Glen - Great article and great insight!
One fine gem is the fact that the generally accepted most brilliant Chess Player of all time, Garry Kasparov is a Tweeter and is one of Vlad's (Putin, not Burachynsky) greatest critics!
I think we need to put Garry up against Donald in Chess Boxing, with a 30 second opportunity to tweet between rounds? We'll see who get's whose ass handed to whom in all three forms! I can't imagine him lasting 3 rounds in any of the three categories! And it's hard to tell convincing lies with a fat lip, two black eyes and the whole Twitter Record.
Trump-bashing aside, I like your point(s) about self-policing/governance and membership in a community. I think community membership it *is* a slippery but key topic. I think we are suffering from a massive "tragedy of the commons", where facts and truth, while somewhat mutable *are* part of the commons. Or perhaps more to the point, Language is part of the commons, and it has been pretty thoroughly mangled in many quarters.
Your distinction between "identifying with" and "participating in" is particularly apt. In our modern culture, it feels as if our consumerism has lead us to "identifying with" as a substitute for "participating in"... Further in-depth analysis seems worthwhile.
- Steve On 2/6/17 5:21 PM, glen ☣ wrote:
In light of the idea that we don't talk about complexity here on friam, this article: Why Nobody Cares the President Is Lying https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/opinion/sunday/why-nobody-cares-the-president-is-lying.html triggered my itch. In it, Sykes says: > As uncomfortable as it may be, it will fall to the conservative media to police its worst actors. I've relied on the argument that it's up to a community to police itself. I suppose it's a remnant of my libertarianism, whose mantra (back then... don't know about now) was "self-governance". After all, the libertarian (or anarchist, for that matter) rhetoric crumbles without self-governance. My main target for this rhetoric has always been atheists. The tendency of atheists to claim that atheism isn't a "belief system" allows them to abdicate on their responsibility to police themselves. It's just laziness. But the reason I'm posting this, now, is to posit that the concept of self-governance relies fundamentally on a coherent "self". In our post-fact world, to which communities does any particular person belong? ... to the ones you think you belong to? ... to the ones that respond to your calls to action? How do I know if I actually belong to a community or if I just "identify" with it? My boss at one of the dot-coms I hired into once told me that I have less power to invoke my network than I think I have. (It's most likely he was attributing to me what he attributes to himself because he seems to think he knows more about me than he demonstrates. ... but why he said it is irrelevant.) I rarely "invoke my network", except to argue or get drunk. 8^) But it raises the question of whether I even have a (substantial) network and whether I'm even part of any communities at all. By what means do _parts_ represent their wholes? Isn't this just another version of Russell's paradox?
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