Nicholas Thompson wrote circa 10-05-17 09:08 AM: > We all seem to fear most corporate AND government > power. That is a huge point to agree on. I think that if we can keep > that agreement in mind we can move TOGETHER beyond slogans. But i am > not sure how.
Chris Feola wrote circa 10-05-17 10:05 AM: > I think the Founders provide insight as to how to proceed. > [...] > This is why libertarians believe in divided government. The donkeys > and elephants both steal and abuse power, but they have somewhat > different constituencies. Keeping the government at least partly > divided between them guarantees the honesty of thieves. That's why > I'm hoping our president will soon be blessed with a worthy opponent, > the way Clinton had Gingrich and Reagan had Tip O'Neil. And I think > Bush -- and all of us -- would have been much better off if Pelosi > had taken the Speaker's gavel in 02. This is the most interesting direction this discussion/argument could take, I think. Nick points out the dialectic. Chris points out the process of refining the semantic content of the terms. And eventually we move from talking merely about that abstract nonsense term "the government" into talking about the concrete term "types of government". In order to do that, though, we can't stop at the 1st refinement iteration (from "the government" to political parties, branches of government, or corporations). We need the 2nd, 3rd, ..., and Nth refinements as well. In particular, as a libertarian myself, I think the non-partisan offices are WAYWAYWAY more important than the partisan offices. Local government, note the lack of any quotes around the word means I think it's _actual_ government... the governing of some specific thing, like a water table or a forest, is the most important type of government. Both "the government" and "corporations" (aka the federal government and _large_ corporations) are corrupt in the sense of Steve's power/corruption duality. They are so because they over-generalize, stereotype, and abstract away from the human (or the pine tree or e.coli ... whatever organism you pick). The power/corruption lies in the abstraction. We see this in biological models, as well. Why is Fick's law _powerful_? Why are these equational laws more powerful than agent-based models? On the flipside, why is Fick's law (by itself) insufficient for a specific treatment protocol for a specific condition? And why is (something like) an ABM necessary for any explicit, fully concrete, situation. It seems that to take the next step from what the "founding fathers" set up for us, we need to apply what we've been working on all this time to government. Where is abstraction necessary, sufficient, and good? Where is concreteness necessary, sufficient, and good? -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
