277. Democracy – Comment on a Proposal

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Thor

Obama1This short post adds to a recent dis­cus­sion in The World Post:

Berggruen, Nicholas and Nathan Gardels (8 April 2014) “Post-Party Democ­racy Can Restore the Rule of the Many Over Money”. The World Post, online @ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-gardels/post-party-democracy_b_5108263.html?utm_hp_ref=world

Kudos to the writ­ers for even think­ing about the democ­racy prob­lem. The Amer­i­can ver­sion of shielded plu­toc­racy con­cealed in a pop­ulist sleeve is def­i­nitely no longer a model that imag­i­na­tions like mine (and a few bil­lion oth­ers) out­side of the United States aspire to. The wed­ding cake pro­posal in this arti­cle is already famil­iar in parts. Think of the pro­gres­sion from town gov­ern­ments to national rep­re­sen­ta­tion and you have some inkling of the space for incom­pe­tence and manip­u­la­tion. Con­tinue read­ing →

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276. The Mental God Bot

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Thor

GodMaskAlmost every kind of god seems to be somebody’s favourite. Most of them make an easy tar­get for satire. Explana­tory evi­dence for a gent on a thun­der­cloud seems to be thin in the air after all. Yet a per­fectly rea­son­able account of one kind of god is avail­able from a care­ful obser­va­tion of the human mind. Firstly it is clear enough that con­scious­ness is a mere pin­prick of light illu­mi­nat­ing one frac­tion at a time of the myr­iad com­pu­ta­tions in our brains. Sec­ondly most philoso­phers agree that there is no sin­gle “I” or self. Our lives involve mul­ti­ple roles, and the frag­ment of con­scious­ness which becomes “I” in each of them can be quite dis­tinct. Thirdly, our behav­iours often involve role play­ing. We typ­i­cally have a super­or­di­nate self behind the mask edit­ing what is pre­sented to the world. Finally, given this frag­men­ta­tion of self, it may be a small step to con­struct a super­or­di­nate “bot”, a kind of men­tal agent, to provide a pri­vate inte­gra­tion and ratio­nal­iza­tion for our diverse iden­ti­ties. It might make sense to call this super­or­di­nate agent bot “god”, and make even more sense to iden­tify it with a socially adver­tised supreme being called “God”. That is, the pub­lic God offers a very reas­sur­ing iden­tity and val­i­da­tion for all the pri­vate gods of indi­vid­u­als. The indi­vid­u­als in their pri­vate sub­jec­tive worlds can rein­ter­pret the pub­lic God for pri­vate con­ve­nience with­out fear of rebuke. They may not even be con­scious hyp­ocrites, but from the evi­dence of his­tory they will defend to the death that socially shared pub­lic ver­sion of their God. 

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275. Live and Let Live

Posted on December 29, 2013 by Thor

They may not be your kind of peo­ple. They may not even be my kind of peo­ple. Come to think of it, I’m prob­a­bly not your kind of per­son. What­ever. They, you, me – we’ve all been here since the (human) world began, or at least yobos like us. No reli­gion, ide­ol­ogy, cul­ture, reign of ter­ror, or adLiveandletlive-arkver­tis­ing agency has ever been able to change the whole daggy mix. So what do you want to do about it? Stand on a street cor­ner and preach to the con­verted? Retreat to your lim­ou­sine and sort them into your superior type and the other trash? Be a preda­tor to prey on the unwary and unwise? Screw any­thing that moves and get wasted while the party lasts? Hope for a safe life of sub­ur­ban gos­sip, the small world of office hello-friend­ships and fear of the tabloid mur­der rate? Well, it’s your call. Me? I’m glad that it takes all kinds of peo­ple to make the world go around. There would be no sto­ries with­out them. I don’t do bars, usu­ally, but I under­stood my father who used to say before stum­bling off to find a new dive, des­per­ate to escape his des­o­late home life, “gotta go check out the local wildlife”. 

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274. Come the Revolution

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Thor

RevolutionYou talk too much about what you’ve seen and what you think. While the mafia are still in charge of the asy­lum they will find a law to bury you alive (McMil­lan-Scott, Edward MEP (n.d.) “Liu Xiaobo: biog­ra­phy”. Char­ter 08 for reform and democ­racy in China web­site, hosted by the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment, online @ http://www.charter08.eu/5.html or Esco­bar, Pepe (August 2, 2013) “Our man in Moscow”. Asia Times, online @ http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01–020813.html ).

Come the rev­o­lu­tion they will kill you first. You are knowl­edge­able, tol­er­ant, polite, polit­i­cally aware. You are a rea­son­able alter­na­tive. Rea­son­able alter­na­tives are a mor­tal threat to rev­o­lu­tions (Barnard, Anne – Novem­ber 30, 2013 – “Syr­ian oppo­si­tion frays as dis­il­lu­sion and exhaus­tion take hold”. Bris­bane Times, online @ http://www.smh.com.au/world/syrian-opposition-frays-as-disillusion-and-exhaustion-take-hold-20131129-2yh36.html#ixzz2mAl8XnQt ) . 

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273. What Is Going On Here?

Posted on September 19, 2013 by Thor

AlCaponeBecause they are mega-every­thing, states like China and the USA become test par­a­digms for what can go right and wrong in man­ag­ing humans. Con­sider these: 

1) The US has the world’s largest and most sophis­ti­cated assem­bly of spy­ing orga­ni­za­tions. They col­lect what is laugh­ably called “intel­li­gence” on all of us, legally and often ille­gally. How­ever this vast mass of intel­li­gence assets has repeat­edly been unable to antic­i­pate attacks upon its own integrity by its own per­son­nel (who are surely more spied upon than any­body else): in the first instance from infor­ma­tion leaks by thought­ful and con­sci­en­tious insid­ers (Man­ning, Snow­den, John Kiri­akou … there are oth­ers too), as well as from a long his­tory of sol­diers shoot­ing fel­low sol­diers; or on a much larger scale from the “war on drugs” – read fail­ure to eval­u­ate the real mean­ing of “intel­li­gence” from mas­sive sur­veil­lance – which has gen­er­ated an explo­sion of vio­lence and crim­i­nal­ity (shades of the 1920s-30s Pro­hi­bi­tion); and of course a from long list of wars with fail­ure sourced in end­less mis­in­for­ma­tion and self-decep­tion; and about to break: a tsunami of lost busi­ness for US cor­po­ra­tions which are now regarded as agents of US spy­ing and no longer trusted world­wide.

2) The US has the world’s most “sophis­ti­cated” health care sys­tem. Result: also the world’s most expen­sive health care sys­tem. Its out­comes have resulted in ris­ing mor­tal­ity, an increase in dis­eases, and ever-falling life expectancy for US cit­i­zens rel­a­tive to those in other coun­tries, and about 62% of bank­rupt­cies due to med­ical emer­gency (so this is “intel­li­gence”?).

3) The US has the world’s best uni­ver­si­ties. A few. It also has one of the world’s most frag­mented and least suc­cess­ful edu­ca­tion sys­tems amongst advanced nations, with grad­u­ates indebted for decades. It would be tire­some to list the fail­ures here, but basi­cally the mess is an ide­o­log­i­cally dri­ven, hys­ter­i­cal melt-down, best under­stood by the pop­ulist con­tempt for teach­ers.

Issues 4), 5), 6) … why go on? 

So Dag­wood Bum­stead, pre­pare a sim­ple solu­tion, an exec­u­tive sum­mary in 50 words or less for your lobot­o­mized neigh­bour­hood direc­tor… Well Mr Dithers, the prob­lem is partly that nobody really knows how to man­age any­thing as com­pli­cated as a large, tech­ni­cally advanced coun­try. Spin doesn’t cut it. Excep­tion­al­ism is another word for arro­gance. But there are other basic miss­ing ingre­di­ents too, such as out of fash­ion ideas like hon­esty (from which comes real trust), gen­uine respect for oth­ers (don’t spy on them), coop­er­a­tion (not coer­cion), and actu­ally want­ing to do your job well (CV fluff and salary level are not evi­dence). Oh, and lead­er­ship the rest of us can believe in… 

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272. God, defined

Posted on September 4, 2013 by Thor

God-cloudGod : def­i­n­i­tion: A form of socially shared delu­sion imply­ing a sen­tient, omni­scient, omnipo­tent, non-human force which is nev­er­the­less con­cerned with human actions. Often used sub­con­sciously by indi­vid­u­als to avoid ego respon­si­bil­ity for cer­tain thoughts and actions. Used socially by power seek­ers as a proxy to val­i­date and enforce con­trol over the thoughts and behav­iours of oth­ers. Often a con­ve­nient metaphor or fig­ure of speech to indi­cate a total­ity or unseen force, and used as such even by those uncom­mit­ted to any reli­gion. As a soci­o­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­non the com­plex God sym­bol has much in com­mon with other sym­bols of abso­lutist ide­ol­ogy (e.g. in mod­ern times, Com­mu­nism, Cap­i­tal­ism .. etc). Ide­o­log­i­cal sym­bol­ism, includ­ing the God delu­sion, is often defended vio­lently since it becomes entwined closely with feel­ings of per­sonal iden­tity and group iden­tity, as well as reflect­ing much shared cul­tural behav­iour. In many juris­dic­tions God/Ideological sym­bol­ism is con­structed into for­mal pro­vi­sions of com­mu­nity law and used to divide good (those who com­ply with the entailed beliefs and behav­iours) from bad (those who do no com­ply with the entailed beliefs and behav­iours). In all national and cul­tural juris­dic­tions large num­bers of prag­matic indi­vid­u­als have always remained silent in pri­vate rejec­tion of widely accepted God/Ideological belief and insti­tu­tional frame­works since for social and pro­fes­sional rea­sons a pub­lic chal­lenge would usu­ally yield lit­tle per­sonal advan­tage, but ensure sig­nif­i­cant per­sonal dis­ad­van­tages.

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271. Security & the Neo-feudalists – One Dimensional Chess

Posted on August 3, 2013 by Thor

FeudalCastleA few cen­turies ago Europe was dot­ted with castle fortresses, sur­rounded by sup­pos­edly impreg­nable stone walls and moats of water. Bar­ri­caded in these castles were lords and ladies, suck­ing the life out of the peas­ant farms around them, and blow­ing the sur­plus on weapons, wars and glut­tony. They were war-lords, or in mod­ern par­lance, mafia god­fa­thers. Their cur­rent incar­na­tions are a bit more com­pli­cated. They go by the names of pres­i­dents, prime min­is­ters, cor­po­rate chief­tains etc, but their fan­tasies and fears are still essen­tially feu­dal. “Secu­rity” is their obses­sion. Day and night they fear for their own arses, while whole pop­u­la­tions are conned into pay­ing the bills for their deprav­ity. And as in the Mid­dle Ages, these neo-feu­dal­ists gold-plat­ing their scor­pion nests in Wash­ing­ton, Bei­jing, Moscow etc have induced new breeds of out­laws. For every action in nature, there is an equal and oppo­site reac­tion.

For the sto­ry­tellers amongst us, the present dis­or­ders hum­bling those who would be gods is a rich har­vest of irony. A while back, we had hopes for Barack Obama, but he turns out to be another sock pup­pet, with his min­ders, the gen­er­als and the money-lenders, tus­sling inside his sock. The great­est cheat-game in his­tory, new toys to steal the pri­vate lives and secrets of every­one on the planet (Prism, NSA XKeyscore etc), has been busted wide open by a gent called Edward Snow­den, dis­missed as a lowly techie. It turns out that Snow­den was a sys­tems design ana­lyst, tasked with find­ing weak­nesses in the whole mon­ster machine. He had keys to every door in the castle, and hor­ror of hor­rors, gen­uine intel­li­gence. Unlike the lawyers and MBas who pre­tend to “man­age” our civ­i­liza­tion, he actu­ally under­stands both the pol­i­tics and the tech­nol­ogy. He skipped ahead of them to Hong Kong, from whence the Wash­ing­ton lords, con­sumed by their own arro­gance, drove him to Moscow and forced him to stay there. They forced a man like Snow­den, awash with all their secu­rity secrets, into the arms of a spy­mas­ter like Vladimir Putin. Now there was bril­liance, duh? With half a brain between them, they could have let Snow­den slip off to South Amer­ica and picked him up eas­ily. Instead Obama and his mil­i­tary min­ders have proved con­clu­sively that they lack the com­pe­tence, integrity and cal­i­bre to man­age or inter­pret the tor­rents of infor­ma­tion about all of us which they have stolen. There is a the­ory going around that some­body in this game is play­ing eleven-dimen­sional chess, Matrix style. If so, Snow­den and Putin have out­classed the Wash­ing­ton scor­pi­ons on every move.

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