Yet another possibility for the wired future....
I recently read that some people's idea of the future of e-commerce on the internet will be enormous expansion of on-line auctions. I find this prospect frightening. (1) It takes a lot of time to compete in online auctions, so that any "labor saving" potential of computers may get more than absorbed in a new form of compulsory shopping -- having to bid on one's groceries, toiletries, everything The potential downsides seem to me almost endless, although I can see some ideological "freemarketeers" celebrating this as, at last, a really free market, since everybody will be able to negotiate on the price of everything (well, of course, not really, but that probably won't deter the freemarketeers from celebrating as if it was...). Many persons just won't be able to cope with so much computer interaction so close to the heart of their lives (or they won't want to). Probably many new forms of "middlemen" will spring up to do the bidding for their "clients". Which will mean lots more highly volatile commodities "markets", etc. I don't want to imagine any further how just this one new social construct: The Internet as universal bazaar/auction space (which may just kind of happen by the machinations of the "invisible hand" without too many people working too hard to help it happen...) could make our lives far more complex and precarious -- could take over our lives Might the effects be as portentous as I believe was the closing of the common lands -- "enclosure" -- at the start of the Industrial Revolution (sorry my history here is not good)? +\brad mccormick -- Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works (Matt 5:16) Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Blaming the victors [Winning without fighting -- culture'sway]
Brian McAndrews wrote:
I appreciate Brad McCormick's struggle to make himself clear. I believe the
problem is language. We are forced to use it (language), as I am doing now
to address the problem. I've had some success helping beginning English
teachers wrestle with this. Most people seem comfortable with the word
'concept' until I present them with the introduction in Ruth Beebe Hill's
novel "Hanta Yo". Hill states:
To the Reader
Admit, assume, because, believe, could, doubt, end, expect, faith, forget,
forgive, guilt, how, it, mercy, pest, promise, should, sorry, storm, them,
us, waste, weed- neither these words nor the CONCEPTIONS for which they
stand appear in this book; they are the whiteman's import to the New
World, the newcomers contribution to the vocabulary of the man he called
Indian. Truly the parent Indian families possessed neither these terms
nor their equivalents". Ruth Beebe Hill, Hanta Yo, Warner Books, 1979 --
**
I ask each of you to try to imagine not having as part of your 'self' any
or all of the 24 concepts that the Dakotah people did not have. Play with
the idea of removing 'because' or 'guilt' from your way of thinking,
feeling, speaking, being. Does western science depend on 'because'? How,
beginning as a young child, did you begin to acquire these concepts? And
how are they still changing as you age? Is 'guilt' the same for you now as
it was when you were seven?
What concepts might the Dakotah have had that we do not?
Language, simple stuff, eh?
[snip]
Great imaginative exercise material!
Alternatively, one might try Julian Jaynes' notion that
pre-1000BC Greeks did not have "selves" and that they
acted based on commands given by "gods" (what we
would call auditory hallucinations). The title of Jaynes'
book is telling: The Origin of *Consciousness* in the
breakdown of the bicameral Mind -- imagine: "people" can
have minds without being conscious (esp.: without
having *self* consciousness!) -- they can treat
"themselves" as just aspects of the social collective that
metabolizes itself (from *our* perspective!) "in them".
Imagine what "our lives" would be like
if we lived in eternal fog, and could never see
"the heavens"!
Paradoxically, to realize: "We are determined by our
language and other unwitting social customs" seems to be the
beginning of *real* freedom.
Alas, it may be a rather "stoical" kind of freedom,
since thinking: "I am caught up in competition"
doesn't seem to accomplish much in freeing me from
that competition (maybe it would be like a fish
realizing: "I am in polluted water").
+\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
---
![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Blaming the victors [Winning without fighting -- culture'sway]
Ed Goertzen wrote: Brian McAndrews [EMAIL PROTECTED] Wrote and Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] Replied I appreciate the exchange below. It seems to me that the teaching of culture is the inculcation of what we used to call morality. The unwritten rules and laws of behaviour (mental and physical) that are communicated more by practice than by curriculum. Since the rules were inculcated by osmisis, so to speak, they served until experience either validated or invalidated them. Alas, this is not what I meant to communicate (nor, I think, what Hall and Resnais meant, either): Because these forms of behavior (where beliefs are understood as one kind of behavior...) are "inculcated by osmosis", they are largely immune from being invalidated by experience, in part, because they prescribe the kinds of experiences the person can have. This is why they are so dangerous: We don't know that what we think is our freely chosen behavior is really channeled by these unrecognized rules. Of course, in varying measures, we *can* become aware of these rules and to ever greater extent free outselves from (i.e., extricate ourselves from) them. The results are generally "eye opening" from the individual's perspective, and extremely threatening from "society's" perspective. I would again cite the difference between believing "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!", and believing: "There seem to have been persons who believed "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" -- I wonder why they held that particular belief -- and, what do I see? there even seem to be persons in my own social world who at least say they believe it. Let's see what we can find out by studying the historical and logical consequences of believing: 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori'!" The Generals have a much harder time mounting "human wave" assaults with the one kind of person than with the other kind The watershed occured in my opinion during the 60's when both the authoritative and the authoritarian were rejected. The veracity of moral laws was rejected unless they could be validated. Perhaps (and here I may sound like I am contradicting myself!) not enough effort was made to see what behavioral norms could be validated. Today, we have "postmodernism", not an ethics of Universality (Husserl, et al.). We have widespread acceptance of horrible customs both in other "cultures" and in our own [wage labor, ritual genital mutilation of children, etc.]. That was a reversal of traditional process when moral law was accepted unless it could be invalidated. I disagree: It was a *reaction* to the traditional process when moral law was accepted, *period* -- and those who did not or would not conform were intimidated into submission, or ostracized or crushed. But we have still not seen the day when wage laborers, students, and other subordinated categories simply no longer have to endure being less than fully human, i.e., less than co-legislators of their social world (like the bosses and school administrators, et al.). As Marx said: "communism" will be when the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things. The classical Greeks knew that to be governed, and to be fully human are incompatible. With society's love affair with the TV, the proving ground has ben removed. The resultant loss of social "self government" has created a vacume that is being filled by the writing into statute law what more property belongs in the realm of moral law, where the practice of it is modified to suit its time and place. [snip] A stray thought which just came to me: What a difference a single letter makes in an acronym: the TVA was, I believe, in its time, a symbol of real hope for many Americans. end [snip] Not yet! Best wishes to all! +\brad mccormick -- Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works (Matt 5:16) Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Blaming the victors [Winning without fighting -- culture's way]
n is
a representative. Thus, while the cliche of seeing
the universe in a grain of sand may be romantic,
the idea of reproducing a whole culture in each
little social gesture is quite true, and each
such social "molehill" is indeed a mountain
(or at least an iceberg)
The surest way to win is if the "opponent"
isn't even aware there is anything to fight about.
+\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
---
![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: NY POST on US Statistics ruse
"Ray E. Harrell" wrote: Good to see you back. Ray Steve Kurtz wrote: I couldn't quickly determine which date this appeared, but it seems recent. Steve CPI REPORT DID NOT INCLUDE ENERGY COSTS By JOHN CRUDELE NY POST Did Washington eliminate the rising price of oil from the last Consumer Price Index? [snip] Yes, we have been having *LOW INFLATION* lately. It seems to me that really means that falling energy prices (and, I would also speculate(sic!): food production prices, and probably the prices of other "raw materials"!) have been *falling* so that the *increase* in prices for production and distribution and advertising and policing and so forth... of everything has been OBFUSCATED! Voodoo economics (along, of course, with psycho-physics!) is the most advanced exact rigorous mathematical science, and appropriately deserves funding instead of such dead pseudo-sciences as Marxism and Husserlean phenomenology! It seems to me that *real* low inflation would be where energy prices and prices paid to farmers and to raw materials producers of all kinds were *rising*, and, still, both the Producer and Consumer price indexes were steady (and, of course, both those indexes included all significant factors)! We are living in good times! +\brad mccormick -- Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works (Matt 5:16) Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Cooperative bookstore
"M.Blackmore" wrote: THIS ain't such a silly idea Any thoughts on how one could go about it, either a good dot.com, or a physical site...? Perhaps we are going to have to start reinventing - for similar reasons - what our 19th century ancestors had to do in Britain with the cooperative movement... *From:* "john courtneidge" [EMAIL PROTECTED] [snip] Dear f/w friends Time to set up a co-operative bookstore (to stock the stuff that others hide away? Of course I sympathize as well as empathize with this idea. But I am curious about its practicability. Can someone tell me what are the "stuff that others hide away"? (I've gotten some pretty obscure things from Amazon -- which is a fact, not a feeling) Maybe I don't know what I'm missing? Other than chance encounters, You can only encounter in reality what you have previously encountered in fantasy. (--Gordon Hirshhorn) "Yours in discourse" +\brad mccormick -- Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works (Matt 5:16) Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: The Bill of Gates fallacy
"Cordell, Arthur: #ECOM - COMÉ" wrote: A community is about people. People perform many functions than just the one at hand. [snip] I think this is always important to keep in mind. One especially important instance, according to my hypothesis, is *laissez faire* capitalism. Its supporters constitutte themselves as *communities* organized around [around what? well, alas, around the destruction of community for others, and, perhaps unwittingly, in the end, for themselves...]. I am fairly confident that Bill Buckley Jr and his "cronies" constitute among themselves just as vital a community as the citizens of the classical Greek polis constituted among themselves, or "good guys", like the Wobblies, constituted among themselves, etc. The "problem", of course, in the case of laissez-fairers et al., is [to be scientific, and use mathematical arcana:] that the function over which they compute the integral is not recursive, i.e., the set of workers in the one case, and of slaves in the other case, is not identical with the set of entrepreneurs in the one case, and citizens in the other. So that there is a way in which the salvation of Everyman on this earth is prefigured, albeit in the form of involuntary self-alienation, in the oppressing classes (but also, of course, often, when we've read a message, we throw it away as no longer worth keeping...). "Yours in discourse" +\brad mccormick -- Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works (Matt 5:16) Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: The Bill of Gates fallacy, Odysseus and the Cyclops, the invisible hand....
"Cordell, Arthur: #ECOM - COMÉ" wrote:
Bravo! Self service is no service at all. We just access part of the
bank's (or supermarket, or gas station, etc.) mainframe, and doing the work
ourselves, complicate our day and put people out of work. Amazing. And we
call it progress.
[snip]
Self-service sometimes is a *big* service. If I had a
car I liked (e.g., the BMW 318ti I lusted after when
I had a long commute to work -- You had better believe I
would pay *more* to pump the gas myself instead of letting
some Who-cares? bring that sharp piece of
metal near my enamel!
But, no doubt about it, more often it is the other way
around. In August my wife committed the almost
mortal sin of getting a cash advance from a non-Fleet
ATM machine (we bank with Fleet because they
bought out Nat West...).
We always pay our credit
card balances in full each month [I like the "float",
and not carrying cash]. Somehow this little
financial cancer cell got into our bank accounts
*without showing up in the monthly balance*. So we
start getting *FINANCE CHARGES!* Christmas Eve,
I call up the bank to try to get the thing straightened
out. To make a long story short: (1) I found out that
anything you pay on your credit card account is
applied *TO THE LOWEST INTEREST BALANCE FIRST*, so that
(2) The only way to kill the cancer was to: (A) Pay
off *everything on the account including anything
we had charged after the latest statement in full +
the cash advance*, and also *not use the card
until the check cleared*. A first line supervisor
told me the magic number, which was a couple
hundred dollars over the balance due. (B) we
did as we were told. [Oh, yes, the supervisor told
me she was not allowed to give me her supervisor's
name, and threatened me about my verbal abuse of her!]
(C) We got our new monthly statement - WITH
ANOTHER FINANCE CHARGE.
So yesterday I go to my neighborhood Fleet branch,
and the manager, after about half an hour of herself
having trouble getting anywhere, finally gets
the finance charges cancelled and the tumor
removed and also she gives me the name of the
person to bring back to the branch if my next bill
is not right.
Needless to say: (1) I went in the branch making
it very clear I was very angry [because I felt *helpless*!].
And (2) I thanked the manager profusely for her help.
So there's the two sides of "self-serve", in my
opinion.
"Capitalism" is one of mankind's greatest
inventions: It enabled exploiters to claim
they were only hurting you because thay had to
hurt you to not hurt you and lots of other
people worse ("the invisible hand"). Computers
added a second good reason why nobody
is to blame for your (i.e., in each case: my)
getting hurt -- because the computer does it that
way to *everybody*. Stalin and Hitler were idiots: If you
didn't like what they were doing to you,
you at least had a target to try to
shoot at.
As Odysseus would have answered the Cyclops if
he was alive today:
Cyclops: "Who put out my eye?"
Odysseus: "The invisible hand of the market did it!"
Cyclops [calling his colleagues for aid]: "Help!
The invisible hand of the market put out my eye!"
And, of course, none of his colleagues come to his
aid, because they all know that that's just what the
invisible hand of the market does to Cyclopses --
so there is no problem [Odysseus's real answer,
of course, was: "Nobody" -- and, when the Cyclops
yelled: "Nobopdy has hurt me!", all his colleagues
figured he did not have a problem, because he told
them so himself!]
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
---
![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Hegemony
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There was an interview with someone from Sun Microsystems on the syndicated radio program, "Newsweek on Air," Sunday morning. Although I was taking a shower at the time and not listening with full attention, the comments this person made frightened me deeply. The interview concerned the recent "Denial of Service" Internet attack. The person from Sun Microsystems commented that one of the reasons such an attack was possible was the low cost or no-cost of e-mail communication. The Sun Microsystems person suggested that if the e-mail cost were increased, by charging customers in a way similar to how cell phone calls are billed, with people paying for both receiving and sending messages, then the conditions that permit a "denial of service" attack would be eliminated. At the moment this comment was made, I was paralyzed with fear. There is no doubt that those who control the economic and political levers of power have noticed the success NGOs and other protest groups are having using e-mail to mobilize their adherents, and the healthy global civic culture that has been developing. These elites are also aware of how destabilizing a healthy civic culture can be for a plutocratic, patronizing, narrow-based, corporate power structure. I began to wonder how long it will be before communication such as through listserv lists is restricted by increasing its economic cost. Right now we can send and receive an unlimited number of messages of any length at either a low fixed monthly cost or no cost. That is what permits the NGOs and listserv lists to proliferate and expand. If the Internet is envisioned by the political and economic elites as solely a commercial medium, like television, then there is little reason for them to allow us to continue e! ng! [snip] I am a bit baffled. There is no such thing as "free email" -- at least for the majority of the people who use what is called that (Netscape mail, Juno, etc.). [University students have different problems in this regard] These services are being supplied by capitalists, and (1) there must be something in it for them, and (2) a person is foolish to think the capitalists will continue to provide this service if the day comes when they decide the costs outweigh the returns. Anybody who has serious intent in using the internet is in my opinion foolish to rely on "free" services from profit making enterprises (unless they view themselves as guerrilla surfers, with no enduring return address). This should be kind of obvious. Surely one takes risks in using fee based internet accounts, since the provider may decide the service is not worth continuing to provide, or the provider may simply go out of business altogether. But I think the risks here should in general be less than in the first case. Even in the best of "free" cases, e.g., Geocities, look how much more intrusive their banner ads are now than were the little logos they asked users to place on each web page 3 years ago. Persons who are really serious about populist / alternative internet access need to band together and buy themselves a server and do all the stuff necessary to "wipe their own -sses". Alternatively, they should work toward enacting legislation that would help secure reliable and affordable internet access for all citizens (illegal aliens, too?) -- but that's not anybody's solution for today or tomorrow. Perhaps there is another alternative (which I more generally sometimes fantasy about): Perhaps all the "nonworking" housewives could scour their local law libraries and find angles to entangle the corporations in enough litigation to make it less costly for them to guarantee continuance of "free email" (etc.) than to even think of withdrawing the hand which offered the dog such a juicy piece of meat. "Let a thousand law suits blossom!" Now *that's* the American way, it seems to me! That, of course, is just one inconsequential person's opinion. +\brad mccormick -- Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works (Matt 5:16) Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Fw: One Country Two worlds [more than 2...]
"Ray E. Harrell" wrote: It is because I admire Brad that I continue this and he may answer what I say but I can speak only from my own perceptions in my work and life and the experience of those perceptions.So here goes but I cannot continue the discussion beyond this post. Ray "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." wrote: (snip) If Ray is disturbed by my denigration of unreflected life in all its forms (what I intentionally provocatively call: "ethnic formations"), (snip) Actually I am disturbed by what you expressed. As the poet Jerome Rothenberg has said on many occasions, "there is no culture or people that has survived by twiddling their thumbs and speaking in half-formed thoughts." A good case can be made for that belief as a left over piece of 19th century Utilitarian thought that was used to justify aggression. I at first misread you and saw: "Unitarian". What a relief to see that is not the word you wrote! Edward T. Hall had to train that attitude out of the American Diplomats and businessmen because they were in danger of failure in both areas. The multi-linguistic future on the internet puts us all in danger if we see ourselves "above" ethnicity rather than a part of it. Maybe there are two Edward Halls, or one Edward Hall with MPD? Hall's _The Silent Language_ is one of my favorite sources for anti-ethnicity argument/rhetoric (the other being Allan Resinous' film "Moon Once d'Amerique"). I can only say that I hope I made it clear that my critique is not aimed at "primitive peoples" but at everything which is *primitive* (i.e., not radically grounded in self-accountable reflective reconstruction of all that which merely is given) -- wherever it occurs. (snip) Nothing is primitive in that sense. Just relative to its place in time/space and its growth structure. Primitive more accurately means Primal but to me it is a fake issue. I never met a primitive but I have met provincials and ignorance. I have no problem with the hypothesis that there are persons in solaced "primitive" cultures who are more ethnological advanced than many First World MBAs and PhDs, etc. -- not to mention such "Europeans" as my own parents and grandparents (my paternal grandfather may have been a Neanderthal and nobody recognized his zoological value -- but to say that would be to denigrate the Neanderthal species without good evidence. Fortunate the child who grows up in a civil[ized] and culture*d* family!). Neither will it do to reply to this that: "Everyone makes mistakes." Galilean natural science, Hegelian dialectic and Husserlian phenomenological reflection are all self-grounding projects for [albeit iteratively and asymptotically] overcoming error in every aspect of life. The books of C. Castenada caused a stir a while back because no one wanted to admit that the people, he claimed taught him, existed. I believe there are serious questions as to Castanedas' authenticity. My college roommate because an expert in Mexican Indian culture, and he told me Casanedas was a fake -- I have no more hard evidence for this than for Americans having landed on the moon 30 years ago, however Don Juan was compared to Husserl and as one scientist said to me, "If these people exist then we have committed a monstrous three hundred years."Well I believe the books are fake but the beginning of any young Shaman's instruction is "be observant!" and "put your feet where no one else has stepped."My teachers were far more reflective, artistic and outrageous than Castenada's stories. They also dealt with some of the nation's greatest scientists both Newtonian and Quantum from a place of equals. They were neither afraid of science nor worshiped it. They also had a healthy believe in the evolution of consciousness but in much too complicated a way to consider one cultural universe more important than another. I can only say that I would welcome an opportunity to talk about these issues with one or more of these persons. I assert that I am ready to abandon due to new evidence any belief except the continually re-interrogated belief in the necessity of questioning everything -- especially the idols of *my own* tribe (I am not in favor of "Imperialism" and "colonization", etc.). [snip] Jerome Rothenberg spent several years with the Iroquois studying the poetry contained within their everyday life and the ceremonials. From that point on he concluded that most of the Indigenous people's he worked with were "Technicians of the Sacred" and far more subtle and complicated than the Jesuits whose rigidity made science seem both universal and profound. According to Needham, the Jesuits "screwed it up". They argued that the accomplis
Re: Fw: One Country Two worlds [more than 2...]
"Ray E. Harrell" wrote: I am not altogether clear exactly where Ray's response to my posting engages with what I wrote, and/or the limitations of what I wrote. If Ray is disturbed by my denigration of unreflected life in all its forms (what I intentionally provocatively call: "ethnic formations"), I can only say that I hope I made it clear that my critique is not aimed at "primitive peoples" but at everything which is *primitive* (i.e., not radically grounded in self-accountable reflective reconstruction of all that which merely is given) -- wherever it occurs. In support of my position, I will simply quote from the NYT article Ray himself reposted: But indigenous knowledge can be faulty. "Traditional people sometimes get things right, and sometimes get them wrong," said Alan Fiske, a psychological anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Some things people do are bad for them." Other anthropologists have challenged the notion that all indigenous groups have somehow developed a blissful oneness with their world. Neither will it do to reply to this that: "Everyone makes mistakes." Galilean natural science, Hegelian dialectic and Husserlian phenomenological reflection are all self-grounding projects for [albeit iteratively and asymptotically] overcoming error in every aspect of life. That the 17th Century Chinese recognized in Galilean natural science "something new, because true for everyone who took the effort to learn it", and not just true for those childreared to believe it (--Joseph Needham), seems to me to lead to one of two possibilities: (1) The Chinese understood that *their own limited form of life* was superseded by the Universality of Science, or (2) That the Chinese are just like "The West" and so their admiration for Science just proves they aren't "real peoples" any more than the Jesuits who brought Galilean science to them Finally, there is Margaret Mead's _New Lives for Old_, and a recent report in the NYT of one traditional culture in Africa, where the elders have undertaken a thoroughgoing inventory of their traditional culture, to see what parts of it are still viable and which are not worth preserving (e.g., ritual genital mutilation of children). I see these developments as somewhat similar to our recently having taught some apes to speak (ASL, etc.): The innate faculties presumably always were there, but somehow they did not express themselves until Western Modernity provided the catalyst (and let me repeat: I do not consider "Western Culture" in its higher forms to be Western but rather to be *Universal* -- *Western* culture is symbolized by such semiotic specimens as Superbowls, "commercial paper", and "Keep America beautiful, get a haircut!" -- Yes, Prof. Latour, "We have never yet really been modern." But I say it's time to get on with it! "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." wrote: (snip) .) Robert Musil's vision of a world in which "mystical experience" would be rescued from the muddled hocus-pocus of fuzzy feelings [snip] And then there is the following article about the rest of we ethnics whose practicality is buried so deep that the rest of the world considers it superstition and screws it up in the argument about the future without understanding the past. We have noted that this article was not straightforwardly supportive in a blanket way, of traditional practices. [snip] To bad Freud didn't really have the guts to get it beyond his own Viennese prejudice. Narcissism and Idolatry are sisters except he was too embarrassed by his tradition and desire to be accepted in a racist society, to say so. It is my understanding that Freud did indeed have such an unanalyzed complex as Ray here specifies. If Freud had been rich, he would have spent his life chopping up worms: Prof. Sigmund Freud, Invertebrate Biologist. Don't throw away the old until you understand it and have something better to put in its place. This is just prudence (which, admittedly, the contemporary "civilized" world has no surfeit of). *However*! Even while we keep the old, we can keep it at arm's length: "reduced" to semiotic raw material -- however valuable it may be! -- thru phenomenological, hermeneutical, sociology-of-knowledge and other rigorous reflective methods. It is a very different thing to say: "There have been persons who believed that 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori', and studying their sentiment may help us to cultivate our own feelings", than to say: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!" But, please, do not take my word for it: Substitute
Re: FW: Individualism
Melanie Milanich wrote: Futher to Michael and Ed's posts relating to the growth of individualism in the western world (and doctor's obsessions with their personal portfolios), today's Toronto Star has an article "Free agency comes to the shop floor" quoting Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, who expects the workplace to evolve into a world of free agents, with workers demanding their own work terms just like athletes. That, he says, is because the concept of loyalty to an employer is fading, while loyalty to one's own career is on the upswing. In time, human resources policies where all employees get the same wages, benefits and vacations will disappear, Martin argues. Instead, workers will demand one-on-one contracts that recognise individual needs...customised spaces at home. [snip] This strikes me as a "mixed bag". It could lead to "anything" from the reduction of even the most highly skilled "professionals" to work-at-home [distributed] sweat-shop *piece workers*, to the end of the still universal barbaric social custom of renting human minds and bodies (aka: "wage labor"). I think this is a good time to refer yet again to the Polish sociologist, Jan Szczepanski's magisterial (and quite short!) essay: Szczepanski, J. (1981). Individuality and society. Impact of science on society, 31(4) 461-466. It's well worth the small effort of asking your friendly reference librarian to get a copy. And, if anyone has access to a Kurzweiler machine (text digitizer), I'd be glad to edit the raw text and post it for all to read. "Yours in discourse..." \brad mccormick -- Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works (Matt 5:16) Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Fw: One Country Two worlds [more than 2...]
he muddled hocus-pocus of fuzzy feelings and [what *would* Musil have thought of these folks?!] new-Age-ers, et al., etc. -- and "the mystical" realized by each of us at the center of the most exact technological work (which thereby would at last discover its *heart*) is only one of the great "dreams" (I am referring here esp. to Husserl's sad statement from the late "30s"...) of the 20th century, which is "over" only in the sense that we have not yet even begun to take it up, and, in trying to realize it, to *test it out*. (See below) The most advanced sectors of "The West" still, in my estimation, remain largely in the thralldon of unreflected ethnicity. The Egyptean elevator operator says his traditional prayer to Allah the merciful. A Harvard or Wharton Tech. diplomate investment banker says his equally traditional prayers to "commercial paper" and Professional Football. "Yours in discourse [which is aware of its self-constituting and world-constituting majesty and infinite desirability, as well as its universal fragility]...", on this the holiest day of the secular Western calendar: Superbowl Sunday. \brad mccormick -- Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works (Matt 5:16) Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: FW: Medical football-philia etc., was: Re: FW: The structure of future work...
Victor Milne wrote: I am by no means a communist or socialist, but this looks like propaganda-sriven tunnel vision to me. Comments follow. I once had a manager who, after being sentenced to third shift for his opinions, told me: "I have no evil thoughts." (the poor guy had quit the army after 20 minus 1 years to take the job!). - Original Message - From: Harry Pollard [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Ray E. Harrell [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Harry Pollard [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Steve Kurtz [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: January 25, 2000 12:45 PM Subject: Re: FW: Breeding, was: Re: FW: The structure of future work... [snip] [snip] There were most certainly inequities with high party officials living in luxury and ordinary people living very humbly in crowded apartments. (By the way what's the difference in life-style between a US senator and your average Washington, DC resident?) However, medical care was universally available and pensioners could live without financial anxiety. This is not the case after a decade of US-driven free enterprise in Russia. For another communist country, Cuba, I read recently that the infant mortality rates are less than in the USA. [snip] There was an article in Sunday 23 Jan 2000 New York Times Sunday Magazine about Russia's top new novelist: he said most Russians had it better under the Soviet regime (obviously, he meant: *less worse*). Any able person worth his salt heads for the US. My nephew - an anesthesiologist - now in Virginia told me with amazement the change. Yes, skim off the cream and then say what's left isn't very substantial stuff. I would like to repeat my contention that, whatever the intrinsic propensities to badness of Communist regimes, the "West", via its relentless policy of strangling these regimes from the get-go (the late 1910s) has unquestionably contributed to exacerbating these negative qualities and minimizing the chances for the regimes' better qualities to flower. I believe this certainly happened with Cuba. Maybe in Vietnam. (The rest I'm even less up-to-date on -- and then there was Tito, who surely ws the very worst thing that ever happened to the Balkans -- right?) I say: Shame on the West! Talk about "free competition"! You bet! We did everything we were free to do to crush "the specter which haunt[ed/s] Europe". Note that I am not saying Stalin was as noble a statesman and as great a benefactor of the weak and downtrodden as Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. I am simply asking whether even at only isolated places and times the peoples "behind the Iron Curtain" would have had better lives had the West not done everything it could to squeeze these governments (oops! sorry! none of them were legitimate governments! --For starters, read D.F. Fleming's _The Cold War and its Origins_, on the issue of America's legitimizing of anti-Communist puppet regimes, etc.). While back in England the doctors over coffee would discuss football results, here they discuss their investments. Good God! I'd far rather have a doctor who discussed football results than investments. You know what I'd rather have? A doctor who discusses the existential meaning of medicine, and who *cares* about this as a primary issue in his or her daily life. A doctor who strives for technical excellence and effective bedside rapport will do -- whatever he or she thinks about. But my ideal would be a real "doc-tor": one who (etymologically) guides ["teaches"] persons to have richer lives -- where part of the work of enrichment is through technical medical and chirurgical propaedeutics. I certainly would not want a doctor who *plays* "football (i.e., soccer) -- for I would worry that his avocation had caused brain damage from hitting the ball with his head! [snip] \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: hello beautiful! [A (2nd) response from within the list]
Ed Goertzen wrote: X-Envelope-From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Envelope-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 05:45:23 -0500 From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brad said: Well, it *is* the "oldest profession" (probably pimping antedates it?), and this mailing list is about the future of *work* What's one big difference between a non-working wife and a prostitute? The duration of the work contract. Ed said: Hey Brad, I looked in vain for a smile following your comment. No smile[y]. I was simply working out some of the logic of capitalism. I received one [at least one -- I haven't finished today's new mail yet!] strongly irate response to my posting. Perhaps I should have made clearer the context: I interpreted that the thread-inaugurating unsolicited email was some kind of sexual solicitation which somebody sent out in hopes of making some money. Perhaps that assumption was false; I certainly did not research the "problem space" in depth. The connection between that assumption and my posting was that our list is about the future of *work*, and here *is* an example of a kind of sexually-oriented work which is part of today's "economic scene", and will likely remain so, or even grow on the near future. So I offered some [admittedly elliptical and oblique] thoughts about "the cash nexus". I had second thoughts in the light of the irate response, of saying that of course not all non-working wives are nothing but long-term contract sexual workers. This is obvious -- just like it's obvious that not all capitalists are always nothing-but extractors of surplus value (else the word "paternalistic" would never have been paired with the word "corporation", e.g.). But I thought better of that, and want to say that I do not believe that all "prostitution" is unalloyedly bad. Obviously our mailing list was intruded upon by unsolicited spam email. But, if that is the case, what is offensive about it is not its nominal subject matter but the fact that it is an intrusion. I would hope that everyone would have been equally exercised over an unsolicited spam from a "respectable" source -- say, someone spamming us to contribute to Oxfam or whatever. I was genuinely surprised that anyone got *very* upset about the intrusive spam email. This is part of the real workings of the Internet. If multinational corporations get their secure ebusiness servers penetrated more than seldom, and thousands of their clients credit cards get posted on the Internet, what should one expect might happen to a plain-text mailing list that probably runs on a low-security server? Obviously, this incident should be reported to the list's server institution, where *hopefully*, there is staff to track down intrusions and try to do something about them (my ISP asks users to send them any spam the user receives -- please include *full headers*, or else there is no hope of tracking the stuff down...). The absence of the smile implies that the monetary accounting system has completed the intrusion into the family and underlies relationships in the nuclear family. Sad. Capitalism is, in a perverse way, what Edmund Husserl called: "an infinite task". The process of monetarization of the Lifeworld cannot, on principle, be completed, for any number of reasons, including that monetarization of any component of the Lifeworld generates new social structures which themselves are not *yet* monetarized. Then there are the aspects of auditing, efficiency and cash flow analysis, etc. which can open-endedly be "refined". Also, there is what one might call the "microscope" angle: Any aspect of the Lifeworld which has been "thoroughly" monetarized can always be broken down into component parts each of which is not yet individually monetarized Etc. --Monetarization without end, Amen. (And, with computers, the day when the "overhead" of all this accountancy overwhelms the ability to process it so that the system collapses under its own weight can indefinitely be postponed.) Perhaps the difference between a couple each contributing 50% to the marriage in order to make one? Again, I failed to contextualize my posting. Certainly I was not talking about, e.g., farmer's wives. But I live in Westchester County New York / Fairfield Connecticut, and I have seen some of the women drop their husbands off at the train station for a long train commute into "the city" -- before the poor guy even *starts* his work day! --, and then they drive off in their BMW (Volvo, etc.) to have a day of fun -- and even sometimes brag about how their husband loves to lavish them with all nice things. (Heck! Lucky the "commuter" whose wife drives him to and picks him up from the train, instead of even making him get there and back on his own steam!) No, n
Re: 2. Re: FW: The structure of future work and its consequences -- techies
Christoph Reuss wrote: Brad McCormick wrote: I find it rather remarkable that techies still have any [human] interest in having mates, and that they make any effort to find mates. Well, what about all those DINKs (double income no kids) who don't want to have their "standard of living" lowered by kids ? (costs, inconvenience and stress..) [Not to speak of those who would want kids but are too chemically polluted to have any.] Not all mates mate, so to speak... Maybe there's an numeric error in Keith's theory on the "corporate uebermensch"... Chris Good question. I've often thought that a lot of "working class" persons could have had a better life style had they not had children. I would also refer once again to Garrett Hardin's classic article "The Tragedy of the Commons", at, e.g.: http://www.dieoff.com/page95.htm In our grotesquely overpopulated world, I think it is obscene for even rich persons to have more than two children. Here, as often though not everywhere: Less is more Check out the 4th item from the top on this page on my website, about a National Public Radio story of why the Russians are trying to keep down their casualties in Chechnya: http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/etc.html \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: 2. Re: FW: The structure of future work and its consequences
Ed Weick wrote: Brad McCormick: [snip] Brad, think of it this way. If we did not suffer, how would we ever know what is good and valid from what is bad and corrupt. Is truth so pathetic that it cannot survive except in a sado-masochistic relationship? This idea can be found, e.g., in Heidegger's notion that the being of what-is is revealed in functional *breakdown*, which throws into relief what previously was lived only pre-thematically. Of course Heidegger has described *one* modality of revealing. But I think Heidegger missed another way: the unambivalently benedictory illumination, which has its source/prototype, in Heinz Kohut's lovely phrase, in: the mother whose face lights up at the sight of her child (i.e., in the child's seeing the mother's face light up). I read somewhere that extreme circumstances don't make pleasant people. Alas, that is me (and perhaps some less insignificant persons, such as one world-class scientist I encountered in IBM Research). Here's my take on this suffering is good stuff: If anyone thinks that truth needs suffering to distinguish the good from the bad, etc., then let this person NOT TAKE THE EASY WAY OUT: Let him or her have the wealth of a Bill Gates, or at least of a St. Francis of Assisi. *Then* let this person overcome the most insurmountable obstacle to any good thing: wealth, health and happiness. Heck, the wretched of the earth have it easy according to this way of thinking. To paraphrase something from Elias Canetti's _The Conscience of Words_: If only I was really a writer, my words would extirpate this way of thinking from the earth, except as the semiotic equivalent of the smallpox virus in the NIH (and we know there is a lively debate whether or not *that* evil should be preserved). Does a mother need to make sure to hurt her child so that the child will appreciate when "her face lights up at the sight of the child"? Yours in the hope for a more Matissean world (facilitated by science and technology, among other cultural resources). Amen! Yes, amen. I would argue that at least most of us been so badly mutilated by our "upbringing" (downsizing is more like it...) that we have little idea of who a child could grow up to be under unalloyedly nurturing social conditions (see Frederick Leboyer's _Birth Without Violence_). And, in any case, if anyone thinks life will be too easy, there are always the *hurts from nature* which technology has not yet stopped from impinging on us -- starting with aging and death. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Einstein: Time's man of the century
First, let me note that "the people's choice" on Time's person-of-the-century poll was: (1) Elvis (2) Ischak Rabin [I can't spell his first name, sorry] (3) Hitler "Ray E. Harrell" wrote: Brad said: Needham's orienting question was: Why, when China was in many ways more advanced than Europe even in the 1500s, did Europe "take off" but China remained in feudalism? His answer, which he did not like, was that Capitalism seems to have been the engine which drove not just the West's economic exploitation of the whole world, but also the great flowering of genuine Enlightenment in the West. When Kazantzakis wrote out the "story" to explore these questions in Odysseus a 20th Century Sequel he came up with the answer that it was war that did it. I haven't read Kazantzakis. Obviously, the question does not have a single, simple, univocal answer. All I can say is that one of the great scholars of the 20th century spent most of an almost century-long lifetime on this question, and I gave what he concluded. Needham must have been a remarkable person -- his massive erudition was even coupled with a fine sensitivity to human sexuality (see his Preface and Afterword to Jolan Chang's _The Tao of Sex_). "I praise you Helen for your heaving thighs that lit in slothful men a raging war that opened minds and widened seas." She deserved to be the object of one of those American Express celebrity "Who?" ads. [snip] No one wanted Cortez or Pizarro around in Spain. The same could be said for Ceasar and Rome. Better that they fight "out there." See what happened when he stayed home too long!If El Cid had lived, he would have been off to America in no time at all. This may also have some connection with the custom of "primogenitur"? In any case, I seem to have heard that my paternal grandfather was shipped over here from Poland by his father because he was "incorrigible". [snip] As to Needham, the real question for me and my tradition, is why a "sedentary China" is considered less advanced than a predatory Europe? [snip] I think I made it clear in my posting that "Europe" has been an ambivalent phenomenon. (Not that most other cultures have been unalloyedly beneficient to all their "members" --item: widespread ritual female genital mutilation practices in numerous non-European "cultures".) But let me spell out yet again my thesis: *Universal culture* seems to have only once appeared on earth, and that appearance was in Europe. Probably the European people didn't deserve it, but they (i.e., at least some of them) got it, and if they (we) lose it, it may disappear from the face of the earth. And what am I talking about here? Galilean mathematical exact science is *one* part of it, but the highest achievement of it so far (at least as far as I know) is Edmund Husserl's phenomenology: The thematization of humanity as devoting it(my/our)self to the *Infinite task* of self-critical comming to self-accountability in *all* aspects of life, including all the details of childrearing. Does it matter if this disappears from earth? Probably not. Does anything matter? Equally probably not. For nothing is necessary -- not even does any person need oxygen. It's all a question of what people (and, perhaps, other sapient creatures...) *want*. "Yours in [the fragility of...] discourse" \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: FW: The structure of future work and its consequences
Brian McAndrews wrote: I was rereading Marjorie Perloff's 'Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary' and paused after I read this quote: "When we think of the world's future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction." Wittgenstein, "Culture and Value" [snip] We? There are exceptions in addition to there being the rule (Brecht). Certainly such thinkers as Edmund Husserl and Robert Musil, along with such others as America's own William Ellery Channing (the text of whose 1819 "Baltimore Sermon" appears below) and Edward Hall, and others, when they thought of the world's future, *hoped* that it would transfigure into something radically incommensurable (mathematically, not just a *curve*, but a *discontinuous / non-differentiatable function*: the ever again recommenced radical praxis of self-reflection in the self-accountable re-new-al of the human Lifeworld in all its aspects, including those aspects which still remain largely in the darkness of unreflected ethnicity and its unwitting semiotic-viral replication in each new generation, e.g., childrearing in all its aspects, competition, etc. (See, e.g., Alain Resnais' film: Mon Oncle d'Amerique.) They spoke and wrote to try to make that future happen. I believe it was Clemenceau who said (as quoted in the highly literate CBS News TV series: World War I), at the outbreak of World War I: "The lights are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them back on again in our lifetime." And, today, still "History continues. . . ." (Elsa Morante, _History: A Novel_). Things are not good, but (to rescue George Bush's image, which Ivan Morris used, at least as early as 1964, to refer to "The world of the shining prince" (Genji), i.e., 1,000CE Kyoto: Here and there in the darkness, there flicker, for a moment, before they vanish again into the darkness: *points of light*. And, to rescue also Ronald Reagan's image (which, e.g., graces a Masonic poster I have:) We have at least the idea of a radiant city on a hill (Rabelais' Theleme, e.g.). \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Millennium (Y2k) greeting! (from Brad McCormick)
As that day approaches which, apart from computer technology, would be just another day like any other except to some persons who attribute magical properties to numbers, I, like many others, have my millennium (Y2k) greeting to share with you: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/Y2kGreeting.html Best wishes for the new millennium! And may the computer technology which brought us the "Y2k" bug make up for the trouble it has caused us, by facilitating us all to celebrate felicitously together that new year which, in computer terminology (where numbers are often "base 2", and a "k" is consequently: 1,024...) shall more properly be called "Y2k": 2,048! -- N.b.: If you, like myself, think the Times Square "Time Ball" that drops at midnight of New Year's Eve is just kitsch, I learned from the U.S. Naval Observatory website -- http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/ -- that this is not exactly true: It is an *atavism*. In the days before telegraphy, The USNO [and other observatories] would drop a ball from a pole atop the observatory building at NOON each day, so that anyone who could see the observatory building could synchronize their clocks. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Microsoft cooperates with Scientology
Brad Hanson wrote: I'm a lurker but I thought I'd throw my $0.02 worth in here. While I'm a manager by trade I have an interest in alternative belief systems and the organisational culture of cults and fringe sects. From my studies, I would argue that Scientology is nothing more than a business which has been very effectively handled, and which has developed a finely honed defence mechanism using the legal system. Their capacity to infiltrate both the minds of their prospects and institutions is also considerable. [snip] I'm confused: Do Scientology and EST (Werner Erhard(sp?)) have anything to do with each other? Thanks for any clarification \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Fw: WTO alert heads up from White House
Michael Gurstein wrote: - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, December 18, 1999 9:28 AM Subject: WTO alert heads up from White House THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release December 17, 1999 US - EU SUMMIT STATEMENT ON THE WTO The United States and the European Union consider the multilateral trading system one of world's principal bulwarks of peace, sustainable development, and economic growth; and a primary engine for rising living standards and broad-based prosperity in the future. As we approach the new century, we must ensure that the trading system retains its dynamism and ability to respond to changing needs of an increasingly diverse membership. [snip] I once came across a critique of Adam Smith's notion of "the invisible hand", as it relates to *global trade*. I can't vouch for it (but I do provide the source citations), because I haven't studied Smith. But I would be interested to hear from knowledgeable persons, and everyone may find it interesting. I've "preserved" what I read as the first item (dated: 12Jul97) on the following web page: http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/qtarchive1.html Have the free marketeers and globetraders even deceived us about the very nature of their own patriarch's concept of "the invisible hand"? "Yours in discourse" \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Not all new is bad news. Instance:
New York Times Book Review, Sunday, 19 Dec 99, p. 14. Review of Gertrude Himmelfarb's _One Nation Two Cultures_. Title of review: "The Moral Minority". The author of this review is identified as "Richard A. Posner... Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit". Posner describes Himmelfarb as a "social conservative", and writes (e.g.): "The distribution of condoms in schools may be a sensible policy, though Himmelfarb disagrees. She wants to make premarital sex dangerous in order to discourage it, and denial of condoms will do that, increasing both the pregnancy risk and the disease risk of sex She is onto something: the more dangerous sex is, the less of it there will be. But, as she neglects to add, a higher fraction of the reduced number of sexual encounters will result in an unwanted pregnancy or the spreading of sexually transmitted disease, so that the total number of such misfortunes may be higher. She does not explain why she thinks safe sex is more harmful than smoking, a vice she does not want to repress" Who says the government is all bad? (I also liked Air Force Col. Jack Boyd, who died in 1997) But I can hear the rejoinder now: "Oh? Of course! *Everybody* knows Posner is a *liberal*." [Implication: He is ipso facto unfit to be a judge.] \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: The Johnny Holiday/John A. Taube Technocracy post
, in
Alexis de Tocqueville's monumental Democracy in America. In a word, two
distinct thought-worlds were rubbing against each other in
nineteenth-century America.
There seems to have been a "tradition" in 19th Century America which
was non-tradition*al* -- Emerson, Whitman, Channing, et al. I can
vouch for it being quite possible to "grow up" in America in
the 1950s and to have no idea such a "tradition" ever existed --
I even must have gone past Harry Stack Sullivan's Towson, Maryland
home many times as a teenager, and never even have heard his
name
With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-worlds disappears.
Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous
Huxley outlined in Brave New World.
Jacques Ellul is *one* good source here. Just about anything he wrote:
_The Technological Society_, _The Technological System_,
_The Technological Bluff_ (in chronological order
of publication)
[snip]
It
makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by
redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by
history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit
its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian
technocracy." "Technopoly" by Neil Postman 1992 Pp. 46
Alas, the physics image of "singularities" ("black holes") does
seem apposite to our current devolution asymptotically
toward zero in "product cycle times", and -- I would argue --
toward the correlate of total haste resulting in total waste.
For, to quote Heidegger ("the baby and not the bathwater"),
quoting Holderlin:
The mindful god abhors untimely growth.
End
Peace and goodwill
Ed Goertzen,
Oshawa,
L1G 2S2,
"Yours in discourse"
\brad mccormick
--
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
---
![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: population resolution, Aspen Colorado
Victor Milne wrote: I don't think this resolution is at all hypocritical. It is generally the well-to-do, well-educated class that is most aware of ecological concerns. By the way, the fact that the US population is growing so rapidly compared to other developed countries is probably because there is a large number of poor people there, although statistics can mask their presence with the high per capita income in the USA. Generally, rsing standards of living are paralleled by a falling birth rate. I recently heard a program on National Public Radio, where an analyst from the Inst. for Strategic Studies (London) explained why he thought the Russians are trying to avoid casualties among their troops in the Chechnya action, whereas Russia has a long history of little concern for casualties among its troops (remember the cliche: WWII was won with American technology and Russian bodies?). The analyst explained that, in past, Russian families had many sons. Now often they only have one son, and, he said, that makes people think differently. The moral of the story is that the value of each individual is inversely proportional to the number of individuals. Rising standards of living give persons higher hopes for their individual lives, as well as causing them to value each person's life more. This should help us understand the meaning of actions that aim (e.g.,) to restrict access to contraception and safe, affordable abortion. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: [Brad] Re: The two essential features of the capitalistsystem
Ed Goertzen wrote: X-Envelope-From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Envelope-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1999 20:00:13 -0500 From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ed Goertzen wrote: [snip] Brad wrote I know this is "utopian", but one of the main problems with capitalism is the existence of *workers*. If the renting of persons was outlawed like the selling of them has been, then we could have a market economy of *peers*, in which every person was an independent or cooperative producer. [snip] Edward said: The whole point about motivation in a capitalist society was "reward or gain for effort." When the "new labour demanding" capitalists found that no one would work for them, there followed the "enclosure laws" depriving labour of a means (rural, agrarian, mixed farming) of existance without wages. deprived of a means of existance labour was swept into urban areas for exploitation by capitalists who hired the lowest bidder. Since that time, the capitalist motivation has changed to "privation for lack of effort." Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but probably a more accurate position would be something like: "privation for lack of effort, and for effort, too", or, less hyperbole: "disconnection of effort from reward" (else "coupon clippers" must really be building up their biceps!). But, seriously, I once heard a manager at one place I work reveal at least *his* ideology: "I want to see asses and elbows." My idea (and probably yours, too?): Work smart, *not* hard. === Hi Brad: I've no problem with your take on what I said. My real objection includes that corporate persons can own other corporate persons. Smacks of slavery to me! [snip] I'm confused (about who's saying what in this email exchange...). But no big deal May I change your point about the multi-level market[ing] (corporation) problem to say: The laws concerning "corporations" are grievously in need of a review that won't likely happen because the corporations are more or less in control of the organs of potential review? (A similar analogy would be an overhaul of the educational system by the teachers and administrators.) I think the only justification for "private property" is *stewardship*: Like the Patek-Philipe watch company ad goes: You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely take care of it for the next generation. (Yes, I *am* aware there are some jobs that need to be done but that don't merit being done well. But I think our society generates a vast surplus of such.) Best wishes! \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: [Brad] Re: The two essential features of the capitalist system
Ed Goertzen wrote: [snip] Brad wrote I know this is "utopian", but one of the main problems with capitalism is the existence of *workers*. If the renting of persons was outlawed like the selling of them has been, then we could have a market economy of *peers*, in which every person was an independent or cooperative producer. [snip] Edward said: The whole point about motivation in a capitalist society was "reward or gain for effort." When the "new labour demanding" capitalists found that no one would work for them, there followed the "enclosure laws" depriving labour of a means (rural, agrarian, mixed farming) of existance without wages. deprived of a means of existance labour was swept into urban areas for exploitation by capitalists who hired the lowest bidder. Since that time, the capitalist motivation has changed to "privation for lack of effort." Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but probably a more accurate position would be something like: "privation for lack of effort, and for effort, too", or, less hyperbole: "disconnection of effort from reward" (else "coupon clippers" must really be building up their biceps!). But, seriously, I once heard a manager at one place I work reveal at least *his* ideology: "I want to see asses and elbows." My idea (and probably yours, too?): Work smart, *not* hard. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: FW: Re Krystallnacht in Seattle(?)
Replying to no particular posting on this thread: Is "Krystallnacht" really an appropriate word to apply to what happened in Seattle? Of course I wasn't there, so maybe it *is* entirely apposite. But my guess, so far, is it isn't. http://remember.org/ "Never again!" \brad mccormick pete wrote: Mike Hollinshead [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I don't think I am a conspiracy theorist, but I know enough about the role of agents provocateurs in history to wonder if the vandals in Seattle were all that people assume them to be. So does that make me paranoid when that was my first thought about it? I guess it's a result of hearing in passing somewhere that almost all `revolutionary' political groups in north america in the sixties were penetrated by agents provocateur in the pay of one or another US govt agency, even the goofball Vancouver Maoist faction. -Pete Vincent -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: torn: Reply to Ed Wieck
Ed Weick wrote: From: "Cordell, Arthur: #ECOM - COMÉ"[EMAIL PROTECTED] It seems that the Czechs in 1968 tried to bring in Socialism with a human face. How about Capitalism with a human face? arthur cordell -- Perhaps that was a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt? \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: The Battle of Seattle
Michael Spencer wrote: Whats the diffrence between Chechnya and Kosovo? How is it that the US can smash one yet is poweerless to act on behalf of the Chechins? Easy one: Greater Serbia doesn't have a stupendous strategic nuclear arsenal. - Mike Greetings! There was an article in the 8Dec99 NYT about Chechnya which I found sufficiently interesting to put up a note about it on my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/etc.html (The second item from the top of the page -- the topmost item is about Chernobyl) The Sorrow and the Pity goes on \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Torn
"Cordell, Arthur: #ECOM - COMÉ" wrote: Cordell responds to Middleton responding to Cordell. [snip] Bringing standards of living down to (choose your country) will not solve issues related to sustainable development. Bringing misery to the 'developed' countries will not bring the desired outcome. [snip] I agree with Arthur. Personally, the best way to get *me* to help others is first for me to have my own needs met. Example: At work, one of the things that gives me the most pleasure is helping others to learn and do their jobs more effectively -- *But* only if I have the time to do this. If helping somebody else means I have to work late to meet some deadline, then I resent the deadline imposers sufficiently that I can hardly help "contain myself" to get their deadline monkey off my back before I do something that gets me fired. And the needy coworker, who, under humane conditions, I would like nothing better than to help, now becomes just another impingement. Arthur Cordell D. Middleton responds to Cordell (below) How do we define higher or lower standards of development? Does upwards harmonization equal access to a consumer society that is inherently unsustainable? Is a simpler life style of lesser quality? Where has Jay Hanson ( http://www.dieoff.com/ ) gotten to? There is little or nothing inherently unsustainable about the U.S./Canadian/ Japanese/French/... standard of *living* -- provided you don't also want to maximize the number of warm squirming bodies on this small planet. Is a simpler life style (esp. stopping at, at most, one child) of lesser quality? [snip] I find it is an interesting paradox to support the move of work, access to income and development of markets to less developed countries such as those in Central and South America and at the same time see the loss of jobs in Canada occur. It is fortunate for some and unfortunate for others. "It is fortunate for some and unfortunate for others." What isn't? A global thermonuclear holocaust would apparently be good for grasses and cockroaches And, as I have read, the 100 years after the Black Death were one of the best times before 1900 to be alive in Europe (due to the labor shortage which drove wages up) -- *if* you were one of the survivors. What's the point here? Our definitions of lifestyle and quality of life needs to be redefined. I agree. Bill Bradley's wife is a "[Hermann] Broch scholar". Imagine a world in which the American first lady wasn't just "schooled" but also cultured. Imagine a world in which Everyman (woman, child) was at least at George Steiner level of human development. Such people do not thrive in straitened material conditions. But, even further *down* Maslow's hierarchy of needs: "Extreme conditions... don't make pleasant people." --Patricia Hampl, NYT Book Review, 26Jan97, p.13 Deborah Middleton MES Faculty of Environmental Studies York University To what standard of living has the author harmonized herself? (Not that I mean to imply this is an ultimate question, for we know that Gandhi chose voluntary simplicity for himself -- *and also* for his unwilling family!) On the other hand, we surely could cut a lot of resource consumption without diminishing our standard of living one iota (a prime example would be to restructure middle-class American life so that the majority of people could walk to work and to all the other places in their daily lives. This would eliminate the need for automobiles, which do not really increase our standard of living but rather are (as the cliche goes): currently "necessary evils". Eliminating commuting would even *improve* our standard of living, by giving persons more hours of liveable life each day. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: FW Viviane Forrester -- L'horreur Economique (fwd)
Timework Web wrote: The _reason_ for this is that the small number of those who run the world economy are _themselves_ superfluous and the only way to conceal that is to make it appear that workers are superfluous. Now! Now! Capitalists never have seriously proposed that workers are superfluous. Capitalists love workers! They even have "human resource" departments and "time and motion study" engineers to optimize their employment. Capitalists have only required that there always be *some* superfluous workers (Marx's: "industrial reserve army") to help keep down the wages of the rest. I know the "labor theory of value" is totally discredited (by what???), but, pray tell, where else would capitalists get profits from if not from the extraction of surplus value from a labor force to which they blocked unmediated access to the means of production in order to compel them to work for wages? \brad mccormick VIVIANE FORRESTER For the first time in history, the vast majority of human beings are no longer indispensable to the small number of those who run the world economy. The economy is increasingly wrapped up in pure speculation. The working masses and their cost are becoming superfluous. In other words, there is something worse than actually being exploited - and that is no longer to be even worth exploiting! Tom Walker TimeWork Web http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/worksite.htm -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: WILL A SOCIAL CLAUSE IN TRADE AGREEMENTS ADVANCE INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY?
Ed Weick wrote: WILL A SOCIAL CLAUSE IN TRADE AGREEMENTS ADVANCE INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY? By David Bacon The flaw in the social democratic argument is that its assumption and purpose is wrong. Society exists to serve the social needs of people, not the productivity needs of capital. Those two needs are in basic conflict - a conflict of class interest. But surely these things can't be separated. Since our productivity downturn in the mid-1970s, unemployment has risen, real wages have risen only very slowly, if at all, and poverty and homelessness have become part of everyday life. My point is that increasing product belongs to society as a whole, not only to capital, and is shared by society by legislatively or contractually established rules. Isn't the problem that, when a society plans itself (I choose those words pointedly to emphasize my ever increasing conviction that "free markets" are a form of social planning -- just, paradoxically, not a form that is very empathic to most human beings' needs and aspirations...) -- isn't the problem that, when a society plans itself in terms of the metric of the productivity needs of capital (which I presume means "return on investment"), then the society locks itself into a predicament in which, in truth, all values must be subordinated to the logic of capital accumulation, because the only way any social value can be realized is as a *byproduct* of profits. No profits, no nuthin. Isn't this the problem? \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Timocracy, Democracy etc. (was torn: Response for Brad)
Christoph Reuss wrote: Ed Goertzen quoted Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia (which keyword?): "...If the mass of the population governed and they were virtuous, it was called a timocracy. (The Greek timios means "worthy.") But if the many were not virtuous, it was called a democracy. The Greeks generally had a very low opinion of democracy, equating it with mob rule". Democracy as it is practiced today should rather be called "Mediacracy" (oops, almost said "Mediocracy"..) -- the rule of the media: Even in a 'direct' democracy, the voters' decisions are based on information they receive from the media, so in effect, the media are ruling by 'biasing'(*) this information. And who 'owns' the large media...? (--Oligarchy) [snip] Yes, this gets back to Freud in the best sense: Making the unconscious conscious, so that we can assume more *real* control over the course of our lives rather than imagining that just because we are "free to choose", that we are really free (self-accountable, etc.). To repeat myself, Edward Hall's _The Silent Language_ and Resnais' film "Mon Oncle d'Amerique" are both excellent here. The carrot beats the stick every time. Repression always causes more problems than selective-permission. Prudes may enjoy the results of repression. But a gung-ho people all busting their butts to win the various *competitions* in society get more gratitifications makes for a higher rate of growth of the GNP -- for, while in any competition some individuals win and some individuals lose, the competitive apparatus's strength is increased by the efforts of all (presuming, of course, that the people pursue "*free market* competition", not "*wild west* market competition"!). \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: FW Seattle police violence video
Mary Bedard wrote: After hearing from my family member who lives in the Puget Sound area, I would encourage restraint in jumping to conclusions about the violence in Seattle around the WTO meetings. [snip] He later added the following comments: Approximately 600 people were ultimately arrested. The "cowards" all in black stated they were Anarchists. Well, there are Anarchists and anarchists, like there are communists and Communists [esp. Stalinist flunkies and "fellow travelers"]. It should be noted that, according to Hannah Arendt's exegesis in _The Human Condition_, the classical Greek polis was a form of an-archy, because, in the polis, there was no structured government of some citizens by others, but rather all the citizens collegially [an-archically] shaped a life in common. Also there is Marx's lovely vision of a "communistic" future, in which "the administration of things will replace the government of men" (an-archy, i.e., lack of hierarchical "government", again). \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Fw: NYT on the Future (and the liberal professoriat)
Brian McAndrews wrote: [snip] Progress Without People By: Russell Mokhiber January 4, 1999 MIT Professor Noam Chomsky makes the point that if you serve power, power rewards you with respectability. If you work to undermine power, whether by political analysis or moral critique, you are "reviled, imprisoned, driven into the desert." "It's as close to a historical truism as you can find," Chomsky says. Let's test Chomsky's theory of power and respectability with the case of [snip] ...Noam Chomsky. Now let us deconstruct famous men! \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: torn
Andrew Straw wrote: I must admit that I am often torn between supporting those who want freer trade and those who are interested in protecting workers in core countries like the US. [snip] Make more people owners. Active owners. Both in core AND in peripheral countries. Real democracy is peer participation in all the important areas of one's life. Representative democracy is an oxymoron, in which the only democracy is the democracy of the representatives (like in Athens: there women and slaves didn't count as part of the polis; here "the people" don't count as part of the WTO: workers, students, welfare recipients, housewives, just about everybody, except persons "x" where "x" is a valid substitution instance in the formula "CxO"). Any other answers? Concerns? I heard a lovely report by one of the pharmaceutical company "free marketeers" on NPR: http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/etc.html#fm He very clearly explained what a "free" market is, in contrast with the chaos of a "wild west" market! Ah, the joys of centralized government planning (aka "free enterprise")! \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Fw: NYT on the Future
Brian McAndrews wrote: The following book review presents another view (and saves me a helluva lot of typing!). Brian McAndrews Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman 1976 [snip] In my opinion, _Computer Power and Human Reason_ remains a challenge to our technistic way of thinking. It is as relevant today as when it was written. The review snipped here doesn't really do the book justice. As far as WTO is concerned, Weisenbaum wrote in the book that: By coming along in the nick of time to process data the way clerks were used to processing it, but when the *quantity* of data exceeded clerical capacity, the computer enabled the existing bureaucratic structures of society to survive when otherwise they would have either collapsed or been transformed. --If by "revolution" one understands a change in the social relations between persons -- the computer has been ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL FORCES FOR SOCIAL REACTION IN THE 20TH CENTURY. His chapter on "incomprehensible programs" and their social impact is highly admonitory. His ending shows the difference between judgment and calculation: I hope that, as the discipline of computer science will mature also, so that, whatever computer scientists do, THEY WILL THINK ABOUT IT, SO THAT THOSE WHO COME AFTER US SHALL NOT WISH WE HAD NOT DONE IT. This is an excellent, and highly readable book, both for lay persons and for techies. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Fw: NYT on the Future
Steve Kurtz wrote: Hi Brad, As usual I find your analysis mostly cogent and challenging. Perhaps you can help me here: When the word "transcendental" is as trendy as "algorithmic" there will be some hope for a future. I'm familiar with the "Transcendentalist" writers including Emerson and Thoreau. What exactly do you mean above? What is to be transcended? From/To? I assume you mean by humans. Anything 'Supernatural' involved? Thank you for the "opening" Emerson would certainly be a good place to start (I'm not so sure about Thoreau...) -- *especially* if one is looking for "home grown American sources" (my quote from St. Paul in my email signature is the text of William Ellery Channing's "Baltimore Sermon" of 1819, defining American Unitarianism -- in this honorable tradition of American "transcendentalism". (I really do not know much about Emerson, et al. so I can't elaborate -- but I have been a member of the Baltimore Unitarian Church, where Channing gave his epochal sermon). In no way was I referring to anything "Supernatural", unless -- and this is a quite valid interpretation -- one interprets human existence (thought, praxis...) as *supernatural*, because it is a[n effectively transforming...] perspective upon nature rather than just a part of nature. Emmanuel Levinas wrote (in _Totality and Infinity_ that any belief which does not ultimately resolve to interpersonal relations is not a higher, but always a more primitive form of religion -- Marx would have spoken of man's self-alienation by projecting his own *being* into the world as *a* B/being separate from himself -- etc.) But I was thinking in particular of Edmund Husserl (following Hegel and Kant). The things in the world are *transcendent*: they are ultimately beyond our control (we did not make them). We are *transcendental*: we are a perspective upon everything -- every "thing" [however understood...] is an object for consciousness, or, if you will, consciousness is [to use Kant's terminology:] *the condition for the possibility of [whatever, incl. "everything"...] being anything*. "Transcendental" is a difficult word. But then our scientists claim not to be put off by challenges Also, I was being a bit cynical. Lots of people (including prestige Univ. comp sci PhDs!) mouth off words like "algorithmic", "the brain is a computer", etc. without really knowing what they are talking about. As Gregory Bateson emphasized: the metaphors we use to think about ourselves shape who/what we will be (thinking that a mountain has thoughts and feelings won't hurt much, since the mountain remains just a lump even if we "anthroporphize" it; but if we think of persons as thing-like, then persons will likely try to act like the things they believe they are, thus making themselves be *less* than they might have been -- so the psychologistic, biologistic, computeristic, etc. fallacies are potentially very damaging). Even the things people say that they don't understand affect what they become. Even though it is nonsense, if people believe they are computers, they will become more computer-like. Even though people might not understand what "transcendental" means, if they think of persons as being individually and socially more like a board of directors of the world, overseeing all things and legislating the shape of their world, they'll probably elaborate much richer lives for themselves, even if they don't understand the underlying theory. Best of all for Everyman to deeply understand transcendental [Husserlean, etc.] philosophy; second best for them to try (e.g., mouthing words like "transcendental" which they don't really understand); bad for them to try to become degrading things they don't understand (mouthing off words like "algorithmic", "neurological", etc.). Does this help any? Again, I recommend Enzo Paci for his deep integration of Husserl and Marx. Since we *are* all childreared, I would also include Donald Winnicott (another dead person...) here Of course there are living persons in academe who are working in a constructive direction, e.g., Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth... And, *very* recently deceased: Cornelius Castoriadis and Hans-Georg Gadamer (you are welcome to add others...) "Yours in [the] discourse [which constitutes our being human -- transcendental --, in contrast to all things that can be talked about...]..." \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Fw: NYT on the Future
"transcendental" is as trendy as "algorithmic" there will be some hope for a future. Persons like this editorial writer who predict a future that is like the past, only more so, are a cliche in our time (or at least McLuhan thought so, and we all know the cliche about "preparing to fight yesterday's war"). He means well, but, especially in our age steered by massive corporation-university conglomerates, good intentions count for even less than they used to. Read Paci. Peace! \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: FW Techno-Eugenics Email List newsletter #3 (fwd)
Christoph Reuss wrote: Brad McCormick wrote: No doubt it is true that genetic engineering -- especially under conditions of late-capitalism, will create many not just problems, but straightforward injury and harm. But I fail to see where the pre- diagnosed/manipulated genes that cause hemophilia, various cancers, cystic fibrosis [what's the point: there are so *many* of them!!!] *enhance* anybody's humanity, except on the "conservative" only-torture-builds- strong-characters-12-ways-and/or-enables-you-to- go-to-heaven-or-at-least-be-certified-by-your- society-of-origin-as-a-hero ideology. Genes *cause* cancer ? Isn't this a fairy-tale of the chemical corporations (who happen to overlap with the genetics-corporations) to distract from the fact that their own chemicals cause cancer ? Their PR pitch that we need GE to fix diseases is about as credible as their PR pitch that we need GE to fix world hunger. B$. Chris Of course you are right that corporations *cause* a lot of cancers, etc. But just because somebody's shooting at me from in front doesn't mean somebody else isn't also shooting at me from behind. Do you really believe that nature doesn't cause any diseases or suffering or death? My point is simply that we have *two* enemies: nature and in-human people. We have only one ally: persons (and maybe some higher animals...) who genuinely and effectively care for us. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: FW Techno-Eugenics Email List newsletter #3 (fwd)
"S. Lerner" wrote: Of possible interest to FWers To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: (Fwd) Techno-Eugenics Email List newsletter #3 Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1999 07:39:05 -0800 Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Loop: 70438 Hi - thought this might be of interest to you. to subscribe send a message to marcy (bottom of newsletter). mike [snip] "We cannot find our humanity in our genes. But because of the increasing progress in genetic diagnostics and manipulation, we will increasingly confront genetic questions and problems that *challenge* our humanity." [snip] No doubt it is true that genetic engineering -- especially under conditions of late-capitalism, will create many not just problems, but straightforward injury and harm. But I fail to see where the pre- diagnosed/manipulated genes that cause hemophilia, various cancers, cystic fibrosis [what's the point: there are so *many* of them!!!] *enhance* anybody's humanity, except on the "conservative" only-torture-builds- strong-characters-12-ways-and/or-enables-you-to- go-to-heaven-or-at-least-be-certified-by-your- society-of-origin-as-a-hero ideology. I think we need to keep always in mind that, as Stephen Jay Gould said: Nature is in love with the *idea* of the individual, *not* with particular individuals. *You* are the indifference -- except insofar as you pass your genes on to the next round of indifferences (and Nature doesn't even care about that, really, since it is not intentional being and so doesn't care, *period*). Only persons (and perhaps higher animals, ETs, etc.) can *care* about anything, although, of course, much human activity it hurtful to people (the kind of care a stalker has for his victim, e.g., is still *care* of *a* sort...). Perhaps one day we will be able to find humanity in our genes: when children are born who will discover that all the impediments to their possibility for fullest elaboration of their potential have been engineered out of their genome by not just affectively, but also *effectively* loving parents. We cannot find humanity in our genes because we did not create them Etc. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: The 'Privatisation of Knowledge' agenda
(N.b.: I think my email may be screwed up due to (1) problems with STS mailing list, (2) Me changing from Netscape 3 to Netscape 4 email in prep for Y2K on my computer, (3) ditto #2 on my wife's computer. Sorry.) Ed Goertzen wrote: [snip] A couple things to keep in mind. Knowledge is that which can be disproven. If this is aimed at me (BMcC) -- which I am not sure is the case --, I would ask for your notion of "proof". For myself, the *empiricist* notion of proof is itself something grossly in need of inquiry (e.g.). Information is moulding the receptical so that anything poured into it (read propaganda) takes on the shape of the receptical. In-form-ation. The thought comes to my mind: "Facts" are little information-warfare bullets. I like the idea -- what better camouflage for *values* than to call them "facts"! Entertainment is "to capture the imagination". Also known as enslaving the mind. I rather think what in our "Society of the Spectacle" (de Bord) is called "entertainment" does indeed capture the imagination -- and snuff out the prisoner as best it can (Maybe we agree here?) Enjoy the weekend! I always try to -- including downloading Netscape 4.7 for my wife's computer because I received an ominous message the last time I tried to purchase something online with Netscape 3.04 -- something about security running out when Y2K arrives. (I'd always had it on my own computer, along with Internet Explorer, Opera, HotJava, SeaMonkey, etc. and so forth -- I just *liked* Netscape 3.04) - - - - - - Verily! Y1K was nothing -- except that superstitious people *fantasized* it was something (to the Roman Catholic Church's credit, the Church told the people that millennial anticipations for Y1K were nonsense). But, this time, some 20+ years after Joseph Weizenbaum wrote about "incomprehensible computer programs", etc. in his appositely titled book: _Computer Power and Human Understanding: From judgment to calculation_, we have technologically created real millennial dangers. Many things are strange, but strangest of all is man... [the strangest thing of all about whom is that the only thing he doesn't find at all strange is *himself*] (--paraphrase from Heidegger's analysis of Sophocles's "Ode to Man" in Antigone, in his _Introduction to Metaphysics_) I am once again reminded of the computer science PhDs from prestige universities whose imaginative horizon is bounded by the latest episode of StarTrek, and to whom the dictum applies: Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not understanding. And: UNDERSTANDING IS NOT WISDOM. Is it any wonder postmodernists have rejected the idea of "progress"? Ed G. Peace and goodwill [snip] \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: FW: nettime my design me [-- each of us does do this...]
Harv Nelson wrote: Hi, Here in the Madison, Wisconsin area, there has been a big push toward "No Smoking" in restaurants, much improving the atmosphere (and the health of those of us who take our meals there)... Much the same could be accomplish with regard to caloric intake by simply reducing the size of the plates used in restaurants ... making them 3/4-inch in diameter smaller. Then, you could acheive the same "perceived" value ... "Big meal", "Full plate", etc. with less food. Less food on the plate means less calories to walk/jog/sit off. [snip] The perceived amount of food "required" for each meal is dictated more by the size of the plates than by metabolic needs. Sorry, but I had something else in mind: *Gourmet* vegetarian meals, heavy on garlic, olive oil, etc. becoming the *norm*, by there being moderately priced such eateries in every neighborhood (oops... sorry, I forgot that, at least in The United States of Levittown there aren't many neighborhoods...) and workplace and school commisary Preferably with a glass of better-than vin ordinare red wine I think we *are* to a large extent what we eat, and workers who return to work from a Big Mac are more likely to produce Big Mac products and tolerate Big Mac working conditions than if their lunch was an example of a higher form of life (yes, the value judgment is intended: I don't think Coca-cola and Richebourg, or the "taste" for them are created equal) \brad mccormick Harv Nelson (just a lurker ... and casual terrorist ;-) stuff snipped so that my ISP would send this Something that "galls me" to no end: [snip] Our society is obsessed with perfect bodies, AND EVERYWHERE I GO, WHEN I TRY TO "JUST SAY NO" TO FATTENING FOOD WHICH IS PROMISCUOUSLY STUFFED UNDER MY NOSE, PEOPLE ACT LIKE I WAS BEING AT BEST RUDE AND A "PARTY POOPER", IF NOT CHARACTER DISORDERED, etc. If our society wants perfect bodies, why don't we start by mobilizing all restaurants and food stores to push *only* healthful foods, and to make buying a Cocal-Cola at least as shady a deal as buying "coke"? -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Polotical satire onL The future of work in America
For all those of you who may have liked my political satire about the Clintons moving to Chappaqua, here is another satire (only *one* page this time!), about what may happen if the Republicans wil the next United States Presidential election: http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/nasa.html (I *do* wish I knew Hapanese...) \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: COMPUTER WARFARE
Johnny Holiday/John A. Taube wrote: In the San Francisco Chronicle, November 8, 1999 COMPUTER WARFARE By Bradley Graham of the Washington Post WASHINGTON - During last spring's conflict with Yugoslavia, the Pentagon considered hacking into Serbian computer networks to disrupt military operations and basic civilian services. But it refrained from doing so, according to senior defense officials, because of uncertainties and limitations surrounding the emerging field of cyber warfare. "We went through the drill of figuring out how we would do some of these cyber things if we were to do them," said a senior military officer. "But we never went ahead with any. [snip] You'd trust [dis]information warriors to tell the truth? Ipse dixit On the other hand, everything is an index of something. The question is *what* is it an index of? My feeling is the best way to act (insofar as we are astute enough to do it...) is in such a way that the truth values of situational variables do not affect the outcome First of all, we need to examine the *questions* being asked -- not just go off trying to answer them. Yours in Cartesian/Husserlian "bracketing" of experience (Every illusion is, eo ipso, a reality) (Did you read in the NYT recently about some of the United States' information warfare activities in Vietnam? http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/VirtualReality.html etc.) \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
A possibly useful Internet resource: Engineering Ethics Online Help-Line
Yesterday, I ran across something that may be of use to some of us sometime (hopefully not, of course...). The Online Engineering Ethics website (Ethics Center for Engineering and Science) has long had a lot of valuable material, like the stories of the engineer who tried to prevent the Challenger disaster, and the engineer who, *after* he built the Citicorp building, realized it had the potential to collapse in high wind (the latter's story is more felicitous than the former's) http://onlineethics.org/ They have a new service: An Online Help-Line for engineers (I presume that would include people like myself who, even though I've never had an engineering course in school, am employed as a "software engineer"...). http://www.ONLINEETHICS.ORG/helpline/ I feel this is an important issue for science and technology, the study thereof, and both the present and future of work "Yours in discourse" \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: A possibly useful Internet resource: Engineering Ethics Online Help-Line
Please excuse, but in my earlier post, I left off part of what I meant to write: The online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science now has an online helpline for engineers *facing ethical problems in their work*: http://www.ONLINEETHICS.ORG/helpline/ I feel this is an important issue for science and technology, the study thereof, and both the present and future of work Hopefully this emendation helps make my original message make sense. (We learn by doing, and we learn from others -- and, as the following image tells, quality and production are not necessarily incompatible http://www.packardclub.org/graphics/servltr2.gif "Yours in discourse" \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Sun. 7 Nov NYT article on American vs Eurpoean capitalisms
For those who have not yet seen it, there is an
interesting article (front page) in the Sunday 7 Nov 99
New York Times about a brother and sister who
were born in East Germany, but the sister came to America and
the brother remained in Germany. The article compares
their attitudes and lives, in America vs Germany,
and the old East Germany vs the new united Germany.
One quote all the free marketeers will like. The sister
describes "communism's effect on motivation:
nobody wants to herd the state's sheep
".
Now this brings to my mind several thoughts: (1) Garrett Hardin's
classic article which we have talked about here, "The
Tragedy of the Commons".
(2) The hypothesis that herding sheep may be an
intrinsically unappealing human activity (???), and
(3) I bet you could get graduate students in
animal science / veterinary school / etc. to herd
those sheep [or at least their State University
department's sheep...] as part of the "dues" they pay
to get their union cards (errh -- PhDs).
(4) If we conceptualize herding sheep as "the moral equivalent of war",
then we can get them herded by applying the very
American method of conscription ("Selective Service"...)
\brad mccormick
--
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
---
![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: no subject (and Everyman...)
ved", they're "obvious" -- see Edward Hall's _The Silent Language_...) -- being paid well to promulgate self-deceptions, surely is powerful validation of the truth and social value of what one's doing After I had went through this with my 9 year old, she sat quietly for awhile and finally said, "I understand what you mean Dad and it sounds really good. How come people don't pay you to talk about this? To which I could only reply - they don't want to hear. No -- you haven't figured out how to become a paid lecturer. (I'm not being facetious here: Persons get paid to lecture just about any point of view, including socially responsible and even "radical" perspectives. Paolo Freire, e.g., makes out pretty good -- at least well enough that the (Swiss?) tax auditors got interested in him, if I remember correctly) Respectfully, Thomas Lunde -- "Yours in discourse" \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: FW A US Futurework website (fwd)
Cordell, Arthur: DPP wrote: Just getting around to this site. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery so I guess we should be happy that the US govt with all its resources has adopted futurework as the title for its web site dealing with work in the new economy. arthur cordell -- From: S. Lerner To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: FW A US Futurework website (fwd) Date: Monday, September 20, 1999 6:15AM Check this one out... Futurework - Trends and Challenges for Work in the 21st Century_ http://www.dol.gov/dol/asp/public/futurework/report.htm Published by the US Department of Labor (DOL), this report explores the social impact of the new economy and the role of the "twenty-first century work-place" in America. [snip] I just gave this site a brief glance, but here's my hypothesis about it: It's another part of the downsizing of expectation for the American people. My guess is that the fine report which Eliot Richardson did for HEW in the Nixon Administtation: _Work in America_ (MIT Press) is far superior to this. How many know the Richardson report? Raise your hands! I don't think I see many. The Richardson Report, as one of its main themes, had the issue of making people's work: *MEANINGFUL*. Maybe this report should be titled (borrowing a phrase from Hannah Arendt's _The Hunam Condition_): The future of *animal laborans* in America. Certainly I doubt it has anything to do with what Nietzsche's Zarathustra said: Happiness? What need have I for happiness? I have my *work*. Another installment in the interminable story of "The Sorrow and The Pity" Show me I'm wrong \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: 87 YEAR-OLD PERSON REFLECTS ON MODERN TIMES
Christoph Reuss wrote: Brad McCormick couldn't resist either: "Free markets" are oxymorons! The only way to have a "free market" is to have a strong police force to curtail the muggers' freedom to participate in the freedom of the market! Naah... A strong police force would mean a strong state == the last thing that Free Marketeers would want! No, in the Ultimate Free Market, security is privatized too: A Free Market of private security services for the rich, and a Free Market of muggers for/of the poor. "Survival of the Safest"... The Invisible LongFinger will take care of it! Chris Yes, I like your improvement. Of course the police should be "outsourced" and not a government function. I think capitalism is really still a wishy-washy thing. We need to *really* get behind the principle of the market, and *monetarize* *EVERYTHING*: People could be surgically modified to have a meter where their mouth and nose is, so that if they don't put money in the meter then they don't get air. Similarly, children should be paid to go to school (since the purpose of schooling is to train workers). All this would not have been feasible in past, but new technologies enable us to put flow meters on more minutely differentiated processes, and new computer power enables ut to "keep books" on it all. Of course the project of universal monetarization can never be completed, because, by the familiar "diagonalization" argument of mathematics, it is always possible to define a function which is not measured by anything But, as Husserl said: mankind's destiny is to undertake *infinite tasks* (although this is not one of the tasks he had in mind) \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: God save us from .pdf files!
Ray E. Harrell wrote: Why? You seem to have a lot to say. In fact reading more in the form of some extended writing or a graphic or two seems reasonable. Junk mail should be junked and I do. I never open an attachment from someone that I do not know. I don't like bugs. But the limitations of my lists often reduce serious discussions to sound bites. I just returned from the Eddie Adams Workshop for photographers in the Catskills. [snip] So I would say make more and better attachments! [snip] In many cases, the would-be attachment(s) can be loaded onto a website, and the email need only contain the URL. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: 87 YEAR-OLD PERSON REFLECTS ON MODERN TIMES
Christoph Reuss wrote:
To paraphrase Rosa Luxemburg: Freedom is always the freedom of the muggers.
Couldn't resist...
Chris
Well, then, I can's resist either:
"Free markets" are oxymorons! The only way to have a
"free market" is to have a strong police force to
curtail the muggers' freedom to participate in the
freedom of the market!
Free markets are social clubs ("plutocracies") in which
the owners of the means of production not only have
fun together, but also (and this is part of the fun,
besides playing golf and tennis and having tax deductible
lunches, etc) they determine the life conditions
of everybody elsee in the society.
A pox on all prudes and all other genres of "mind f---ers"!
\brad mccormick
--
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
---
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Re: 35 hour week (Matching jobs to persons...)
Victor Milne wrote: [snip] Another problem: there may sometimes be a job for one individual in a certain geographic area but none for his/her spouse who also needs a job. I know a really penny-wise-and-pound-foolish instance of this. I once recommended for a job at one of the world's largest and richest corporations, the person who, of all I have ever known, I believe to be the most productive for his employer (whichever that may be). There was no question in my mind that this person would make contributions to the corporation which would far exceed any compensation he received. The super-big-super-rich corporation was lukwarm about this person, but, in the end, did offer him a position. But there was a problem: The work site was located inconvenient to public transportation, and the person I recommnded is legally blind (even though he sees through things few others even recognize as issues...). Of course the company never thought of providing the man with car service (he wasn't being hired at "that level"). The man's requirement to take the job was that his wife be offered *some* position at the same work site, so she could take him to work and back. No way. Well, the super-big-super-rich corporation lost on this one. But since it is a corporation, "it" doesn't really gain of lose anything. Only people do. And the future which the man I recommended for the job would likely have actualized for himself, that corporation, and our society -- which required him to work in this kind of setting -- never materialized. He survived (but hasn't flourished). The corporation survived (but didn't flourish). Our society survives using the computer software which failed to benfit from the contributions he would have made. One may speculate that those responsible for this waste are not among those who believe in the importance of remembering the past so that we do not repeat it. Or, at least, not: *their own past* \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: (Was Re: Cure for the cancer of capitalism (Korten)) - Is dealing with the U-Word !
john courtneidge wrote: Dear Friends, all, I snip then comment -- From: Bob Olsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Cure for the cancer of capitalism (Korten) Date: Mon, Oct 4, 1999, 11:27 pm Over the nearly 600 years since the onset of the Commercial Revolution, we have as a species learned a great deal about the making of money and we have created powerful institutions and technologies dedicated to its accumulation. But in our quest for money, we forgot how to live. ** David Korten's contributions are excellent, and we can help his analysis forward. It is not clear that each generation opts to go on a "quest for money." Rather, each finds itself born into an economic system bequeathed by its parents (and one which they, largely also, had 'laid upon them.') I see capitalism as a systems fault. The fault is, firstly, philosophical: € the belief that anything (Marx' 'means of production - land, money, knowledge found in productive facilities) *can* be owned. [ This is, palpably, is non-sense.] Secondly, that those owned resources can be: € used for personal benefit (sic) [ Rather than for the commonweal (and within a care-full stewardship of the planet.) ] These thoughts, historically, have developed into the challenge to usury, a debate which has been effectively stifled in very recent times. € Thus many (most) books don't (yet?) include 'The U-Word' in their indeces. So, I invite folk to check books (even dictionaries and encyclopeadias) for the u-word, and even notice the amount of weasling that goes on, in many that do have it, around the true meaning of this word. Agreed! In today's increasingly de-materialized world, where significations (symbols) tend to be promulgated in ever less "substantial" material substrates, it sems to me *even more crucial than ever before* to seize the linguistic high ground! Who controls the terms of discourse (what questions gt asked; how "things" get phrased, etc.) has a great advantage in the age of logorrhea! Just like we must reclaim such phrases as "right to life" (Right to life, d-mned sure! Right to life for *the living* -- and, if you've got any energy left over after that, you ch tackle the problem of raising the dead!) -- just like we need to reclaim that phrase from those who would make women the hostages of their pre-20th century medical science mediated bodily processes, we need to tackle the discourse of human praxis, which, often enough these days, goes unde rthe rubric of "economics". Yes, let's talk about usury. What rate of interest, under what conditions of the borrower's life-constraints, would *not* be usurious? Since money is dead stuff, perhaps the accrual of interest to it is a superstitious displacement of alienated [unreflected, or else malignly manipulative...] thought. "Usury" Let's hear it for: us[ur]ers -- and not just frail human bodies that all too quickly suffer and die, but for those super-persons, the all-too-real legal fictions: *Corporations* -- such as the banks that charge 18% + interest on credit cards! \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: 87 YEAR-OLD PERSON REFLECTS ON MODERN TIMES
Johnny Holiday/John A. Taube wrote: --- Name: 1HOPPE.pdf Part 1.2 Type: Acrobat (application/pdf) Encoding: base64 I finally managed to save the .pdf file to disk and read it with the "Acrobat reader". The story part was really "enjoyable", and the commentary interesting. But I would urge people not to use that wilfully perverse Adobe Acrobat (more like a Dingbat!) .pdf format! Documents produced with it are very difficult to read (at least unless you have a 21 inch monitor running at 1600 X 1200 pixel resolution or better (I don't) Plain ascii text is at least readable by Lynx (the TTY compatible web browser...) or just about anything else. HTML can be visually appealing. And if you really want to do a "class act", do your original in SGML/XML, and convert it to HTML for the Internet by running it through something like Omnimark, and supply an XSL stylesheet (for XML) so people with Internet Explorer 5 can read the original directly God save us from .pdf files! \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: 35 hour week
Hal wrote: [snip] As Henry George said in his typically cogent fashion: "Why are people looking for jobs? Why aren't jobs looking for people?" We should answer that, rather than chase after unworkable palliatives such as job-sharing. Harry There must be some basic physics model for this: If jobs chase after people, people eventually get harder to get, so the jobs eventually chase less; then the people have a harder time getting jobs, so *they* chase the jobs harder... (iterate ad infinitum...) I believe there is a general rule of "the world" that all things generally tend toward an equilibrium condition. There is nothing "hopeful" in this observation, however, for the equilibrium state toward which we may be tending at present, with hyper-population, hyper-profit seeking, hyper-pollution, etc., may be a planet which comes to a stabile state as (To quote an old New Yorker article about the consequences of global nuclear war:) a kingdom of grasses and cockroaches. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Constitutional Differences? In practice or by intention ? (Was Re: Germaine Greer on N.Y. and Ottawa)
john courtneidge wrote: Dear Friends I snip, then comment below. -- From: Melanie Milanich [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Germaine Greer on N.Y. and Ottawa Date: Wed, Sep 29, 1999, 2:02 pm Melanie Milanich wrote: The Globe and Mail, Saturday Sept. 25, 1999, p. D2 Dreary as Ottawa was, it was in the end a better place than New York by Germaine Greer snip Though I love New York, I disapprove of it. Dreary as Ottawa was, it was in the end a better place than New York. Canadians believe that happiness is living in a just society; they will not sing the Yankee song that capitalism is happiness, capitalism is freedom. Canadians have a lively sense of decency and human dignity. Though no Canadian can afford freshly squeezed orange juice, every Canddian can have juice made from concentrate. Thae lack of luxury is meant to coincide with the absence of misery. It doesn't work altogether, but the idea is worth defending. ** It's flattering that Germaine Greer sees more dignity and social justice in Canadian society..but along comes the new right and the Harris government rushing blindly to push us into the same thing --- I worked in Ottawa for two years and love it to pieces. One ?significant? comparison between the US and Canada lies inthe Constitutions: * The US focus on "Life, liberty and the pusuit of happiness." As compared to: * The Canadian focus on "Peace, order and good government." The former is the personal agenda, the second relates to our social needs (I've an essay about this, but i know that I speak and post too much already.) [snip] I would, once again, urge everyone to get thee to thy friendly local reference librarian, and ask him/her to get thee for a copy of Szczepanski, J. (1981). Individuality and society. Impact of science on society, 31(4), 461-466. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Greer's pertinent piece
Cordell, Arthur: DPP wrote: -- From: Ed Weick (commenting on Challen) WHY WORK ( like all good work - unfinished ) Real work is mental or physical effort benefiting at once ourselves, others, and the delicate inter-dependence of the planet. [snip] If such is "real work", then I say even *real* work is something unfit for persons. Leisure is the basis of culture (Josef Pieper, et al.). I would argue that only that activity befits human beings which is not in any way *effort*, but rather is "flow state" (viz. Abraham Maslow et al.) experience in which one is productive without effort *and* also is a witness to one's being productive without effort Humanity (in a normative as opposed to taxonomic sense...) is -- to the best I, at least, have learned -- (to borrow a notion from Robert Musil, George Leonard, my late friend H.F. Broch de Rothermann and others): rational ecstasy \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
The Sorrow and The Pity (yet again...)
Quote from review of Susan Faludi's _Stiffed: The betrayal of the American man_, New York Times, 28Sep99, p. E1,E8: "...the World War II generation bequeathed to its baby boomer sons its own definitions and requisites for manhood: the promise of a frontier to conquer, the promise of 'a clear and evil enemy to be crushed,' the promise 'of an institution of brotherhood in which anonymous members could share a greater institutional' glory and the 'promise of a family to provide for and protect.' [/] Unfortunately for the sons, Ms. Faludi goes on, the rules of the game had changed by the time they came of age. Space, which was supposed to be the new frontier, proved 'a place not much worth conquering.' Vietnam provided no clear-cut mission, no moral payoff. And the institutions that were supposed to provide 'masculine honor and pride' in exchange for loyalty all too often turned out to be corporations willing to sacrifice their employees to downsizing." I personally most like the phrase about Space being a frontier not much worth conquering, which is such a good rebuttal to the vapid fascination with StarTrek and Sci Fi of many of the PhD computer scientists I worked with at one time, although, of course, that's the least important issue in this wide-ranging summing up of contemporary American middle class life. But then, again, maybe there *is* a connection: If those comp sci PhDs had been more interested in social institutions which would provide loyalty... instead of empty Space, maybe they would have contributed shaping the contemporary world into something better than corporations willing to sacrifice their employees to downsizing. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: (Humor) Kansas State Board bans teaching of Economics
Christoph Reuss wrote: [In reply to Steve's 28-Aug-1999 forward on the Evolution ban ;-)] Kansas State Board of Education bans teaching of economics: "There's no proof of an invisible hand." The Kansas State Board of Education voted to ban economics from the curriculum of its public schools citing a "profound lack of scientific evidence" that Adam Smith's invisible hand of economics exists. [snip] ( http://www.bobsfridge.com/august.html ) I hypothesize this is a spoof. But, in all seriousness, I wish it was true. I'd gladly trade kids not being taught evolution in exchange for them not being taught survival-of-the-economically-fittest (economic Darwinism). If G-d created the world ca. 5,500 years ago, that wouldn't hurt anybody. Capitalism has victims in the ~ 10**9 range. Real evolution is not biological but in persons' growth in self-understanding as being self-understanding (and mutually self-determining) beings. I have recently come across a beautiful (albeit "difficult") little book on this subject by one of the truly humanistic great philosophers of this century, Hans-Georg Gadamer: _Hegel's Dialectic_ (Yale, 1976). Yours in [to quote Gadamer from a different text:] "the conversation that we are" \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
24/7
From Edupage:
ON WEB, NEWSPAPERS NEVER SLEEP
As online competition increases, newspapers are beginning to
deliver news 24 hours a day rather than only once. To meet the
demand for more timely news, many newspapers are asking print
reporters to do more work and to cope with multiple deadlines.
[snip]
Furthermore,
news staff believe the extra writing may detract from reporting
time, and some experts are concerned that the ability to publish
immediately on the Internet will lead to journalistic
carelessness. (Washington Post 09/07/99)
I know this is about as obvious as anything can be,
but that doesn't seem to mean it's being attended to:
The increasingly pervasive 24/7 (all day, every day,
without a break...) nature of more and more human
activity (aka: "business") seems to me to imply that
increasingly strong measures need to be taken to
protect human bodies and psychies. A person cannot
and should not be expected to work 24/7. If the
"work" needs to be done on a 24/7 basis, then there
need to be rigorous procedures and structures in
place to limit individuals' working time, e.g.,
by "manning" operations with 3 shifts (actually,
at least 4 -- to take care of weekends). If the
work is not important enough to pay that many
people to do it, then it should not be done. If the
response is that "if we don't do it, people in
cheaper labor markets will", then that indicates
the anti-personnel mine-set of "free trade".
Somehow, technology has to get back to being
a "labor saving" dynamic, which it previously was
touted to be. If "progress" doesn't result in *more*
leisure ("Leisure is the basis of culture" -- Josef
Pieper; and Aristotle probably said it was the aim of
human life...) -- if "progress" doesn't result in more
leisure, then it's just a non-illegalized dangerous,
addictive substance.
\brad mccormick
--
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
---
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Re: 24/7
Christoph Reuss wrote: Brad McCormick forwarded some experts are concerned that the ability to publish immediately on the Internet will lead to journalistic carelessness. (Washington Post 09/07/99) OTOH, the old fixed deadlines can *also* (or even more so?) lead to journalistic carelessness: I remember a case a few years ago where a journalist at a local daily newspaper HAD TO finish an article late in the evening -- the printers were waiting --, and he didn't have available all the facts he needed to complete the story. Time was late, so he had to "GUESS" a fact in the story. His bad luck was that he guessed *wrong*, and after the flawed story was printed, he got SUED by the person this "fact" was about ! The journalist then got fined for printing the wrong "fact", to the great amusement of the competition newspaper... [snip] I never meant to imply that technological progress *created* all the world's ills. I did mean to argue that if "progress" does not result in *progress* then (what did Hamlet say?) something is rotten in Denmark (no, not Denmark, which is relatively socially progressive, I believe, but the United States of America). Of course "deadlines" preceded the "information age". The word "Charette" is not post-modern. The question (and I admit it is an empirical issue) is whether leisure is increasing or decreasing, and, conversely, whether the Charette is going the way of the horse-and-buggy or becoming more ubiquitous even if most of those engaged in it don't know the word. When it comes to working overtime, there is something I say to those to whom I have to kow-tow (for I am not "independent"). I tell them when I have reached the point where I am making more mistakes than progress with the task. If they want to fire me at that point, I really don't know what else I could have done. But I do know that a good night's sleep (and, yes, a few hours of waking time-off-task) often work wonders for getting more work done the next morning. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: work/fish
Michael Spencer wrote: Most of us have seen the bumper sticker that says, "I'd rather be fishing." I saw an interesting variation this week with pleasing ambiguity: WORK is for people who can't FISH I'd give a purty to know whether the driver of that car was an idle-hours sports fisherman or a commercial fisherman (of which there are many hereabouts.) All the commercial fishermen (and women) know theirs is dangerous and exhausting labor. But all of them (or at least all of them who work the inshore boats with a crew of from one to six) value their independence, their proprietorhsip or partner relation with their skipper, their part in decesison making. It's a real defeat, a failure, if they have to take a mere job, no matter the wages. An almost vanished perspective. - Mike Reminds me of the movie _The Man of Aran_ (did I get that right?). But I also have a friend who is a computer genius, and who it noted for such assertions as: "Time for a work break!" "Everything you do in life is the same thing -- you always learn more about who you are." He sees cooking a gourmet meal as just as much work as writing a computer program, and writing a computer program as just as much "living" as taking a vacation. This guy's manager never could appreciate when I explained to him (the manager) that he should carefully study what this employee had to teach him, for (I continued): "You are unlikely ever again to meet such a person in your life". \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: sustainable transport
tabeles wrote: The exchange between Brad McCormick and George Schrader on the issue of transport takes on new perspective when informed by Reg Morrison's recent book, The Spirit in the Gene. Morrison argues that any effort other than radical change, such as Brad suggests, when quoting DeBord, will lead to a collapse of society. To, once again, advert to the lesson of The Great Depression, it seems that the old society can at least sometimes find ways to revitalize itself for another generation. The computer has accomplished this in the past 30 years, by enabling us to continue to use the old bureaucratic forms of social organization after the quantity of data to be processed exceeded what could be handled by human clerks. To repeat myself yet again: Joseph Weizenbaum argued that the digidal computer has been one of the most powerful forces for social reaction in the 20th century (and certainly computer programmers are not a new generation of anarcho-syndicalists!). Conservation and efficiency such as suggested by Schrader can do little but push out the time of the collapse. The question is *how far*? Roosevelt pushed it out 50 years. The computer *just might* do it again Like with ballistics: If you raise the muzzle velocity far enough, the shell will go into orbit instead of falling back to earth. [snip] While Morrison's thesis uses Dawkin's concept of the selfish gene as the foundation, he overlooks the potential saving grace in Dawkin's Meme, metonyically represented by DeBord. I have not read these authors. But if a "meme" is a [metaphorical] piece of semiotic DNA, then I think memes are, at best, as ambivalent as DNA/RNA. I will only refer, once again, to the female-genital-mutilation "meme" which has infected many African and other "cultures" (petri dishes for memes?). If memes are the building blocks of *ethnicities* (not just "primitive", but also our own!), then we need to develop cures and preventives against them, just like the AIDS virus. (Again, Edward Hall's book _The Silent Language_ and Alain Resnais' film "Mon Oncle d'Amerique" are two accessible sources here). In other words, the work being done by such dedicated research organizations as the Rocky Mountain Institute and Lovin's and Hawkin's forthcoming, Natural Capitalism, do provide paths which will tread more lightly on the environment, but fail, in the end, because they do not create the transformational shift in a positive manner, thus resulting in Morrison's collapse. I don't think we really know how much "palliatives" can help, nor do we know whether enough "gradual change" just might induce a "change of phase" (transformational shift). We do know, however, that radical attempts to change society can result in "bloodbaths". Does that mean we should not attempt radical changes when we think they might "work"? No. But I do think we need to think about the well-being of the anonymous masses of humanity (those who, in the French historian Michelet's words: "end up even more dead than the rest" -- because their names are not remembered by history), for whom history is an external impingement (read Elsa Morante's novel _History: A Novel_). Conservation, while critical, if it doesn't lead to a transformation, is a manifestation of a looping behaviour which gives the sense and not the actuality of a change. thoughts? More questions? \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: [Fwd: ILO Study: Americans Work Longest Hours]
S. Lerner wrote: [snip] Study: Americans Work Longest Hours By Geir Moulson Associated Press Writer Sunday, September 5, 1999; 8:01 p.m. EDT GENEVA (AP) -- Americans work the longest hours in the industrialized world, overtaking the Japanese, according to a United Nations study released Monday. But the U.S. lead in productivity is being whittled away by their European and Japanese rivals, who are working less while Americans stay on the job more, said the report by the International Labor Organization. Hard-working Americans run a risk of burning out, said the ILO's Lawrence Jeff Johnson, co-author of the 600-page ``Key Indicators of the Labor Market'' report. The report was based on figures covering the years 1980-1997. [snip] ``As an American myself, working long hours is part of the culture,'' Johnson said. ``Whether it's correct, whether it's value-added, in the long haul, who knows.'' ``People do burn out,'' he said. ``If they keep working this hard for these long hours there is burnout and there is diminishing returns.'' [snip] Working *hard* versus working *smart*. Poor management planning can send vast armies of workers to go out and bust their -sses in endeavors concerning the outcome of which the *best* we can hope for is that the project will fail, so that we and those who come after us will not inherit its consequences. Sometimes the best expectable outcome is *waste*. And "working smart" does not primarily mean being technically clever. It means, first of all, analyzing the encompassing social horizon and doing what will optimize the inclusive conditions of all the people's form of life. (E.g., not designing more fuel efficient cars, but designing a social world in which people can walk or use the phone to get to the places they need to get to.) I cannot believe that the current fetishism of "decreased cycle times" can be anything other than a euphemism for accelerating haste accelerating accelerating waste. An ever- accelerating vicious circle which will not have the felicitous outcome of the nursery rhyme tigers turning into butter! As I wrote recently, bosses like to see "-sses and elbows", although there is a story (I hope it's true) about when the Industrial Efficiency experts were contracted by Ford Motor Company, and they found this guy with his feet propped up on his desk looking into space. They asked management about this, and were told to leave that man alone, because he had had an idea which saved the company millions of dollars, while sitting in just that position. The exception and the rule (ref.: Bertold Brecht). \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Labor Day NYT Op-Ed
The New York Times Op-Ed page for Labor Day has a couple fine articles. In one, Thomas Geoghegan, described as a labor lawyer, says that the best hope for over-worked American white-collar workers is strong labor unions, which, by demanding reasonable vacation time for their members, may give "professionals" an opportunity to claim a bit of rest for themselves. He makes many good points, including that part of America's vaunted "productivity" is due to people working 70 hour weeks but recording them as 40. I quote: "I know that there are people who claim that working exhausting hours is part of the culture -- a way to achieve self-actualization. Only why does it feel like self-vaporization I long to be like my father, the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. That man was supposed to symbolize conformity. But to me he's a rebel -- because The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit went home precisely at 5. While consultants and academics, who are often paid by corporate America, can find many people who proudly declare that... hard work is the American way, I can't help thinking that such surveys are like cruising the bars at 2 A.M. to find people who will say there's no drinking problem in America Spiritual life? In case anyone cares, prayer is like any other job -- you have to set aside time and show up for it. Perhaps in a future decade, a foreign government will intervene and impose some sort of detox program But more likely, our only hope is that the people 'below,' in the unions, will save the professinals at the top" On this Labor Day, let us remember that there are alternatives, even if they are beyond *our* reach: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/culture.html \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Worldwatch report on Unemployment
Ray E. Harrell wrote: Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote: (snip) I find it remarkable how quickly that same society retreats to the recourse of the mindlessness of the "market" just because the problems of coordinating social production with individual freedom are difficult. Sounds like the balancing of authority with the concept of freedom that is the hallmark of the "sweet sixteen year olds."How often the cultural insecurity and outright shallow thought is blamed on the terrible adolescent (society).I'm posting an article from today's NYTimes. From the NYTimes September 5, 1999 Gap Between Rich and Poor Found Substantially Wider By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON The gap between rich and poor has grown into an economic chasm so wide that this year the richest 2.7 million Americans, the top 1 percent, will have as many after-tax dollars to spend as the bottom 100 million. [snip] I'm not clear whether Ray is agreeing or disagreeing with my original posting, but as long as he's brought up this Sunday's New York Times, I have a further comment: The Magazine section has a couple articles relevant to this issue. One is about teen-age actors. I didn't read it, but I'm pretty sure it's pretty offensive to anyone except those I like to call "free-fall free-marketeers". The other article is one of those things which "drives me up the wall": "The Singer Solution to World Poverty". Of course I think that we should contribute liberally to charities (including those working on *controlling* the population, not just feeding it -- a point conspicuously missing from the article; non-existent mouths do not need charity). But I think there is also the issue of killing the goose that has the potential to lay golden eggs. Singer himself, the article says, contributes 20% of his income to charity. I doubt that puts a very severe crimp in the lifestyle of a Princeton Professor -- especially one whose personal agenda is to promote such giving (which "giving" thus enriches Singer in a more than merely economic way). But, as the article timidly suggests, 20% surely is not enough: Singer (and everybody else) should, according to his logic, give *at least* until they have no more than the least of the beneficiaries of their largess (of course, the problem then arises whether they will cease to be able to contribute so much, since they won't keep enough of their income to be able to continue to go to work). It seems to me that what is needed is a decency *and* an honesty which is not on anyone's [acknowledged] agenda: To do good for others *and* for oneself. I see little reason to contribute to a world which doesn't contribute anything for me (I've had quite enough experience of such!) -- although I will grant that power is often a far more valuable asset than mere money, and that such "poverty" as the Pope or Mother Theresa have may, literally, be "beyond price". I, for one, would certainly be glad to exchange my computer programmer's job with Singer for his University Professorship, and, I bet, even after giving 20% of my new annual income to charity, I'd still keep a good deal more than my current gross income. More importantly, my new job would pay me to pursue my interests, rather than my having to earn the money elsewise to pay for those interests myself (having to waste one's life to earn a living; employment frustrating rather than facilitating productivity; etc.). \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: sustainable transport
George Schrader wrote:
Steve
Over the long haul with out great change in resource consumption its
doubtful humanity will do any thing but collapse under its own resource
consumption weight.
[snip]
Two issues seem most urgent. 1 leveling population expansion and 2 leveling
resource consumption to sustainable levels.
[snip]
There is however a glimmer of hope. One specifically that I have been
clinging to.
Thankfully reaching a sustainable society does not solely rest with in, our
all getting together and helping each other to this point of equality. Sadly
mankind has not evolved consciously to act in that behalf yet. Fortunately
we do have other means at our disposal ones that will not require such
benevolence.
There is much that we can do as a society. A greater utilization of
technological advances can make a huge difference in resource consumption.
The efficiencies we are capable of are far greater than what we have
utilized.
Introducing recent technologies into transport alone suggest the ability to
make wondrous strides toward leveling resource consumption and developing
the necessary well-being.
[snip]
It still seems to me that the challenge is to *eliminate the
need for transport*. Work at home. Live near where you work.
Individuals can often effect the first item by themselves, if
their employers will only permit it. The second requires
zoning and other manipulations at a higher level of societal
management.
Also, there is a second reason for *eliminating* transportation
as much as possible, which is economic but not merely
economic: The more *people* travel, the more *diseases*
travel. If we stayed home, communicable diseases would
be minimized, thus resulting in further economic savings
and a better quality of life. Since, today, most
travel doesn't really take you anywhere anyway
(Debord's _The Society of the Spectacle_, among many
other sources, makes this point), transportation
is mostly just waste. Even "space travel" -- the
"ultimate frontier" of the imaginatively challenged --
doesn't take you nearly as far away from your
local social milieu as a genuinely transformative
book or other work of art ("peregrinatio in
stabilitate" -- the monastic notion that to undertake
an adventure you do not need to leave your home).
\brad mccormick
--
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
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Re: Worldwatch report on Unemployment
Steve Kurtz wrote: Greetings, I've presented my (similiar) views on this linkage for the three years I've been on-line, and received little response. With the limits of waste sinks and non-renewable resources, growth /or development (even with better technology and social policy) are proving incapable of providing solutions. Or so it seems to me. Steve [Note: This brief is the second in a series of reports on global population issues leading up to the Day of 6 Billion, October 12, 1999. Additional information and resources can be found at http://www.worldwatch.org/alerts/pop2.html] UNEMPLOYMENT CLIMBING AS WORLD APPROACHES 6 BILLION Brian Halweil and Lester R. Brown As global population rushes toward 6 billion-and beyond-national governments face the daunting task of creating nearly 30 million additional jobs each year for the next fifty years. Although Americans will celebrate Labor Day on Monday, September 6 with unemployment at a near record low, unemployment in the rest of the world is at an all-time high. [snip] I hope it is a cliche, but a very lamentable one, to say that *employment* is a highly unreliable mechanism for facilitating human productive activity on a societal scale. This, it seems to me, was the lesson of "The Great Depression". (And if anyone wishes to respond to this that "Communism" was far worse, that seems to me like saying that having lyme disease isn't having ALS. For a society which prizes "intelligence" so much -- even if only the "artificial" kind --, I find it remarkable how quickly that same society retreats to the recourse of the mindlessness of the "market" just because the problems of coordinating social production with individual freedom are difficult. Such a defeatist attitude would never have split the atom or brought men back from landing on the moon, etc.) To make a reference to Hannah Arendt's excellent book: _The Human Condition_: Happy animal laborans day! \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: US slipping back to Middle Ages?
Steve Kurtz wrote:
Free weekly mailings from American Physical Society:
http://www.aps.org
Steve
Original Message
From: "What's New" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: What's New for Aug 27, 1999
WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 27 Aug 99 Washington, DC
[snip]
Chandra images are posted at http://www.chandra.nasa.gov.
How about: http://chandra.nasa.gov/# ?
\brad mccormick ("God is in the details")
--
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
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Re: US slipping back to Middle Ages?
Steve Kurtz wrote: Free weekly mailings from American Physical Society: http://www.aps.org Steve Original Message From: "What's New" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: What's New for Aug 27, 1999 WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 27 Aug 99 Washington, DC 1. DEVOLUTION: [snip] Is the US slipping back into the Middle Ages? I doubt it. The Middle Ages were a time of -- often albeit slow and non-uniform -- growth. Is the US slipping into a new Dark Age? Now *that's* a good question, or at least so it seems to me. A "Dark Age" is a time of devolution, where things fall apart and people learn how to *survive* rather than *live* or, a fortiori, *flourish*. Two possibilities: (1) H.G. Wells' fine sci-fi film "The Shape of Things to Come", in which a small saving-remnant of aviators scour the earth and bring all the little Richard Daley's (father, not son) who figured out how to survive, back to reason. (2) Luc Besson's exquisite film "Le Derniere Combat", in which things do not work out so well for the last scientist. More likely: Learn a lesson from Vittorio de Sica's admonitory film "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis". It's a foolish rat that stays on a sinking ship. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Times article on Russia: Maimed by embracing the market
M.Blackmore wrote: Forwarded: Don't know if anyone's interested but yesterday's Times contained this rather negative and depressing report on the situation in Russia and elsewhere. -- jP -- My comment: hey, big surprise, what? [snip] I agree. I think we could give the Russians one more piece of help that wouldn't cost us a cent. Tell them New Hampshire's motto (as something they might adopt): Live Free or Die I'm sure that's the last little piece of help they need from us to complete their ascent from commective Communist HELL to uindividual Free Market PARADISE. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: nettime Science Proves Money Makes You Stupid *8-/ (fwd)
Michael Gurstein wrote: A lot of systems use motivators other than financial ones--religious faith, ideological zeal, family/love relations, communal/ethnic/tribal ties (and not surprising pace the 10,000 year history of the creative arts and starving artists--creato-endorphins). There are those who argue (cf. Sorokin following Kropotkin following Tolstoy) that contemporary "material/capitalist" incentive structures are in fact, the overwhelming historical exception. [snip] I am not interested in what is usual (Heinz Kohut beautifully pointed out that dental carries were usual until the advent of flouridated water...), but in what is *good*. If financial motivations were the highest humanity has so far conceived of, then so what if only *we* are so guided? But, as Hannah Arendt pointed out in her aptly named book: _The Human Condition_, for the classical Greeks -- those few thousands of persons who created *ideas* as such, including the idea of The Good, etc. -- , the objective in life was not to make a lot of money, but to not have to do with *banausic* pursuits (everything concerned with what Marx called "the reproduction of individual and species life"). The classical Greeks would have deemed Investment Bankers and such to be mere tradespersons -- unworthy, due to their absorption in busy-ness, to be citizens of the City (polis). Read Josef Pieper's: _Leisure, the basis of culture_ if you can find a copy of this aptly out-of-print little book! \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: FW: [Co-opNet] Co-operative work, Linux and the future of computing (fwd)
Ray E. Harrell wrote: Hi Brad, Just a couple of points. 1. Like Christians, I basically judged systems not by their theories but the people of practice them as well as how much they were left alone in the world at vital times for their development. i.e. you can't stomp the corn when it is a bud and blame for tasting bad. I'd annotate that statement with references to Lloyd de Mause's _The History of Childhood: The Untold Story of Child Abuse_ (Peter Bedrick Books, 1988), Alice Miller's books: _For Your Own Good_, _Thou Shalt Not Be Aware_, and _The Drama of the Gifted Child_, Frederick Leboyer's _Birth Without Violence_, etc. Not to mention more literal forms of "stomping buds", i.e., ritual genital mutilation of girls and boys 2. The people at IBM years ago referred to thier system as corporate socialism. I suspect that is what this current system is since someone IS paying the bill somewhere. Do you have a reference for the IBM dictum? -- I'd much appreciate having it. I'll bet nobody at IBM *TODAY* is saying that! We've "progressed" in the past 20 or 30 years, far beyond such things, into the brave new world of ever shorter product development cycle times, longer work weeks, decreased employment security, greater income disparities, etc. Why, to borrow a turn of phrase from Nietzsche's Zarathustra's Prolog: We've invented "twenty-four seven". REH Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote: Ray E. Harrell wrote: Just a question. Who pays the salaries for all of these folks doing free things and giving up their ideas for nothing? [snip] someone always pays the bill. People do have to eat. [snip] I'd also like to note that the lead article in yesterday's New York Times magazine was something I've been saying for a long time: "The West" didn't do what needed to be done to help the Russian people after we liberated them from Capital-C-Communism. --But then I've been reprimanded more than once for thinking that surgeons should have any concern about their patients beyond when the patient is discharged from the hospital (the context here is wondering what is the point of bringing people from poor countries here and operating on them if they're just going to go back to poverty). \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: FW: [Co-opNet] Co-operative work, Linux and the future of computing (fwd)
Ray E. Harrell wrote: Just a question. Who pays the salaries for all of these folks doing free things and giving up their ideas for nothing? [snip] someone always pays the bill. People do have to eat. Very good question. Sounds to me like a good research project for some sociologists! Also the first post that ascribed this to communism seems strange since that involves committees. It seems more accurately to be a Democratic process, not unlike the cultures of many pre-Columbian societies here. [snip] Two points here: (1) Ray's definition of "communism" seems to be oriented to what came out of the Bolschevik revolution and *called* itself "Communist" while *being* more fascist, etc. If we're willing to give up the word "communism" to the Right-wingers, then how about: "anarcho-syndicalism"? (2) Whatever one wishes to call a *material* democratic process in which the workers are also the policy makers, I wonder how such a process applies to a bunch of *computer programmers*, who, in my experience, have a vision of human social interaction limited by *science fiction*, which, for the most part, seems to be very existentially "thin" and to have an ideal of a rebirth of feudalism in flying fortresses (Star Wars, etc.). My guess is that many of the "free software" programmers have little notion of any social process, and that their vision of a "free software community" is merely an epiphenomenon of whatever *real* social system provides them with computers and pizza (yes, even programmers have to eat...). The present Global Capitalism probably suits many of them just fine (Joseph Weizenbaum argued that the computer has been one of the most powerful forces for social reaction in the 20th Century). I would like to see technical workers develop a richer sense of what it means to be human (including what it means to do computer programming), and to thematize the political nature of what they do (whatever it is). For, as Sartre said: To not choose is to choose [for what will happen if persons don't do anything to change it]. And, to quote from imperfect memory, Joseph Weizenbaum: I hope that, as the discipline of computer science matures, its practitioners will mature also, and that, whatever thsy do, they will think about it, so that those who come after them will not wish they had not done it. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Y2K: Secular time and salvation time....
I guess it's obvious, but I hadn't thought of it
until now: Y2K will be (as far as I can see...) the
first, and, so far, only *year* that has ever
had *real* consequences (i.e., real *existence*
as a material factor in human life).
Divisions of time: days, months, years...,
generally have no substantive origin in nature.
*We* draw a line here and not there (etc.), and, on
New Year's Eve lots of people get excited
about "the stroke of midnight" -- but, as
far as reality is concerned, it's all a
continuum.
But Y2K will mark a real event in time,
irrespective of "anthropomorphizing". Some
computers will fail *because* it's that moment.
There will be a [however
small and partial] "discontinuity", *not* a
[universally] "continuous function".
The notion that the alienated product of
labor comes back to confront the alienated
workers (us) as a "second Nature" here seems
exemplified with a vengeance. Until now,
real "epochs" of time were reserved to
eschatology. Unwittingly, "we" have now
done one.
I don't yet see what to "make of" this. And
I am not here thinking about anything that
depends on Y2K having really terrible
consequences (which may or may not
happen). I am thinking about the
"structure" of our temporeity ("Being and
Time", etc.)
Any thoughts?
\brad mccormick
--
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
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Re: Canadian Indian Claims
Robert Rosenstein wrote:
If there is no such thing as obligations to past generations, then the
idea of History is nullified.
Perhaps there are one than one "idea of History". Santayana's
warning that "Those who do not remember the past are
condemned to relive it" is in no way vitiated by giving
up the idea of *blood feud*.
It seems to me that the only ontological status of
"past generations" is their present-day living
*memory* in us ("history", like "the universe, etc. is not
a material (is there a German word: "Stoffish"?) "reality", but
rather an existential modality of human
Being-in-the-world ("Dasein"). Funerals, for instance, clearly
are productions of, by and for the benefit of the survivors,
not the funerees(sp?) -- who either have passed
into another life or "into" no-longer-being-at-all.
An exception I can think of to this is the Roman
Catholic Church's notion of *indulgences*.
In no way am I condoning The Holocaust (or even
my own middle-class Anmerican 1940s-50s social
milieu of origin). But it does not seem to me that
the *children* of Nazis (to pick one example)
should be punished for their parents' crimes, or
that the residents of southern Fairfield County, Connecticut, USA
should be dispossessed because of injustices which
were done by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs
(etc.) to the Pequots.
If an action such as a genocide has no
force after a given number of years, then as long as one can get away
with it for the requisite period, the action has no value except to let
others know what can be gotten away with. Consequently, except for a
nuclear winter in which the slate is wiped clean, there is no justice.
This is, in my opinion, *factually* the case, whether we
like it or not. As the old cliche goes: No one will ever
know the identities of the best money counterfeiters
(etc.). Escape from justice by death happens all too
frequently (or, perhaps, not frequently enough -- since
society is saved a lot of expenses when criminals
die as part of their criminal acts, or shortly thereafter).
Nietzsche wrote (and I think he here if not always he has
merit):
That man be delivered from the spirit of revenge is for me
A bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after ong storms.
Or, as Jesus said:
Leave the dead to bury the dead. (except in urban settings,
where corpses are a public health problem)
\brad mccormick
--
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
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Re: Canadian Indian Claims
Permit me to insert, in medias res, a concern I have: Ed Weick wrote: Too bad they can't assess liability for lost families, intellectual capital, land use ideas etc. It seems to me that you are using the rules of a divorce without separating. Better you start with the ideas of justice and the rule of law as defined by both groups. The truth is that one group has the power, [snip] How to provide reparations to persons whose lives have been adversely impacted by the exploiters, *without* in turn doing injustice to the persons (such as most of ourselves) who are associated with the exploiting classes but have not themselves done significant exploiting? This is, of course, an old problem (reverse discrimination due to "affirmative action", etc.). But let me put it pointedly: What motivation should a person have to help others when there is nothing in it for the person him or herself? For, if *that kind of life* is good for some, then (applying Kant's universalizing logic) it should be good for all, and, therefore, we should help the exploited -- not to have reparations, but to have more deprivation. Another popular idea I find dubious is providing reparations to the living for the harms done to the dead. Should a [black, indian, etc.] M.D., lawyer, university professor, etc. be paid reparations for the harm done to his or her ancestors, who, being dead, are presumably beyond the ability of earthly things to affect them any more? Etc. These probably are not "popular" thoughts and questions. Of course there are many *exploiters* living among us, who should be brought to justice, and many exploited among us who are in need of reparation. But it seems to me that the objective should be to achieve a "win-win" situation for as many as possible (again, taking into account the need for justice in the cases of those who have used power not for trusteeship but for exploitation). If it is a tragedy for a person to be confined to a wheelchair, it is also a tragedy for a person to have two good legs and not be socially enabled to use them. If it is good for the crippled to be enabled to walk, it is also good for the able-bodied to walk, too. It is popular to rank sufferings, and to dismiss the problems of the relatively well off. But no less a figure than Elie Wiesel said (and I heartily concur): "Don't compare! Don't compare! All suffering is intolerable." -- Elie Wiesel (quoted in TIME, 19Sep94, p.94) \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Marx, Keynes and Ancestors -- Free Trade nurtures Culture
May I for once be openly cynical? Christoph Reuss wrote: On Sat, 24 Jul 1999, Keith Hudson wrote: For better or for worse, we recreate society much as it was before whenever we have passed through technological/economic change. OK, we might well lose picturesque customs and metaphors (such as 7 or 70 different names of snow -- and it's important for scholarly reasons that records are kept of these), but we recreate new ones which are equivalent. [snip] The above notion that "picturesque customs" come and go, and always did so, ignores what's fundamentally new in the current process of globalization: That old local/regional customs are not being replaced by new local/regional customs, but by GLOBAL "customs" -- by a McDonalds/Coca-Cola mono-"culture" that is the same everywhere. What is being lost isn't just "old customs", but the cultural diversity of this planet. [snip] Here is evidence that the above assertion is empirically false: When I was in Japan in the mid 1980s, I was struck by the fact that all the MacDonalds restaurants had an item on their menu which I had never encountered in MacDonalds in America: corn soup. Clearly, the new global economic "order" fosters cultural divesity, not homogenized "monoculture". \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Marx, Keynes and Ancestors
Ed Weick wrote: My point was a different one -- that we shouldn't romanticise the customs of the past. Record them, enjoy them in hindsight, investigate why they arose -- but don't accord them any special sanctity. They were merely decorations that grew around the basic technology of the time. Hi Keith, I don't disagree, though you do say it a little more bluntly than I would. [snip] Pesonal note: *I* like the pointed way Ed put it. Why? Because my personal experience of "customs of the past" has been chronically oppressive: The factical ethnic matrix (a.k.a.: "Land of the free and home of the brave", etc.) into which I was born without any notion that things could be otherwise was for me, in retrospect, at best a kind of internment camp. I have no idea what Ed's reasons for being pointed here are, but my aim is to drive a stake through the thing's core (the word "heart" has wrong connotations here). I don't think this makes my position *wrong*, but I also speculate that, had I grown up in a social milieu which nurtured my spirit, I would cathect these issues far less strongly. Curiously, earlier today, before I read this posting, I revised a little mini-essay that is elevant to this topic: http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/sthoughts.html#reduction "Never again!" \bad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: On being snotty
Richard Mochelle wrote: The day of letting those snotty little welfare cheats take our hard earned tax dollars without pretending to work is over. Ed Weick Don't we loathe the freeriders!! Racehorse breeders, stockmarket jockeys, golf champions, boardroom junkies, etc. a vast army of snotty little welfare cheats (if we read welfare as meaning the immeasurable benefits of global cooperation, technological heritage and ecological providence). Let's not kid ourselves that all moneymakers and taxpayers are 'in truth' working, let alone working 'hard'. [snip] This reminds me of a little vignette from my child-rearing (which, by now, you all surely have tired of hearing me elaborate on how "bad" it was...). One day, when I was in the back seat of our 195x Ford middle-of-the-line model 4 door sedan, driving somewhere, I referred to something as being: "lousy". My parents in the front seat immediately instructed me that I was never to use that word. Over the years, I increasingly came to appreciate that the reason my calling some indifferent external object "lousy" upset them so much was that, "subconsciously", they all too well knew how easy it would be to change the referent of that word from that indifferent external object to their whole form of life: indeed, they may have even intuited that the "indifferent external object" was really a stand-in for *them*, already -- that, like the chicken pecking at the ground, I was calling [whatever indifferent external object] "lousy" BECAUSE I was not free to call them and their whole "world": lousy. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: the invisible hand requires an invisible fist
Christoph Reuss wrote: Concerning the recent topic of war and the economy: In a NYT article of 28-Mar-1999, Thomas Friedman (Madeleine Albright's adviser) bluntly admits that "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." ( http://www.transnational.org/features/democracy.html ) This is quite in contrast to the neoliberal party-line that the infamous "Invisible Hand" of the "Free Market" works _on its own_ because people like free trade so much... BTW, if anyone has the full NYT article handy, I'd be interested in it. Well, this *is* a capitalist society. Go to the New York Times web site, select Archives, and search on "hidden fist". You can purchase a copy of this article: "A Manifesto for the Fast World", online. But the messge is not so new. I believe that a great deal of force was needed to install the factory system in late-medieval England, and, of course, the "Wobblies" (to cite one example) in our own century were controlled by capitalist state organs of force. There has never been a truly free market, for thieves (et al.) are forcibly restrained from competing. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: War, Confucious and the CBD -- Mondrian and Kafka
Ed Weick wrote: And I would guess that in xxx years from now people will look back on the commuters, subway riders and busy busy people and say what? You mean people went into a Kafka/Mondrian environment and parroted the party line just to get paid. No wonder there is so little incentive to break the work/income nexus. arthur -- Was it not always thus? People do not recognize that they are living in a Kafka/Mondrian environment nor are they likely to in future. [snip] May I ask what Mondrian has to do with Kafka? The Kafka-[ab]world is all too much with us (I've spent much of the past year in a couple of the less extreme places where it is flourishing today on earth). But my understanding of Mondrian is that he was a kind of "mystic", and that the "austerity" of his art (not that his last few paintings, e.g., "Broadway Boogie-woogie", are all that austere!) was an expression of hopes and a vision of a good life, not fears and "consumption". I am not an expert on Mondrian (with one or two "a"'s in the last syllable), but I do find his paintings *hopeful* for a world of light (both illumination -- "Lux mentis lux orbis" -- and lightness, e.g., Nietzsche's notion that we need to "overcome the spirit of gravity"). \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Marx, Keynes and Ancestors
(be they Medieval Roman Catholic, 20th Century new-Age, or whatever), but to the event of consciousness taking responsibility for itself in such discourse and actions as we are here trying to elaborate.... \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: FW: Data media (was re: Charles Leadbetter)
pete wrote: "Thomas Lunde" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Just recently, I was reading a posting about all the early computer tapes, discs, hard drives, etc that we are losing for two reasons, one the storage devices are deteriotating and two we are losing the disk drives, operating systems, formats, in which this knowledge was stored. [snip] Each time the data is migrated, the experimenters have to decide what data they feel is worth spending the time to copy, and of course, a lot is discarded. Does this matter? It's hard to say. One could reasonably argue that there is no earthly reason why anyone would ever want to look at old particle physics data tapes again. On the other hand, we still have the log books of experiments from two hundred years ago, and people still like to go back and look at some of the notable ones, those from significant experiments, or famous experimenters. But the people who do this are rarely doing it to check the data, rather they are historians of science or commentators on scientific method. Future counterparts would find very little of value on data tapes. [snip] Certainly astronomy is one science in which this does not apply. I believe contemporary astronomers are still using ancient Babylonian observations to help figure out where the stars are moving. Second, I would like to quote (from defective memory) something Enrico Fermi said ca. 1940, speaking of one cloud chamber photograph from about 1930: He said that had he paid better attention to a certain detail of that picture, he would have made one of his most important discoveries ten years earlier than he did. If the entropy of electronic documents gets bad enough, we may find ourselves losing our history, and becoming in an ironic way like our primary-oral ancestors: With only the present version of a past (bards' tales for them; recent computer files for us -- it is worth noting that the epic poems of primary-oral societies, through various poetic techniques of rhyme, rhythm, etc. implement powerful *Error Detection and Correction* coding -- very much like computer data). \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Humour: IMPORTANT VIRUS ALERT!!!!!!!! (it's ok, it is funny) (fwd)
Eva Durant wrote: A virus called WORK is on the loose... If you receive any sort of work at all, whether via e-mail, internet, or simply handed to you by a colleague... DO NOT OPEN IT! The work virus has been circulating around our building for months and those who have been tempted to open it or even look at it have found that their social life is deleted and the brain ceases to function properly. [snip] I have a friend who is either a computer genius or close to it. He also has a *deep* commitment to doing the work right. He often has difficulty coping with the incompetence of the people around him -- not so much that of the people below him, but the people above him who prevent him from fixing the situation. He would often say (in a somewhat pointed tone of voice:): Time for a work break! He also often observed that, for him, there was no difference between working on a computer program and working on a gourmet meal (enjoying a gourmet meal or enjoying programming). I once told his manager that he (the manager) should be grateful for the opportunity he (the manager) had been given to learn from this person, the likes of whom the manager was unlikely ever again to encounter again in his (the manager's ) life (manager did not respond with pleasure to my attempt to be helpful to him (the manager)). Is this correct Latin: "Laborare orare sit" (*May* one's working and one's most important personal living be one-and-the-same!). \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: FW: Welcome to the Future! (gas prices)
Christoph Reuss wrote: On Wed, 21 Jul 1999, Thomas Lunde wrote: With regret, I cannot find a posting, I'm sure I saved which stated that the real cost of a gallon of gasoline was $15, when all the subsidies, tax breaks and special regulatory exemptions were added into the price of crude oil. The International Center for Technology Assessment has recently released a study entitled "The Real Price of Gasoline." It can be downloaded in PDF format from http://www.icta.org/projects/trans/index.htm Depending on how you crunch the numbers, the real cost of gasoline is between US$5.60 and $15.14 per US gallon (3.785 liters). think back to 1973 and the anger and the gas lineups. Only this time it won't be temporary. In fact, a vehicle without fuel is a pretty clumsy boat anchor and we don't even have horses to make Bennet buggies anymore. [snip] As far as I am concerned there has been no computer revolution, and certainly no Internet revolution, so long as almost everybody has to drive (or take Metro North) a loong distance, wasting lots of energy and lots of precious *life time*) COMMUTING. Question: Why can't we all work from home (except for EMT personnel, etc.)? Answer: Because bosses like to see "asses and elbows". Why not recall some words from Joseph Weizenbaum: The computer, by enabling old bureaucratic forms to live on after the quantity of data to be processed exceeded the handling capacity of clerks, HAS BEEN ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL FORCES FOR SOCIAL REACTION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (_Computer Power and Human Reason..._, W.H. Freeman, 1976). \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: High Tech Temps Aren't Mourning, They are Organizing (fwd)
Michael Gurstein wrote: -- Forwarded message -- Date: Sat, 17 Jul 1999 15:52:41 -0700 From: Michael Givel [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: High Tech Temps Aren't Mourning, They are Organizing Labor Group Wants to Organize Tech Temp Workers It seeks benefits, security for Microsoft `permatemps' Ilana DeBare, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 16, 1999 [snip] They clearly have got an uphill battle. High-tech employees not only are independent minded, but they also often are well paid. Traditional union elections and contracts can't be applied easily to temporary employees, who make up a growing share of the tech workforce. And the entrepreneurial culture of the tech industry means that many workers see stock options rather than union cards as the ticket to financial security. But there are some growing murmurs of discontent within the ranks of tech workers that could create opportunities for unions. Programmers and engineers in their 40s and 50s commonly voice complaints about age discrimination. And as companies rely increasingly on contractors and temporary workers, some high-tech temps are starting to rebel against what they see as second-class status. [snip] Recently, I observed the work situation of a friend who was employed in an IT shop where there were about 15 employees (including the IT Director) and more than 15 contract programmers / software engineers (all working on developing one big application for the company). The sociology of the contract workers (however well *paid* they may have been...) seemed grim: Each Friday (Thursday nite, if they were lucky...) most would go home for the weekend to places possibly a thousand miles away, only to have to go in the other direction the same thousand miles on Sunday nite or Monday morning. Each had a perhaps 3-1/2 foot section of work-shelf, just big enough to hold a computer monitor, a stack of computer books and a can of soda -- oh, yes, and a telephone. Five or six of them would thus be lined up along the wall of a narrow cul-de-sac appendage of the IT department's main work space (no windows, no ventilation -- some of the people had little electric fans...) -- sort of like cattle in a factory-farm lined up in their pens facing a common feeding trough They were working on a project which was to be the hiring company's flagship activity, but about which the company knew almost nothing and wasn't doing anything to acquire the knowledge to take over the project when it would be finished. The consulting company manager said that the company that was contracting them didn't know what it wanted, so a very important thing was to document everything one did (to account for time spent, i.e., paid for by the company) Despite conditions approaching Heraclitean flux (you never had precisely the same group of people working on the project twice), the project was gradually approaching a successful completion almost as if *it* "had a mind of its own" -- due, of course, to the logic of computer programming that bugs have to get fixed. -- We seem to be undergoing an a massive "computer revolution", centered around the the growth of an acceleratingly prolific flowering of diverse forms of techno-drudgery and meaningless but pressured, highly mentally demanding activity involving computers. Here, as so often, "crescit eundo": the more of this stuff the people do, the greater the demand for more of it they produce as one of the consequences of their activity, and the harder it becomes to put a halt to the manic yet depressive process Why shouldn't these people unionize? It's worth a try, before we give up and say, like Heidegger: "Only a god can save us." \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: the broad, middle class?
ation, downsizing and re-engineering. I do appreciate Arthur's point about the middle class and the maintenance of social cohesion, by which I understand something like having faith in society and public institutions, and a willingness to help resolve serious social issues. Will it be possible for people who do not have a career path and must essentially behave selfishly to have such faith? [snip] How can they be made to feel that the state is essentially benevolent and society good? An expanded employment insurance scheme or a guaranteed annual income would likely be a minimum. Yet here we run into our tighter, poorer and more difficult world and the question of affordability. I believe the word "affordance" exists in English and means something like commodiousness, provision to satisfy needs and aspirations, etc. (I'm taking a risk here, since I do not have a good enough dictionary at hand at the moment). I think it is in the sense of affordance that we have a problem of affordability. What the "global economy" (which is really just the latest form of US and other First World economic ordering of the whole earth) seems to me to be buying at enormous cost is a process of decreasing the "slack" in all systems to the point where small mistakes have ever increasing potential for calamitous consequences and ever diminishing chance of being "caught", and where, ultimately, few other than the unemployed will have any time-off-task to be able to sleep (but the latter will be so worried that sleep will come hard to their unemployed hours, and will therefore not constitue any enticement to the sleep-deprived...) A "head hunter" told me bluntly during my own recent two months of unemployment: "You are too rigid. In today's economy, if the boss says "Jump!" you ask: "How high?". My wife works on a project everybody knows will never ship, but on which she and her coworkers must work every night till 11PM and on Saturdays, to keep up the pretense that it will ship and they need to give their all to get it out" Stanley Kubrick's most important film, in my opinion, was "Paths of Glory". [snip] \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Charles Leadbetter
Steve Kurtz wrote: Thomas once again has given us his insightful, sobering commentary on a unidimensional, rather ephemeral perception of the human predicament. It is not realistic to continue discussing the future of work without including the future of the caloric input required for brain activity - a requirement in a knowledge based or any other sort of economy. Water, shelter, fuel, security must be included as well. I think we need also to add the enormous entropy of the obsolescence of knowledge. This is sometimes stated more "positively" as a shortening "half-life" of knowledge, so that by the time an engineer has been out of college 10 years, 50% of what (s)he learned is no longer current (or whatever the exact numbers are in each case). (The especial affront of this is that it is not a consequence of "natural processes" outside human control, but of human symbolizing activity.) I have seen this *with a vengeance* in computer programming. I have found it discouraging to have to keep learning new ways to be able to keep on doing what I was previously able to do quite well with programming knowledge that can no longer be used because the new computers do not recognize it. It reaches the level of absurdity that programs written in the presently "sexiest" (-- perverse locution) programming language, Java, which hardly existed in 1996, had to be signifcantly rewritten by 1998 because one of the most important and pervasive parts of the language (the "event model", i.e., the program's ability to respond to something happening) was incompatibly redesigned. I worked on a big educational website (just a lot of HTML an Javascript -- pretty "simple" stuff, as computer programming goes!), where, every time Netscape came out with a new "maintenance release" of their web browser, it was time for me to find out how it would cause my application to break "this time", so that I'd expect to spend from a few hours to a few days getting back to where I had been before. In general, data processing departments live with the pervasive "confidence" that upgrading anything will break something that nobody could have guessed it would, and which, to fix, may break even more things (Joseph Weizenbaum's notion of "incomprehensible programs", from his now over 20 year old, but by no means outdated book: _Computer Power and Human Reason: From judgment to calculation_, W.H. Freeman, 1976). The switch from "command line" oriented computer programs to "graphical user interface" has come at the price of at least one and maybe two "orders of magnitude" jump in the amount of disconnected detail knowledge (facts that cannot be reduced to guessable specifications of a few easily grasped "models") a programmer has to master. The information is nowhere available in a form that assures: "These are the complete answers, and there are no surprises hiding behind them." -- this is a *big* problem with, e.g., programming for Microsoft's Windows operating systems. Oh yes, then there is the librarians' nightmare of the rapid deterioration of "electronic media", coupled with the fact that even if the media can be preserved, it becomes ever more difficult to find media-readers (tape drives, etc.) that can *retrieve* the information. So much *waste* and (to borrow Nietzsche's phrase:) "the eternal recurrence of the same" (which Buddhists call:) "the wheel of karma" So much contribution to the Gross(sic) National Product If computer programs are among the free-est constructions of the human mind (they aren't much constrained by things like laws of physics...), they certainly are rarely models of *lucidity* (there are exceptions, of course -- Ken Iverson's APL programming language, e.g.; IBM's original MVT/360 operating system was pretty good in this regard...). It's like we got a chance to be G-d and blew it (and, yes, surely "the force of the market" has been a powerful factor, rarely rewarding programmers for quality craftsmanship, but just expecting it as a no cost given, no matter how much deadline pressure the programmers are subjected to...) And why not note the barbaric working hours (both in duration and in deviation from a 9 to 5 bell-shaped curve) to which computer workers are frequently subjected? -- Once when I was in IBM, I overheard two business planners talking as they walked down the hall in front of me. They were not happy. One said to the other: "Fishkill is not bringing in the inventions on schedule." \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Durability as a means of conservation...
Thomas Lunde wrote: Dear Barry: I have been missing your clear voice of reason for a long time. I have always liked your idea of durability [snip] I second that motion! One of the benefits of working on things that endure is the good feelings the activity gives to the worker. I also recall something Peter Drucker wrote: Cleverness carries the day, But wisdom endureth. I also remember the example of the 14th century craftsman, Goivanni de Dondi, who spent *13 years* building a (ca. 35 inch high) astronomical clock (there is a replica of it in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution). Fortunately, there is now a fine web site about this clock: http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hall/3551/copiainglpresastr.htm Also, let me cite the advertising slogan for Patek Philippe watches: You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely take care of it for the next generation. In my opinion, only things which either meet that criterion, or, as "consumables" (e.g., food), *contribute* to the further realization of such things in the world, deserve to exist. As for everything else, I think of some words from Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus (taken out of context): Best of all [for them] never to have been born; Second best [for them] to have seen the light and gone back swiftly whence they came. \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: The End of Work/The End of Jobs
Michael Gurstein wrote: One thing seems to be overlooked in the "end of work" argument--both pro and con. While the evidence is still unclear as to whether there is a net positive or negative impact of technology on the number of jobs, there seems little doubt that technology is having a significant impact on the manner and form of work and in this way on the nature of at least some jobs. I guess I'm not the only one on this list to want to substitute: "technology under current capitalist conditions" for: "technology". How much impact and how many jobs are so impacted isn't, it's true, clear but the old industrial work structures with master/slave authority systems, repetitive and clearly definable/delimitable tasks, continuity of work organization, stability of job content, and so on and so on has for many disappeared and is for very many others disappearing. I won't put an evaluation on it... for many it is an improvement for many others it's a step back but for most it appears inevitable. "Master/slave", yes, but also more genteel paternalistic and perhaps even locally egalitarian conditions such as the relations of IBMers (e.g., seles reps) to "Big Blue" I have a feeling, in response to the "End of Work" argument, that we may only be seeing the end of "jobs" as we have known them and not the end of "work" and in fact, the transformation in the nature of "jobs" may be such as to increase the number of those "employed" while decreasing their security, stability, continuity, and so on. Might the current concoction of techno-capitalism be leading us to ever worse techno-drudgery. Meanwhile, the PhD computer scientists who are building this future often have imaginative horizons limited by the latest episode of Star Trek, and envisage what I have previously describd as: "Techno-feudalism in flying fortresses." If this is the case, then the End of Work argument is not only a bit of a red herring but also a diversion from the task of determining how the new type of "employment" can or should be regulated, and what sort of safety net/transition programs makes sense in the context of rapidly emerging fluid, speedy, contractual, self-defining, skill/knowledge intensive, job structures. I remember a person in IBM -- an older man with a white beard -- who had a calendar on his office wall that had the following slogan at the bottom of each page: Was the Sabbath made for man, or was man made for the Sabbath? Was technology made for man, or was man made for technology? I, for one, am not too hopeful. Mike Gurstein \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: interrelations between economic boom and simple living
Robert Neunteufel wrote: In Europe we hear a lot about the long lasting economic boom and the success in job creation in the USA. On the other hand we hear about the success of bestsellers like Your Money or Your Life or the simple living movement. I'd like to ask the members of this list how they see the interrelations and / or contradictions between the economic boom and the simple living movement. With best wishes from Austria / Europe, Robert Neunteufel Having grown up in a milieu in which I was supposed to be "altruistic" (i.e., to satisfy the ambient adults' selfishness which they called selflessness, by doing things which they liked but which I did not like), I am generally as suspicious of "virtue" as I am of vice. The self-styled "simple living" movement is one of those things of which I am a priori suspicious. I certainly would not deny that there are probably some persons who live under that banner who are genuinely decent (etc.). But as far as the movement as a whole is concerned, I would like to see how well these simple livers would like to live in a world in which there was only their own kind, and no high technology system to covertly help them live out their ideas. I once read that one of the reasons that vegetarians do not suffer from nutritional deficiencies is because of the minute bits of meat: dead insect parts, which they unwittingly eat in their vegetables. As the late architect Louis Kahn beautifully put it: The city is the place of availabilities. It is the place where persons pursue interests and refine their skills beyond the necessities of survival. It is the place where a young boy, as he looks around from the work of one master craftsman to another, may discover something he *wants* to do his whole life. In the "simple life" -- the world of the peasants who lynched Martin Guerre, and whose besotted bodies litter Breughel's paintings (my prejudices are showing, n'est pas?) -- there is no "high culture", no rigorous science (neither the Galilean nor the Husserlean kind)... -- and maybe that's precisely what some of the "simple livers" want [i.e., want to deny *me* and you the opportunity to have]. We know that some of the simple livers believe that of all the species on earth, it is OK for lions to eat gazelles, and for orcas to eat penguins, etc. -- but it is not OK for humans to -- exist. Gandhi is one good exmple here: As a lawyer, he had the freedom to live rich or poor or whatever. He *chose* "voluntary simplicity": and he also chose it for his family, who *did not* like it. Sorry, but this kind of stuff is one of my "pet peeves". \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[SGML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: simple living
. "Cartesianism") and inanimate resouces of planet earth with much and technologically sophisticated care, because our ability to live and, a fortiori, to live well, is dependent on them (e.g., we need trees to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen). But what level of "right to exist" should I grant to a mole on my chest which is bleeding and pieces breaking off of it? (This is not from the NYT, but from my lived childhood -- since I am now 52 years old, obviously a physician successfully killed that bit of life.) [snip] Greetings, Chris Greetings to you, too! P.S.: Is the computer you use to engage in this discourse part of the simple life?-:) \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[XML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Media / Oral Literacy
Thomas Lunde wrote: -- [snip] In my opinion, there has been very little intelligent follow-up by academics, whether mainstream or creative on McLuhan's work. And yet, I believe it is/was the single most creative piece of analysis done in the 20th century. Far outweighing Jung, Freud or any of our other so called pyschological thinkers. As to the philosphers, I find most of their speculations grand science fiction dressed up in dubious logic and fancy vocabulary, often of their own invention. I would beg to differ. McLuhan was surely a kind of genius, but his ideas can be traced backward and forward. In my opinion, his main contribution (and I do agree it is a very important one!) was to popularize it. Alas, we still need many more such "popularizers", for McLuhan's message has not yet -- in my opinion -- sunk into our society. Thomas Kuhn, Norwood Hanson and (in a different disciplinary area) Harold Innis are a few names which come to my mind. Then there is Gregory Bateson. Edmund Husserl's work (and the work of those who have continued to carry it on) is probably the most deeply thought out of all. Freud seems to have been torn between hermeneutics (understanding human experience "from the inside" in terms of its lived meaning as irreducible) and brain-physics (reducing experience to an epiphenomenon of that particular domain of the contents of experience which we call "neurophysiology" -- the logical absurdity of this aspiration should be obvious, but it isn't). [snip] As the following article indicates, perhaps two thousand years of church and academic scholars have completely missed the main message in the Iliad and yet perhaps, if an Albanian or Serb from a rural village had have been asked their opinion, many of them still very oral in their sensorium and culture, an answer that indicated the truth of the following story might have been found much sooner - but then what does a peasant know? Well, that's my rant. Respectfully, Thomas Lunde From: Mark Graffis [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Danny Fagandini [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** Financial Times Weekend Section 20.6.99 page 1 Could the 'Iliad' be more than just a story - a stellar guidebook, in fact? Christian Tyler tracks the ancient heroes across the heavens Generations of scholars and students have pored over Homer's Iliad. They have admired the vigour of its language and relished the descriptions of fighting and smiting. And if this ancient epic has sometimes seemed overpopulated, inconclusive and strangely narrow in its focus, that could always be put down to the rude ignorance of antiquity. But, according to Florence and Kenneth Wood, we have all been missing the point. The Iliad, they say, is not just a story. It is a stellar guidebook, a poetic encryption of ancient geography and an astronomical record. [snip] I think the line of scholarship from Walter Lord thru Walter Ong (et al.) would say that, whether or not the above is true, the Iliad was the Library of Congress of the early Greeks, and if it mapped to the starry constellations, that would be primarily just one more "check" on its faithful transmission by the generations of bards who composed it (in both senses: (1) producing, and (2) constituting the elements of). "Yours in discourse" \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[SGML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Media / Oral Literacy
Thomas Lunde wrote: -- From: Robert Rosenstein [EMAIL PROTECTED] It seems to me that the thrust of all this, if it continues, is away from a society in which everybody is (should be) reading and writing literate to one in which the overwhelming majority will be culturally-content with their daily entertainments (movies, sitcoms, music videos, award shows, specials), and manufactured news bits. In such a situation, there will be a privatization of knowledge, owned by the few and used for the benefit of the few - which is almost the situation, now. Thomas: A couple of thoughts on the above paragraph. Most listening, watching technologies are time specific. But not all. Your can freeze-frame and replay as often as you wish a VCR or audio tape, or, a fortiori, a laser disk. Though you have mentioned several times the attribute of being able to listen while doing something else, I would comment that retention, reflection and musing get lost as the data stream continues uninterruped. The minute you take your attention from the TV, radio or other media, there is no going back to catch what was missed. It is much like riding on a train. As long as you sit at the window looking out, you can see the current scenery, but you can't replay that which has just went past, nor recapture that which happened while you glanced away or left your seat for a minute. The strength of reading as learning information medium is that you can go back and re-read or compare with other information and reflect on the juxtaposition of thought that has been presented. Similarly, with speaking. It is a spontaneous event, unless speaking from something memorized. For most people, speaking is not prethought, it is just a reflex action and the speaker is often surprised or delighted or ashamed of what came out of his mouth as is the listener. Also, speaking limits vocabulary to approx 5000 common words in the language. This may be true in a primary oral society, but literate persons should be able to deploy their larger vocabulary in secondary orality. While writing allows a greater vocabulary and language more specifically used. Writing, focus's the communicator specifically on his message, allows complex themes to be developed, fosters rational thought and specificity rather than the generalizations commonly used when speaking. Yes, but Consider the architect or engineer designing something. Words, whether spoken or written, would be hard pressed to substitute for "mechanical drawing" and/or freehand drawing, etc. (See William Ivins, _Prints and Visual Communication_, MIT Press) A large part of this is dealt with in great depth by Marshal McLuhan and his observations that TV and radio represent a sensory change from visual (reading and writing) to an oral society, which most of prehistory and history up until Guttenburg operated in. Oral societies are often tribal, ruled by emotion and passion, foster different lifestyles and focus on different aspects of reality than a visual society. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that persons in primary oral cultures live in a *different reality* (See, e.g, Julian Jaynes, _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_, Houghton Mifflin). I think it is an open question the extent to which primary oral persons *are* persons in the way educated literate persons -- esp. after Descartes, Kant, etc. -- conceive of ourselves. Speculation: primary oral "people" may have a form of existence somewhere between that of higher apes and us. The ancient Greek notion that the line demarcating the human from the non-human does not run along a species boundary, but rather runs through a single biological species may be worth thinking about. According to McLuhan, media shape the sensorium of individuals and his major theme was that we are creating new media which is reshaping the majority of the populations sensory intake which will have the effect of changing society in ways that are totally different from political philosophy's, economic theories and cultures. One form of "change" is ceasing to be What might the ultimate outcome of the present ever-accelerating speeding-up of everything (etc.) be? Conversely, what if we conceived of ourselves and others more as interpreting perspectives upon the world and less as predefined objects in a pre-given world (which is how a lot of us think a lot of the time)? Just some thoughts \brad mccormick -- Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[SGML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Easing Transition to Cybereconomy
Thomas Lunde wrote: Thomas: snip The only human jobs for the semi- to unskilled will be as a Courier driver delivering parcels or pizza delivry guy/girl and even both of those "jobs" could be automated. It's time to own up that we need a new way to distribute income other than working - the production of goods and services are still there and need consumers to exist [snip] I have not been following this thread closely, but I do wonder whether there is any intrinsic limit to Capitalism's capacity to "make work". For the high IQ people, there is computer programming and advertising (two Susyphean labors!), etc. For the less skilled, there are all the "service" jobs -- waiters and waitresses (and Starbucks crews...), etc. If *none* of the up-scale cook their own food, and none of the service sector people cook their own food either (because they are too busy working...), that's a lot of "service sector" jobs. Then there are the housecleaning services, the services that offer to do *anything* (walk the dog, stand in line for whatever *you* otherwise would have to stand in line for, organize your closets, etc.). The monetarization of the human life world is far from completed. And let's not forget about war, which uses up lots of human and other resources I'm not saying I'm sure capitalism *will* be able to sustain full employment. I'm only speculating that it *might* be able to come up with enough ultimately useless but "economically necessary" activity to be able to maintain a wage-work driven society of scarcity where, otherwise there might be enough for everybody with very little work. \brad mccormick -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[SGML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: short article on 'Smart Growth'
Michael Kreek wrote:
[snip]
Finally, to demonstrate why I can't hop aboard the population
bandwagon immediately here are some questions I would need
answered before I, at least, possibly could:
3a.
To repeat: Is population control "value-free" and, if not (which
I suggest must be the answer), is it open to its "cherished
values" being questioned along with everyone else's? What are
those values?
There simply is no human action or inaction (that covers it all...)
which
is value-free. And probably population control people have
different and even conflicting values: some may want to save the
earth for "other species" (with the impact on human beings being
a secondary consideration); others may wish to save the earth
for *human* wellfare (with other species playing an ancillary role),
etc.
3b.
To repeat: Is population control itself a systematic or holistic
(either side of the disjunction not necessarily meaning the same
thing) approach or does it see itself as "the answer"?
It will certainly create *problems*, i.e., the increased need for
social services in an aging population. These may be problems
we choose to accept as the price for the goods we want from
population control, but they will be problems,
with their costs and impacts, nonetheless.
3c.
Is it not necessary to think of population as applying at both
ends of a human life? That is, should we not set a limit to
longevity of human life as well as a limit to the number of human
lives while we are at it and, if not, why not? (Is this value of
people to desire to live forever not something that should also
be questioned while we are questioning other "cherished values"?)
This is a powerful question, but I would argue that human
existence at least potentially runs counter to many of
the arguments in favor of the grim reaper. Other species
can evolve only by current individuals dying and being
replaced with new ones who evolve *across* individuals, not
*within* particular individuals. Humans,
with their posers of self-reflection
and self-modification, could potentially evolve without limit
("Onward and Upward forever") without needing to replace old
individuals with new ones.
Also, there is the moral/existential/etc. issue of the individual
person's attachment to their life (which, of course, is not an
immutable given -- life can be made so wretched that a
person "wants to die", and Buddhists and others can apparently
become indifferent to the continuation of their individual life
under any circumstances).
[snip]
3e.
Should we not limit the size of each person's "environmental
footprint" which, of course, is related to their "material
wealth" before we attempt to limit births or along with limiting
births? If not, why not?
If scientific/technological advance enables us to do ever
more with ever less, then, *at least in principle*, we could
have high and increasing standard of living for an ever
greater percent of the population, combined with reducing
the impact on the environment.
3f.
There is no more cherished value to us Americans, I suggest, than
our economic system. It is our unspoken state religion. Why is
this system of values (which is contrary, of course, to its much
rumored status as a science, assuming science itself is not a
system of values) not being questioned in the article above when
it is far more pervasive as a "cherished value" than "smart
growth"?
Excellent question: How can "the invisible hand of the marketplace"
which works by principles analogous to hydrostatic equilibrium
be expected to optimize *any* normative value except for
competition itself taken as a value?
3g.
And should all the issues raised by all these questions not be
discussed along with the issue of poplation control before we
judge the merits of population control. And, if not, why not? Or,
have they already been discussed and, if so, where?
As Sartre said: to not act is to act. If we don't try to
control the population, then we are "voting" for increased
population and all ite consequences.
Since increased population seems
to portend many serious problems, doesn't it make sense to
take the "conservative" path while we debate the matter, and
try to bring population growth under control? If it turns out
that unlimited population is really best,
we could always start reproducing
rapidly again. The world's current population growth has almost
all occurred in the past 100 years, so it wouldn't take too
long to get back on track
--
Michael Kreek
VTT
RR 1 Box 593
Walpole NH 03608
603 756 3750
Acting Executive Director
Institute for Vernacular Philosophy
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/5307/lwjtitle.html
603 756 3754
\brad mccormick
--
Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but
Everyman (
