade Organisation) has meant that poor countries have seen their ability to determine their own food security policies severely undermined.

Policies such as structural adjustment demanded by these institutions meant most developing countries had to not only cut back on health and education, but food stamps and other support for the very poor. Trade barriers and other support mechanisms for local industry were also often required to be removed, allowing foreign companies to more easily compete, often being at an advantage as they would typically be larger multinationals with more resources and experiences.

I'm not sure exactly what speculation contributes. It contributes something, but it is not the entire story.

[ironbark]

43. ‘How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it’

By Frederick Kaufman

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/07/0083022

“The history of food took an ominous turn in 1991, at a time when no one was paying much attention. That was the year Goldman Sachs decided our daily bread might make an excellent investment.”


-
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/06/0082533

The stories varied in focus and emphasis but employed the same basic plot points: biofuel production, caterpillar plagues, commodity speculation, crop disease, drought, dwindling stockpiles, fear, flood, hoarding, war, and an increasing world appetite for meat and dairy had bubbled into a nasty poison. Every day, another 25,000 people starved to death or died from hunger-related disease: every four seconds, another corpse. Rising prices for corn, cooking oil, rice, soybeans, and wheat had sparked riots in Bangladesh, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, and nineteen other countries. Not to mention Milwaukee, where a food voucher line of nearly 3,000 people descended into chaos. (“They just went crazy down there,” said one witness. “Just totally crazy.”)
Oddly enough, almost none of the food riots had emerged from a lack of food. There was plenty of food. The riots had been generated by the lack of money to buy food, and therein lay what may have distinguished today’s hunger from the hunger of years past. Therein lay the substance of the Rome conference.
……………………………………………………..
The dates reveal the emerging facts of the scam as “*the* factor”. Your links are from 2008 when the facts were not known.
Kaufman has been following the Food Crisis since the speculation you linked to and has written the book (‘The Food Bubble’) on the central/key/major factor of Wall Streets fucking up the food market.

Wondering ‘why’ the obfuscation to that (now well known and accepted) reality?
(Both the BBC and ABC Radio National have covered the scam….you have not heard of it?)

[Jim__]

42. From today's news: Move by one of the world's largest exporters helps drive up grain prices

Source.

MOSCOW — Russia announced Thursday that it would ban grain exports through the end of the year, a response to a scorching drought that has destroyed millions of acres of Russian wheat and hobbled the country’s agricultural revival.

The ban on grain exports by Russia, one of the world’s largest wheat producers, helped propel wheat prices in the United States toward their highest levels in nearly two years and raised the prospect that consumers could pay more for products like flour and bread as Russia tries to conserve its supplies of wheat, barley and other grains for its own people.

In announcing the ban, which is in force from Aug. 15 to Dec. 31, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin said that Russia had sufficient stockpiles of grain but that blocking exports was an appropriate response to the worst drought in decades.

“We need to prevent a rise in domestic food prices, we need to preserve the number of cattle and build up reserves for the next year,” he said during a televised cabinet meeting, according to The Associated Press. “As the saying goes: reserves don’t make your pocket heavy.”

[ChadwickHenryWard]

32. Wait, what?

I never said anything about Wall Street, and neither did you. This analogy has no bearing on Wall Street whatsoever. The people in hell have nothing to gain and everything to lose by refusing to help others. Any four-year-old could point out that the only way to eat the food is by cooperation. It needn't be out of altruism or concern for others; even pure greed would dictate the quid pro quo of feeding each other. There is absolutely nothing stopping them from doing so.

The people on Wall Street, however, are in exactly the opposite situation from your story. They are not harmed by refusing to help others; far from it. They become fabulously wealthy by buying and selling the lives of other people. They are greedy, but not stupid.

I would like make a further constructive criticism of your analogy: people rarely refuse to help others out of sheer malice and stupidity. They generally have some good reason, whether real or perceived, to do wrong by others, be it greed, fear, ignorance, or what have you. The damned in your story have absolutely no reason not to help the people around them, and a very good reason to go ahead and do so. This makes the story unrealistic and not very informative.

[ironbark]

33. Strange. I never said or suggested you or I “said anything about Wall Street”.

No quote, no reference prior to answering your question re “why the people in hell are so comically inept”.

You seem to hold the conception that hell is a location, a place to be “in”. The story and my pov is that hell is a condition and/or set of behaviours. Those involved in the Wall St ponzi scheme that drove millions into hunger are reflective of that condition/behaviour- greed and stupidity- hell.

“This analogy has no bearing on Wall Street whatsoever.”

It is a story, an analogy…and as such wide open to interpretation. You see no “bearing” connection between the blind self cantered behaviour of the hell characters and the blind self cantered behaviour of some crooked commodities traders……ok.

“The people on Wall Street, however, are in exactly the opposite situation from your story”.

The hell characters are clinically narcissistic, just want to get some/more in, oblivious to the needs of others.
The Wall St traders engaged in the scheme are clinically narcissistic, just want to get some/more in, oblivious to the needs of others.

Like I said…it is a story/analogy…not a dovetail joint between life and an account thereof.

“They generally have some good reason, whether real or perceived, to do wrong by others, be it greed, fear, ignorance”

So to “greed and stupidity” you add “fear” and transplant “ignorance” instead of “stupidity”………ok.

“….people rarely refuse to help others out of sheer malice and stupidity.”

Wait a minute……..I said “greed and stupidity”……..said nothing about “malice”.

“The damned in your story have absolutely no reason not to help the people around them….”

Except being “damned” by the inability to perceive the needs of others or even recognise their own best interests.
You don’t believe such conditions/behaviours are manifest in the world?...Think it “unrealistic”?

Ok.

[onager]

25. Don't quit your day job.

n/t

[dmallind]

30. His day job is probably not plaigirizing. NT

[ironbark]

34. You are not from the Law Firm- Snide, Smarmy and Supercilious….are you?

[dmallind]

40. Nah - I just give credit when I borrow from well known writings. NT

[ironbark]

44. Good for you. I heard the story as an anecdote in a pub. You need a link?

Or are you that guy who screams “Stolen Riff”! every time a piece of sampled music comes on?

[rrneck]

37. It's direct applicibility is not the point.

The OP is a story. A work of fiction. It is supposed to inspire us to think about the value of selfless generosity and compassion and the consequences of refusing to do so. That's all.

Doesn't anybody read fiction any more?

[Old Troop]

46. Hey! That was pretty good