I still feel like 99% of this conversation is about convenience and work.
Nothing worth doing is easy, whether university accreditation, sifting good
faith from corruption, sifting truth from bullshit, or selecting your content
providers. TANSTAAFL
For those of us still using Grok and Twitter (or Amazon Prime, Google,
yaddayadda):
This is what a digital coup looks like
https://www.ted.com/talks/carole_cadwalladr_this_is_what_a_digital_coup_looks_like
The Social Security Administration Is Gutting Regional Staff and Shifting All
Public Communications to X
https://werd.io/2025/the-social-security-administration-is-gutting-regional-staff-and-shifting
On 4/12/25 10:39 AM, steve smith wrote:
...
I do not agree with the motives for attacking accreditors, and will admit that
there might be a tiny baby in an ocean of bathwater, but I will not mourn their
demise.
davew
I'd like to see a larger discussion here of the abstractions involved in all forms of
"governance" and "regulation".
We all have beaucoup personal anecdotal experiences of the myriad ways those designed-in
feedback loops seem to go entirely awry or seem to work against their own stated purpose.
This can exhibit as an acute (or even mild but chronic) inconvenience any one of us
experiences as we rub up against said "regulations". It can also exhibit as
what feels like a fundamental opposition of values (e.g. when I feel that it should be my
personal choice whether I wear a seatbelt while driving vs feeling entirely comfortable
with deferring to a rule declaring which side of an undivided highway I should be driving
on).
To the extent that the universe is ordered by stacks of self-organizing systems
(quarks, elementary particles, atoms, molecules, bio-molecules and cellular
life, multicellular life, .... ) it would seem inevitable that there is a
liminal range between these levels of organization where what multicellular
creatures experience as *cancer* cells are to the cells themselves, just
exercising their own (?latent?) sovereignty.
It is easy for me to identify with the peasants with their torches and
pitchforks at the castle gates, but with a little self-awareness of my larger
context also recognize that there is a logic to the higher-level organization
of society that I am engaged in which it behooves me to understand and engage
in (even if as a dissident or freedom-fighting revolutionary). A hallmark of
life, and perhaps this stacked levels of reality I'm trying to gesture toward,
seems to be to maintain a multi-scale loyalty/identity with upward/downward
coupling... a cell needs to nurture it's own organelles while participating
in being a good member of a tissue which in turn is organized into a good organ
which collectively comprises an organism which fits into it's own
familial/ecosystem/cultural context.
In the spirit of "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all", I
tend to withdraw my participation from systems where I feel that my participation is more
disruptive than not. I (like many) harbor all types of anti-social sentiments which have me
*wanting* to disrupt systems which happen to be inconvenient or confounding to my sensibilities,
but I also recognize that I actually don't want to participate in a "revolution" which I
have no concept of what I will replace the existing organizational structure with. My outrage and
energy are better directed to systems I *can* contribute to?
I don't mean to dismiss all "creative destruction" just recognize that perhaps
there is always a bias against glancing up and down the stack of self-organization and
noticing one's actual role in that continuum? Many little kids (esp. boys?) seem to
find it more interesting to kick down someone else's sand castle than to build their
own. Maybe a meta-rule of entropy at work?
Maybe this will trigger a return to Glen's rants about the implicit use of "levels" which is also
welcome as I don't think my references here to "stacks" and "levels" are completely
righteous by any means. I'd like to find a better language.
On Sat, Apr 12, 2025, at 10:44 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/11/trump-war-on-universities
--
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