KPFA and Sasha Lilley
G'Day Economists, After discussions in the Pushing Limits Collective, I've decided I find myself on the other side of the line from Sasha. So my name will appear on the letter from the other side. In that regard, first the context. The turnaround at Pacifica in my view was a signal of the end of the long period of the rightwing tide. Some might find that a small thing, but for disabled rights advocates we have a voice now we didn't before. Small things yes, but in the context of the way the U.S. is going a sign of the winds of change. The conditions are right in my view to build a mass movement for the left. In order to do that Sasha, I advocate we talk openly where ever we find each other facing each other. To bring into the open what needs to be heard by the left. Certainly Michael's list represents one of the fairest places to discuss what could the voice of the left and how to build it. To my mind that is a democratic process. And requires that we treat each other as brothers and sisters, or comrades as it were in the common struggle. To take the goal as building the left and learning how to make the left strong. Agreed? thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: KPFA and Sasha Lilley
Greetings Economists, Thanks Michael for giving me the leeway to using Sasha's name this way. You are right though and I was careless to word things this way. A flame war is far from my intent. But we all know how certain sorts of approaches facilitate that. Also Sasha I hope you feel also respect in my addressing you. My intent is really for the left community to help us think about how to address what's happening and help us to both resolve hurt and pain and more importantly build a bigger movement. Nor do I represent Pushing Limits here. We have debated this issue and left open to our collective's members to make their own decisions where they stand. In that sense I will listen carefully to Sasha and anyone else that has signed their note. From my side I hope to reach across to friends and comrades where I can. And express what I can about where I see problems. Which I think is exactly how trust and power is built amongst us. thank you, Doyle
The rise of an emotion based left was Bush using drugs
Greetings Economists, It is but a small step from what CC writes: As a friend of mine in the local Depressive Support Group once observed, Just because you're crazy doesn't mean you're not also a jerk! There is no difficulty in demonstrating that Bush and his friends are one large bunch of thugs war criminals. There is no need for Capital Blue's baiting of the mentally ill! Doyle, to taking seriously what emotion contributes to society. Everyone knows the Enlightenment view of emotion is that it does not belong in rational discussion. Contrarily, the philosopher of law at the University of Chicago, Martha Nussbaum posits a society in which asocial emotions do not shape society, and social emotions do. It is a far cry from that position to one which condemns Bush for being depressed. It is bigoted anti-disability claim about Bush. Just to be clear Nussbaum for example distinguishes disgust as an asocial emotion from anger or fear which are social emotions. In other words Nussbaum takes seriously the role of emotion in the construction of society and gives us probably the first non bigoted way to approach this issue. She in fact directly addresses bigotry against disabled people. No socialist or Marxist can possibly stand by an attack upon depressed people as a legitimate left path. Down with the bigots. thanks, Doyle
Re: Math
Greetings Economists, CB (Charles Brown) writes, (first), ...Math, grammar and logic are all sets of rules on how to use symbols then CB writes, ...logic is mathematical and linguistic, but I am curious on the essential distinction between linguistics and mathematics implied here To which JD (James Devine) replies, ...it's possible that math might be part of Chomsky's transformational grammar, i.e., the structure of human language that is inborn (built-in) in the human brain? In that case, math is linguistic, but not merely so Doyle, Chomsky's transformational grammar? This is still a debate about what exactly is inherited. A better discussion about the issue of inheritance is found in Gould's book, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Belknap, Harvard press, 2002. Chapter eight, Species as Individuals in the Hierarchical Theory of Selection, pages 638 through 644 discuss some of the problems that Dawkins has with the idea of rule based inheritance. Since you seem to think grammar is inherited, Let's try to make a distinction here that most people could understand. Logic has been treated as part of mathematics for awhile. So I won't distinguish between them. Grammar structures language as is the commonplace. We might go to Wittgenstein to get an odd ball view of grammar (Philosophical Grammar, Wittgenstein, Blackwell, 1974) which parallels JD's conflation of mathematics and language. However, mathematics doesn't appear to grammarize symbols. There is a case for a low level math instinct in the sense of babies can count before they can think language. That is called subitizing. To understand the difference then between grammar and subitizing it is best to consider the difference in the labor processes. The basis for language is joint attention. That is at some point babies learn to look at a parents face and follow their gaze. So if mom looks at something like a toy the baby understands something about the object which is a toy. Or food, or whatever. Sharing attention means more or less mind reading. That is states of the brain are shared and understood to be shared. Mom does her brain work in her old familiar ways. That is incoming to the occipital lobe mainly for vision, naming things in the temporal lobe, doing things in the parietal lobe, and organizing and planning what to do with stuff in the temporal lobe and parietal is done in the frontal lobe. The baby does roughly the same sort of stuff. Babies vary in how they do things from their parents for various reasons. The baby learns how to use their mind from the example of the parents. Habits of brain work. Not necessarily there in terms of a grammar. Grammar is variable within bounds. Chomsky like the enlightenment thinkers he has always sprung his own thought from thinks of this as a universal essence. However, Gould and others see this differently. We may have a tool that can do certain things, the brain. But what emerges in how we do things must certainly vary. How can the brain anticipate email? A general purpose theory of the work process of brainwork that grammar implies, presumes that we understand what exactly the brain is doing word by word. George Lakoff the linguist looks at where Mathematics comes from. Like many linguists Lakoff broadly uses metaphor as the basic mechanism of thought and therefore of mathematics. In his book, Where Mathematics Comes From,. Lakoff, Nunez, Basic Books, 2000, gives an extended examination of all levels of mathematics to trace down how metaphor might be the basis for mathematics. Metaphor stands in for field states in the brain. So for example at a given time, various fields are connected in the occipital lobe, temporal lobe, and frontal lobe. That being the metaphor. Returning to grammar, language is a representation of between a parent and child the basic way to use the face and hands to do work in the world. Mathematics is not confined to that metaphor. Math does not function in brain work like plain language acts. Grammar is not mathematics. They are both metaphorical in the sense that sheets of neurons interconnect in patterns. But the labor processes are different. Nor is it possible in my view to say grammar is inherited. As most evolutionary theorists would say there is a wholeness of environment and human beings that does not reduce to rules. Let's try to envision that. If I write this piece I am using a linear script to describe brain states or metaphorical activity in the brain. However, the brain states are not linear. So in the sense I write anything linearly I am not conceptualizing the process of thinking. If I conceptualize thinking that is create symbols that work like thinking, I might then find ways to do non-grammatical language. That is not restrict myself to an a priori limitation to what can be done. Thanks, Doyle
re; leftist encylcopedia
Hello All, J.D. writes, Anyway, every once and awhile, someone suggests that pen-l produce some sort of collective project, but the prospect always seems akin to that of herding cats. The existence of the WikiPedia suggests two ideas: Doyle, Wonderful suggestion. Further Pen-L can foster debates for the structure of this Encyclopedia. Also, more importantly how does one create a collaborative left document with the tools we have? While wikipedias are sort of ok, they really seem like primitive steps toward collaboration building documents that the working class can use. For example, in my view cell phone access to the web is going to be important. How does one use the encyclopedia to address what it means to carry a cellphone around and talk to whomever whenever one feels like. That is how could the wikipedia content reflect interactivity? Still this is one of the very best things I've ever seen on Pen-L. The spirit I mean to think of collaborating instead of lone wolves saying what is often interesting thoughts but without a sense of how to bond together in solidarity to build something more than what individual expression accomplishes. Hooray for JD. thanks, Doyle
Re: Disability
Hi All, Sabri says it well. We would very much appreciate what you think is important to say Michael. I think the most exciting part of the program is how pioneering it is. There are many areas in disability where no one has really said something in a left perspective before. The amount of heat that comes from all sides in the disabled community is an important sign about how much hunger there is for substance in our community. I hope you feel welcomed by us to contribute how the left understands what is happening to the working class. Because I am currently subscribed so I don't receive email I can't reply directly Michael Yates. Rather than give the advertising spam bots more reasons to send spam to me by publishing my address on the list could someone do me a favor and send my email address to Michael Yates? Michael P? Or tell me (Michael's email address) what I can do to communicate off list with Michael Y. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Disability
Hello Michael Yates, Pushing Limits Radio Program (on disability rights) is interested in this topic quite a bit. Getting statistics is difficult. You interested in talking about this subject on our radio program? We probably could some others on that know this area. We want to focus on the left voice on our program. Our program has been covering the budget crisis in California and how it affects funding for disabled people, but the larger impact of unemployment upon disability issues is equally important to us. Doyle Saylor
The Lighter Side of Depression
Howdy All you Econo Mysts, Pushing Limits a collective of disabled folks goes exploring a bit deeper into cognitive issues and disability rights. Pushing Limits in the San Francisco Bay Area, at 94.1 FM KPFA and KPFB in Berkeley, and KFCF in Fresno on Sunday December 21, 2003 at 6:30pm to 7pm. will present; The Lighter Side of Depression We look at the lighter side of Depression. That is not so much about being light weight as pushing disability rights into new areas. Just a little shift right now, but about starting to give all the potential to disabled people that is being repressed. Lots to do and so little time. We are archived on the KPFA site. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Thanks Michael
Hi All, Michael as luck would have it I had to go out of town immediately after asking for some thoughts on our coverage of California budget cutbacks. I appreciate your comments. Both points of view matter to us. Both the larger question of who will be hurt and how it will affect disabled people. To me the main questions are to bring out as much as we can and help people understand how important it is to unite as much as possible. More or less exactly what you were focused upon. In Illinois over last few days I was amazed at the conversations about disabled rights there. Two interesting points of speculation were that Newton and Cavendish were Autistic. Especially Cavendish seems a likely savant. I was talking to one person who does fundamental work in mathematics who struck me as cognitively interesting. A fundamentalist Christian doing higher math. The dissonance I saw in him was absolutely amazing. There seems like so much work to be done about who we are and what is the underlying structures of organizing people. Anyway thanks for the response I just got back. We'll be on the air tonight trying to get at the issues. The discussions over the last few days have been helpful to us. in solidarity, Doyle
Questions about California Budget Crisis query
Hello All, Our radio program, Pushing Limits, is going to feature two budget analysts on the Schwarzenegger budget. However, our collective's budget expert is going out of town and can't co-host that night. So I thought I would ask for some economic help from Pen-L. What would you ask these people? They are pretty knowledgeable. We have a 30 minute program. So we have to pack a lot into a short time. Any help would be appreciated. thanks, Doyle
Re: threatened cut-backs for the disabled in California
Hello All, Quoting James Devine who forwards an article on disability cutbacks in California by the lamentable Schwarzenegger: [strangely, no mention is made concerning cut-backs of benefits for those disabled by over-use of steroids.] Doyle, Just to keep it as clear as possible, putting disabled people back into institutions costs more than home care in many cases. Secondly SEIU has been organizing home care workers and there has been positive results in that realm which will be undermined and set back by these sorts of cuts. Further the managed care facilities have used the threats of losing jobs to pit the unions involved in those work places against home care work. This is an issue which has profound implications for the disabled community. It is not just the hardship on families, it deeply affects the quality of life for tens of thousands of disabled people throughout the state. This is brutal and barbaric. Thanks Jim for putting this up. Doyle
Re: the next wedge issue
Hello All, I am home today sick. For me, this is a sad moment. I don't look for times like this to take stands they just seem to come to me. When I was young I was assaulted many times as a queer. I didn't even know what that meant. There are certainly many people like Melvin who are in the left and feel they are leftists. To them I am morally wrong. To what extent that affects my ability to be on the left I don't know. But we can't build a left that includes gay people that sees them as morally wrong. They must keep their mouths shut, don't ask don't tell because there are so many who disapprove. The same process affects disabled people. I grew up feeling sad, depressed if you will. In those days denial was ubiquitous. I think my depression was a combination of being vulnerable and abusive conditions. At any rate don't ask don't tell also ruled my life about that. One of the key factors in dealing with depression is to be able to talk about depression to other people. The very high suicide rate among gay young people is an outcome still of how the deadly combination of moral disapproval and silence combines to kill. I do appreciate Lou's comment here. A real revolutionary movement recognizes forms of oppression and does something concrete to change conditions for those oppressed. We all grew up in reactionary climates. I grew up to a large degree hating 'queers' even though in fact I was one. I had good reason to change that opinion, but lots of gay people just reflect the prejudice around them and hate queers just as much as any 'hetero. One left prejudice is that homosexuality is a reactionary element in society. Another prejudice (not left) is homosexuals are pedophiles. Can't be trusted around children. A person can change but they must listen to a cry for justice. The disability rights movement goes a step further and asks about the rights of people who have cognition outside of the 'norm'. For various reasons people with prejudice and rigidity fall into an area like a disability. That abuse instills rigidity, that emotional disabilities make it hard for many people to participate in able bodied social structures. For example Bill Choisser, http://www.choisser.com/faceblind/ , who is face blind cannot see emotions in the face, cannot hear emotions in the voice. What is his right in a society that considers certain ways of being the norm? So nothing is ever simple about oppression. But a social movement that liberates people cannot hold onto prejudice against homosexuals. A wedge issue is an issue that seeks to portray itself as being for rights when it actually divides the movement. In the U.S. Christian fundamentalism is morally outraged against homos, so they think if Homosexuals accept Jesus Christ and their moral system then all will be well. But a wedge is simply a way to bring divisions into social settings. I am for couple rights I just don't like homos. I'll give them their rights along with everyone else. They are still 'wrong' in my view. My only answer to that is the whole working class is the whole working class. We cannot build a socialist society that does not acknowledge all the different elements that build a society and builds a whole society. Thanks, Doyle
Lakoff was More on anti-corruption
Greetings Pen 'Ellers, Thanks Joanna for forwarding Lakoff's interview. I've enjoyed reading Lakoff, especially on philosophy and mathematics. Lakoff argues for 'embodiment' which I think helps to clarify the many muddy arguments about cognition and dissipate the mind duality that permeates the culture in the developed countries. Additionally, Lakoff was a student of Chomsky's and participated in the so-called language wars and broke with Chomsky over the issue of inheriting a grammar structure in the brain. So Lakoff to my way of understanding things, continues a solid left historical perspective on thought. Given that, Lakoff's approach to moral systems seems to me to have some problems. First is interpretation of framing to use in language to bind a social community. It seems to me not so obvious as Lakoff makes his system seem that framing can be used to build a left movement. What seems to me to be missing is a way to map a moral system so we can build with it. My first guess about moral systems is that they reflect values or the structure of emotion that binds cortex structures together. So if we talk about moral systems we have to really have a grasp of emotional structure as well as the language structures of metaphor. Secondly while Lakoff has powerful things to say about metaphor, and extremely useful, it seems to me that the structure of using that is not well addressed. What I imagine in this case is that an architecture of moral systems is possible to consider. This sort of reasoning on my part looks rather like the historical processes that religions try to accomplish. Essentially how to construct societies on the larger and larger scale where everyone can be together in very large units. To give an example if one considers the bible as an example, the prohibitions against killing probably reflected the conflict structure of groups being modified for a larger tribal structure than nomadic peoples previously could not have considered. In other words the emotion structure that previously led to groups killing individuals was being modified to adapt to a much larger social structure. Emotion structure underlies 'moral' systems. Moral systems as I think Lakoff rightly observes are metaphorical, i.e. neural network like, but without an adequate theory of value (emotion structure) using just metaphor is to me a laborious endeavor to track down how words are currently being used. This neglects the change that happens in word usage as well. If one incorporates emotion structure into a metaphorical system I think one could look at that as well as a labor process. So that to take the metaphor of architecture a step further, each person constantly helps build an overall 'moral' system of the whole society. So that we might consider how to automate parts of the architecture to increase productivity. thanks, Doyle
Re: internet infrastructure investment data
Greetings Pen-'Ellers, Well KGC's response was just fine. No need to pursue anything in my view, however, I found some nuggets or tidbits of Telecom stuff here and there in my notes so I'll pass it along assuming that it might find some interest for KGC. Tidbits about Telecoms from here and there which includes some dollar figures here and there as well as other comparisons, Gridlock on the superhighway Dec 12th 2002 From The Economist print edition ...In America, the telecoms bust of 2000 has wiped out some 500,000 jobs and $2 trillion in (apparent) stockmarket value. ...But the main source of the problem, we argued, was that most of the newcomers (called competitive local exchange carriers, or CLECs, in America) had simply failed to do their homework. In particular, the DSL (digital subscriber line) technology that most of them adopted was singularly inappropriate for the task. Apart from causing interference problems, the 2B1Q algorithm used in America (and the 4B3T line code used in Europe) to transmit digital signals along a pair of copper telephone lines stumbles badly over bridge taps where the wires get spliced. ...Some readers believed that the CLECs' choice of technology was not entirely arbitrary. Part of the reason, suggested one insider, was that most of the CLECs were dependent on 'vendor financing' from the makers of the older line codes-and, as such, were locked into purchases of inferior equipment. from Pen-L, December 6, Nomi writes in response to a Paul Krugman article, ...Krugman Bad metaphors make bad policy. Everyone talks about the information highway. But in economic terms the telecommunications network resembles not a highway but the railroad industry of the robber-baron era - that is, before it faced effective competition from trucking. And railroads eventually faced tough regulation, for good reason: they had a lot of market power, and often abused it. Telecoms are worse than railroads. The railroads built twice as much capacity as was needed, while the robber barons cashed out, over a period of 25 years. In telecoms, 20 times as much capacity was built as was needed, and the cash-out period was 3 years. Railroads were substantially financed by business speculators in Europe. Teleco's by the US public. washingtonpost.com Telecom Sector May Find Past Is Its Future Giant Phone Companies Offer Stable, Well-Funded Option By Peter S. Goodman Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, July 8, 2002; Page A01 ...Investors poured large sums of money into telecommunications -- $880 billion from 1997 to date, according to Thomson Financial in New York. But there were not enough phone calls or e-mails to sustain the hundreds of new phone and Internet networks. As that reality emerged in the spring of 2000, the great unraveling began. No one knows how much of the investment -- $326 billion in stock and bonds, plus $554 billion in bank loans -- has been destroyed, but it is surely a huge sum. Half is as good a number as any, said Richard J. Peterson, chief market strategist at Thomson Financial. At least 63 telecommunications companies have landed in bankruptcy since 2000, according to Bankruptcydata.com. ...This enormous construction project cycled huge amounts of money through the economy. Local and long-distance telephone companies spent $319 billion building their networks from 1997 to 2001, said RHK Inc., a San Francisco research firm. Mobile telephone companies spent more than $58 billion. The money landed in the coffers of chip-making, software, computer and network equipment companies. ...From October 1998 to February of this year, the transmission capacity across the Atlantic expanded by a factor of 19. Meanwhile, the price of a leased transmission line dropped to $10,000 a year from $125,000, said Eli Noam, a professor of finance at Columbia University Business School. FEBRUARY 7, 2002 NEWS ANALYSIS:TECHNOLOGY By Alex Salkever Business Week ...What happened? The numbers in the subsea cable business paint a stark picture. From 1997 to 2001, trans-Atlantic cable capacity increased more than 20-fold, according to TeleGeography, a telecom consultancy. Trans-Pacific capacity soared 40-fold. As so many lines were laid, demand for the services became diluted. Prices for wholesale bandwidth on land and sea plunged apace, falling between 50% and 70% a year. DIVING AND DIGGING. Before Global Crossing launched in 1998, the standard lifetime contract for 155 megabytes of capacity went for $20 million. Global Crossing dropped that immediately to $8 million. By the end of 2001, that same deal drew only $350,000. Long-term contracts no longer hold their allure for customers, who now seek out more flexible one-year or two-year leases. FEBRUARY 4, 2003 Business Week SPECIAL REPORT: ALL-DISTANCE TELECOM Alex Salkever Eating Asia's Broadband Dust Unlike the halting and financially crippling rollout of high-speed access in the U.S., in the Far East it has gone much faster and cheaper
Re: internet infrastructure investment data
Greetings Pen-'Ellers, KGC writes, But there is an idea floating around geekdom that the Web works (in the sense that it scales 5B+ documents, something which no one really expected) because of various purely technological ideas (most of which get attributed, inaccurately, to Tim Berners-Lee). I want to engage this idea in my book (for my own nefarious, leftie political reasons) and my publisher is cool with me doing a bit of politics of technology. Me, Clay Shirky writes about the economics of what makes the web work. Has some theories about various ideas floating around about the IT industry that are a starting place to think about what works and doesn't work about Web Services, etc.,. http://www.shirky.com/ Hal Varian writes a column for the NY Times and teaches the economics of information technology at UC Berkeley. He may have some specifics for you to track down about hardware spending versus, software ideas like Tim Berners-Lee might represent in the public mind. http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/ Varians University web site. http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/resources/infoecon/ A site of his that gives research sites for information about the information economy. Doug Henwood has a new book out sometime in the next decade (has been promised for more than a year so far) about the new economy in which he gives an economic accounting of the basic area you are interested in. Look up Ian Foster who is chief scientist on the GRID, which is a new internet like technology for super computing on a large scale. The cost of hardware for this project where it is academic related is probably public information. Therefore you can get an idea about the relative cost of building a new internet. And this system probably is a requirement for the success of Web Services in the long run, so it gives some insight now of what Web Services has to bring along to work right. This question is like asking what Open Source software brings in value to business. So you might look at Servers and costs selling them. IBM servers (along with other companies) are driving Sun Microsystems into the ground by utilizing Open Source software. This gives some idea of what theory (or human labor) provides over hardware. Especially look at how the relative updating cost for Sun are higher than the brand new installation of IBM servers. Not easy comparison, but perhaps gives some insight. Look at labor costs overseas like India for IT because that makes theory much cheaper to use. Because that is what you mean by theory I think is labor costs. You might clarify your thinking about that issue of theory versus hardware in technology terms also. For example, historically for a lefty what is the path toward programming? Writing. What about memory in computer? The public libraries. Writing - Let's take color in magazines (being print media closely tied to traditional typescript), which gradually increased from the 1920's onward. Color represents a major increase in costs and production for photographs. Throughout the 20th century color photographs were basically just one big frill on the ass of the printing trade. So when we talk about computing and web services we might ask where the sheer productive volume of writing theory actually is merited by Web Services. Hal Varian gives some bench marks about the sheer volume of information being produced, tv, x-rays, written text etc. So the value of theory can be understood in some ways by the general increase in the volume of produced writing. One can take radio transmission, tv transmission etc. as fancy sorts of writing because they transmit words also. Some people argue that the value of that sort of stuff declines to near nothing in the present computing environment. Copying costs being just about nil as Clay Shirky would argue. However, the value of theory in terms of writing would the vast increase of unit volume of writing. And because of that a transformation of the sheer structure of writing in some analogy like black and white photos going over to color. We don't exactly foresee what makes a big increase in production of information important, because our culture never had this option. Printing in some ways was a big increase, but the volume increase of memory coming, Terrabyte hard discs, allows us to think in terms of tens of thousands of movies stored to use in theory making. So instead of the of few kilobytes on this list, theory would entail a gigabyte structured into meaningful writing or whatever people will end up calling what this points at. So in that sense I am opposed to Doug Henwood's (amongst others) view of the economics of theory and software in Information Technology. I think theory can actually be looked at in terms of volume of product attached to all volume of production in economic terms. Doyle
Re: internet infrastructure investment data
Greetings Pen-L, KGC writes, Oops, but, but, Clay Shirky is a bit of a moron. Doyle, Couple of things, while for you the term moron is simply a label that indicates you think Shirky is not interesting, for me as a disability rights advocate I find the term anti-disabled. If you read Stephen Jay Gould's book on The Mismeasure of Man you get a decent insight on this made-up word. The basic concept from the early nineteen hundreds in the IQ 'science' underlying the word moron was a person too stupid to learn how to read. The science behind the concept was dismantled by Gould. So the term moron while associated in the public mind with developmentally disabled persons is simply empty of meaning because it has not scientific validity. As to your personal insight into Shirky, I always thought Bush was not intellectually able, but I don't dwell on labeling him stupid because that is an empty way of trying to understand what is going on. Just a brief reaction to your wording about Shirky. Shirky represents an influential part of the IT industry accessible and available for you to read. How some of that school analyze their industry bears upon your request. Since you know him well that offering from me is irrelevant to your question. In fact too bad he was not a pleasure to work with and brilliant. Life is so short to waste upon someone whom one does not respect. I would say though you can't argue that investment in the telecom industry is what made things scale up to 5B + documents, if people didn't use the internet as well, it was after all for a couple of decades just a back water in the sciences community. If you are meaning 5B+ (billion plus) documents I am struck by this statistic that there are roughly one document on the web to every five hundred documents in private intranet resources. So I think about these things in terms of public and private intellectual property. As far as that goes, it is interesting that investment had three roughly parallel tracks in the telecom world. The U.S., Europe, and Asia. If scaling up is a key issue, how does each region differ? you write, One of the prevailing explanations is that HTTP got smarter (basically, it became more cachable by intermediaries and proxies) and that those technical changes (the changes aren't *theoretical* or theory, and I didn't imply that) were the critical change which has let the Web scale to 5B+ documents. me, well I read this comment in your previous email which says; you wrote, because of various purely technological ideas (most of which get attributed, inaccurately, to Tim Berners-Lee) me, Which sounds to me like you are going to write about technology ideas (and implementation) and you just don't agree that was important for the web in relation to the infrastructure built during the great bubble economy. But you seem not so much intent on validating theory or ideas as important for 5B + documents that was made possible by the investment in infrastructure of support for the web. So you are downgrading the intellectual labor process that goes into the web by dwelling on the machinery behind it. Maybe that isn't your intent, but strikes me that way. you write in the previous email, My suggestion will be that of at least *equal importance* to these technical fixes (having mostly to do with the differences between version 1.0 and 1.1 of the HTTP protocol, for anyone who cares) is the massive influx of investment dollars to beef up the infrastructure of the Internet, most of which the Web benefited from. me, This reads to me like you have a thing about the W3C (world wide web consortium) being over blown in value. And the machinery and spending on the infrastructure as much more important. Roughly like saying the auto industry spends a gazillion dollars a year on plants and infrastructure and the labor of the auto workers is sort of secondary. May not be what you mean, but I get a little bit of that sort of message here also as well as above. you write, Huh? You really lost me here. me, One analogy that Doug Henwood uses to good effect about the relative lack of change between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century is that he points out during the nineteenth century with the telegraph wires communication leapt from an era of foot travel to instant communications around the world was unprecedented in world history, while one could look at computing communications as a much less spectacular addition to the human culture. To me if you are going to talk about so-called 3rd generation telecom industry and what it's meaning was as a lefty, you must pay attention to the historical precedents as Doug Henwood did to get your 'ideas' across. Even if I think you are off the beam I get a lot out of a capable person writing in depth including having a historical sense of time and place. I hope I gave you some value for your request for advice. I was trying to be helpful. thanks, Doyle
Re: Vegatative states and neuroscience: From Hari Kumar
Hello All, Due to a computer problem I have been unable to get to the list for a few days. This is a bit old, but I would like to give my two cents. Hari Kumar wrote to Doyle (not Doug as his note says) Question: Hi Doug: I would not disagree with most of your premises. But please explain the class issue here. Hari Kumar Doyle The U.S. census says there about 54 million disabled people in the U.S. The class structure part of this story which is important is first that roughly 70% of disabled people are not working. The system forces many disabled people onto the streets because of lack of social support. The working class families often have to bear the burden of some member being disabled. The working class generally has a scapegoat goat for a variety of the problems of society etc. If you have a system that promulgates a ideal worker, then if someone is not that they are no longer a living being. So broadly you can see how class structure creates the disabled person? Another element is the fragmentation of many people away from everything in society. What do people who are paraplegics or blind have in common? The abstract idea of access and autonomy that other workers have to society is what they have in common. Or building a society that represents the whole working class. You know if you live long enough you are likely to be disabled. But if that is not in the working class is not affected by class structure but simply a natural example weakens of getting old then why should society do anything about the old worker? Or from another perspective, the problem that being disabled represents for building a society is pretty deep. The technology for disabled people is usual pretty advanced. Disabled people can be experimented on because of their social weakness. So they get to test the forward edge of the systems development. But what does solidarity really mean for disabled people for the whole working class? If you think racism is difficult, think of the complex issues that disability raises? So if we were to have a significant disabled movement the force it would bring would be a magnitude deeper than what has so far been attempted by socialist movements. The eugenics movement is directly an attack on disabled people, and by extension a weapon upon any element of the working class labeled marginal. Jim Devine writes: For what it's worth, dyslexia and many developmental disabilities are more perceptual or information-processing (awareness) problems rather than being cognitive (knowing judgement) problems. Jim Doyle, Let's take the history of dyslexia as an example. Early on in the 20th century it was labeled word blindness. Can't see the words was the idea. Then that shifted toward a processing problem which seems like not seeing words but not exactly since every dyslexic seems somewhat different. Then by the sixties another shift in which the disability became a language disorder. That is deep brain processing not perception in any traditional sense. If you look at the retina for example, it looks like an exposed layer of the brain. The first layer is not the light receptors but the ganglions that first process the image after the rods and cones at the back of the eye capture a photon. So in some sense of the word, knowing, is happening right at the retina. By the time the signal gets to the optic nerve, 100 million retinal receptors are consolidated to 1 million ganglion cells carrying the nerve impulse back into the brain. If you define knowing as consciousness, then how does one explain blind sight. That is that the path to the occipital lobe is interrupted and conscious sight is not there. But the person still can 'see' by other routes totally outside consciousness but going into the cortex anyway by more ancient routes of the original mammalian brain. So if I don't see I can be knowing, but I know? That is another way to draw attention to my original use of cognitive. What is a broad term that can include 'perceptual' and cortex? You tell me what people whose disability is affecting their brain have in common? What word would you use? Cognitive obviously derives from knowing rather than perception, but the distinction as such is difficult to maintain in the face of how the brain works in many areas, dyslexia being a better known example. Rather for scientific purposes we distinguish parts of the brain for both practical and historical reasons. But for disabled rights we need to unite people who have dyslexia, traumatic brain injury, epilepsy, autism, etc. Therefore to me the broadening of the term to cognitive makes some sense. But if you can give me something that works better by all means do it. Doyle
Geomatric sensor computing environments
Hello All, I think this article on the developmental potential of geometric content for computing is interesting. I think geometric computing, making information with spatial meaning, hasn't been well developed by capitalism. Maps, street signs, cultural information based upon location suggest how this has developed in the past. Big business likes this a lot. thanks, Doyle Industry Outlook The Smart Sensor Web A Revolutionary Leap in Earth Observation By Vincent Tao Tao is the Canada research chair in Geomatics and the founding director of Geospatial Information and Communication Technology (GeoICT) Lab, York University, Toronto; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] THE MOST PROFOUND REVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGIES ARE THOSE THAT DISAPPEAR. THEY WEAVE THEMSELVES INTO THE FABRIC OF EVERYDAY LIFE UNTIL THEY'RE INDISTINGUISHABLE. THE WEB IS AN EXCELLENT EXAMPLE OF SUCH TECHNOLOGY--IT'S NO LONGER EXCITING, BECAUSE IT HAS BECOME PART OF OUR LIFE. However, Web-enabled technologies are continuously advancing, challenging our vision and even our dreams. One exciting new Web-enabled vision is the Sensor Web. Electronic Skin With the presence of cheaper, miniature and smart sensors; abundant fast and ubiquitous computing devices; wireless and mobile communication networks; and autonomous and intelligent software agents, the Sensor Web has become a clear technological trend in geospatial data collection, fusion and distribution. The Sensor Web is a Web-centric, open, interconnected, intelligent and dynamic network of sensors that presents a new vision for how we deploy sensors, collect data, and fuse and distribute information. Neil Gross' article, The Earth Will Don an Electronic Skin, (BusinessWeek, Aug. 30, 1999; http://www.businessweek .com/1999/99_35/b3644024.htm) provides a compelling explanation of the Sensor Web concept: In the next century, planet Earth will don an electronic skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit sensations. This skin is already being stitched together. It consists of millions of embedded electronic measuring devices: thermostats, pressure gauges, pollution detectors, cameras, microphones, glucose sensors, EKGs, electroencephalographs. These will probe and monitor cities and endangered species; the atmosphere; our ships, highways and fleets of trucks; our conversations; our bodies--even our dreams. In short, the Sensor Web offers full-dimensional, full-scale and full-phase sensing and monitoring of Earth at all levels: global, regional and local. The Sensor Web is a revolutionary concept toward achieving collaborative, coherent, consistent and consolidated sensor data collection, fusion and distribution. Such sensors include flood gauges, air-pollution monitors, stress gauges on bridges, mobile heart monitors, Webcams and satellite-borne Earth imaging devices. The Web is considered a central computer that connects enormous computing resources. The Sensor Web can similarly be thought of as a global sensor that connects all sensors or sensor databases. Characteristics The Sensor Web is an evolving concept with many different research efforts working to define the possibilities. Examples of pioneering work include sensor networks (National Science Foundation), sensor pods (NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory), Smart Dust (University of California, Berkeley) and integrated Earth sensing (Canadian Centre for Remote Sensing). A conceptual framework describes the Sensor Web. Inspired by significant advances in sensors, communication, computing and positioning technologies, the Sensor Web is being developed by connecting heterogeneous sensors or many proprietary sensor networks. To succeed, the Sensor Web must be interoperable, intelligent, dynamic, flexible and scalable. Interoperable The Sensor Web is achieved by connecting the distributed, dynamic and heterogeneous in-situ and remote sensors to an open, interconnected network--the Web. The Sensor Web is a universe of network-accessible sensors, sensory data and information. Just like building a Web system, developing the Sensor Web requires thorough and careful design of the system hierarchy, registry, Internet Protocol domain services and applications. Implementation of interoperability requires commonly accepted standards and specifications, and the Open GIS Consortium http://www.opengis.org has pioneered much of this activity. Intelligent A unique characteristic of the Sensor Web is that the sensors deployed are intelligent. They act as smart agents able to sense the environment in a responsive and timely manner. They also can communicate to each other to perform collaborative and integrated sensing. Such intelligence comes from sensor connectivity, just like human intelligence comes from connected neurons in the brain. Sensor networks forage for information the way ants forage for food. By linking existing databases or previously sensed data with the Sensor Web, we will dramatically increase the
Re: Vegetative states and neuroscience
Hello Pen 'ellers, Carrol wrote, You have just given me a very good reason for what one might call pre-emptive suicide. Kill oneself before one loses the ability to communicate but not the ability to feel pain. Doyle, First I forgot to give the radio identification; KPFA, 94.1 fm in Berkeley. This is a tangent but I wonder if our radio program, Pushing Limits, could call you sometime and talk to you about depression? I'm not sure a show on the disability, depression, has to go along with committing suicide, but what produces depression in people, and how people learn to cope with depression is very interesting about building a social movement. I'm talking to a bi-polar person about producing a program in this area. Even if you don't want to be a guest, if you had some ideas about exploring in this area from a left perspective I think that would be important and welcome contribution to our work. Just to be clear I am a high functioning depressed person I've come to accept about my life. I can't work on the left without that having a big impact on being a leftist. thanks, Doyle
Vegatative states and neuroscience
Hello All, One of the key areas for the disabled rights movement is cognitive issues. To be clear when I use this term, cognitive, many disabled people do not use it in broad context, but to mean a specific area of disability. Cognitive for me is involvement of the brain in a disability. Schizophrenia, developmental disability, blindness, dyslexia and so forth have cognitive issues. This article in the NY Times goes to the heart of the physician assisted suicide movement. The disability rights movement takes a strong stand on the rights of disabled people, and contra to philosophers like Peter Singer of Princeton advocate euthanasia for a variety of disabled people. I do not think the medical profession is the place for these issues to be fought out, i.e. this is a social issue, and a class issue. However, in some cases in a practical sense this is where the debate is currently waged as well as by election for the right to suicide. The article I quote is: What if There Is Something Going On in There? By CARL ZIMMER NY Times magazine http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/magazine/28VEGETAT.html Published: September 28, 2003 Doyle, There are particular claims in the article: ...One morning just over a year after his accident, Rios was taken to the Sloan Kettering Institute on Manhattan's East Side. There, in a dim room, a group of researchers placed a mask over his eyes, fixed headphones over his ears and guided his head into the bore of an M.R.I. machine. A 40-second loop of a recording made by Rios's sister Maria played through the headphones: she told him that she was there with him, that she loved him. As the sound entered his ears, the M.R.I. machine scanned his brain, mapping changes in activity. Several hours afterward, two researchers, Nicholas D. Schiff and Joy Hirsch, took a look at the images from the scan. They hadn't been sure what to expect -- Rios was among the first people in his condition to have his brain activity measured in this way -- but they certainly weren't expecting what they saw. ''We just stared at these images,'' recalls Schiff, an expert in consciousness disorders at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. ''There didn't seem to be anything missing.'' As the tape of his sister's voice played, several distinct clusters of neurons in Rios's brain had fired in a manner virtually identical to that of a healthy subject. Some clusters that became active were those known to help process spoken language, others to recall memories. Was Rios recognizing his sister's voice, remembering her? ''You couldn't tell the difference between these parts of his brain and the brain of one of my graduate students,'' says Hirsch, an expert in brain imaging at Columbia University. Even the visual centers of Rios's brain had come alive, despite the fact that his eyes were covered. It was as if his sister's words awakened his mind's eye. Doyle, The implication being that what had been the bottom line for euthanasia has once again shifted. I.e. what constitutes the right place to exterminate disabled people when they are (fill in the blank)? The writer for this article continues with some other points worth considering: ...Last year in the journal Neurology, Giacino and 10 co-authors accounted for that touch of the nose -- and other enigmatic hints of awareness they have observed -- by proposing a new category of consciousness: the minimally conscious state. By their reckoning, a vast number of people who might once have been considered vegetative actually have hidden reserves of mental activity. And as the study of Rios suggests, brain scans may be able to help scientists eavesdrop on their inner world. ''It's free speech for people who have no speech,'' Hirsch says. Doyle, Of course the decision and right to suicide is not being contested by the disabled community, rather the social structure that labels particular disabled people as unfit for society. And therefore having done that steps in to put them to death, or in many cases provide them with no support and pushes them to do it themselves thereby depending up their depressions (a disabled state which affects roughly 10% of the U.S.) that ensue to get rid of people. That is a complex issue which gets lost in the rush to give people the right to suicide. For those interested, our radio program, Pushing Limits in the San Francisco Bay area will take a look at these issues on Sunday October 5th, at 6:30pm to 7:00pm. I may be co-hosting that show, still to be decided, but Eddie Ytuarte housing advocate and disability activist will be the main host. Our show breaks ground in the intellectual world. We go to the limits for disabled people. We stand for socialism and justice for all the oppressed working class. Power to the Disabled! For those confused about this area, I am talking about 54 million people in the U.S. some of whom being wealthy can afford a better life but in a daily way on the streets is the reality for
Re: What I did in the holidays
Hello Pen 'ellers, I enjoyed reading the travel journal. Reminds me of reading Sartre's novels. The writing held up through the whole piece. I myself don't think of doing art this way. This little essay did stimulate me in another direction. I am thinking about Wittgenstein and color. If one reads Wittgenstein, his style of writing is quite different from Jurriaan's. There is a wholeness to Jurriaan's approach that is quite different than Wittgenstein's. I think it possible to think about these issues not so much for literary merit, but in the Marxist sense of realism and where it might lead. I think I'll take a critical look at Wittgenstein for a little note to this list. And consider certain things about Wittgenstein, for example memory in his writings. Marx might raise history about Wittgenstein in a more broad way, but I think we can also narrow the issue down to Wittgenstein's level. I have some curious visual examples to use that resonate on the issue of color. Wittgenstein loved the movies, pulpy stuff appealed to him according to various person's who knew him. So Wittgenstein has a track record in an area that is being rapidly transformed now in the economy. So I have an easy soft target in Wittgenstein for developing some political history and economics about. Coming soon. thanks, Doyle
Some economic comments on disk storage
Hello Pen 'ellers, Some interesting comments on Disk Storage from a Microsoft employee. Costs according to him. Implications according to him. Excerpted comments on; *Terabyte drives and sequential access replacing random access, *Disk delivery economics *Processors in the interface, processors in the disk drive Doyle ACM QUEUE at http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Contentpa=showpagepid=43 excerpts, A Conversation with Jim Gray Vol. 1, No. 4 - June 2003 ...Gray, head of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center,... (Doyle DP is Dave Patterson) DP...the fundamental problem is that we are building a larger reservoir with more or less the same diameter pipe coming out of the reservoir. We have a much harder time accessing things inside the reservoir. DP How big were storage systems when you got started? JG Twenty-megabyte disks were considered giant. I believe that the first time I asked anybody, about 1970, disk storage rented for a dollar per megabyte a month. IBM leased rather than sold storage at the time. Each disk was the size of a washing machine and cost around $20,000. Much of our energy in those days went into optimizing access. It's difficult for people today to appreciate that, especially when they hold one of these $100 disks in their hand that has 10,000 times more capacity and is 100 times cheaper than the disks of 30 years ago. ... JG Today disk-capacity growth continues at this blistering rate, maybe a little slower. But disk access, which is to say, Move the disk arm to the right cylinder and rotate the disk to the right block, has improved about tenfold. The rotation speed has gone up from 3,000 to 15,000 RPM, and the access times have gone from 50 milliseconds down to 5 milliseconds. That's a factor of 10. Bandwidth has improved about 40-fold, from 1 megabyte per second to 40 megabytes per second. Access times are improving about 7 to 10 percent per year. Meanwhile, densities have been improving at 100 percent per year. ...(Doyle since 1989) JG Mark Kryder of Seagate Research was very apologetic. He said the end is near; we only have a factor of 100 left in density-then the Seagate guys are out of ideas. So this 200-gig disk that you're holding will soon be 20 terabytes, and then the disk guys are out of ideas. ... JG Certainly we have to convert from random disk access to sequential access patterns. Disks will give you 200 accesses per second, so if you read a few kilobytes in each access, you're in the megabyte-per-second realm, and it will take a year to read a 20-terabyte disk. If you go to sequential access of larger chunks of the disk, you will get 500 times more bandwidth-you can read or write the disk in a day. So programmers have to start thinking of the disk as a sequential device rather than a random access device. ... JG So lately I'm sending complete computers. We're now into the 2-terabyte realm, so we can't actually send a single disk; we need to send a bunch of disks. It's convenient to send them packaged inside a metal box that just happens to have a processor in it. ... JG In the old days, sneaker net was the notion that you would pull out floppy disks, run across the room in your sneakers, and plug the floppy into another machine. This is just TeraScale SneakerNet. You write your terabytes onto this thing and ship it out to your pals (shipping crate) ... JG That translates to 40 gigabytes per hour and a terabyte per day. I tend to write a terabyte in about 8 to 10 hours locally. I can send it via UPS anywhere in the U.S. That turns out to be about seven megabytes per second. DP How do you get to the 7-megabytes-per-second figure? JG UPS takes 24 hours, and 9 hours at each end to do the copy. DP Wouldn't it be a lot less hassle to use the Internet? JG It's cheaper to send the machine. The phone bill, at the rate Microsoft pays, is about $1 per gigabyte sent and about $1 per gigabyte received-about $2,000 per terabyte. It's the same hassle for me whether I send it via the Internet or an overnight package with a computer. I have to copy the files to a server in any case. The extra step is putting the SneakerNet in a cardboard box and slapping a UPS label on it. I have gotten fairly good at that. Tape media is about $3,000 a terabyte. This media, in packaged SneakerNet form, is about $1,500 a terabyte. ... JG Something that I'm convinced of is that the processors are going to migrate to where the transducers are. Thus, every display will be intelligent; every NIC will be intelligent; and, of course, every disk will be intelligent. I got the smart disk religion from you, Dave. You argued that each disk will become intelligent. Today each disk has a 200-megahertz processor and a few megabytes of RAM storage. That's enough to boot most operating systems. Soon they will have an IP interface and will be running Web servers and databases and file systems. Gradually, all the processors will migrate to the transducers: displays, network
Blame Canada for making your children pirates
Hello All, The RIAA has carefully calculated how to stop the file sharing that has corrupted the youth. There seems to be loophole north of the Border. Just like prohibition the Canadians stand ready to provide a product forbidden in the U.S. This means war of course, down with the Canadians, the traitors. Ashcroft to the border another Cold War...Yay! Doyle Blame Canada To view the complete article go to: http://techcentralstation.com/081803C.html By Jay Currie A desperate American recording industry is waging a fierce fight against digital copyright infringement seemingly oblivious to the fact that, for practical purposes, it lost the digital music sharing fight over five years ago. In Canada. On March 19, 1998, Part VIII of the (Canadian) Copyright Act dealing with private copying came into force. Until that time, copying any sound recording for almost any purpose infringed copyright, although, in practice, the prohibition was largely unenforceable. The amendment to the Act legalized copying of sound recordings of musical works onto audio recording media for the private use of the person who makes the copy (referred to as private copying). In addition, the amendment made provision for the imposition of a levy on blank audio recording media to compensate authors, performers and makers who own copyright in eligible sound recordings being copied for private use. -- Copyright Board of Canada: Fact Sheet: Private Copying 1999-2000 Decision The Copyright Board of Canada administers the Copyright Act and sets the amount of the levies on blank recording media and determines which media will have levies imposed. Five years ago this seemed like a pretty good deal for the music industry: $0.77 CDN for a blank CD and .29 a blank tape, whether used for recording music or not. Found money for the music moguls who had been pretty disturbed that some of their product was being burned onto CDs. To date over 70 million dollars has been collected through the levy and there is a good possibility the levy will be raised and extended to MP3 players, flash memory cards and recordable DVDs sometime in 2003. While hardware vendors whine about the levy, consumers seem fairly indifferent. Why? Arguably because the levy is fairly invisible - just another tax in an overtaxed country. And because it makes copying music legal in Canada. A year before Shawn Fanning invented Napster, these amendments to Canada's Copyright Act were passed with earnest lobbying from the music business. The amendments were really about home taping. The rather cumbersome process of ripping a CD and then burning a copy was included as afterthought to deal with this acme of the digital revolution. The drafters and the music industry lobbyists never imagined full-on P2P access. As the RIAA wages its increasingly desperate campaign of litigation in terrorum to try to take down the largest American file sharers on the various P2P networks, it seems to be utterly unaware of the radically different status of private copying in Canada. This is a fatal oversight, because P2P networks are international. While the Digital Millennium Copyright Act may make it illegal to share copyright material in America, the Canadian Copyright Act expressly allows exactly the sort of copying which is at the base of the P2P revolution. In fact, you could not have designed a law which more perfectly captures the peer to peer process. Private copying is a term of art in the Act. In Canada, if I own a CD and you borrow it and make a copy of it that is legal private copying; however, if I make you a copy of that same CD and give it to you that would be infringement. Odd, but ideal for protecting file sharers. Every song on my hard drive comes from a CD in my collection or from a CD in someone else's collection which I have found on a P2P network. In either case I will have made the copy and will claim safe harbor under the private copying provision. If you find that song in my shared folder and make a copy this will also be private copying. I have not made you a copy, rather you have downloaded the song yourself. The premise of the RIAA's litigation is to go after the supernodes, the people who have thousands, even tens of thousands of songs on their drives and whose big bandwidth allows massive sharing. The music biz has had some success bringing infringement claims under the DMCA. Critically, that success and the success of the current campaign hinges on it being a violation of the law to share music. At this point, in the United States, that is a legally contested question and that contest may take several years to fully play out in the Courts. RIAA spokesperson Amanda Collins seemed unaware of the situation in Canada. Our goal is deterrence. We are focused on uploaders in the US. Filing lawsuits against individuals making files available in the US. Which will be a colossal waste of time because in Canada it is expressly legal to share music.
Re: Micropayments and publishing on the internet
Greetings Pen 'ellers, Joanna asks, Very interesting, but is it true? I thought Apple was making some kind of money on selling tunes over the net??? me, Shirky writes indirectly in a general sense about how to consider Apple's latest net music business. His point being that media is being undermined that someone else makes that we can't directly connect to them through that media content. Apple seems to be taking the road toward they control distributing music which people will pay for, but how long can that last? One has to stifle the general population making more and more interesting stuff to keep Apple in business with a product that one can't make a group come together with. Here is how he writes about publishing in this essay from this link: http://shirky.com/writings/weblogs_publishing.html Shirky, One obvious response is to restore print economics by creating artificial scarcity: readers can't read if they don't pay. However, the history of generating user fees through artificial scarcity is grim. Without barriers to entry, you will almost certainly have high-quality competition that costs nothing. This leaves only indirect methods for revenue. Advertising and sponsorships are still around, of course. There is a glut of supply, but this suggests that over time advertising dollars will migrate to the Web as a low-cost alternative to traditional media. In a similar vein, there is direct marketing. The Amazon affiliate program is already providing income for several weblogs like Gizmodo and andrewsullivan.com. Asking for donations is another method of generating income, via the Amazon and Paypal tip jars. This is the Web version of user-supported radio, where a few users become personal sponsors, donating enough money to encourage a weblogger to keep publishing for everyone. One possible improvement on the donations front would be weblog co-ops that gathered donations on behalf of a group of webloggers, and we can expect to see weblog tote bags and donor-only URLs during pledge drives, as the weblog world embraces the strategies of publicly supported media. And then there's print. Right now, the people who have profited most from weblogs are the people who've written books about weblogging. As long as ink on paper enjoys advantages over the screen, and as long as the economics make it possible to get readers to pay, the webloggers will be a de facto farm team for the publishers of books and magazines. Joanna continues, Now here is the internet and that possiblity is realized, but it seems that the sheer volume of stuff would minimize the chance that such a poem could be found. I mean, what would I google for: truly great love poems? There is also the truth that a lot of people want to read/be aware of stuff that is pre-selected, vetted by some market or other authority. This puts them in the know. In a sense, the growing internet space, polarizes even further the chaotic but free from the pre-selected but costly cultural product. So how would this affect our notions of what constitutes culture or value in art? I guess the time has come to write the seminal essay on Art in the Age of the Internet ...an updated version of Bejamin's Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Doyle, I surmise from Shirky and it seems also to follow from what you write above that what is likely to emerge is a culture of group connection emerging out of a fast growing chaotic increase in media production. The impact of something like that seems very light right now. There are some novel group processes here and there. Some successful in a tentative way, like these discussion lists, but the ability to use our media to undergird a shift toward group formation is very hazy right now. I have some thoughts that I want to work on myself. Some massive gathering like the Burning Man in California given to some sort of collective image making process seems apt. What could that look like if the tools were much more powerful? How could a whole lot of people find a way to massively work together toward some large scale process that is breaking through to what is just being hinted at now? To summarize to me Shirky proposes and I think he is right that the group process is really what the internet is enhancing. That is where the development of production and the culture is going to head toward and undermining the business model for traditional culture. Print culture started several hundred years ago, and the media of group connection is just getting started. We have to find a way to make it work for us (the left) in our own terms now. Just finding people to do something with is a big chore right now. Very hard work to knit together group activity. Where is the appeal? Try to figure out why Burning Man took off for example. There is a disconnect between what we are familiar with in forming groups, face to face, and somehow using the media to form groups in more powerful ways. Enough people trying will make it
Homohop
Hello All, Last year when the Bi-Sexual magazine I was working on was still functioning, I got to meet Juba Kalamka who was working on the magazine also. Juba has been doing pretty good with his hip hop group Deep Dickollective (DDC) so I thought I would pass on a show he is directing in San Francisco. For those in the Bay Area check out this homo show! Take note Deep Dickollective observes class issues in this American Society. Doyle Saylor They're here, they're queer and they homohop. Gay and lesbian artists, long rejected by mainstream rappers, are stretching the genre's boundaries. Neva Chonin, Chronicle Pop Music Critic Wednesday, September 10, 2003 ©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2003/09/10/DD 182424.DTLtype=music The Urban Hermitt was standing outside a school three years ago when she received her first explicit lesson in hip-hop gender politics. Waiting for her turn at a freestyling battle in front of Seattle Central Community College, the aspiring MC watched another rapper clamber atop a bus shelter, strip to his boxer shorts and, clutching a microphone in one hand and his crotch in the other, spit out a rhyme about his anatomy. The assembled crowd cheered. When the Hermitt's turn came, she decided to go with the flow. Peeling down to her own boxers, she grabbed her crotch and proceeded to rap the praises of having a butch, female physique. The crowd froze. A film crew covered its camera. Put your pants back on! yelped one of the battle organizers. We don't want no obscenity! That day the Hermitt (a.k.a. Andre) learned exactly what the hip-hop adage of keeping it real meant for the gay hip-hop fan. Real meant the straight world. Real meant denying her evolving identity as a transgendered female-to-male MC. I've always had to fight for my time onstage, says the Hermitt, 25, who recently moved to San Francisco and now identifies as male. I've had things thrown at me. I've had people try to beat me up. It's a challenge gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender hip-hop fans face every day. Drawn to hip-hop's legacy of free expression, they too often discover that their stories are less than welcome in a genre filled with ethnically and socially diverse, but overwhelmingly heterosexual, voices. For decades, gay hip-hop-heads have toed the line, rapping about everything except their sexuality and stifling their anger at homophobic lyrics by mainstream rappers. Like good street soldiers, they kept it real while the music they once embraced as a creative outlet became another closet. Now that's changed. Thanks to the emergence of homohop, a growing genre that's equal parts music and community, gay MCs and DJs are staking their claim in uncompromisingly loud, rhyming terms. Homohop is an international phenomenon -- one of the most comprehensive online homohop sites, Gayhiphop.com, is out of London -- but thanks to a recent QueerYouthTV documentary on the genre that spotlighted local acts such as Deep Dickollective (DDC), Jen-Ro, Hanifah Walidah, Katastrophe, God-Des and Jaycub Perez, the Bay Area is ground zero. At this week's Third Annual World Homohop Festival -- part of East Bay Pride -- gay rappers, DJs and spoken-word artists from across the United States will celebrate their growing prominence as they converge on Oakland's Metro Theatre for four nights of rhythm and revelry. The festival, dubbed PeaceOUT, supplies a safe space and throws down a challenge. Hip-hop fights against oppression, but at the same time it takes on the role of the oppressor by mirroring society at large: male-centered, patriarchal and classist, says DDC MC and festival director Juba Kalamka (a.k. a. Pointfivefag). ...See the SF Gate site for the rest of the article PeaceOUT: The Third Annual World Homohop Festival: All shows start at 8 p.m. at the Oakland Metro Theatre, 201 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets: $8-$15, sliding scale. (415) 244-8658, www.eastbaypride.org. Thursday: Screening of QueerYouthTV's Homohop documentary, followed by party with host Larry Bob and DJ Toph One. Friday: Tori Fixx, Protegee, God-Des, Jen-Ro, Jaycub Perez, DJ Toph One and DJ Sick Diamond. Hosted by Marvin K. White. Saturday: Deadlee, Katastrophe, Johnny Dangerous, Houston Bernard, Scream Club, Cazwell and DJ Sick Diamond. Hosted by Judge Dutchboy Muscat. Sunday: Deep Dickollective, Shawree, Kayatrip, Lucky 7, Urban Hermitt, Sergio, DJ Ross Hogg, DJ Soulnubien, DJ Black and DJ Sick Diamond. Hosted by Micia Moseley. E-mail Neva Chonin at [EMAIL PROTECTED] ©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback Page D - 1
Micropayments and publishing on the internet
Hello All, Clay Shirky caught my attention about a year ago. Shirky thinks about the economics of the web. In this case Shirky considers why micropayments wouldn't work. He takes into account exponents of micropayments like Scott McCloud. One facet of Shirky's claim is that content on the web is not tied to the form. For examples the current music industry, and the current movie industry tie their production to a form. CD's etc. We buy the form, and the content comes along. Shirky can be found at Shirky dot com. Doyle Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content First published September 5, 2003 on the Networks, Economics, and Culture mailing list. Micropayments, small digital payments of between a quarter and a fraction of a penny, made (yet another) appearance this summer with Scott McCloud's online comic, The Right Number, accompanied by predictions of a rosy future for micropayments. To read The Right Number, you have to sign up for the BitPass micropayment system; once you have an account, the comic itself costs 25 cents. BitPass will fail, as FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, and many others have in the decade since Digital Silk Road, the paper that helped launch interest in micropayments. These systems didn't fail because of poor implementation; they failed because the trend towards freely offered content is an epochal change, to which micropayments are a pointless response. The failure of BitPass is not terribly interesting in itself. What is interesting is the way the failure of micropayments, both past and future, illustrates the depth and importance of putting publishing tools in the hands of individuals. In the face of a force this large, user-pays schemes can't simply be restored through minor tinkering with payment systems, because they don't address the cause of that change -- a huge increase the power and reach of the individual creator. Why Micropayment Systems Don't Work The people pushing micropayments believe that the dollar cost of goods is the thing most responsible for deflecting readers from buying content, and that a reduction in price to micropayment levels will allow creators to begin charging for their work without deflecting readers. This strategy doesn't work, because the act of buying anything, even if the price is very small, creates what Nick Szabo calls mental transaction costs, the energy required to decide whether something is worth buying or not, regardless of price. The only business model that delivers money from sender to receiver with no mental transaction costs is theft, and in many ways, theft is the unspoken inspiration for micropayment systems. Like the salami slicing exploit in computer crime, micropayment believers imagine that such tiny amounts of money can be extracted from the user that they will not notice, while the overall volume will cause these payments to add up to something significant for the recipient. But of course the users do notice, because they are being asked to buy something. Mental transaction costs create a minimum level of inconvenience that cannot be removed simply by lowering the dollar cost of goods. Worse, beneath a certain threshold, mental transaction costs actually rise, a phenomenon is especially significant for information goods. It's easy to think a newspaper is worth a dollar, but is each article worth half a penny? Is each word worth a thousandth of a penny? A newspaper, exposed to the logic of micropayments, becomes impossible to value. If you want to feel mental transaction costs in action, sign up for the $3 version of BitPass, then survey the content on offer. Would you pay 25 cents to view a VR panorama of the Matterhorn? Are Powerpoint slides on Ten reasons why now is a great time to start a company? worth a dime? (and if so, would each individual reason be worth a penny?) Mental transaction costs help explain the general failure of micropayment systems. (See Odlyzko, Shirky, and Szabo for a fuller accounting of the weaknesses of micropayments.) The failure of micropayments in turn helps explain the ubiquity of free content on the Web. Fame vs Fortune and Free Content Analog publishing generates per-unit costs -- each book or magazine requires a certain amount of paper and ink, and creates storage and transportation costs. Digital publishing doesn't. Once you have a computer and internet access, you can post one weblog entry or one hundred, for ten readers or ten thousand, without paying anything per post or per reader. In fact, dividing up front costs by the number of readers means that content gets cheaper as it gets more popular, the opposite of analog regimes. The fact that digital content can be distributed for no additional cost does not explain the huge number of creative people who make their work available for free. After all, they are still investing their time without being paid back. Why? The answer is simple: creators are not publishers, and
Pushing Limits
Hi All, Our 'Pushing Limits' Radio Collective is back for the fall on KPFA radio 94.1 fm in the San Francisco Bay Area. Sunday evenings, 'Pushing Limits', goes on the air at 6:30pm to fight for disabled rights. The first, third, and fifth Sunday of every Month (Starting September 21st) we'll be there for a half hour giving the sort of coverage the world doesn't see, with a fine cast of disabled people doing and living completelydifferently (in the most literal sense of course) and loving it. We'll take a look on our first show in September on disability and Radio. Give a critical look at what is available spinning the dial and start carving out a big territory called disability for broadcasting to get with it. Next down the line we are planning shows on Disabled Prisoners, 'Assisted Suicide and Disabled Rights' (Not Dead Yet!!!), Disabled Housing, Disabled Artists, Attendant Care and in-home Care, 'Politics Culture and Disability'. And coming from me, 'The Face and Disability; Facial Disfigurement and Face blindness'. A look at a disability spectrum that brings up many questions about contemporary American Culture and what serious social change might point toward. On Sunday Nights from 6:30pm to 7pm. We have been getting a lot of disabled people's attention with our crew of diverse disabled folks. Leroy Moore of the 'Molotov Mouths' back from a tour of the East Coast returns as our main on air host to talk culture and bring people of color to the forefront of the fight for disabled rights. We will take a look at sexuality through the experiences of people like Timothy Brett Reed, who has Schizophrenia, and is a writer and playwright. thanks, Doyle
Re: FW: Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood
Hello All, Michael responds, The list costs me nothing, but some people -- especially those outside of the US -- pay a great deal to use the net. Doyle, Well costs can appear in many ways which restrict access to information. It is true that some people such as Lou also pay for the volume of their sites as well. These are important questions. But also outside the U.S. large file delivery is often not through the internet, but through television, or movie theatres. In extremely poor countries people have access to those files in a particularly defined delivery system. The question would be in my mind that local leftists could deal with these issues in other ways. For example Vietnam appears to deal with the issue of small bandwidth by downloading something for alot of people to use through another delivery system. My main point though is to look at the lack of collaboration that goes on in list servs. The collaboration is threaded conversation. Even within that there is relatively little effort to coordinate communal communication. One could easily look at a web site as more than just a list of archived emails. Why not have blogs of various people on the site. Some people willing to adhere to certain standards. Max Sawicky has a major blog site. Why not both Ian and Jurriaan blog on a site. Ian loves to post a large range of internet based info, and Jurriaan loves to pontificate. As well Mel who is an organizer might benefit from his prolific postings to concentrate on using his voice to bring more people to PEN-L. Or not given the economic nature of the site, those decisions aren't up to me. But my point is that there are many ways to think about collaboration short of big files. Big files can be long postings, but they can also be photos, sound files, and movies. There is a point to building large files which represents many hands, because the historical process of making movies the tools require complex collaboration to serve content well. Michael, Also, in many cases, a paragraph or two can illustrate where a post is going. Shorter posts are better at opening up a dialogue or a multilogue. Doyle, In this case you are under theorizing what 'conversation' is. Why a conversation matters is much more complex than thinking about that email threaded conversation is a summary paragraph that starts the conversation. Or a group process. In my view this is the real heart of Marxist theory. Communal conversation does a certain labor process. For example to call this area that list servs fall into the 'commons' (no one here calls it that, but in economics shared public space is often called the commons) seriously misses what exactly people build in communal conversation. Words and language have long been controlled for distribution, but we still rely upon real conversation as a means of building dissent and social change. Casting our eyes upon this process we might ask why can't we use the tools of production for more powerful social change processes. It is simple to point out that movies and television are very powerful tools to shape the society. But it is not so easy to understand how to use the same tools in a conversational way. This seems to me to be an essentially political economy view to be built upon. Thanks for the response Michael. Like your work on IPR a lot. Doyle
A disappointing American Splendor
Hello All, I saw American Splendor yesterday. I enjoyed reading Pekar in the eighties in part because he focused on working class world I was embedded in, the file clerk in a big corporation, and that Pekar both felt he was a socialist, and a realist in his work. The biggest problem for the movie American Splendor for me was the focus on a minor character who in the words of Joyce Brabner Pekar's wife, the character is 'borderline autistic'. Joyce Brabner character is someone who goes to Palestine to do something about Palestinian rights which is admirably leftist. The autistic character is fundamentally a stereotype of a cognitive disability. I won't go into this here. This is a deep issue that is not even gone into by the disability rights movement very deeply. However this is where the greatest social change can be envisioned. The issue shows up more clearly in terms of knowledge work i.e. artificial intelligence. What is the production process of this movie really telling us? Aside from this deep issue, another glaring issue for movies shows up in the credits. An amusing moment is the pan across various panels of a comic strip identifying for the credits the production staff. If you notice this is linear vector directed string of the panels. On a web site of the same content we don't have to follow a string from panel to panel, but choose the panels in a non-linear pattern appropriate to our interests. One could construct the string anyway one wants. The film ignorant sods that they are, don't have a clue about how to understand what a linear vector quantity can do or distort human cognition. In other words the filmmakers have no sense of contingency. As Marxist we do. For example the love affair with the dialectic. See Steven J. Gould. This movie fails on the level of doing justice for Harvey Pekars respect for working class members in the giant corporate environment. Instead this movie caricatures and stereotypes the working class in the exact working class environment in which I have spent a significant proportion of my life. The movie is never the less arresting as a visual instrument. For example, I really like the dance between the real Harvey and the fictional Harvey. This Brechtian like distanciation is very interesting. Let's go to a bar and get drunk about seeing this movie, and wake up in the morning and as Marxists and blow their asses away with our culture. Doyle
Re: [Fwd: FW: Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood]
Hello All, James Devine wrote, for what it's worth, Jurriaan is new to pen-l and posts a lot of stuff that seems new to me. And then some complain that he posts too much! Jim Doyle I agree with this point, but I would like to dilate on this also. For Michael, how much people post may be directly related to how much the list costs, so I am not asking for someone to bear a greater burden for the personal opinions and thoughts of individuals. Second to this Carrol tends to observe what is readable, so if a posting is two web pages long it is about readable but something longer is not. This has some merit in my view given the form. However, I believe there are other issues also affecting this discussion. If one looks at the business world collaboration applications are a major part of the business climate. From Instant Messaging to the more complex Content Management Systems (CMS) a major component of working groups is the organization of the content and making of documents that are done by more than person. It is dead obvious that two web pages is not adequate to express much content. On the other hand non of us wants to read only book length tomes on the web. It seems to me that these are worthy areas for Marxists, and leftist who were previously known as Marxists but call themselves something else. I'll make some points that I think are relevant as well from my own perspective. The web is a medium in which access to people with disabilities is possible and a part of the technical debate about the web. So a text based list is about as accessible as anything one encounters on the web. That makes it pretty democratic in some senses. But not for those with cognitive disabilities. They may require more visual based solutions to content. Secondly from my point of view, most of the time individuals write these things. We just have the most impoverished view of working together by seeing individuals writing by themselves to produce something for these lists. Instead what the collaboration 'is' is the debate about which underlies Carrol's and Michael's observations. Individual voices are guaranteed to emphasize the divisions. Contrarily, many thoughts can be shared and built together which email lists obscure. For example, if I shot many photographs in a major peace demonstration, my pictures will hardly be different than anyone else's. So If we combined the best from many people we'll have a wonderful collaborative work but not any sense of the individual voice. Individual voices are important because experience gives 'some' people a deeper insight in making pictures and so forth. And that is what a list serves to provide many voices, but many projects really require a variety of persons contributing to be truly powerful. For example to write adequately about racism really requires having more voices than Caucasian men can bring to the issue. One cannot answer on a text based list certain sorts of questions. For example the use of images on a web site is much more useful than to paste images into an email. The form of email lists simply doesn't allow more ambition toward making images. Primarily in terms of bandwidth issues. Finally file size and productivity are related to how much images are used. One can get by fairly well with 35kb pictures posted to a web site. But an email is often far smaller file, mainly due to brevity of expression. A hundred images is viewable in a matter of seconds but according to a 35kb standard text is over 3mb in size reads like a major chore at 3mega bytes of file. So text based lists in some ways hover in the nineteenth century when journals were text and images were an extreme luxury. The communal nature of thinking processes is not well served by email lists. But email lists do encourage global conversation and should not be discouraged until the higher production bandwidth and collaborative tools to reach more ambitious goals are widely available. Doyle
Re: American Splendor
Hello All, Lou's review of Harvey Pekar is another fine posting on U.S. culture. Harvey Pekar caught my attention a long time ago, 1984. Harvey portrayed himself in his comics as something of left oriented, but what I found interesting about Harvey was his eye tuned to the kind of life I've led. Poor neighborhoods, cheap apartments, friendship being the biggest reward of my life. Perhaps most important to me of a rootedness in one area of living in. Harvey aspired to use the comics as literature on a level with the famous writers. And Harvey's work is realist. Interior monologues and examination of what real people say to each other. Often leaving the reader with drawing one's own conclusion. A socialistic sort of aspiration. Another interesting comic book maker is Scott McCloud who offers context and meaning to what Harvey aspires to. Scott's work is about the comic book in a theoretical way. Looking at the pictorial conventions that pervade Euro-American sensibilities, Europe, and Japan, Scott offers the inside understanding that the comic book authoress must assimilate. The Japanese being probably the greatest visual artists of all cultures have a 'vocabulary' much beyond what is typical here in comic books. The comic book industry is the little shop, the out of sight or isolated authoress etc that we associate with writing. Scott gives some decent insight into what people think about to make a good comic book. One of the more interesting aspects of Harvey's work is that he collaborates with a variety of illustrators. Historically with the decline of realism in U.S. art being an illustrator has similarly sunk low in art world esteem. Not so many illustrators have the privilege to work with the ambition that Harvey has. Whatever Robert Crumb's own comics rise to, Harvey is a better writer in my view. The great thing about comics is the combination of pictures with writing. Harvey's focus on realism has more in common with the movies than with what most still picture makers do, or for that matter Harvey's work has to do with the novel. Movies move though. Harvey uses a storyboard to assemble the word structure upon for his collaborators to illustrate. That is quite like Hitchcock for example. It is no surprise that a movie about Harvey has lot's of potential since the basic planning for Harvey's stories follows the same methods that most commercial movies are based on. The question though is of the raw flavor that Harvey brings to a movie could translate into something more intrinsic to a great comic book expansion. I just don't think comics can expand out of their niche. The economics of comic book expression have little access to mass media expression directly. So there just isn't going to be a rise of comics as perhaps Hip Hop was to music. Scott McCloud again writes well about why this is true. I of course like the medium and don't wish it any ill wind by saying the above. Rather I think the internet presents a better outlet for the same sort of aspirations that just can't be consummated in the comic printed media. The big issue? The audience willing to support the serious directions that some people will go to like Harvey. The game playing 'worlds' of video games offer a tantalizing image of where comics could go. The mammoth collaboration and emergence of special personalities augers well for a new kind of narrative structure. The conversational work of art. What does that mean? Another way that the internet frees the medium of the comic book is to take advantage of location in new ways. Where his comic books really represents Cleveland Harvey does not attach his pictures to the world around him in ways that the internet really allows. Sticking a photo upon a telephone pole in the neighborhood is one thing, it is quite another for a writing to be really rooted in a time and location as one might hope for in the internet based mediums. Allowing the artist of a time and place to go into the remembrance of things past. Doyle
Re: Reductionism KH
Hello All, Ken Hanly writes back about Wittgenstein, then towards the bottom conflates me with Churchland. Thus Ken writes, So the claim that brains think makes some sense in our culture especially given that brains do not exist outside the body. But they do exist outside the body. You and Churchland must come from some other culture that is trying to invent words that are connected to nothing but your own violations of English grammar in the interests of reductionism. Brains thinks stinks of reductionist metaphysics. Cheers, Ken Hanly Doyle I find your point amusing. I read Wittgenstein's Investigations at some point but got little out of it. I have been more interested in what he was writing about grammar, psychology, and color. For example W writes, Philosophical Grammar, page 8 21. In a familiar language we experience different parts of speech as different. It is only in a foreign language that we see clearly the uniformity of words. me again, My real interest was peaked by Wittgenstein's Remarks on Color. I got a lot out of an experiment by Edwin Land on color 'Mondrians' which showed me what I think is a pretty clear demonstration of the connectionist structure to seeing color. Wittgenstein writing long before that time is certainly writing about conceptual clarity and cohesion, but missing from 'cohesion' is connectivity which color can show us. But W's attempt to wring out confusion doesn't help me understand why color appears constant under different light conditions. W on Remarks on Colour page 62 prop 326, To observe is not the same thing as to look at or to view. look at this colour and say what it reminds you of. If the colour changes you are no longer looking at the one I meant. One observes in order to see what one would not see if one did not observe. me, W is writing about conceptual clarity no doubt. But in what sense does this help me understand color constancy? On the other hand Hacker seems to me to give a pretty good take on a variety of thinkers. For example I thought Dennett sounded 'Cartesian' to me last year when I replied to some casual remarks Brad De Long made on his web site about Dennett. From Brainstorms, Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology in 1981, to Consciousness Explained in 1991 for example he has a thread in his thinking which is: Dennett, Consciousness Explained, page 300, Some of this structure may indeed be innate, as Chomsky and others have argued, but it really doesn't matter where the dividing line is drawn between structures that are genetically deposited in the brain and those that enter as memes. These structures, real or virtual, lay down some of the tracks on which thoughts can then travel. me Which is also clearly made earlier in 'Brainstorms'. Hacker is able to go into depth on many fronts with Dennett. Dennett is famous for his 'materialist' stance. For being against Cartesians. So how is one supposed to take what looks like Chomsky like innate theory in Dennett? One feels like one is dealing with a major 'Confusion' in Dennett as Hacker constantly relies upon W's finding confusion and destroying confusion. This seems to me to help cut the bullshit in these areas. Damasio wrote a book Descartes Error, Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Hacker's point is that Damasio is splitting the 'brain' from the body wholeness. If one thinks Damasio is rejecting Descartes' theory of mind/body which seems logical from the book title, then the conceptual confusion in Damasio is going to be hard to sort out. Damasio is a very very good writer on the emotional system in human beings. To me Damasio is important because of the profound lack of emotion awareness in Western culture. Damasio in his way is breaking down some aspects of what I think are a severe cultural problem in how we conceive what we are doing when we talk to each other. Essentially thinking words can separate from emotions in the content of expression. I also think Hacker has an insight about Damasio by bringing out the Cartesian attitude toward the brain that 'thinks'. Your reply was nice to receive. thanks, Doyle
Re: Reductionism JB
Hello All, Jurriaan writes, ...The popularisation of associative, analogic thinking and rapid communication, as a substitute for systematic theoretisation, particularly in the social sciences, basically means the forward march of various forms of pragmatism as the dominant epistemic paradigm. ... Doyle, You bring up Postmodernism, and your being against associative, analogical thinking. I think Postmodernism is quite different from a connectionist theory of the brain. The appeal of connectionism at least for me is really how it can make association work so well in some sense. I don't think it is as simple as you draw conclusions about. I have read a lot of Lakoff for example whom I agree is very interesting writer, and having a lot to offer a leftist. Lakoff emphasizes metaphor in almost everything he writes. How else could one take metaphor but association of diverse concepts to explain other things? For me the reason I am interested in the Neuroscience is to get a handle on the labor processes in 'brain-work'. Because I am engaged in trying to express myself in visual media. Now if I take seriously what I just have read in Hacker. My typical way of expressing myself, 'brain-work', is Cartesian sounding. I think Hacker suggests there is a lot of work to be done about such interpenetrations of a mind/body theory into one's every day consciousness. How does one throw off a serious confusion in one's concepts? I don't advocate a thorough going removal of all offending 'Cartesian' thoughts. I don't think Wittgenstein is that useful to a leftist. I think Hacker may have a point that a suitable theory is not available to 'conceptualize' what the labor process is all about that I am fond of calling 'brain' work. I could see this as being a ripe area for the left to do some interesting economic analysis in the old Marxist political economy sense. For example, where Michael Perelman writes about Intellectual Property, there is something in his look at corporate ownership these days which a Cartesian view probably undergirds in the corporate world-view. That area is such a really rich area of the current global economy one has to feel this is where a lot of serious economics could be done. And a non-confused look at these things would be wonderful for the left to bring out. thanks, enjoyed your remarks, very stimulating, Doyle
Reductionism
Hello All, Reductionism is not a philosophy as much as a practice in parts of science. However, the method has drawn substantial fire as a philosophy. I am going to examine one such attack. In this case this is an interesting wide ranging criticism of not Reductionism but of the established Neuroscientific community. A book has come out, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience by M.R. Bennett (a neuroscientist) and P.M.S. Hacker a philosopher. They take on virtually all the famous names of Neuroscience, such as Crick, Churchland, Damasio. This review takes a look at some of this conflict over amongst many things, Reductionism. Hacker is a student of Wittgenstein. For those who know of Wittgenstein, it is no revelation that the Vienna Positivist philosophical group were influenced greatly by Wittgenstein. These Positivists and the Anglo American analytical philosophy movement inspired by English Cambridge philosophy tried to bring 'science' to philosophy. Hacker turns his back on these roots to attack 'scientism' in Neuroscience. This book is fairly readable. Given the subject matter especially. However, the subject matter of neuroscience has been growing in importance in U.S. culture at least since the mid 1970's when it began to appear that the brain would reveal it's secrets. The authors of this book look at a broad range of underlying thinking behind this movement. They assert that four conceptual commitments form a crypto-Cartesian picture of the mind. The Cartesian split between mind and body according to these authors permeates the Neuroscientific investigation of the human brain. The four assertions are: 1. The mental is a private domain. Kosslyn, Searle, Damsio, 2. The private can be understood by private introspection. William James, Humphrey, 3. The domain of the private is accessible only to the subject. Searle, Blakemore, Crick, 4. Psychological predicates name inner states of the 'mind'. Crick, Edelman, To which Bennett and Hacker counter these four rejections of Crypto-Cartesianism; 1. Truly someone experiences pain themselves, but the experience is shared by others. 2. Introspection is not the source of knowledge about the 'inner'. 3. The subject does not have access to anything inner at all, she has pains not access to pains. 4. Names of inner experiences do not explain inner experiences they are associated with. As one can see above very substantial criticisms of the underlying theory of Neuroscience are being made. The above comments of mine are adapted from pages 87 and 88 of the text. The authors say that in many many cases that various assertions are factually wrong. The authors therefore are extremely controversy provoking. Oddly too coming from a follower of Wittgenstein, the authors are attacking what they call 'scientism' They take great pains to describe 'reductionism' and the problems they see with it. Primarily that Reductionism claims universal truths of the parts over the whole. This rejection of the parts as explaining the whole comes explicitly for example where they say 'the brain does not think', the woman thinks. The mind does not think the person thinks. The brain has no, - to reiterate for emphasis, - has no capacity to think, and the concept of the 'brain' thinking is factually wrong. Perhaps this makes sense given our culture if one observes that the brain cannot exist outside the body. Otherwise these claims seem like rather strange claims about the brain. Page 290, .For there is, and can be, no such thing as a private sample by reference to which an expression in a language is defined and which functions as a standard for the correct use of a word. Not only could other speakers of the language not know what the word, as used by the speaker, means; the speaker himself could not know what he means by it either. And, indeed, it would mean nothing at all. In the appendix two major American philosophers are 'refuted' in detail about their Cartesian thinking. Daniel Dennett, and John Searle. The Denne tt critique is an excellent description of Dennett's thoughts, and then the attack upon his 'crypto-cartesian' theories. The authors emphasize the whole to explode the 'conceptual' confusion that for example 'reductionism' bring to Neuroscience'. They point to the job of philosophy to create conception, and destroy confusion. The point they make that the philosopher does concepts certainly leads to a whiff of idealism on their part, though given their commitment to materialism this seems contradictory.Surely this book stands out as a contribution to thought about consciousness and opens the door to serious challenge to current established beliefs in the extreme. I recommend this book. My own received opinions were shaken. One can of course run into people who will challenge one's preconceptions. I remember my few encounters with James Blaut over the issue of the modularity of the mind. Be that as it may this book is an
Re: The Quiet American
Hello All, Louis Proyect wrote an interesting and quite good review of the recent movie, The Quiet American. In passing LP writes: LP, While the novelist can create a deeper reality through such words, the cinematographer is somewhat limited in what he or she can do. Despite various tricks at their disposal, the camera is ultimately a passive mechanism to record the way that things look. Doyle A bold assertion indeed, but I both wonder what that can mean, and think the concept is confused. This seems like an unexamined thought that someone might have about seeing movies that on a thoughtful turn would be worth questioning. What does it mean to say watching a movie is passive? The internet thinker, Clay Shirky, has opined that most media is audience based. A movie is shown in the theatre or on TV and we cannot talk back to the image. The polar opposite being group process media like this listserv for PEN-L. In this sense LP is right about movies in the current culture are audience based and passive. But what does passive mean in a bit more explicit way? To be active in communication is to speak and listen. To share a conversation. Therefore, LP is claiming ultimately that movies are incapable of being used in a conversational way. That is what I don't agree with. For example, if one took a video camera, and walked about with it pointing here and there, the audience would see the motion of the camera person through the world. They would get it that the camera operator was active, not passive. So any movie is at least not passive for one person, the operator. In the production process, the editor takes the movie and cuts it up and re-arranges the structure from the raw footage to a finished movie. The editor interacts with the movie, and is not passive. The editor makes the content of a movie work, conceptually. So there are at least two examples of movies not being passive. A movie therefore is not ultimately passive. But the industry is audience driven. Now if LP read the book The Quiet American, that also would be a passive experience. So the writer is not necessarily doing something with writing that a movie maker does by showing in theatres. Rather the structure of the media that leads to an audience rather than a conversational group is the key issue. In order to use a movie in a non-passive way we would have to interact with it. The word interact is one of those neutral sounding words from science used to describe various computer activities. So the word does not adequately convey what would be active about using a movie in some sense by which LP meant not passive. A much more clear word is conversational. Now if we do do that, assume not being passive is being conversational, does that get us anywhere understanding movies? Yes in an everyday sense. For example, if one is having a video conferencing in a business meeting, we can see someone talking to us. Their face shoots information at us, more or less like movies, we see the emotion that comes out. And we can literally talk to each other. That is not a passive sense at all. The point here that LP might bring up is the conceptual possibilities inherent in language over that of the movie. For example we don't edit the video conference in real time. But books take forever to write, and a long time to read. So we could compare writing to movies and find rough parallels without directly addressing a possible concern that LP might raise. On another level, again using the video conference in a business meeting, we might prepare a power point slide show which is displayed through the moving imagery. We might do any number of manipulations of the images. And we could share those resources over the web and both work on the same document. In that sense we actually might consider that pictures and movies has some general properties more powerful than writing. For example, in an ordinary sense, we might be walking down the street with a blind person trying mightily to describe what we see. A difficult task because unexpected sights constantly challenge us for some possible word to describe the wealth of imagery flying past as we walk along rather slowly. But if I brought a video camera along, the camera could record the imagery readily with no trouble. Giving us a real insight about how much more powerful a movie might be in a non-passive way than would be writing. just some thoughts on the ultimate nature of a movie. Doyle
Re: open-source teaching?
Greetings Economists, Jim Devine forwards and them comments, Pen-l alumnus Tavis Barr asks: I've created a lot of my own teaching materials that I put on the web, especially for my stats class, where I have lecture notes, exercises, review sheets, practice exams, etc. I'd love to find a way to share this with other profs in a collaborative kind of way, maybe save them some work, save myself some work with other people's material. Specifically to have an open source kind of approach where I can give material to my students without charging for it. Maybe even write a textbook with 15 other people, each taking on a chapter. Do you know any online (or physical-world) spaces where people collaborate on teaching materials in this kind of way? I'd like to know, too. Jim Devine. Doyle, Seems to me this message is conflating the idea of Open Source software with Teaching materials. How is one supposed to go back into something written like a book and correct the book like one is able to do with the code for operating systems in Open Source? There is a method for doing that with Open Source software, but normally we don't go back to books and do that. Of course the idea that we could treat books like open source software is worth theorizing about. Secondly, what does collaborate mean here? Collaborate has specific meanings in terms of on-line technology. IT has been involved with 'collaboration' for quite awhile. Asynchronous forms like writing a paper to be published on-line, and synchronous forms which is like a web abased phone conference between a group of people in a staff meeting. In my view this is an important area for the left to do something. I'm pasting in some recent articles about Sony Corporation moves to use the 'Grid' for their gaming environments. These grids are meant to combine up to millions of people at once. That large scale collaboration is what I think ought to be investigated economically from a left point of view. The Grid and open source have some suggestions for the left about how to understand organizing brain work labor. thanks, Doyle Saylor http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8014-2003Feb26?language=printer washingtonpost.com Butterfly.net Snags Game Deal With Sony W.Va. Firm, IBM Hope to Attract Millions of PlayStation Fans to Their Network By Nicholas Johnston Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, February 27, 2003; Page E05 ... The deal, expected to be announced today, will allow PlayStation game developers to create games that can run over Butterfly's network. This expands our developer community and user base exponentially, said Butterfly.net chief executive David Levine. Now we're just part of the whole Sony economy, and they've shipped 50 million PS2s. ... In May 2002, Butterfly.net and IBM teamed to create an online video-game network based on grid computing -- tightly linked networks of servers that can support millions of players at once. Traditional online games are divided among servers that can handle only a few thousand players each. If you look under the covers, what it is, is a lot of small side games collected into one environment, Penberthy said. David started all this by saying, 'Let's design something for a million online gamers.' PlayStation 2 taps into grid computing By David Becker Staff Writer, CNET News.com February 26, 2003, 9:00 PM PT http://news.com.com/2100-1043-986195.html ... Butterfly was formed last year to tackle the growing logistical challenges behind hosting online games, which can have tens of thousands of concurrent players and require hundreds of servers. Butterfly uses a grid computing approach, in which multiple servers work together as a virtual supercomputer, seamlessly shifting processing tasks among individual machines. Games have instant access to additional server space and other resources as they attract more players. IBM, which provides servers, physical space and software for the Butterfly project, has been the most active corporate proponent of grid computing as a way to make networked computing more reliable and efficient. ... Reliability is much more of a factor for the PS2 because as a consumer-electronics device, there's a lot less tolerance for glitches, lag and all the other annoyances with PC games, Levine said. It's really got to work if you want it to take off into a mass-market thing. Butterfly.net also gives developers some of the advantages of the closed Xbox Live network that Microsoft built for its Xbox game console, such as a single player ID that can be used for accessing multiple games. The grid solves a lot of problems, but the developer is still in control of the content--they can make whatever deals they want as far as marketing, distribution, accounting, Levine said. ... end of quotes
Re: open-source teaching ref # 35147
Greetings Economists, Thanks for bringing this up Tavis. Something I've wanted to see discussed for quite awhile. In my view an important topic for the left to develop some practice in. So your initiative is welcome from my point of view entirely. I think there are some questions of course to pose. Where Tavis writes, Tavis, Open-source publications can be malleable. For example, the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) (www.linuxdoc.org) is a series of documents -- of highly variable quality -- that help users negotiate the Linux operating system and related software. Doyle, Why such methods haven't migrated to publishing textbooks already seems a highly practical point to make here. I think this requires a close economic examination of the issues that arise. The essay that Bill Lear forwarded on his list of URL resources observes the problems with textbook publishing through open source. It is not just a matter of document publishing in Open Source being malleable. To quote from that essay; http://www.lightandmatter.com/article/article.html The most surprising result of my survey, however, was that there were no books that were really open source in the sense in which the term is used in the open-source movement. Doyle, A text book is a book as opposed to computer software and web based applications. Are we writing for the web or are we writing for print? The Print industry was designed to fend off pirating texts and that might explain why Open Source publishing has been difficult. One can publish to the web and print from there of course, but I don't think you are advocating strictly that. You bring up the WIKI community as an example which is an on-line community process. So let's just see the conflict between a book and a web site. Jakob Nielsen writes about reading the web (Designing Web Usability, page 101) Keep your Texts Short Research has shown that reading from computer screens is about 25 percent slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know about this human-factors research usually say that they feel unpleasant when reading online text. As a result, people don't want to read a lot of text from comput6er screens. Therefore, you should write 50 percent less text--because it's not only a matter of reading speed but also a matter of feeling good. We also know that users don't like to scroll: one more reason to keep pages short. Doyle, I think clarifying whether or not something is a book or web based publication has a great deal to do with the success or failure of a text book open source project. I do want to see something like this happen. I think the collaborative process can be explored on the left in a very positive way. Thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: open-source teaching? Ref # 35137
Greetings Economists, The remarks pasted in below the signature have several problems in an 'open source' sense. Bill Lear posted a site -http://www.lightandmatter.com/article/article.html - that describes the problems an individual author had with open source book publishing. That essay considers whether the source might be a book or an on line publication, what open source publishing requirements. The list below from Kelley starts by advocating sources of collaborative teaching projects which while fine have little to do with the concept of open source, and continues to conflate Open Source with Collaboration in a way that makes it hard to understand what is at issue. How are we to understand why text book publishing is retarded in comparison to other Open Source projects? Let's discuss collaboration technology in a different thread. Wikipedia is more an archive of writings on the same topic rather than a carefully crafted single standard source of information derived in a collaborative (collaboration techniques variable to the Open Source product) manner under specific commercial licensing agreements characteristic of Open Source theory about copyright. There may be virtues to having multiple threads to an Encyclopedia article, but that neglects the standards and rights issue that Open Source promotes. Kelley writes there are plenty of Open Source book publishing information on the web which assertion is addressed cogently in the essay cited above from Bill Lear. A quote from that source; The most surprising result of my survey, however, was that there were no books that were really open source in the sense in which the term is used in the open-source movement. Doyle, There are little Open Source books being published on the web. What is being published rarely meets the needs of teachers as yet, even though a potential may be there for that. Why? What holds book publishing back? Open Source is a business model about copy rights. Open Source (given the limitations of volunteers being responsible for coding software) does well globally for operating systems (including documentation of the software) because the cost benefit of the software is highly competitive in relation to Microsoft products and Unix products. IBM, for example, has assigned phalanxes of programmer skills to supporting the Open Source software that is of commercial interest to IBM as a tool against their competitive rival Microsoft. There is no such similar support for book publishing, and the issue of digital publishing is not adequately addressed in Kelley's links. In my view there may be a strategic combination of technology limitations to displays in monitors that makes on line book publishing not acceptable and the cost of printing compared to strictly on line Open Source projects favors established book printing practices. Thanks, Doyle Saylor Kelley remarks pasted below Kelley writes, Jim, collaborative teaching projects can use Web collaboration software such as userland: http://www.userland.com/ phpnuke: http://phpnuke.org/ wiki: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb Wikipedia is an example of a collaborative encyclopedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Our_Replies_to_Our_Critics (interesting response to crticis) there are also plenty of open source book projects. i can't find the link for my favorite, at the moment, but googling on open source books and open source publishing brings plenty of results to peruse. http://opensourceschools.org/index.php?topic=books http://opensourceschools.org/index.php?topic=apps There's an education and technology list that Iused to sub to that would probably be helpful for answering questions about collaboration, open source, etc. Kelley
New KPFA Radio show on Disability Rights 'Pushing Limits'
Hello Economists, Starting in late April on Wednesday Afternoons at 2pm, San Francisco Bay Area radio station KPFA will broadcast 'Pushing Limits' made by the Pushing Limit Collective. 94.1 FM on the Radio dial. One of our first broadcasts will feature Marta Russell former Pen L participant on disabled prisoners. Pen-L member Doyle Saylor will examine Web Accessibility for disabled people, and Disability and the Arts. Other programs by the collective will look at Iraq and disability and the War, Paratransit, Housing for disabled people, employment for disabled people, Anti-disabled people movements centered around ethicists like Peter Singer, disability and sexuality, etc. This program is an on-going news and analysis program aimed at giving a voice to serious disabled rights, economic analysis on an in-depth level, and an organizing tool. Further information periodically posted. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Re: Re: Re: Lerner and a split in San Franciscodemo
Greetings Economists, JKS writes, I didn't think I said anything about broadcast TV either, apart from its being too expensive. I really don't know what you are driving at. jks Doyle, Your position I am critical (mildly and friendly) of centered upon the boring quality of what the left puts out. So let's talk about that. What can we say? For example you use the word, boring, which is an emotional response on your part. I take that seriously in terms of understanding what is to be done with respect to what the left needs to do. But what you do say isn't very penetrating to the depths of the problem? To paraphrase you 'I'm bored with what I read, and hear the left say coming from the stage in mass rallies'. So how could we consider that in a larger sense? The particular instances I associate with your position are with journals, Fox network political talk shows, and mass rallies. Fox (right wing television) is entertaining, left events are dull and boring. So what are we to do from a left perspective? I'm saying that to take seriously the emotional content of media we have to consider the interactivity content of media. For example journals unlike broadcast television do not well carry emotional content. Face based communications structures like broadcast television communicate the emotional content of communications structures albeit in a one way non conversational technique. That is one reason why broadcast television come across as more interesting than written media. The boundaries imposed upon the whole process as far as the left is concerned is the conversational limits of what media produce. It is one thing to know how someone feels by watching a movie, and it is another thing to make a media conversational. Despite it's limitations carrying emotional content, emails can have something like a conversational quality to them. That is important to make things more interesting to human beings. That is what it takes to make organizing people happen. So I am taking your basic thrust to make an emotional comment about left discourse and I am pointing at what it takes to move the intellectual work forward. Two basic elements improve the emotional content in media we produce. We must utilize face based methods of communicating (so that emotional clarity can be understood), and Secondly emphasize the conversational structures that we could build. These together would massively improve the left's media communication. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Lerner and a split in San Francisco demo Ref # PEN-L:34965
by Lessig in which Lessig attacked copyright laws. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Re: Lerner and a split in San Francisco demo
Greetings Economists, JKS responds, I said nothing whatsoever about speakers at mass rallies, a topic I was not addressing. As matter of fact I do think speakersa t mass demos are boring, but since the right doesn't hold mass rallies, by and large, there's no contrast class to compare right wing to left wing speakers. jks Doyle, I thought from reading your remarks elsewhere you would say as you do that mass demos are boring these days. I think expressing how you feel is not a problem. But the other side of that coin is to get beyond the specificity of a feeling to understand how the left could manufacture information that fits your (or anybody's) emotional needs. Can we see this 'describing a feeling' as developing the work process which big mass demonstrations entail? In your words find a way to get beyond the boring nature of speech making one encounters these days? Certainly in a large abstract way what Michael Perelman addresses in some of his economic texts, i.e. the structure and production of intellectual property. Television and mass demo platform speeches are not interactive. Do not reflect a model of conversation between people. Making information interactive is a production issue as well as a concern in how a left might be built. For the left the more ordinary people can speak up the better if we take seriously the emotional content in how the technology might be used interactively. From a technological perspective one could address that need for satisfying emotional content, making our position more interesting, not more boring, by addressing the interactive nature of information being exchanged in conversation. Research in collaboration processes points toward this area, i.e synchronous, asynchronous techniques for information production. Suppose we emulated video games and had 100,000 people on line as well as marching? How does your comment about how you feel point at that? You haven't explored these areas, and instead have concentrated in a lack of talent on the left for shining in puerile broadcast television. That games aren't boring and why isn't on your agenda for this discussion of feeling coming out of the left? Am I being harsh toward you? I respect you enough to bring up differences to debate, not tear you down. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: RE: RE: Lerner and a split in San Francisco demo
Greetings Economists, Max replies to Jim Devine, Lots of people have cited stories that reflect badly on his personal habits and organizational style. But the fact remains that he has put something real together, and most of us are just posting to the Internet. Doyle Joanna says he got his fifteen minutes of speechifying. More than anybody else in San Francisco. He has a bully platform being able to write for the WSJ. Your point was that giving him his place on the platform was to unite the movement (bring the mainstream in). I don't agree with that position. The question is what unites the movement? How do you do that? Your argument is based upon the way those platforms (the mechanics of mass events which is a production process of intellectual labor) are organized in order to express the 'unity' of the left (bring the mainstream in). Literally to take the faulty format of the stage at the head of these mass rallies and use that as a metaphor about what is unity. Mr. Lerner's entry into the movement was his special perspective on Answer, but Mr. Lerner is not much of a friend to working class people. He doesn't make any special mileage with me with his attack on the integrity of the demonstrations in the middle of the most important Anti-war demonstration of the last 30 years. You argue Lerner has an organization that makes him a bigger shot than those who write on these lists. Let's organize then. And organize in a way that unites the left. I think Mr. Lerner is not interested in uniting the left. I'm saying to you that how we produce these events has a great deal with how we build the unity of the left. The kind of intellectual product that comes from mass stage events does not reflect an adequate process to build movements. Big masses of people come to these events and melt away again. The organizational means to build things is sadly lacking in these processes. I advocate the discussion of the one way technique of big rallies or the one way technology of broadcast television that the left can't organize unity of the working class with those great megahorn approaches. To understand that we have to examine the weakness of your assertion about how to build the unity of the movement through giving Mr. Lerner his Warhol moment. Max writes, The underlying issue in the Lerner/ANSWER flap is whether the anti-war movement will be steered towards or away from support for a right of return for Palestinians, thereby denying the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Doyle No the underlying issue is whether or not the movement unites the working class in it's own organizational interests. When we have a unified left we'll have the opportunity to reflect upon the merits of the political position that Mr. Lerner espouses. Personally I don't know anyone who likes Lerner. What I would prefer to see is something of what JKS wants which is to address the issues of how we like (the emotional content) or don't like these mass events in order to understand how to build the movement. I don't see what Lerner brought to building a movement with his fifteen minutes on that platform. What is that fifteen minutes worth? Your political issue of fifteen minutes in San Francisco doesn't count for nothing with the average person on the street that could be organized. I brought this up in the first place to have some meaty issues in the left part of the headlines to bring to an economic analysis of how to understand building the movement. Not to tear you down, but to look at the depths of what matters to serious political people and to argue for building the movement. I am taking the Information Technology available for us to use and think about what we could do to organize the movement. The fifteen minutes given to Lerner built nothing for the movement. We have an upsurge happening in the United States. A fine time to consider how to make a real live left. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Lerner and a split in San Francisco demo
Hello All, I wanted to comment on two theories about large demonstrations. Representative of the first theory is Max Sawicky who to paraphrase in regard to Lerner's accusations of being banned at the San Francisco march, that Lerner ought to be allowed to speak as a way of advancing main stream unity with the Anti-war movement. I think this theory is in error in analyzing the structure of mass events. Representative of the second theory is JKS on speakers at big demo's are boring, and the left lacks good speakers compared to the right. I think JKS is wrong about the reasons for why mass events are boring. It is my view that one could look at the production technique for large demonstrations and draw other conclusions. We are at a transition point for mass communications. We still use loud speakers from a central rallying point to make enough noise to be heard at large out door venues. I am slightly deaf and usually I can't hear what is being said or the noise is so deafening I wish I couldn't hear the speeches. Technically centralized stages for addressing crowds leaves a lot to be desired. Specifically to Max's point about allowing Lerner to speak, many people have said it is up to the people organizing demonstrations to decide who speaks and why. Not enough time in the day for a lot of people to address the crowd. A practical limit to the time limits of presenting words to a lot of people at once. That summarizes the problem with large demonstrations that my reference to a transition point indicates. We are about to see a time when the average person can carry a cell phone to an event and get the event through their cell phone. Why do we need to have a single stage presenting information as mass demonstrations currently do? I see no reason why Lerner has to be an issue in that circumstance. The way we organize and produce information in real time is the key issue, not whether or not some individual thinks that their relationship to other groups is being abridged. The media eliminates spatial considerations to communications. That gives us very new ways to understand how to communicate with large crowds at once. Most speakers are recruited because a plethora of interests are being solicited for their reactions to events in a given rally. Why not increase that tendency in such events. Manufacture even more from various groups during a large event for that event. Marshall hundreds of reactions in complex interplays of group dynamics that tens of thousands of on-lookers can observe? To JKS objection that current left wing speaking is boring, it seems to me that JKS is not creatively engaged with how the media works. I'm not condemning the subjective reaction to how entertaining or interesting current left public voices are, but it seems to me that as the above proposal indicates it is the techniques of production that matter in the current period. For example it is well known in mathematics that most mathematicians cannot keep up with the whole field of mathematics. Technical expertise usually is not sufficient to know anything but rather narrow niches in human endeavors. Further from a left perspective the amount of potential skilled participants is far less than the pool of talented individuals in the general population. All in all what is presented at large demonstrations is not so much a problem with talented persons capable of scintillating word mongering, but the difficulty of using such venues in ways that compete with the power of internet tools of expression. That such large scale events beg for hybrid uses of communications that allow us to apply truly global sources of information. So that talent can be gathered from a much larger pool to express what needs to be said in a given event. To summarize, both Max Sawicky and JKS assert problems which given internet methods of production are not problems in mass communications. Big events need no longer present a single focal point with a limited list of speakers, and that releases into the mass gathered a much more varied diverse source of information all can find attuned to their needs more specifically. The question of talent and originality of thought being expressed is a consequence of the manner in which thought is being produced in such events, not the failure of the U.S. left. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Peter Singer versus disability advocate in the NY Times mag
Hello All, The following article follows some of the arguments made here on Pen-L about Singer and the ethics of killing disabled babies. I'll let the activist speak for herself. She admits to being caught out to racist views at one point in her article, so let's not pretend that being disabled is free from prejudice, nor forgive prejudice when it appears. I want to put forward a brief comment about disability rights though. The most difficult area for disability rights has been and will continue for some time to be cognitive disabilities. Learning disabilities like attention deficit disorder are making some headway in the public access, but severe developmental disabilities remain the area where people like Singer can argue about the ethics of killing disabled people. Singer means society has a right to execute the disabled in various free floating categories as infants, teenagers, and adults. See the magazine article below. The critical juncture is human attention related to developmental disabilities that at this moment the disability rights movement struggles with. In psychology the research in how human beings acquire language is called 'joint attention'. Meaning that most people share their attention with each other in particular ways through language. Many people with cognitive disabilities have difficulties with sharing attention. For example autistics are famous for their inability to theorize what another mind is. Yet autistics have phenomenal ability to focus their attention if not share that attention. Which implies that the work done with attention is much more than what we get out of able bodied shared attention. That the cognitive work of attention is hardly plumbed by the standards of able bodied shared attention. So building a society that is more inclusive for disabled people requires considerable development of how attention structure is shareable between people and the sort of cognitive work that might be related to a new system of attention structure work in language like sharing. For some people we must build an attention structure into the established communication structure that accommodates to their attentional needs. The basic concept is find attention structure in a cognitive disability and attach a communications channel to that attention structure so that the cognitively disabled person can 'share' attention with the society we are building. Though what they produce may be of an order of magnitude different from what most people want or expect. NY times article selected quotes is pasted below. thanks, Doyle Saylor http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/magazine/16DISABLED.html?pagewanted=print; position=top February 16, 2003 Unspeakable Conversations By HARRIET McBRYDE JOHNSON He insists he doesn't want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened. Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it's . . . almost fun. Mercy! It's like ''Alice in Wonderland.'' ... He also says he believes that it should be lawful under some circumstances to kill, at any age, individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn't consider them ''persons.'' What does it take to be a person? Awareness of your own existence in time. The capacity to harbor preferences as to the future, including the preference for continuing to live. ... Q: Was he totally grossed out by your physical appearance? A: He gave no sign of it. None whatsoever. Q: How did he handle having to interact with someone like you? A: He behaved in every way appropriately, treated me as a respected professional acquaintance and was a gracious and accommodating host. Q: Was it emotionally difficult for you to take part in a public discussion of whether your life should have happened? A: It was very difficult. And horribly easy. Q: Did he get that job at Princeton because they like his ideas on killing disabled babies? A: It apparently didn't hurt, but he's most famous for animal rights. He's the author of ''Animal Liberation.'' Q: How can he put so much value on animal life and so little value on human life? That last question is the only one I avoid. I used to say I don't know; it doesn't make sense. But now I've read some of Singer's writing, and I admit it does make sense -- within the conceptual world of Peter Singer. But I don't want to go there. Or at least not for long. ... Then, 2001. Singer has been invited to the College of Charleston, not two blocks from my house. He is to lecture on ''Rethinking Life and Death.'' I have been dispatched by Not Dead Yet, the national organization
Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: RE: a slip of the Fox noose
Greetings Economists, JKS responds about my ironing habits, JKS, Don't be irony-impaired, Doyle. Doyle, ;-) JKS Fish would eat you and your milieu for an appetizer. Your bet's idle, though, because he wouldn't consider you worth him time. Anyone who is familiar with his writing and speaking knows that he's brilliant, fast, funny, well-informed, and glib as hell. One thing about that kind of rep is that means you don't have to turn it on inless you want to. Doyle Two comments, First my milieu is the mean streets where being too impolitic depends upon the street corner. I hang with different crowds, but you telling me Fish can trade gibes with dykes? Asians, Black gang members, people in the disability movement? Which segues into my main point, Years ago in one of my many endeavors to get health insurance when I wasn't working I joined the Writers Union for the benefits even though I am a lousy writer. A forgiving lot they are, but they had a one day seminar series on how to get a job in various areas. I've never told this story either to anyone. One of the seminars was on script writing for Hollywood, which was an hour of some guy who was making a living at that. He stands up in front of the crowd floridly displaying like those Australian lizards that rare up on their hind legs and run like crazy across the desert floor with their neck flesh out like a lions mane this guy flaired his enormous ego out for all in the audience to take in. Pacing in front of us like that was no way to win my heart but danged if this ego monster didn't say a wise thing. To paraphrase 'there are tons of smart writers trying to sell their work'. Forget smart forget wit, there so many people with those credentials not getting any work.' Just like beauty it was just a commodity in Hollywood where you could buy plenty more where that came from.' The basic problem with your comment is that no one is that smart above the rest of humanity. You put Fish in a room full of dykes and see who is the wittier. You put Fish on street corner in East Oakland in a crowd of young rappers and see who is the most quick on the draw in talk. Does that diminish either person, I think not. The format of Talk Television is profoundly limited. I spent years of my life considering what it means to make a movie. If you tell me that a set up situation like that is cleaning someone's clock intellectually and I just feel like we aren't considering the depth of intellectual issues that television presents. In that low level, I am sorry but I don't take Fish's performance seriously. On the other hand as usual you are your feisty self about any old argument, and I enjoy what you have to say if I don't agree. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Copying and Sharing files
room. It's really kind of hard to say what it is except maybe a virtual neighborhood. A number of features are built into There to prevent the sort of harsh treatment and harassment that women often receive in chat rooms and online virtual worlds. One such control permits members to ignore an irritating avatar while replacing their own avatar with a computer-controlled fake. www.there.com Doyle The above web site of the company produces this video game says they have been building this for four years. Obviously the industry is not mature. The central point though is how they are approaching making the commodity to sell to women. I believe this may be an important clue in building online political resources that women can use to build a left movement with women as the foundation of the movement. There are many more things to say, but I would like to point at some key components, Avatars built to show emotion, Social networks that minimize Testosterone (indicating hormonal shape to communication structure ignored by previous social movement) based harassment, Rapid building of groups in simple fashion, Resources and software support needed to build such communal resources, File sharing necessities in communications, thanks, Doyle Saylor
Marta Russel on Helen Keller
Greetings Economists, Marta Russel used to be on this list. This essay analyzes a fold hero in the U.S. Helen Keller in later life recoiled from many of her progressive views. Marta makes a powerful summary of an icons life. Well worth the read. Not so much for the economic information but in understanding what defines disabled people and how difficult it is to fight the prejudice. Marta beautifully talks about what the underlying fight for disabled rights means. From a Marxist perspective. Also a tidbit about Annie Sullivan. The famous teacher of Hellen Keller as dramatized in the Miracle Worker was put into an orphanage as child and caged in the basement as incorrigible. A woman janitor noticed a certain look in Annie's eyes where everyone else saw only an 'animal'. This woman talked to Annie and gave her food. With time Sullivan began to respond to being treated decently and the Janitors efforts to get a new hearing for the mentally 'retarded' Sullivan eventually got her out of a living hell. Otherwise Sullivan would have lived out her life in a cage in institutions. The example of the janitor is what gave Sullivan the insight to teach Keller. A sense of respect for workers that Keller might have gained from her famous teacher. thanks, Doyle Saylor ZNet Commentary Coining Keller January 01, 2003 By Marta Russell Alabama has a new state quarter bearing the image of Helen Keller. To be so coined, Keller out-rated a moon rocket and a Cherokee chief. This quarter will be the first US coin in circulation to include Braille! How come that took so long? Less cause for celebration are the articles announcing the coin where Keller is described as an Alabama native who overcame blindness and deafness to become a writer and educator. Immediately the emails from disability list serves were buzzing about the Keller coin, in particular about the press's description of Keller overcoming her impairments. Rus Cooper-Dowda from Florida wrote What? She OVERCAME 2 disabilities and tried another one after that? She OVERCAME the other entries and won the Kentucky Derby? In case that objection is not clear, I will restate that for disability activists it is not a matter of overcoming impairment so much as confronting prejudices and discrimination blind, deaf, and other impaired persons face in society. I wondered if the state of Alabama, in so honoring Keller, had it on record that she was a socialist? Did these officials know that she was a member of the Socialist Party and later joined the Industrial Workers of the World, supported the Russian Revolution, women's suffrage and had come out against the First World War? More likely the Alabama officials' view of Keller, as do most Americans', comes from the movie The Miracle Worker, a film that portrayed her as an inspirational overcomer. Keller's endearing trait for Americans, it seems, was that she succeeded despite her impairment with the aide of her nondisabled teacher, Anne Sullivan, precisely what disability pride activists object to today. Socialists also retain this image of Keller and of impairment generally. A prominent left publication's introduction of Keller, for instance, stated recently that Keller struck blind and deaf while a toddler, overcame her disabilities with the help of her teacher ... Emma Goldman commended Keller for overcom[ing] the most appalling physical disability. Goldman, of course, was a stout eugenicist and a disability-phobic who found the slightest impairment cause for eradication. This only shows us that such old attitudes are still pervasive enough to require counters such as Dan Wilkins, aka, wheelchair boy, also Board Chair of The Ability Center of Greater Toledo. Wilkins wrote what [Keller] OVERCAME was bigotry, societal alienation and stigma, and poor support from Alabama's social service system ... but we'll never see it written up like that... Indeed even though Keller was the national figurehead for the conservative American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), and was considered successful in her superstar fundraising position there, she was not a self-supporting socialist. She was dependent on the support of wealthy philanthropists and was nearly always hurting for money - a matter which would cause Keller to curb her more radical activities later in years in order to preserve her affiliation with the AFB charity (charity running against the grain of true socialist principles) and hence, her source of income. Indeed, Keller posed a sea of contradictions. Keller's story offers a way to elaborate upon the contrast between what we might term disability consciousness and the lack of it. Personally I have lauded Keller for her socialist commitment to economic revolution yet must remain conflicted over her definitive message. Sadly, she was not able to envision disability emancipation. My greatest disappointment was upon learning that Keller was a supporter of eugenics, the pseudo science that sought
Re: a Perelman rant ref # 33593
Greetings Economists, Rant or not Michael's statement is important. For example where Michael writes, Michael Perelman, For example, virtually no new technology is the product of a single person or even a single corporation. Ideas and discoveries, what Marx called ³universal labor,² draw upon a multitude of sources. Sorting out who deserves legitimate credit for any technology is impossible. Just consider the complexity of a large software system with 100,000 components. It can use hundreds of previously patented techniques. Because each patent search costs about a thousand dollars, searching for all the possible patent potholes in the program could easily run well over $1 million, and that far exceeds the cost of writing the program.18 Doyle I've been writing recently about the principle of sharing communication through principles of passionate social connection. This drive in U.S. capitalism to Intellectual Property Rights (driven by the barbaric Movie Industry) fundamentally attacks the basis for speech itself and social connection. We share words themselves to the beginning of human society. It is my view we are being given new grounds to fight upon. We are to soon see that we must everywhere carry with us our connection to the communication system. The connection we have with others is going to be dominated by these portable devices. And in that need will be the hand of the capitalist upon every shoulder demanding their payment for all Intellectual Property whereever and whenever. I'm going to quote once more from Michael's essay because I think it important to further explore here and throughout the left, Michael, While energy sources are the central to maintaining life itself, let alone the capitalist mode of production, intellectual property rights are now every bit as important in maintaining the international financial balances of the U.S. economy. Domestic access to oil will remain important, of course, so long as the comfortable classes continue to ride in their SUVs and heat and cool their mega-mansions, but the energy requirements for the domestic production of material goods becomes increasingly less important as production moves to low-wage peripheral areas of the world. Intellectual property rights have become the financial counterweight to deindustrialization, because the revenues that they generate help to balance the massive imports of material goods. Unfortunately, this means of payment still remains woefully insufficient to reimburse the rest of the world for the imports to United States. The strengthening of intellectual property rights is perhaps the most pressing U.S. foreign policy objective today, possibly even more so than oil. The government¹s efforts go well beyond shoring up the legal rights of holders of this kind of intellectual property. The full weight of its power is brought to bear against all evildoers who would dare to create knock offs of a Disney cartoon or a Nike ³swoosh.² In the words of Thomas Friedman, perhaps the most enthusiastic proponent of globalization at the New York Times: The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist‹McDonald¹s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley¹s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine CorpsWithout America on duty, there will be no America Online.19 Lest the skeptical reader dismiss Friedman¹s clever phrasing as nothing more than a rhetorical flourish, consider the words of William Cohen, the secretary of defense in the Clinton administration. In February 1999, upon his arrival in Seattle‹a city that a few months later became a symbol of resistance to the policies that he was sent to advocate‹to speak to the employees of Microsoft, the secretary told reporters, ³I will point out that the prosperity that companies like Microsoft now enjoy could not occur without having the strong military that we have.²20 Friedman and Cohen have expressed what is probably the central thrust of the foreign policy of the government of the United States. Doyle, This is where much of the fight for socialism will be centered from now on. Work is being drastically reshaped in most U.S. corporations. The Intellectual Property rights issue is central to 'sharing' that workers need to do to UNDERSTAND work. It is where we can make our most important fights. Michael emphasizes that IPR requires intrusive control of people to protect the IPR. How do we effectively fight this? Thank you Michael! thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Huck Finn ref # 33557
Greetings Economists, Hello Max, Max, You are criticizing the movie because it's not some other movie you would rather see. The movie is not about two souls from different backgrounds striking a bond in a hostile world. The black gang member is a minor character in the story. In the story, a class movement is precisely what is *not* built. Whatever friendship there is between black and white is swept aside. You might just as well criticize a movie about the Spanish Civil War because the wrong side wins. What's the point of a movie about that? Only that it was what actually took place. Doyle It would be a different movie of course. Any significant change like that would make a different movie. I'll take this difference you and I have in how Yoshie was imagining her position. Yoshie imagined a more collective portrait arising out of trying to show the beginnings of Capitalism. Technologically the sort of movie that would look like would be Sim City like. Where the focus is not how Hollywood picks certain commodities in the cast, the ripe sweet woman, sort of like tasteless tomatoes in the super market, and beefy package of shrink wrapped DiCaprio. Instead the movie process portrays the group dynamics. In that case why not show the feelings between people. It wouldn't change the story at all. The same outcome. But one could see how it is possible for people to feel for each other. To see potentials for class solidarity in the horror. Your movie makes a black people minor characters in the plot. Because when feelings are interjected that is what privilege amounts to. That people have feelings for each other. Whereas minor characters are sort of like clotheshorses in a fashion magazine. Empty vessels. The fact that racism killed people despite passions between people is not so different from Schindler's list. I remember in that movie how the nazi longed for a servant woman in his basement. It is the plasticity of emotions that is how we win fights. It is a kind of realism to a movie. It is possible even in a Hollywood movie despite their being unlike the video game Sim City. I can't picture how one fights against racism if I can't see how people form emotional bonds. If the black man was in the gang, was that a distanced relationship to Amsterdam? They probably did have emotional ties. How else if you have all this racist divisions could they function in a tight knit criminal gang? The Chinese were not loath to utilize criminal gangs in their revolution. They saw potential in gangsters for political understanding of class structure. Thirdly in the last scenes Scorsese holds back in the lynchings. Somehow he is reluctant to show the horror. Do we believe that black Americans want us to show that and not see what they imagine a black person felt? Helpless painful death? The scenes are shot somehow Scorsese was a tetch fearful of the feelings he was stirring up. The whole movie is about the stirring of feelings. The end of the influence of ethnic ties, and the beginning of working class solidarity processes. If I'm a worker in that situation I might consider all the possible emotional threads I saw. Seeing the possible avenues of plasticity in emotions doesn't change the outcome. Doesn't mean the black people arose against their oppressors and joined the union army in shooting down the racists. It means seeing how emotions contribute both to murder, and to alternate scenarios in the hearts and souls of people involved. A Shakespearean ambition. But that is what is wrong with your view. You are afraid of seeing feelings in the black people. You think that reverses the outcome of the movie. What it reverses in my view is a tiny bit of how Hollywood makes contemporary movies. They used to use schmaltz all the time. Sometimes in the right hands it would work well. But Yoshie's point about the collective nature of the events is important not so much that we add feelings to minor characters as it is to consider that this commodity from Hollywood is a particular way of making a movie. When you limit content to central characters with certain well defined store shelf characteristics you lose other important values. It is self evident that people have with them their feelings all the time. The black who is murdered by racism had feelings. He was working with a white gang. He probably felt they were his friends. It was real. And that is what workers solidarity is made of, the passionate connection that people form. Your review was a welcome raising of an important movie, thanks for the opportunity to debate what I think is important. respectfully, Doyle Saylor
On the internet role in South Korean elections
Greetings Economists, Amongst various Telecom disasters concerning broadband internet access in the U.S., the Asian economies avoided the disasters of the U.S. based collapse. While there is considerable use of the internet in the U.S. the wide public affect of visual internet communications has been slow to take hold in the U.S. Contrarily, use of the internet has been on a dramatic rise in South Korea, and elsewhere in Asia, and so on. This article speculates upon the political affect of the internet on political activity. An insight on the growing desire for independence in Asia from U.S. imperial dominance, and how that is managed in an internet society. thanks, Doyle Saylor In South Korea, it's the mouse that roars New breed of politician taps the country's love affair with high tech, GEOFFREY YORK writes http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/PEstory/TGAM/20021230/UNETTN /Headlines/headdex/headdexInternational_temp/4/4/20/ By GEOFFREY YORK of Globe and Mail Toronto, Canada Monday, December 30, 2002 - Print Edition, Page A3 SEOUL -- The winning candidate in last week's South Korean presidential election had little need for mass rallies or traditional campaign tactics. When Roh Moo-hyun's organizers wanted supporters to vote on election day, they simply pressed a few computer keys. Text messages flashed to the cellphones of almost 800,000 people, urging them to go to the polls. During his campaign, millions of voters absorbed Mr. Roh's message from Internet sites that featured video clips of the candidate and audio broadcasts by disc jockeys and rock stars. Half a million visitors logged on to his main Web site every day to donate money or obtain campaign updates. More than 7,000 voters a day sent him e-mails with policy ideas. Internet chat groups buzzed with debate on the election. South Koreans call it digital democracy and e-politics, and they have become the world's leaders in cyberspace campaigning. Their high-tech boom has unleashed a new form of grassroots participation by millions of Netizens who exploit the latest information technology to bypass the once-dominant party machines of the old system. With the world's highest penetration of high-speed and mobile Internet services, South Korea is at the cutting edge of technology that is transforming the political system, making it more open and democratic. It could be a preview of the shape of Western democracy. It's a revolutionary change, and the catalyst of this change is the Internet, said Huh Houunna, director of Internet campaigning for Mr. Roh, 56, a once-obscure human-rights lawyer who emerged as the unexpected winner of last week's presidential election. Almost half of South Korean voters are below the age of 40 -- a prime demographic for users of the Internet and cellphones. Until this year, many were apathetic politically, put off by the country's traditional political machinery. But Mr. Roh reached out to voters with one of the world's most sophisticated Internet campaigns, and the vast majority of the younger population voted for him. Until a year ago, Mr. Roh was best known for his repeated failures to be elected to parliament. Self-educated, he came from a poor family and had been jailed for helping dissidents fight the military regimes of the past. But young voters admired the lawyer for his integrity and his image as an independent outsider, and they formed an Internet fan club to promote his future. The fan club, with 70,000 members, helped launch what has been called the Roh typhoon. Its energetic activism was crucial to Mr. Roh's triumph in last spring's primaries, when he shocked most observers by capturing the presidential nomination of the ruling party. And it was a crucial factor in his narrow victory last week. It was like a fan club for a movie star, said Sonn Hochul, a political scientist at Sogang University in Seoul. The Roh phenomenon was based on the Internet. It's a new form of political participation, and it has educated young people about politics. This was an Internet election. The Internet allowed Mr. Roh to liberate himself from black money -- corporate donations that are South Korea's traditional form of campaign financing. Largely through Internet-based campaign groups, Mr. Roh raised the equivalent of about $1-billion from more than 180,000 individual donors. Although Mr. Roh mastered the Internet, other major political parties used it and other forms of mass communication, too. The parties held an average of only three rallies a day, compared with 49 a day during the 1997 campaign. Campaigning with loudspeakers on the streets is much less common. The political element is part of a decade-long technological revolution in South Korea, where more than half of all homes are plugged into high-speed broadband Internet connections -- the highest rate in the world. (In most Western countries, less than 10 per cent of households have broadband connections.) About 25 million of South
A feeling robot sensor for soldiers in the field
Greetings Economists, The U.S. military is seeking to give soldiers various kinds of tools to endure the terrors of battle. The following technology review indicates how the U.S. military is approaching the issue of emotion production and what to do with such information. Aside from the normal question about another typical unrealistic technology boon doggle, does emotion production technology have implications for working class structure? thanks, Doyle Saylor Feeling Blue? This Robot Knows It By Louise Knapp Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,56921,00.html 02:00 AM Jan. 01, 2003 PT Science fiction often depicts robots of the future as machines that look like people and feel, or at least hanker after the ability to feel, human emotions. A team at Vanderbilt University is turning this notion on its head by developing a robotic assistant whose goal is not to develop emotions, but rather respond to the moods of its human master. By processing information sent from physiological sensors the human counterpart wears, the Vanderbilt robot can detect when its master is having a bad day and approach with the query: I sense that you are anxious. Is there anything I can do to help? But do people really want a machine sensing their anxiety and offering assistance? If that's all the Vanderbilt robot was intended to do, it wouldn't have much shelf life. But the research team has a specific kind of service in mind for its mechanical assistant. Researchers envision the emotion-sensing robot serving military personnel on the battlefield. The human commander may get into trouble but be unable to ask for help, said Nilanjan Sarkar, team member and assistant professor of Vanderbilt University's Department of Mechanical Engineering. In cases like these his robot assistant will be able to detect his stress and either communicate the need for assistance or assist in some way itself. The robot's sensors consist of an electrocardiogram to record heartbeat, a skin sensor that can detect tiny changes in sweat production, an electromyography sensor that detects minute muscle activity in the jaw and brow, a blood-volume pressure sensor that measures the constriction on the arteries and a temperature sensor. The robot uses algorithms to translate the information it gets from the sensors into a format it can understand, Sarkar said. One of our most important claims is that the robot can process this information in real time. So far tests with the robot have proved promising. The machine responds on cue to signals of distress and approaches its human counterpart to ask if he's OK. The robot's biggest hurdle may not be its design but rather its human counterpart accepting it as a trusted assistant. Speaking as a former soldier, the last thing I would want is an artificial girlfriend by my side to nag me about how I am feeling while out in the battlefield, said John Petrik, corporate communications officer at the Office of Naval Research. But, Petrik added, as one of the project's sponsors, the ONR believes the research has potential to develop smarter robotic aids for military use. Other robotics researchers agree that the Vanderbilt robot has potential but needs fine-tuning. Taking these (physiological) signals is certainly a good indication of the human state, but we are at a very primitive stage of understanding the relation between the internal states -- what is observable -- and human emotion, said Takeo Kanade, director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. The Vanderbilt team has time to work the kinks out of its robot's emotion-detecting abilities. Sarkar admits that it will be a few more years before the robot makes it onto the battlefield.
Re: Re: A feeling robot sensor for soldiers in thefield
Greetings Economists, Well Tom you certainly made a good point about whose ass gets worried about first. On the other hand, perhaps old fashioned technology is the best like an enema tube snaking down out of the pack and into a special 'pocket in the rear of the captains pants. I could see the commanders going into the field. Kinda of like little piggies going to the market. Can't say what is really in their scared little hearts (that having dropped down out of their palpitating chests) but somewhere in Florida there is some computer collecting rectum and weeny flow information to summarize to George W about the state of his military morale. Maybe there is a contract here for depends? Wasn't it the Civil War in the U.S. that got started the lucrative market for military clothing. The military is trying to extend the life of Calvin Klein underwear? I could see this being a new thing for all those guys who like to wear camouflage outfits in the city street. Wear your pants down showing off your military depends terror diapers. You could have the tubes be a prominent badge of what you shared with your buddies in combat. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Huck Finn ref # 33551
Greetings Economists, MBS writes, Right. In this respect, incidentally, the friendship in the film between the Irish and the black seems like a film cliche but is actually true to the history. There was enough mingling for such an alliance to be plausible. At the same time, it isn't overplayed. The black man is not prominent in the story, and he dies in the riot. No Hollywood ending there, and another sign of the intelligence underlying the film. Doyle I agree with Yoshie, the weakness of the movie is in not portraying the 'friendship' of a free black man to Amsterdam. You minimize the meaning of friendship here for no good reason. Your comment about the intelligence of the underlying film is not appropriate. How could the truth of the movie be destroyed by saying clearly what friendship meant then? Not likely. In fact it is more likely it is hard in this time to understand a friendship now. And to see how in such a sucky culture of the period that people could be friends is a real eye opener about the porous and plastic nature of human cognition. Which is what class movements are built upon. The working class to remind you is composed of various groups of workers finding unity over time. That often in that century it was the vehement passions of religious cognitive methods (John Brown) that fused people into a single group. The intelligence of a movie is the intelligibility (in contemporary parlance, 'Usability') of the movie in respect to whoever sees the movie. Not the unknowable of Scorsese's intentions behind the scenes. More likely the collaborative team that made the movie is who decided how to portray a black man's emotional reality in the movie. There must have been some debate from the cast and so forth in making the movie about how to portray people. You get the sense that Scorsese uses historical documents (flashed on the screen) to bolster his position that he is seeking to show what the documentation during the period says. Yoshie says that there may be elements that would contribute to a better portrayal over time as the lessons of this movie sink in. That may be. Perhaps the reality is too much to expect of this document if it is opening the doors to understanding the history of capitalism. I think though it better to succeed on levels that I think a red would naturally want than to forgive the high capitalist like Scorsese for their failings. There is no good reason to think that minimizing understanding passionate relationships between people is going to destroy meaning. If you want to debate that emotions are not part of 'meaning' you'll be on not very solid ground. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: extra terrestrial interventions.
structure so we can build groups. And understand how the media provides those structures as well as the more understood elements of language production or words. Ultimately then to understand on the mass scale what the whole working class needs to feel ok about their organizations and movement. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Too much PC
Greetings Economists, Eugene Coyle wrote a nice response to me, and I thought I would add some clarification to my somewhat cryptic response to Carrol. There is a good metaphor from Spike Milligan who died this year. Spike was a British comedian post WWII who worked early on with Peter Sellers. Anyway first a little quip that I think funny, Spike, I want on my epitaph I told you I was ill! anyway Spike also created a sketch on the Goon show, Quoting from the New York Times Sunday Magazine 12/29/02, page 54, in one show, Sellers and Secombe cautiously lower a boat into the Amazon. When they reach land, Milligan is already standing, there. How did you get ashore? He is asked. Milligan answers proudly, I came across on that log. The other two are baffled. They shoot back: Log? That's an alligator! O, Milligan dimly explains. I wondered why I kept getting shorter. Doyle Which aptly summarizes my state of mind about quibbling with JKS about words I say words damn it anyway I digress. About three years ago I started writing into lists. And Almost immediately I took up my words and disability theme with Max Sawicky. I could see at the time the limited utility of this sort of discourse. But there are relatively little ways to bring up the subject in a meaningful way. So off and on over three years I've used various opportunities to explore once again a familiar territory, or if you may permit a metaphor, ride the hoppy hoppy hobby horse. I have other hobby horses to ride, and some of them on disability have more practical purpose to them. In particular I work with a group in Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) writing documents published on the internet explaining accessibility for the disabled to the internet to the public. This sort of common working together is a better model of how to advance disability rights than trying to constantly 'Hector' Achilles (JKS). The group produces papers and individual like myself can't hope to match. The standards making process is extremely complex. For example see the relationship of the W3C to IPR (Intellectual Property Rights, and also see what Michael Perelman has written in his books that cover the economics of IPR). I was admitting political defeat really. For me the higher purpose of the left is to build not tear down. In many ways PC is criticism and correctness. But there are definite weaknesses to correctness. It is fundamentally an Enlightenment approach to brainwork. PC is also a cover for strong feelings. I have strong feelings about disability rights, but strong feelings can be plastic. Admitting defeat, and accepting the strength of others is a source of strength that PC doesn't allow. How refreshing from my point of view to put down something that I grow weary using. Perhaps I will use sometime again, but only in a minor way. I prefer to build the left. To work together. To let Achilles be Achilles. Achilles was gyrating about, dancing with the freedom of saying what he pleased in the face of PC methods. And I would like to be wild and crazy as Spike Milligan myself. So I accept that a position that has given me much in the end is so flawed I must put it down. Not to mount that hobby horse, but to move on to another rocking horse and rootin tootin six gun shooting away we go again. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Religion was Economist K Marx new ref # 33465 67
Greetings Economists, Joanna writes, You also leave out one important social space -- that created by religion. It seems to me that the official religion of the left is atheism and I think this is a huge loss. I think the left needs to recongize that there is a whole spectrum of religious belief in the U.S. -- ranging from the communal meditative practices of Buddhists and Quakers...to extreme Xtian fundamentalism. To put all these practices into the same basket of delusion is a big mistake. It completely shuts out many communities that do believe that the right to life is greater than the right to property, and these communities would well be worth working with. Doyle, And I think you leave out another space that concerns feelings, sex. You mention 'Good Vibrations' once in a while. So I'll comment a little bit about that in a left political context down below. But first I agree with you that emotion structure does allow us to consider religionist space. They also form groups. Meet regularly and as Yoshie writes, Yoshie, In the USA, there is no hard dichotomy between the left and the church, unlike in nations with a history of anti-clerical radicalism due to the established church's functioning as a great land owner itself or an accomplice with fascists. There is no established church to begin with here. The USA has few secular left institutions, so most political meetings have to be and are held in private homes, union halls, college classrooms, and places of worship. In nations where left-wingers have an organized presence, they have their own party offices and buildings where they can conduct their own business and offer public spaces for allied social movement affairs. Doyle, Which makes the left's relationship to religion somewhat different than elsewhere. The emotional relationship of most people to their friends and family reflects theoretical guesses by the religious about social cognition. In a sense for example with regard to homosexuality the Christian Church has on the whole advocated a particular line toward sexual love. Where sexual love is what everyone thinks of as core emotional states for human society. In other words if we could gain some insight to production of emotional structure we could substantially affect what most people consider religious activity. Religion in many cases seems to be postulating what a mass mind is. God being some sort of unified thought process that people can use to address basic social concerns. Why can't the left take on such speculation about the unified cognitive mind? An amazing alternative sexual regime is in a minor ethnic group in China, the NA. They don't have a concept for husbands and fathers. Think about that. Those concepts are invented emotional categories that could be overthrown. The Chinese government has tried for decades to stamp out the NA. Their social structure isn't necessarily appropriate to what I am suggesting, but the Chinese communist have had considerable difficulty in breaking down that assumptions. Women's sexuality control seems to have favored a woman centered society (the NA) in which they chose to pass property through the mother. Back to emotion structure. Religions tends to advocate moral systems in the west. And these then tend to linger in the popular mind about how to organize behavior. A lot of that is non verbal. For example, in sex if one talks about sex with someone, like hey you wanna fuck? Usually that gets one turned down. Usually people approach sex by silently doing things with the body. That shows us how critical feelings are, since the activity depends upon emotions to have sex work. If the left were to try to work in these areas of silent emotion work, is that potentially a break through area for social structure as a whole? Suppose a left really got hip deep into this area that religions traditionally control? My guess is doing emotion work would be the way for women to become a major factor in building the left. Some basic efforts for women to build a woman centered left. It would look substantially different from Pen-L. I'll give you what jumps out at me in current U.S. culture that says women centered social and emotion structure directions. Sim City the video game attracts a majority female audience. There you see the kind of work a woman centered left would arise out of. I'm not talking game playing. I'm talking about how women tend to consider building relationships, and emotion structure that a left might offer. Lastly Good Vibrations tells us something. Again because it has a focus on women's sexuality, what sort of left could absorb and build a social movement that reflects what we see in the grass roots Good Vibrations culture? I believe the key element is emotion structure and an economic analysis. Good Vibrations is a business, and thriving in a difficult time. What is happening? thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Re: Re: Too much PC
Greetings Economists, Carrol I hear you. It is clear enough that I'm not building anything. As it is there are few enough fighting for disability rights. I can see that it is lost. Hectoring people, what did Achilles do? Drag Hector behind his chariot? Ok enough with it. Time to move on. For everybody, I've tried hard to do something for what makes sense to me. My spirit is tired. The only criteria that makes sense is that I was trying to build something positive for people, and that seems to have not happened. I am going to be silent then and let go of what does not work. I feel that is a positive thing for me to do. And that is a good thing. Thank you Carrol for speaking a truth to me. Doyle Saylor
Re: The Economist considers Karl Marx new ref # 33442
of left organizing that succeeds where face to face is not succeeding. One can belong agnostically to several lists. The group membership is loose, and relatively open to the world. Email suffers like any other text based communication tool with comparison to expressing emotion structure via the face. So for now we continue to confront what you raised as a problem in your remark. I see the problem in my way, but the commonality we share is that emotion structure is the barrier in the U.S. to an effective left. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Too much PC
Greetings Economists, JKS writes, Brecht, another Commie, thought hell must be like Los Angeles. Doyle, Brecht also wrote the 'Three Penny Opera' which used the mass of beggars (mostly disabled people) as a major social factor in the play. As an artist I like Brecht's work. In some limited senses Brecht was ahead of most culture in giving credit to disability as a big political factor in social movements. JKS, That's the nature of mental illness. Be that as it may, loose marblesa, and even the colloquial crazy or nuts as applied to Californias doesn't suggest mental illness, just wierdness. Doyle, All this denigration of California has a little or nothing to do with the reality of the working class in California. You seem to be making your points though in a good humored sense. Have fun, but over time the technology will gradually supplant your views about 'crazy' or 'nut' issues in California with more realistic processes of how people can connect to each other socially. How does one deal with being called crazy which is a typical political charge? Especially if one is really mentally ill? Doesn't a depressed person have rights? Both Lincoln, and Churchill were severe depressives. Lenin was supposed to have had serious bouts of depression also. There is no automatic about mental illness means you can't do a job and I am including Schizophrenia since many schizophrenics are merely episodically having symptoms. Once you allow real mental illness into the movement as a rights issue for working class people what about all the people you call crazy who aren't crazy? No substance. The issue is ripe for serious change and substantial impact upon what the left thinks society is about. JKS, And Doyle, while I share your Guthriesque affection for the the odd and peculiar, they are not a revolutionary class. Doyle I take the Marxist view that the revolutionary class is the working class. But the whole class. Not the white segment, men only part of the working class. How do we build a mass movement? I want a movement full of women, minorities, disabled people, etc. I don't think you disagree with this thought. JKS, As I've explained before, I think it's nuts to go ballistic over the colloquial use of insane and similar terms as if they were the equivalent of racial epithets Doyle Surely you recognize the weakness of what you are trying to say. It is what disabled people feel that matter here at any rate. I see a deeper structure that could be articulated around emotion production in our capitalist system than what you tend to characterize as crazy or weird. Emotion production has economic implications (for example in IPR with respect to file sharing see the Supreme Court case brought by Lawrence Lessig) and substantial intellectual support from a variety of serious resources. Emotion production would clarify precisely those areas you and others out of habit tend to call crazy when you have to conjure up some reference to what are essentially emotional structure in human lives. The Enlightenment view that passions are crazy is what you are talking about in my view to the extent there is substance to saying for example, California is nuts. If I were to respond to you with an alternative I would write: There is a definite lack of emotion structure in writing appropriate to ordinary human needs. About a hundred years ago a huge increase in the emotional content of media arose with first movies and later television. This media has always been restricted about what could be done because of the lack of ability on the masses part to share movie pictures in daily life. Interactive media like Sim City the video game, open up the possibility of 'sharing' emotions on a mass scale through media. Of more consequence in a political sense than in a game sense in my view. A good example is Electronic Arts that is putting Sim City on line at 10,000 people per server with a goal of having a functioning 100,000 people on-line at once in the game. Compare that to how many people contribute to left email lists. People like the games because it engages their emotional systems better than writing email. I submitted to PEN-L list a specific resource (Face Blindness - http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/pen-l/2002IV/msg02603.html) to help understand what is the linkage writing systems lack in regard to emotion structure that helps one understand what shapes the economic success of video games. Thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: The Economist considers Karl Marx new ref # 33417
Greetings Economists, Sabri Oncu writes quoting me first, Doyle Sailor, (Sabri you misspelled my name, it is Saylor), Let's talk about loose marbles. Two groups of e people were churned by economic necessity, African Americans during WWII to move to California, and from Mexico and South America Latinos also being forced to California. Then Sabri observes, This is unfair. How about Turks being forced to California by economic necessity. Do I sense some racist tones here? Doyle, Yeah you are right, there are racist overtones in the charge that California is where the loose marbles end up. Which may not be what JKS was implying, but is what sets me off when I read about anyone accusing California as the end point for 'loose marbles'. Saying this is where the loose marbles end up is an attack on working class people of all kinds (including Turkish people) who come here. And a key component of that phrase, 'loose marbles', is the racism that shapes U.S. society which readily denigrates people who migrate to find work. And the metaphor of 'loose marbles' also implies to many people that California is where 'nuts' go. That is a very common slur against California as a location. Sabri, Luckily, I am not an English speaking person, though I can speak some English too, so loose marbles sounds good to me. Indeed, I am proud to be one. Doyle I agree I am proud to be a 'loose marble'. But I don't embrace labels that prejudice uses, to politically identify with. I don't believe appropriation of words or phrases that represent pejorative attitudes really addresses prejudice. Pejoratives are structured by the feelings of prejudice. Name calling is emotion structure in society, not words, in which feelings are used to divide people against each other. Address the causes of why people feel their hurt and pain from prejudice in a material fashion and those working people will 'feel' liberated. Sabri, Thanks for defending me and my likes. I tell you, I hate every second spend in this weird country of lonely people. Did you know that the very first letter I wrote to my best friend one week after I arrived in North America diagnosed the main problem of North Americans as this: These people suffer from serious loneliness. They are extremely lonely. No wonder most of them are not stable. Doyle The U.S. is not a weird country of lonely people. What has that got to do with a class analysis? Secondly, disability rights is about defending people who have mental disabilities against the wide spread prejudice against having depression, or obsession, or whatever. What do you mean not stable? You know Jim Devine was careful to make the point that he doesn't see a difference between loony people and genius. He understands on many levels what I am driving at, but like me will use thoughts and phrases that reflect an unexamined thought about what sounds like a disability to me. In regard to your remark about loneliness, the U.S. has a divided atomized people, does that make them weird? How do you measure loneliness? Some people are and some people aren't in the U.S. culture. Broad generalizations easily become a vehicle for prejudice. Is that what I use to organize someone a concern for their U.S. loneliness? Their degree of loneliness because they live here? Organizing someone is about their network of connections, their work, their social network inside and outside their jobs. And in that there are varying degrees of needs and wants that we want to overcome as reds. Calling somebody specific, like weird, is a personal label upon something strange seeming in your mind about them. Making them an other. Where do you find solidarity with them by understanding why they are like they are? You hate this country. I don't hate Turkey, but I make a distinction between the government or state and the people also. I hope to find solidarity with Turkish working class people. I don't see people from Turkey, or Iraq, South Africa, Ethoipia, Turkestan, Vietnam, Argentina, etc., as weird. I don't know much about them, but for example I read what you write about Turkey to learn more about what is really going on there. But finding a way to unite is no easy task either. Thanks for the thought. You know you would be welcome in my home. I hope if you hate me for being an American, that you could soften your heart toward me by personal contact. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: The Economist considers Karl Marx new ref # 33305
Greetings Economists, Jim Devine writes, FWIW, I wasn't knocking lunatics. I don't think the division between lunatics and normal people really exists. Further, lunacy and genius go hand in hand. Jim in RI Doyle I'm well aware you struggle with me about what you mean when you use words that sound like a disability shapes your comment. Like I wrote before I've been known to use exactly the same sort of characterizations. Something or somebody is crazy. I'm sure if given a chance in some appropriate regime you would strongly advocate for a society that represents socialist values toward health etc. You are trying as above to find a way to make clear where your real values are. Let's talk about loose marbles. Two groups of people were churned by economic necessity, African Americans during WWII to move to California, and from Mexico and South America Latinos also being forced to California. Loose marbles is certainly a common expression for being insane in most English speaking peoples minds. So too those who immigrate for economic reasons are vulnerable to the charge of being of no value because they had to leave their homes to make a living elsewhere. There is no way I disparage those peoples who work hard in severe oppressive conditions for relocating here. They are not in any way 'loose' marbles in the head, heart, feet, minds, hands, persons, etc. Socialism is for the 'whole' working class. It's power derives from unity. From the complex job of uniting everyone. I want it to be clear that we welcome disabled people into Socialism. That the left is about liberation for all the working class. Idle words that seem to make disability the problem are not what Socialism is about. Nor is being correct here what Socialism is about. Rather I am raising my understanding of what I read here to build a bridge of understanding both to you, and about Disability rights for all. Thanks, Doyle Saylor
Face Blindness and Emotion in social structure
of, the visual image of their face and the change in, or fluctuation of, the sound of their voice. What all this means, of course, that the brain is primed to extract someone's emotions from the same place that we extract their identity, and in particular, the motion or change of those inputs is particularly sought out for emotional evaluation. Doyle, On Pen-L we all know how much emotions seem to affect what is written here. The well known conflict between Louis Proyect, and Doug Henwood is a perfectly good example. Why don't we understand what to do? Is writing supposed to be a singular activity in which someone sits by themselves at a desk? Is not language always a social activity. Is not a word meant to be shared? Then too aren't feelings the markers of the shape of society? I love you, and you don't love me. How intrinsic that is to the kernel relationships. One person feels and the other doesn't. How can those two be together? Of course movies show us faces. So we have much more explicit information about what is really being felt. How ambiguous is that of course? The actor is merely pretending to be in the Lord of the Rings. In fact the only way we can judge how real someone else's feelings are is to share with them. And movies are not meant to be shared, meaning not meant to be used in a language like way. Let me emphasize this as big as I can, we must SHARE The feelings to know the reality of how someone else feels. Having read a little bit about face blindness you have a sense when you can't see the face that the critical issues of specific time and space does matter to communication. This vast continent of communication has been lost to the written word. But suppose we used computing tools to re-add emotional content to words long ago written? Do we want to read words from warriors long ago that were meant to frighten an enemy? The terror meant to be sent via chilling words to scare us into submission? We take of words a certain neutrality as an advantage. We can use them without the formidable ties that emotions have to specificity. In scientific sense we have a sense that theories are provisional. That today's paradigm can be overthrown by tomorrows upstart. The theory holds together because we feel and use feelings to do brainwork. That emotions are plastic and social structure can be supported on a global scale in which emotions seem so relentlessly tied to the immediate moment and place. But is that a likely outcome of computerized communication? Going back to my analogy we could add emotional content into words. An actor can speak the lines of Hamlet and re-interpret the lines suitable to a specific time. Instead what makes sense is that a sharing process in society with an emotion based system recognizes how important it is to doing any work to feel. To share feeling with others in a way that reflects truly belonging and a true sense of inner power in the social connection whether on a village level or gigantic global level. That is what a scientific paradigm reflects the commonality of social power that a given emotional glued together theory holds for a group of people. The inner workings of how to construct an emotional connectivity of brainwork that includes the capacity to manufacture via software agents artificial emotional content to words is the capacity to build social structure more emotionally more deeply than mere human bodies can provide. Human bodies are tied to how many people we can know personally. But global networks can be structured to billions of people in a system well beyond what we can personally know about anyone. Returning to the Disability metaphor of rights, where someone can't see emotion in a face they can do brainwork anyway. They might need a system that provides them information appropriate to their ability. But they can do important brainwork without seeing the face. Exactly in the sense that words have served the rise of Capitalsim. The fact that we use faces as the main identity point and emotion channel between us does not mean we can't re-design that mechanism to more suitable structures for a global structure of emotion that permanently ends racist social relationships. Words have served humanity well despite the severe distortion of not seeing emotion via the face in words. We have a sense however flawed that in the Pen-L list that it is not necessary to fight one and the other in flame wars, but to seek some sort of way to support the depth of brainwork. The depth cannot be plumbed without an emotional structure that fully supports the brainwork. Basically an end to the long lasting 'rationalist' theory that words can be taken as neutral. And a determined effort to build consciously an emotional structure to communications that reflects a socialist view. Equality, an end to racism, sexism, a full incorporation and integration of disability rights into the social framework of a global system. thanks, Doyle
Re: The Economicst considers Karl Marx ref # 33297
Greetings Economists, first Jim Devine writes unconvincingly, Jim D: but just as the lunatics have taken over the asylum, the looney right wing has taken over the conciousness of much of the US citizenry (at least here in SoCal), along with taking over more and more of the judiciary every day. Then JKS chimes about his theory of insanity and California, Well, Southern Cal, that's where all the loose marbles go anyway . . . . Haven't you read Nathaniel West's Day of the Lucust? Doyle Really. Loose marbles. First you start by saying we are disabled out here in California where the real disability rights movement started. Well I'm proud of whatever lunatic stands up for disabled rights out here. I'm proud of every epileptic, bi-polar individual, cerebral palsy woman, facially disfigured guy, legless veteran, African American with multiple schlerosis, Native American with cancer, blind diabetic, deaf blind child, who has participated and helped build the disability rights movement. I welcome schizophrenics on the run to California for aid for their HIV. Every depressed person who seeks shelter in California from oppression. Every hurt and abused homosexual fleeing from the horror that this country embraces toward disabled people. I welcome every bone cancer chemo therapy person to California. Every person with lupus. I welcome armless thalidomide adults, and persons with a literal half brain due to surgery. I welcome people with strokes, and fevers. Bad stomachs, and ulcers on their legs. People with neuropathy due to drinking too much. Very obese people, anorexics, and bulemics, obsessives and compulsives. The disability rights movement is for all against the able bodied who castigate you as the problem with this society and capitalism. I advocate for justice for you. A place to live, and food to nourish you. Help when you need it. A place of respect and peace not rejection and death. Not the bio-ethicists with the death camp for the disabled. Not the right coast where only the able bodied can speak their minds. Here where disabled people have taken a stand to fight for their rights against every able bodied charge and castigation. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: finals ref # 33144
Greetings Economists, Chris Burford writes, An article in the Observer on Sunday noted that Google has become something of a prosthetic memory for the human race. Doyle If you have a distribution list like this for example, google is an important tool. I write about the distribution list because I am emphasizing the network aspect of this. How does one find anything without google? At one point the labor of making folders, and indexing something was entirely human labor. In a network like Pen-L part of what makes a network strong or not is more than what the individuals can bring to it. Some people are prolific writers with a lot of interesting things to say. But the over all level of knowledge a list produces is also a result of the general attention of everyone on the list to what is being submitted. Google allows the general network of knowledge to be fed by a wide pool of knowledge from the public archives of knowledge in web sites available. This is interesting also in how capitalism works. Awhile back I saw the statistics between public and private web site and information. According to that statistic (I don't have the reference) there was 500 private web pages to 1 public web page. Therefore a public network like Pen-l has one 500th of the informational resources of private businesses. Tapping into the wealth of information is of course difficult for business since they compete. But monopoly control of information has definite advantages. To summarize, what a group of people share in knowledge is what is important about google. The value of a network is the group. Certainly individuals matter as talented persons help to summarize the knowledge people share. But the overall knowledge shared distinguishes a group. A left wing group such as Pen-L takes a long time to rise to a certain common level of knowledge. None of that could happen without google like network tools that a group must use on line. Therefore as Chris says above, the prosthetic quality of google is now necessary to doing brain work. This is a ripe area for economic analysis about communal brainwork. thanks, Doyle Saylor
The Vehement Passions, a book review
that the disguised remnants of the religious thematics of profound fear-renamed the sublime, or Kierkegaardian psychology, or existentialism-have found their strongest and perhaps their only audience. Doyle: Suppose somehow we returned strong feelings to our lives, what could we anticipate? Well almost certainly people who go through a great social upheaval feel their liberation like, page 46, The Vehement Passions, the vehement passions reinstall an absolute priority of the self, with its claim to be different from and prior to others both in the claims of its will and in its account of the world. The passions are the states of a king in a world in which all others are merely subjects. Where we speak of the passions, we are, in political vocabulary, recreating a monarchical world in which there is only one real self. This is also the world of monotheism. There is only one will, and that is the will of God. Such a God is more commonly a God of wrath than a God of reason. God creates and destroys, because these are, finally, the only two act of the will. Doyle: We gain a sense that if we really feel it is the nearness of others that determine whether or not we feel a certain way. The sense of popular sovereignty that a revolution leads to is fundamentally how someone feels power in their life. If racism were gone then African Americans could feel that nearby whites were no longer figures of oppression and distrust. The feeling that one's inner sovereignty of strong feelings really were worth trusting. That in a sense then if we begin to manufacture feelings for consumption we are trying to activate people and in their motion they feel they have the power to act. Not sit down and watch. We use this sense of judgment all the time. page 106 The Vehement Passions, On the other hand, if we imagine discovering about an eighty-year-old man, because of evidence that has only now come to light, that sixty years ago he committed a crime equal in horror and cruelty to those mentioned above, it is often felt to be hard, now that sixty years have passed, to imagine any severe sentence's being imposed at all. In the immediate aftermath of the crime, so centrally is anger a feature of what we are calling justice that it is hard to think of any punishment as strong enough. But once we move to the opposite extreme and picture a full lifetime between the crime and its moment of punishment, it is often hard to imagine a punishment lenient enough. Doyle: My impression is that we can see in this book the outlines of what our civilization demands of what we produce in our emotions. We are made to feel a certain way that works within our system. A system that mostly requires we write down our thoughts to matter, and forget about how we really feel since that would interfere with the rational process. That working with emotions though is shifting as we come ever closer to using media in real time to communicate our feelings. What is that structure that shapes our emotions? Can we use strong feelings to regain a sense of wholeness to our mental lives? Can we think about this territory in such a way as to truly consider the many questions the left 'feels'? This book opens up the debate in ways that have been really impossible for us to consider. Most emphatically suggesting a profound depth to our minds we can once again ponder as those who debated their feelings about the Monarchy and Church in France, or in Russian, or China the ancient regimes, and Capitalism itself. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Re: Re: Blowback
Greetings Economists, Gene Coyle writes to Carrol, Carrol, I was talking of blowback, not the overthrow of capitalism. Kenya, Bali, and ... wherever is next seems to me evidence of blowback. Gene Coyle Doyle The point that Carrol made is still the same. You say that the unforeseen consequences for Capitalists is the blowback. And that is stupid since it is obvious to someone who is anti-capitalist that things don't go according to so-called planning for them. You have a cognitive theory of smart and insightful that says if you are smart you will see the truth i.e. blowback and will then not be a Capitalist. That doesn't work as a political strategy. Huge societies can be formed like the former Soviet Union in which the social norm is to reject Capitalist methods, and yet 'stupid' as the U.S. capitalist are they pulled the Soviet Union down. So the cognitive part of your analysis is not working. In fact I would simply say about blowback that it says that what Capitalism claims works doesn't work for ordinary working class people. But any sort of theory that rests upon saying they are stupid because what they say is supposed to work doesn't is not appropriate. Understanding how minds work is both key to a major part of creating a socialist society, and that for the most part terms like stupid are simply folk psychology's of how one might understand ordinary human interchange of information. You elide the point by trying to say Carrol misunderstands you not talking about the overthrow of Capitalism. This is all I have to say about this. In order to address this in a serious vein it can't be you said this I said that, it has to be an attempt to make depth to any point. There is nothing about what you said that refutes Carrol's point at all, but if you can take this up and demonstrate that stupid means something in a serious manner go for it. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Blowback
Greetings Economists, Gene Coyle writes, Doyle, I was not intending to refute Carrol. I agreed with what he wrote. My initial remark should have been Bush's policy is fraught with error. And thanks for pointing out my cognitive theory. Doyle: I'm not sure what to say. Your welcome for your response. I think about this area of cognition quite a bit partly because it relates to disability rights so directly. I think it interesting that you responded in the way you did originally. Frankly I just don't know if anyone reads anything I write. So it surprises me when someone actually writes something like you wrote. I know this, from my standpoint, it isn't so much you might now say 'fraught with error', but the intense feeling that surrounds a word like stupid is the real meaning to me. In these email forums most of the writing that catches attention is usually some conflict between two or more people. But so much real life is not about how people disagree, but how people find a common way to do things, and find ways to become friends and comrades. It gives me no pleasure to read you correcting an 'error'. What matters to me is to the heartfelt development of a great left. To feel we can say what we can and be heard in all the variety and energy we have. To find strength in each other. I hope you can read me as trying to build something not tear you down. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Re: Blowback
Greetings Economists, Carrol Cox writes, Viewed abstractly, from outside history, their strategy has been stupid for 500 years, and Massive retaliation for everything describes the crushing of rebellions in the english countryside in the 16th century, the long massacre of the 18th century described by Linebaugh, the incredibly expensive conquest and repression of India over several centuries, the long blood repression in England in the early 19th century culminating in the suppression of the Chartists, Leopold, u.s. slavery, on and on and on. It was all incredibly irrational, destructive, and horrrible -- and it worked. Doyle I think this point is excellent. I would add that saying the opposition is stupid is a pretty empty point that usually reflects how the speaker or writer feels about the capitalist. In disability rights terms of course there is a parallel to that when one calls whomever crazy, etc. That is how we tend to see the structure of society as society appears to us in daily life. Stupid people cause trouble. Crazy people cause trouble. The key element is how we feel. Human emotion is a labor process which has a definite outcome. We feel a certain way and we act on those feelings. In historical terms managing those feelings has evolved with the structure of societies we created. So for good example because everyone is familiar with the process we practice rational thinking to exclude the 'irrationality' of emotions. Taking empty pejoratives out of every day speech in order to recognize the political impact of their usage is common to Christian sects that admonish their membership to not take God's name in vain, goddamn. Regulating emotion structure is also a pacifist tactic as in non-violence. Turn the cheek and love your enemy. That such tactics do work in some emotions of some people allows us to at least understand that certain kinds of non-verbal forms of communication of brainwork do things we can't quite rationalize in the classic enlightenment terms. The big issue in organizing people is how to manage the whole group's emotional connectivity to the group. It is not hard to understand that we belong to a group because we feel we do, not because we can rationalize belonging (speak the words). We can though say that in the case of empty phrases like 'stupid', that the solution is to make a group process that as a whole everyone feels subject to and can employ in their lives comfortably. It is not enough to say that the label 'stupid' does not apply to the capitalist. One must in some profound sense say why the system doesn't work for working class people. And they 'feel' like a part of that rationalization of the brainwork we call feeling. That when in pain the working class says 'stupid' capitalists, and puts into the empty place holder of intense feelings some thing appropriate to working class power and systemic thinking. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Bosnia Generation Imperialist speak up in the NY Times
Greetings Economists, The pro war intelligentsia recruited after the end of the Cold war to represent traditional liberal ideology speak up (below) in their main forum. They seem faltering and incoherent after such a brief period of ascendancy. I think it interesting that a line is being created about the anti-war movement, that it is 'leftist'. That 'real' liberals are not part of this movement. Ceding the anti-war movement to the left when the left is very weak and no threat. Is the door for an organized left movement wide open? What is the left? Across the board I see many people willing to characterize themselves as on the left, and that has no ideological content as yet, the people have not spoken yet, but they are being stirred by events. So for now things are moving our way for practical reasons of liberals having to support Imperialism that Capitalist require of their camp. That means the liberals have abandoned their usual role of usurping left movements. They merely criticize the 'left' as a left. thanks, Doyle Saylor December 8, 2002 The Liberal Quandary Over Iraq By GEORGE PACKER NY Times If you're a liberal, why haven't you joined the antiwar movement? More to the point, why is there no antiwar movement that you'd want to join? Troops and equipment are pouring into the Persian Gulf region in preparation for what could be the largest, riskiest, most controversial American military venture since Vietnam. According to a poll released the first week of December, 40 percent of Democrats oppose a war that has been all but scheduled for sometime in the next two months. So where are the antiwarriors? In fact, a small, scattered movement is beginning to stir. On Oct. 26, tens of thousands of people turned out in San Francisco, Washington and other cities to protest against a war. Other demonstrations are planned for Jan. 18 and 19. By then an invasion could be under way, and if it gets bogged down around Baghdad with heavy American and Iraqi civilian casualties, or if it sets off a chain reaction of regional conflicts, antiwar protests could grow. But this movement has a serious liability, one that will just about guarantee its impotence: it's controlled by the furthest reaches of the American left. Speakers at the demonstrations voice unnuanced slogans like ''No Sanctions, No Bombing'' and ''No Blood for Oil.'' As for what should be done to keep this mass murderer and his weapons in check, they have nothing to say at all. This is not a constructive liberal antiwar movement. So let me rephrase the question. Why there is no organized liberal opposition to the war? The answer to this question involves an interesting history, and it sheds light on the difficulties now confronting American liberals. The history goes back 10 years, when a war broke out in the middle of Europe. This war changed the way many American liberals, particularly liberal intellectuals, saw their country. Bosnia turned these liberals into hawks. People who from Vietnam on had never met an American military involvement they liked were now calling for U.S. air strikes to defend a multiethnic democracy against Serbian ethnic aggression. Suddenly the model was no longer Vietnam, it was World War II -- armed American power was all that stood in the way of genocide. Without the cold war to distort the debate, and with the inspiring example of the East bloc revolutions of 1989 still fresh, a number of liberal intellectuals in this country had a new idea. These writers and academics wanted to use American military power to serve goals like human rights and democracy -- especially when it was clear that nobody else would do it. Many of them had cut their teeth in the antiwar movement of the 1960's, but by the early 90's, when some of them made trips to besieged Sarajevo, they had resolved their own private Vietnam syndromes. Together -- hardly vast in their numbers, but influential -- they advocated a new role for America in the world, which came down to American power on behalf of American ideals. Against the liberal hawks there were two opposing tendencies. One was conservative: it loathed the idea of the American military being used for humanitarian missions and nation building and other forms of ''social work.'' This was the view of George W. Bush when he took office, and of all his key advisers. The other opposing tendency was leftist: it continued to view any U.S. military action as imperialist. This thinking prompted Noam Chomsky to leap to the defense of Slobodan Milosevic, and it dominates the narrow ideology of the new Iraq antiwar movement. Throughout the 90's, between the reflexively antiwar left and the coldblooded right, liberal hawks articulated the case for American engagement -- if need be, military engagement -- in the chaotic world of the post-cold war. And for 10 years of wars -- first in Bosnia, then Haiti, East Timor, Kosovo and, last year, in Afghanistan, which was a war of national security but had
Understanding and Reporting on Disability
Greetings Economists, I am going to build an analysis of disability rights to create an economic foundation for integration of disabled people into the left movement. One serious problem on the left is understanding what disabled people are fighting for. The article pasted below and the web site audio report (courtesy of Kelly Pierce blind technology and public policy expert) indicate how in the public press there is a vast ignorance structure. In the article below a reporter is quoted as saying, I think most newsrooms see disability reporting as having no underlying issues, that there's no politics involved, no public policy issues that need to be looked at. Nothing! Doyle In order to understand these as economic issues there has to be fundamental understanding of the range of human right issues that disabled people face. In terms of what is going in the global economy the primary area that matters for disabled people directly is Information Technology Access. The telecom, dot.com crash directly affect how well disabled people can be integrated into the work force. To understand that I will look at language structure in human communities, and technology and public policy structure down the road in more emails. All of this to understand how class structure is shaping lives in people who are at the 'fringes' (54 million people in the U.S. are disabled). thanks, Doyle Saylor http://stream.realimpact.net/rihurl.ram?file=webactive/cspin/cspin2002112 9.rmstart=7:44.6 the audio feed is courtesy of Real Networks. Kelly Understanding and Reporting on Disability By Suzanne C. Levine [EMAIL PROTECTED] Opportunities for good, accurate reporting on disability are being missed. The most frequent stories are, for example, features about a child who gets to go to camp, coverage of a fund raising event or the super athlete in a wheelchair who climbs the mountain. These stories are typically inspirational or evoke feelings of pity. The missed stories can be hard-hitting, difference-making journalism, the kinds of stories that keep government accountable and people honest. These stories are being missed because society's assumptions about disability aren't considered when disability becomes a news item. Missed Stories Why are stories about disability issues being missed? The answer, according to some mainstream news media reporters, is that there is no easy answer. Bob Egelko, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter who covers the courts and legal issues does not have specific disability experience. Yet he reports on disability when it comes through the courts. Through years of reporting Egelko says that with disability it is impossible to find a monolithic voice because they are complex issues. According to Buffalo News assistant managing editor for features Sue LoTempio, who uses a wheelchair, the news media is lazy when it comes to the disability issues. We like to do easy stories and Jerry Lewis' story is a really easy story to cover or to write. And I think they have a kind of mindset that 'OK, we've covered the telethon, that's all we have to do.' . It's very difficult to get anybody to look at the breadth of the stories that are important. But even when reporters try to get a disability-related story in the news, it can be frustrating. Jennifer LaFleur, a former computer-assisted reporting editor at the Post Dispatch in St. Louis who is currently a McCormick Tribune Journalism Fellow at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, says she has met resistance when it comes to reporting on hard-hitting disability issues. I think most newsrooms see disability reporting as having no underlying issues, that there's no politics involved, no public policy issues that need to be looked at. Nothing! Dateline NBC correspondent, John Hockenberry, who uses a wheelchair, gets to the point by saying: Disability is viewed as on the fringe of society and on the fringe of journalism. Cultural Context Why is disability viewed on the fringe and how does this affect coverage? The first step is to begin to understand how society views disability, because like other diversity issues, society shapes our personal assumptions. In general, disability is viewed with fear, discomfort and loss. It is stigmatized and the emphasis is on correcting and curing disability. On the deepest level, disability brings up visions of our mortality. So, there's some baseline fear. There's a fear of disability that reminds people of the corruption of the body. The disabled body is decomposing before your eyes. There's a real underlining fear of death -- death and corruption, says medical anthropologist Devva Kasnitz, who has a disability and is a faculty member for Disability Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Liz England-Kennedy, a medical anthropologist at who recently completed her dissertation at the University of Arizona, specializes in chronic illness and disability. Stereotypes about people with disabilities
Re: Re: Forward Just say no
Greetings Economists, Melvin writes, Extremely interesting Post. How can I follow this thread? Melvin P Doyle The thread of that discussion was composed of a debate between myself and others about first the dominance of the U.S. for the foreseeable future and how that likely would develop as a process similar to the European Union. And others who feel Asia is likely to challenge the U.S. and become the global center over the U.S., rather than move toward a interstate union in economic ties as Europe continues to expand toward. As an important part of that process both sides argue that networked communications support either scenario, but those leaning toward a rise of Asia view point out how the Asian countries adapt to networked communications faster than the U.S. If one were to use a slogan, never out of touch, characterizes that group building process in many Asian countries. It is my contention that is also going to happen in the U.S. and the lead that Asia has is not decisive. The key element for the powerful U.S. is the concept of never out of touch goes along with the U.S. trying to dominate the world. This shift away from traditional U.S. rootlessness fits closely with a goal of U.S. imperialist aims. I also take the position this leads to a new social landscape of mass political groupings, both in the U.S. and elsewhere. Never being out of touch raises critical issues concerning the emotional connection between people. Where people have room to abandon relationships easily as the U.S. caters to, there is a consequence that people are hungry for emotions related to a sense of loss and empty connectivity. Always being in touch forces upon common people a re-examination about what it means to have long term emotional connectivity. The examination would be through how the communications tools produce emotional information. I.e. if one is not out of touch what does one expect of the tools of communication in terms of the emotional part of the connection process. Can the tools of expression provide emotional ties better than previous U.S. society did? What does this imply for political parties? thanks, Doyle Saylor
Forward Just say no
Greetings Economists, On a private list about technology and economics I run, I had an exchange with someone in Japan about networked society. Alan has been writing for awhile about how communications technology in Japan has been well established and the cultural impact that has had. In this exchange, I talk about how the U.S. resists the technology because of the Just Say No culture and Asian communities embrace networked communications as a part of group think. Doyle: I don't disagree with your point at all, but what I think is important about what you write is the sense of time in those groups. I think the overall sense of group formation is way in advance of the U.S. partly for cultural reasons. Simply put the U.S. is a society of just say 'no'. Forming a group goes against the grain of breaking free from roots to be one's self. In other societies I believe people think of forming more society with new aspects rather than going it alone. Back to what I wrote was important in your point, time, is tied to how we feel more than we realize. Feelings are time sensitive. Our feelings change with time. Our feelings are time specific. And forming groups really depends upon how the group feels about itself in the moment. This is where I think great social change can come from. The primary area would be how to understand the emotional connectivity that goes along with other aspects of communication between group members. Alan: Yes, I totally agree with you and I would like to add another great one for the American society, Why should I? I hardly ever hear that here, but many many students don't do their homework and maybe that's a form of it. Asia is a region of The nail that sticks out gets hammered down and America is a society of The wheel that squeaks the loudest gets oiled. It is very possible that relationships in general are deeper in USA than in Japan. Something that has always astounded me is that children never hug their parents. And I mean never. I have asked several hundred students if they ever hugged their mother and only a handful said yes. Yes, the divorce rate is much lower here, 24% vs about 50% in America but many marriages have ended years ago and they just stay under the same roof for the husband social status in the company (it's a no-no to get divorced if you have some ranking in the company).Many couples sleep in separate bedrooms. So the children, who are a very spoiled generation, all have mobile phones and use them extensively because they want to get out of their cramped and stifling houses and they roam and stay in contact with their friends and they easily change the meeting place or get help with something. It's firmly entrenched in the culture in Japan and I have read it's the same in developed Asian countries like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, S Korea. It's a group thing and the culture encourages that, yet the teenager also can eke out some kind of identity with colored hair, pierced this and that, funny-looking clothes, etc. What I like best about the Japanese mobile phone culture is that it is quiet. There is a protocol well established because it is a mature critical mass. The diffusion rate is quite high, over 70%. I'm one of the few people walking around that doesn't have one. Despite the bad crash of telecoms in America and Europe and the crash of the broadband providers in Europe, I still am extremely optimistic about wireless technology globally. Then why is Japan so weak and trying to get a grip and stay competitive in the global economy? That is the making of another email. I also want to write about finding common ground between your economic model of democracy and why America is and will be the the dominant and most innovative powerhouse in the global economy. I'm saying that a dramatic and profound paradigm shift is going on now and continuously and Asian countries are coalescing at warp speed to form the mightiest powerhouse of them all and they will make America look stale in 20-30 years. There is the group thing again; while America has to strong arm countries to support a war, Asian countries are working more like a cooperative group. Warmest Regards to You and Jan, Alan PS My very best to Jan. I thought of her several times recently.
Geneticist: Abort the blind and disabled
Geneticist: Abort the blind and disabled By: Julie Novak November 20, 2002 Narragansett Times KINGSTON - Society might be better off if it prevents the birth of blind and severely disabled children, said biomedical ethicist Dan W. Brock at the University of Rhode Island's tenth Honors Colloquium lecture last Tuesday night. In a world where genetic screening has become not only common, but also proficient and covered by health insurance in some cases, new parents may be facing more thought-provoking decisions as they prepare for the birth of a child. And Brock thinks such decisions should be left to parents, not the government, because of their complexity. A supporter of pre-birth screening and procedures like abortion to prevent disabled children from being born, Brock said his thoughts should not be perceived as a judgment of severely disabled people. I want to define genetic testing in a strictly reproductive context. It's uncontroversial that serious disabilities should be prevented in born persons, Brock asserted. It's considered a misfortune to be born blind or with a serious cognitive disability, but if it's a bad thing for a born person, then why not prevent these conditions in someone who will be born? Brock countered several arguments put forth by disability advocates, who fear his theories will label them as second- class citizens, in his lecture titled, Genetic Testing Selection: A Response to the Disability Movement's Critique. Despite their fears that this implies society would be better if they had never been born, Brock said he upholds the full and equal moral status of disabled people. He contends the volume of governmental policies that promote equal opportunity still do not help a severely disabled person enjoy the same quality of life as a person who was born normal. But that does not mean someone who becomes disabled through an accident should not be provided for. We should distinguish between preventing people from becoming disabled from preventing the existence of disabled people, explained Brock, a former professor of philosophy and biomedical ethics at Brown University who now works for the Department of Clinical Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Disabled persons will argue they experience a high quality of life, but Brock said that this type of self-assessment can be misleading because people learn new skills and adapt to their environment to cope with their disability. They do suffer real disadvantages, he said. Our notion of how good a person's life is is not fully determined by their own subjective self-assessment. Brock believes genetic screening will eventually lead to fewer people with severe disabilities. He acknowledged that eliminating severely disabled children might decrease the amount of services and programs available for others, a notion disability advocates use to oppose his argument. But fewer resources would be needed, Brock noted. Brock stated blindness and severe cognitive dysfunction are two disabilities he would prevent. But the issue is not black and white, he added, and other disabilities that can be prevented, like deafness, conjure up controversy as well. Is their quality of life severely affected by our society? he asked. This is why these choices should be left to individual parents, Brock said, adding that most parents, if given a choice, will opt not to have a child with disabilities. Preventing a severe disability is not for the sake of the child who will have it. Rather, it is for the sake of less suffering and loss of opportunity in the world. http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=6115819BRD=1714 PAG=461dept_id=73829rfi=6
Re: Chomsky by MP ref # 32766
Greetings Economist, I was sitting in a space ship cruising through space. We sat in a darkened deck, large picture windows looking down on earth. It was a long time since I had been home. We headed toward atmosphere. We plunged into the great halo of air and the glowing particles of plasma flashed by on all sides. Spectacular welcome home. Very dramatic. I walked up to the front door and pushed it open. A voice in the darkness said hi Honey. It was Louis. I looked into his eyes, and swept him into my arms and kissed him deeply. He was a petite fella. Wiry little thing. Hard body for me to caress. Louis had made dinner, but was going on about how little stimulation he was getting. I sat on the sofa, then reclined and invited him to come over so I could have him sit in the hollow of my body. I stroked his hair and looked into his eyes. He was pent up with things to talk about. I suppose I was ready for sex, but willing to listen to him for awhile rather than impatiently go to bed and entwine myself into him. He kept talking about, What do you expect. Michael Perelman's mom was the infamous Fanny Goldstein who organized the seamstresses at MGM in the early 1940s. When she wasn't doing trade union work, she was marching around downtown Hollywood with placards that said Down with Mikado-Trotskyite Agents. Long the People's Front. Desegregate major league baseball. I was thinking about the whiskey in the cabinet. Maybe I could pour some drinks and get us loosened up. I was running my hands up his neck and feeling the short hairs at the nape of his neck, and dreamily listening to him say, Yes, that got Michael thrown out of an Albanian formation called the Communist Labor Party (Revolutionary) in 1977. That was when he was colonizing an artichoke farm in Oxnard. I flicked a bit of dandruff off his collar and smelled his odor. A little sweaty. I put my hand on his stomach and gently rubbed it a couple of times. He was angry with me for interrupting his thoughts and he said, Yes, that's true. We do need to combine slogans like No War in Iraq and Saddem Hussein Drowns Puppy Dogs For Entertainment. I looked at his lips and slowly rose to meet them. I parted his lips with my tongue and pulled him down to me. It was just too much to try to concentrate on his thoughts right then. The bed was calling. I unfastened his belt and unzipped his pants. He pushed my hands away and said, I think everybody should grow up. Me, I am a lost cause. Ha Ha I laughed, my Lou still made me laugh, I threw my head back and pulled him tightly to me. He was lying on top of me. I chewed on his eyebrows. He rubbed his face on my mine and held my face in his hands and looked deeply in my eyes. He whispered in my ear, Of course. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Bukharinite. Peasants, enrich yourselves! thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Re: Re: Bush, moron? ref # 32618
Greetings Economists, Michael Perelman writes, If this article is correct, psychopathology may be associated positively with what markets call ability, not disability. Babiak, P. 1995. When Psychopaths Go to Work. International Journal of Applied Psycholology, 44: pp. 171-188. Of course, I am way over my head here with virtually no knowledge of the subject. Doyle I can understand how you might write what you wrote here (i.e. pathology and ability in the markets). But what does Psychopathology mean? One of the reasons I find Fisher's book quite interesting is that he allows us to revisit the history of how we understand emotions in people going back thousands of years, and also looking at what we have historically been accustomed to in wide spread understanding of how emotions ought to work since the French Revolution. Most of what we are referring to as psychopathology is really not pathology (structural dysfunction in the sense really existing cancer might be labeled), but what individuals in an enormously destructive system adjust their thinking to (reflecting your remark above). Thus a theory of emotion management (which is what Fisher was writing about to describe Kant's concepts) indicates how people might structure their feelings in a class structure to reflect the realities of everyday life. The horrible phrase from Kant, Sich Demutigen, poignantly depicts what it takes emotionally to accept capitalist society in Kant's view. Feel nothing or grovel like a slave. Which in my view is like your statement in some ways. But keeping in mind a disability rights perspective, if someone is disabled is that what capitalism was created from? In other words capitalism creates a distorted unhealthy society, but if individuals are hungry in what sense does hunger make capitalism? If someone is mentally disabled, is a system in which they are embedded likely to utilize them in particular ways, and in another system, socialism, likely to live out their lives in those socialistic terms? I would not look at Bush's pathology in terms of pathology (medicalize society, Mann's thesis in The Magic Mountain), rather I would look at how the Information Technology communicates emotions and what that might mean in terms of the brain work labor process. In order to do work people generally have to 'feel' in certain sorts of parameters to do work. If your system depends upon networked communication structures which in turn rely upon human cognitive structures the material meaning of emotional structures comes to the foreground. Feelings are about the literal here and now, geared to respond to crisis in the moment, as communications technology more and more develops toward real time communication structures, the need to materially reflect how emotions work in the communications process grows ever more urgent in a scientific sense. I'll be literal about this, I don't care (it is ok for Stalin to be crazy in my view, it is how the system works that matters) what Bush's psychological problems are, what concerns me is that how I feel reflects political power. That the tools of expression (the media) provide me with my emotional needs has to come from how I do my work good bad or indifferent. Most people really want that sense of 'feeling' right about their job and their life politically over the details of political rhetoric I could generate to explain what everything means. A major achievement of socialist has always been to reach working class people with a sense of emotional solidarity to their needs and goals. One final thing Michael, thank you for providing a forum in which I can seriously raise these issues. Whenever disability words come up they immediately raise concerns on my part about how we are to consider what they mean. There are few places to put this debate forward in a way that could build a view of things that fully incorporates disabled people into the movement for social change. This is one of the most challenging areas to make sense of. The whole arena of 'sectarian' activity is riddled with questions (people constantly attack sects on the grounds of disability issues they perceive) about cognitive disability and what a system for social change really would be like. In solidarity. Doyle Saylor
Rawls and Kantian thinking
Greetings Economists, Eric Nilsson quotes Louis Proyect, LP, The reason it sounds individualistic is because it is rooted in Kant. It is really an updating of the notion of the categorical imperative . . . and It was only after being exposed to Marxism that I figured out that it was nonsensical to talk about justice without talking about political economy. Then Eric responds This dropping of names still shows a failure to understand Rawls. Saint Karl himself assumed Rawls failed to reject (in fact built upon) the individualist perspective of Kant; BUT Rawls still made a major contribution to the understanding of justice and political theory. Doyle A good place to bring up a commentary on Vehement Passions. First however, the reference to KM as a saint is peculiar in the context of the discussion (though a common enough reference to Marxist). In what sense is religion an issue here (with respect to the theme of this email which is passion)? I don't think that religion has anything to do with this point other than that one assumes that 'faith' matters to a materialist. In the book Vehement Passions, Fisher writes that Kant was the biggest foe of passionate states of mind (faith) after Spinoza, and Kant's influence had a major impact upon how we understanding passion. I.e. to eschew passionate states of mind such as faith. So it is peculiarly appropriate to say that KM is a saint if one is attacking passionate states of mind. Page 239, Vehement Passions, Fisher, 2002, Princeton press Kant discusses the experience of respect or reverence (Achtung) for the moral law as the only possible moral feeling; that is, the one feeling that defines human nature as personality rather than a mere assembly of inclinations directed toward happiness. Respect, the one moral passion acknowledged by Kant, is seen by him to be related to wonder and admiration. Respect (Achtung) occupies the unique place in his moral system that anger (thumos) does in Plato or that Wonder (L'Admiration) does in Descartes. Respect and its counterpart, the destructive blow to self-conceit, slef-love, and pride that he calls Demutgung (humbling or humiliation) is constitutive for moral identity, for location in the world, for Kant's new term for the self, personhood,: Just as man learns in Descrates, or just as man, angered, pursues justice in Plato, so here the respect addressed to the moral law and the humbling of the self that follows is the single constitutive experience involving the passions. Reverence (Achtung) is properly awareness of a value which demolishes my self-love. Note 16 Doyle So Kant is commenting on Vehement Passions, but what are we to make of some poor person living on the streets who is raging against the world? That they find 'Actung'? So much better to have the cop bellow 'Achtung'. Fisher continues on page 238, Demutigung is a far stronger word that dispiriting, even though the central part-mut-is clearly our English word courage, and Gemut is the spirit or heart. Equally, our word disheartened would be too mild for the German Demutigung. The German word carries the sense of being dejected, cast down, humble, meek, submissive, lowly all the words that are the antithesis of pride or self-worth. The phrase sich demutigen means to humble, prostrate, abase, or degrade oneself; to grovel before, submit. Kant's choice of this one approved feeling is a powerful, even a distasteful, medicine. Like Hisrchman's evocation of avarice as the one passion in an economy-driven culture that turns back against all others, taming them in the interest of the Interests, Kant has defined a therapy against the passions, desires, and inclinations that arises, not from reason, but from an impassioned state, humiliation, that is affirmed just because it undermines all other vehement states based on self-love, pride, self-affirmation, or any merely personal search for happiness. The moral law humbles and humiliates our self-conceit. It reverses the self-expansion of the spirited self and denies the value of those acts that define the self as energetic and confident. Doyle Which in my view gives us some sense of how considering the Vehement Passions we can freshly understand what is being given to us in the Capitalist State in terms of meaning. We start with the reality of how really existing human beings feel. Their feelings shaped by the injustice of a class system, and we then say that those feelings are only valid in certain forms such as Sich Demutigen. We then are clear enough that Kant means a society of such and such moral structure whether or not we agree with LP about Rawls. But certainly LP makes it clear that understanding the political economy led him out of the abyss of Sich Demutigen. I have pasted below a short commentary from JKS which appears elsewhere that is interesting in regard to Rawls. Thanks, Doyle Saylor Rawls is a very dull writer, in the tradition of Dewey. As for the cliches, well sorry
Re: ow things change ref # 32537
Greetings Economists, Jim Devine writes, I read Doyle as saying that accusing, say, Bob Barr, of having loony positions does not really argue against his positions and therefore is simply involves leftists talking amongst themselves (preaching to the converted) which doesn't have any obvious progressive effect. If so, I agree. However, there's nothing wrong with the left talking amongst themselves, especially if it involves trashing the Right rather than the standard leftist infighting and emotionally-laden branding of deviants who've strayed to the right as heretics or apostates. (Loony is a cliché, of course, but it's not that bad of one.) Doyle, Obviously out of habit most people indulge in just that sort of low level name calling when they lack more insight. The left may not fundamentally go along with that thinking but at the same time where does the left substitute a serious understanding of the issues. I use the work of Philip Fisher (who isn't a leftist but does a decent history of passions which serves my purposes) because that allows us to think about what underlies the concept of calling someone a loon. I.e. that we have unexamined assumptions about Vehement Passions (or more broadly all emotions) and brain work that are really what we are talking about when we say someone is a loony. Incidentally I looked up the other book, I was trying to remember, William Reddy, Navigation of Feelings, A Framework for the History of Emotions, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Very interesting book in the sense that Reddy systematizes how to consider emotional content in a culture. Reddy seems to have some degree of left orientation. Jim, As for the term loony, I think there are two responses. We can interpret it in the politically correct way, to say that it's an insult to psychological deviants and should be avoided. Or we can embrace it, the way some young people embraced the insult punk and said that they were proud to be punk. Doyle, I don't agree with the idea of taking over pejorative labels like punk. For example a very common pejorative that has been 're-appropriated' that gay people are 'queer'. What underlies the concept of appropriating a word from those who hate homosexuals is the passion which the bigot holds about homosexuality not the word, 'queer'. The tactic does not address the root cause in conservative passions and gives the impression that our culture understands what is at stake when emotions are addressed. If you look at High Schools for example harassment is stronger than ever. Jim, In my experience, every individual is loony in a different way. Most of the time, that's one thing that makes life interesting. We should embrace and celebrate human heterogeneity. Doyle, How can we talk about this economically? It is my view that looking at video games is a key way to understand how emotion can be communicated outside face to face contact. Look at the dollar amounts in various aspects of the communication industry. Why does telephone conversation sell/produce more content than the movie industry? The levels of production differences have a reason for why they reach certain levels and then stabilize there. There are considerable industry efforts to provide video games that we feel emotionally engaged *(see Time article excerpt pasted in below). We are in effect manufacturing emotional content when a cartoon shows emotion. Are these artificial sources of emotional content for human consumption competing with real faces, real ways of emotional production? Can we see providing emotional needs this way? Could we have a framework for economic analysis as Reddy suggests with his book? Thanks, Doyle http://www.time.com/time/sampler/printout/0,8816,391544,00.html From Time magazine, Sunday, Nov. 17, 2002 Sim Nation The Sims Online is a new virtual frontier. Is a video game just what this divided nation needs? By LEV GROSSMAN Let's imagine the most boring video game possible. Instead of crashing spaceships and trigger-happy aliens, you would have suburban houses, leaky faucets and chatty neighbors. Instead of fighting evil, you would do the dishes, watch a little TV, then call it a night. Instead of saving the world, you would be saving for a bigger split-level. It's the opposite of fun - like an '80s family sitcom without the jokes or Clark Kent without his secret identity. Now open your eyes: you've just invented the most popular computer game of all time. It's called The Sims (short for simulation), and the premise is simple. You control an ordinary suburban family. You make them dinner at night and send them to work in the morning. You turn on the TV when they're bored and put them to bed when they're tired. Since it debuted in 2000, The Sims has sold 8 million copies in 17 languages and has inspired a devoted fan following. It's also one of the rare computer games played by more women than men. Next month, when video-game titan Electronic Arts launches The Sims
Re: pc language
storyboards, with pictures of Sims interiors and characters, above written stories and dialogue. A typical novella may stretch for 64 to 200 pictures and thousands of words. Some of them are just Architectural Digest in digital form, involving dinner parties and room-by-room house tours. But most of the novellas are more substantial, and after you've read through a hundred or so of these things, they all blend into one vast modern cultural landscape in which ''Oprah'' meets ''Friends,'' ''Terms of Endearment'' and MTV's ''Real World.'' Doyle From an economic point of view the growth of online social methods like this are ideal for Socialist organization of people. The technical understanding of this comes best in my view from taking seriously what Fisher writes in his book on Vehement Passions. Vehement Passions allows us to create a technical language to talk about what people seem to think they are talking about when they write about sects, crazies, loonies, and etc. Suppose we don't take seriously some sect? We still have the problem of building a movement. You might reply well I know something when I see it, I know when I don't take something seriously and when I don't I trust something my judgement is what I must go by, but how can you talk in a materialist manner about this subject matter? How can one write about this from a socialist perspective? My answer is to use Fisher's work as a model and re-examine Vehement Passions. My point is that when language comes up politically that references disability it is a telltale like the canary in the coal mine. It points to where empty phraseology pops up. On a superficial level it satisfies my pro disability rights attitude to bring up the language use issue, but on a deeper level what Fisher writes about in his book is the historical development of attitudes and methods of dealing with Vehement Passions that could technically allow us to talk realistically about this area. And we can apply this understanding to on-line communities in new socialist ways. And Vehement Passions theory applies to economic theory as Fisher frequently writes about in his book. I don't want to advocate a psychologizing of economic theory, but rather a technical language that jettisons empty phraseology. And in particular because this has a positive impact upon disabled people fighting for their right in this time period gives all disable people the feeling that Marxists respond on a deep level to oppression and how to deal with it. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Re: Re: pc language
Greetings Economists, Carrol Cox writes, Your post invites conversation, but what you are probably going to get in response is not discussion of your arguments but a picking out of this phrase by some backbiter and a mocking of your use of it. Probably they will suggest that you yourself are a bloodless intellect incapable of feeling strong passion. Don't respond to such baiting if it occurs. Doyle, I got into trouble around that sort of thing once and I appreciate your wisdom here. Your support means a lot to me. Carrol, Perhaps you should write a commentary on Fisher for the list. Doyle I'll see if I can put out something for the list sometime down the line. I had been thinking of Fisher in relation to collaboration (content/document management in Information Technology), I hadn't thought he would be that interesting when I picked up the book, but Fisher opens the topic of passion in useful and unexpected ways. Louis Proyect does a great job writing about various cultural phenomenon. I'll see if I can't take that example of an approach to writing about a book or movie and see if I can't do justice to this book. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Re: how things change
Greetings Economists, Doug Henwood writes, Not that much of a change - despite many other loony positions, Barr's always been a hardliner on civil liberties (like Ron Paul). Doyle You loosely apply an anti-disabled phrasing to the enemy. For Socialists what are we to do with the loonies? Asylums? Is that the place to put someone who is a political enemy, an insane asylum? I mean obviously you use this lightly. Your term does not bear weight nor depth nor understanding. You use many terms lightly. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Re: Birds of a feather
Greetings Economists, Peter Dorman writes, There was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about a year ago that was fair-minded, I thought, on Singer and his critics. The man is not a monster... Doyle, Writings on an Ethical Life, Peter Singer, Harper Collins books, 2000, page 163, We might think that we are just more civilized than these primitive peoples. But it is not easy to feel confident that we are more civilized than the best Greek and Roman moralists. It was not just the Spartans who exposed their infants on hillsides: both Plato and Aristotle recommended the killing of deformed infants. Romans like Seneca, whose compassionate moral sense strikes the modern reader (or me, anyway) as superior to that of the early and medieval Christian writers, also thought infanticide the natural and humane solution to the problem posed by sick and deformed babies. Doyle, So is that what we ought to do Peter expose babies on the hillside above the towns to show our moral superiority we've gained from an ethical insight? page 207 We will have to give up hope of finding better treatments for stroke victims, because we will be unable to try out these treatments on patients who have just suffered a stroke and are unable to give consent to taking part in a research program page 207 down a sentence, For me, those choices are not difficult, and I am not at all persuaded that the practices Dorner criticizes have any tendency to lead to Nazi-like attitudes. But there are some questions that are more difficult. Among them are questions concerning the treatment of infants with Down syndrome. ... When Down syndrome is detected and abortion available, the overwhelming majority of women, in most countries in excess of 90 percent, choose abortion. The fact that so many women carrying fetuses with Down syndrome choose not to give birth to the child surely tells us something about their attitude to life with Down syndrome, and their desire to avoid, if possible, being the mother of such a child. page 313 A sinister aspect of this atmosphere is a kind of self-censorship among German publishers. It has proved extraordinarily difficult to find a publisher to undertake a German edition of Should the Baby Live?-The updated and more comprehensive account of my views (and those of my coauthor Helga Kuhse) on the treatment of severely disabled newborn infants. page 315 Germans, of course, are still struggling to deal with their past, and the German past is one which comes close to defying rational understanding. There is, however, a peculiar tone of fanaticism about some sections of the German debate over euthanasia that goes beyond normal opposition to Nazism, and instead begins to seem like the very mentality that made Nazism possible. To see this attitude at work, let us look not at euthanasia but at an issue that is, for the Germans, closely related to it and just as firmly taboo: the issue of eugenics. Because the Nazis practiced eugenics, anything in any way related to genetic engineering in Germany is now smeared with Nazi associations.. This attack embraces the rejection of prenatal diagnosis, when followed by selective abortion of fetuses with Down syndrome, spina bifida, and or other defects, and even leads to criticism of genetic counseling designed to avoid the conception of children with genetic defects Doyle, So the Germans are fanatics because they are concerned with bigoted anti-disabled attitudes. You say Singer isn't a monster? He thinks killing a month old infant who is disabled is perfectly reasonable approach. Since the majority of women will abort their baby who has Downs Syndrome, then have a cop come over to the house and put a bullet in the infant. Or perhaps a clinic for lethal injections that is pain free for the child. As long as the atmosphere is clinical and antiseptic and we have violins playing rock music to sooth the parents during their ordeal. Or organ harvesting, that will make a lot of money won't it? We've got a lot of stroke patients out there taking up nursing home space that aren't producing value, lets do a little surgery. What they don't know won't hurt them, besides the damage is irreversible. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Re: Re: Re: slowing the surge to war
Greetings Economists, Soula Avramidis writes, wouldn't it be better if all the masks are dropped and an all out war takes place instaed of this painful gestation period, espaecially, that pathetic european social democracy that pushes an argument of ultra imperialism. Doyle The U.S. has made itself clear for example through threats to Iraq that it is prepared to use nuclear weapons. The world as a whole is organized around nation states. Your note takes the tack that SA, that if that 80% of humanity called the third world lets air altogether at once they will necessarily shift things in their favour Doyle, which says 80% of humanity would do something together presupposes an international form of cooperation far from being evident and practical at this moment. The primary conglomeration somewhat independent of the U.S. is the European Union which possibly together could stand up to the U.S. power in the military arena if they had some time to build up their forces. Secondarily, China has the unified resources in population and other ways to some day possibly have the power to stand up to the U.S. The rest of the world has large numbers of people with considerable difficulties getting together. For example language barriers and religious barriers. What do you think people will do? They are used to a certain way of life. They (for the most part) haven't got a clue about how to make contact with the rest of humanity to make union against the U.S. Further if Iraq uses biological weapons against Israel in the conflict that the U.S. is seemingly forcing upon it, the U.S. and it's ally, Israel, will use nuclear weapons against Iraq. Nuclear weapons (by themselves) will scare the global community into submission. Some countries like Pakistan have nukes, but no means to use them against the U.S. The U.S. can easily destroy every last city in Pakistan and poison the land forever. That Roman peace works quite well in empires was established 2000 years ago. 80% of humanity wants to live and get along peacefully not die in futile conflicts against an unknown or unknowable enemy on the other side of the globe. They only stand up when their way of life is threatened by capitalist development in their land in their homes. Hence Iran revolted via religious means when left wing alternatives were crushed and made too weak to respond to capitalist systemic workings. The U.S. specializes in the destruction of infrastructure of nations when it attacks. Destroy water supplies, transportation, distribution of supplies. A population is quickly reduced to famine. That doesn't require nuclear weapons. That is the standard strategy of war. The world power elites are tied into the global system. More likely to happen is that someday the big capitalist decide to fight over resources like oil and in that turmoil the 'international' working class gets stirred up enough to form large scale groupings something like those that arose in Russian during their revolution, or China during theirs. Religion is far less likely to provide revolutionary change beyond the border of a nation that has for the most part a single religion population. In any case the general problem of standing up to the U.S. by a religion is more or less the same issue as facing the working class, and the particular religion would have to solve the same set of problems as the working class in terms of global unity. Since the religious aren't materialists they are vulnerable to science which the U.S. well knows since it sponsors an immense scientific establishment to make war weapons with despite the Christian Fundamentalist of the U.S. Republican party. Etc Etc Etc Etc ad nauseum. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Sociobiology in the Nation Magazine
are the products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating. Their own view is that the only sensible thing to say about human nature is that it is 'in' that nature to construct its own history. The implication is that any other statement about the psychological makeup of our species-about our capacity for language, our love of family, our sexual emotions, our typical fears, and so on -is not sensible. page 149 A surprising number of intellectuals, particularly on the left, do deny that there is such a thing as inborn talent, especially intelligence. Stephen Jay Gould's 1981 bestseller The Mismeasure of Man was written to debunk the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariable to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups-races, classes, or sexes-are innately inferior and deserve their status. The philosopher Hilary Putnam argued that the concept of intelligence is part of a social theory called elitism that is specific to capitalist societies:... JD writes, one problem with EP (from what I've read) is that they emphasize human universals too much and downplay the role of human heterogeneity. But it's true that there are a bunch of shared characteristics of humanity across cultures (e.g., the use of language). We shouldn't ignore their existence. Doyle If some human being doesn't use language they aren't human? If a deaf person who grows up without access to sign language (Ukiah California) and has no language are they not human. Is an Autistic who has no language not human? JD also writes about his comments on Johnson's review, Again, I can't comment on Pinker's book. I hope that this representation is more accurate than Louis' description of Johnson's review. Doyle I don't think Johnson's review was cognizant of the science issues. Additionally as Lou speaks we don't get from Johnson the political character of Pinker's book, we are instead led to believe that the issue is merely about nature and nurture extremism called the blank slate. thanks, Doyle Saylor
What is obvious about this election
Greetings Economists, The democrats lost the election. If the democrats can't win elections why vote for them? Does that mean the Republicans represent working people? No. Obviously this is what the left can build a movement around. The democratic party is now vulnerable to the left. Of course do we have people in this country capable of working toward the left? Why not? So what if we drain 5% of the votes from losers? or 25% or 50%. If it is 50% we stand a chance of doing more than draining votes. We stand a chance of establishing ourselves as a political force. The economy provides the left with the means to reach the masses. The war provides a means for the left to reach the masses. The disintegration of the democrats provides a means to reach the masses. That is what I think is obvious about this election. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Sociobiology in the Nation Magazine
Greetings Economists,
Steven Johnson responds to Lou Proyect,
Steven,
If evolutionary psychology has been dominated by the right, that's partially
because the left has expended all its energy denouncing the very premise
that natural selection has had an impact on who were are and the social
relationships that we gravitate towards.
Doyle
S. J. Gould, and R. Lewontin don't argue against natural selection and
structure in human. That is an absurdity. Pinker's book is an attack on
these two people in particular and is not a serious look at biological
issues. Johnson assumes here from Pinker's pop culture text a great deal
about this debate.
There are key claims by Pinker about human evolution. I.e. like Chomsky,
Pinker says that language is an instinct. This concept ('the Language
Instinct') that genetic control of behavior is genetically determined is
highly debatable and as Gould loved to describe a just so story.
Precisely in the sense of how structure and environment interact Pinker is
hostile to any suggestion that threatens his 'instinct' or rule boundedness.
What is not useful about Pinker's book is the right wing personality attack
hysteria to obscure the material basis of the biology of cognitive
structures. Pinker's main claim is both threatened by Lewontin's writings,
and extremely difficult to defend in scientific debate.
Steven Johnson
That seems foolish to me, and I
think it would have seemed foolish to Marx as well.
Doyle
Marx inspired Gould, so this is twisting Marx away from his basic position
of the importance of human agency in building social systems.
Steven,
(I think his 'species
being' is not far from what the ev psych folks are talking about.) It seems
much more productive for the left to make sure that the science is sound,
and then see if there's something to learn from what it finds.
Doyle
That is a decent description of S.J. Gould whose writings are full of
respect and clarity about someone he disagrees with.
Steven,
As I
suggested at the end of my piece, we are a mix of nature and nurture, and a
progressive politics should be able to build on that mix in productive ways
-- dialectical might in fact be a very nice way of describing that
interaction. I would love to see some examples of Marxist writing that
incorporated Darwinian models of the human mind,
Doyle
Has Johnson read Gould?
Steven
but my sense is that there
aren't many out there... Almost everything I read sounds like your post:
Sociobiology is the enemy! How dare we even think about learning anything
from these people! Finally, do you really think that humans are not inclined
to treat their
immediate kin preferentially? In other words, the only reason that people
love their children more than they love total strangers is because culture
has taught them to?
Doyle
Steven Pinker makes it clear he is the enemy of the left in his book. His
book is a waste of time in terms of science to read, but in terms of
ideology it is quite clear Pinker is a reactionary. Pinker writes about
science in depth in other places, but this is not so in this book. Has
Johnson read Cycles of Contingency, Developmental Systems and Evolution,
or The Structure of Evolutionary Theory? It seems to me that one doesn't
have to be a technical expert in these areas to have an opinion, but the
need to have read a range of the literature is called for to comment in
serious fashion upon Pinker's book.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor
Re: Re: Autism on the rise
Greetings Economists, Charles' set of articles is interesting. However I would like to add a social dimension. We tend to think of Autistics as defective. Do we think that way about Gorillas, Chimpanzees, and Orangutans? The crucial element of course with Autism is social development that all the other primates can't achieve either. The main social structure of human beings is a type of social interaction that arises from language use. For Autistics language use is greatly affected and this is the 'problem' for them. We use animals all the time in our society. They can't speak and we don't expect them to. But as so many people testify their love for their pet is greater than for their fellow human being. So the pet is quite successful at doing 'love' work. If the presumption is that language work is the central aspect of human existence what does that mean? It is social framework that fails Autistics in terms of every day living. For them the capacity to suddenly have cognitive abilities we don't have in the language group of human beings is of no value from the language enabled network without the Autistic person participating in the framework that language creates. So Temple Grandin is successful, but other Autistics are not. The obvious point then is that the framework is not working right. One way to say that from an anti-disabled perspective is that Autistic people are a defect in the developmental process. This focus upon genetic 'defects' inevitably accompanies the discussion to explain what it is we seek. However, as Lewontin and others might suggest it is complex relationship with environmental factors that makes problems for Autistics and Language enabled human beings. The key factor really is that Autistics don't participate in the social framework that language enabled humans do. For parents of Autistics the distance of their children from them is particularly painful. They don't respond to love that parents feel toward the children. However, we don't understand what it is that the parents are doing in a labor process to 'love' a child. We tend to reject emotions as non-essential brainwork to which a rational mind is contaminated. Let me state that in a particular way. If you shift brain resources from language areas in the left brain to other areas of the brain, that person can then do certain kinds of brain work because their resources are adequate for certain kinds of tasks. (prodigious memory feats!) So we assume that the level of brainwork (language enabled) people can do is what we want, but in fact what we want is to build a social framework that brain work can be done in period. Even now for an Autistic doing brainwork may be what is valued about them, Temple Grandin, or Blind Tom. And their ability is recognized in terms of brainwork outside the language framework, but for others, the capacity to do Autistic related non-language brainwork is a great social difficulty because the framework which is assumed about brainwork includes devoting extensive human brain resources to language and the framework that language produces. Which may make assumptions about social structure which are unexamined and impoverished as to outcomes that brainwork might produce were we to better understand what language work really accomplishes. Of course we can provide something for Autistics so they can live a long life, and occasionally some Autistic does something we think worthy of our social system, but for the most part it is a mystery to us why Autistics can't 'love' us. Socialism is not about constructing a particular language framework for brainwork, it is the social whole and how it works. Do not be fooled by demands of language structure into thinking it is the end-all-be-all of how socialism will build human society. We may at some point finally come to the conclusion that what we want in terms of brain work is more than what language enabled human beings can do. In that arena an Autistic person may fit well. That isn't to say that is an either/or situation for language enabled humans. We don't understand how the re-allocation of brain resources from language to other brain work could be implemented in our system as yet. We don't see the framework clearly enough of what it is that is being built in language to understand how that framework could include other kinds of brain work outside the norms of the language framework. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: speaking of autism...
there is a labor process issue which Jim Devine points out, JD, It would be a mistake to apply the psychological description of autism to economics in an unvarnished way. Even though high-functioning autistic people are often attracted to academia, where they can lecture others without listening, engage in research alone, and develop beautiful mind pictures, it is hard to say that a majority - or even a large minority - of economists have autistic tendencies. Individuals on the autistic spectrum do not have to specialize in economics to succeed in academia since there are other outlets for expression of their proclivities besides economic theory.12 Being able to work well with others helps one achieve success in academia, as in most spheres, so that those with autistic tendencies would need to be very smart or to work very hard to compensate for social-skills deficits. In sum, self-selection can only be one part of the basis for autistic economics. Doyle The labor process is social structure itself and how to produce that. And at the core of that is the language processes and how those get done. So if someone with Autism can't participate in that structure just as a deaf person can't hear the system provides for their needs. Theory of Mind is used by very reactionary forces in U.S. society to essay how genetics determine human beings. Yet a sense of the social process (Theory of Mind) as the labor process we engage in, and the constant plastic growth of what we build gives us the best possible tool to economically understand the social structure Capitalism attempts to impose. Autism and blindness show us clearly enough how a system malleably molds minds. Two examples; with blindness Scientific American Frontiers had a program with Alan Alda where someone was blindfolded and in a week their visual centers shifted (MRI images of the visual centers active at touching Braille) over to their touch systems to aid in learning Braille. That MRI of a life long blind person showed that brain visual centers in the occipital lobe were being used to read Braille with. And that magnetic disruption of the local areas greatly reduced the ability to read Braille in either case. But with Autistics it is even more obvious that when brain resources are not poured into language structures in the mind (the theories around shifting from left brain to right brain thinking processes which I referenced in a previous posting in this line of conflict around Autism) that a person can spontaneously play a piano, do math calculations most of us could not, paint pictures with more observational skill than most can muster. Etc. Steven Pinker has just come out with a book warning us again to watch out for Blank Slaters and their theories of social plasticity. The 'theory' (Pinker shudders to name) that when you shift brain resources from one system to another and get startling results which contradict our assumptions about social structure and how it must be because minds are plastic enough to fit to changing circumstance. So we return to the question E.P. Thompson poses how do we unite the Working Class? We all have a struggle ahead of us. There is going to be a moment when we rely upon our received learning, like me to call someone insane after years of adjusting myself to a new reality of Disabled Rights Movement. Rather than to see Capitalism is a system not based upon insanity but class structure, and to bring up the specificity of individual lives that on the surface have nothing in common. Autistics can be born anywhere in the system. It is the building of a framework of socialism that concerns us. And therefore to liberate. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: what is science? Pen-L:31265
Greetings Economists, Ravi writes, i would use the example of the mathematician ramanujan, whose mathematical results were stupendous, but who neither cared for nor was good at proofs (leaving hardy to do the dirty work to establish his impressive results). his justification for the results he proposed were often based on his intuition or the claim that the goddess 'parasakthi' told him so, in a vision. i hate rehasing this issue, but i have to point out that scientists will be quick to point out that intuition is alright in the 'context of discovery' but what makes science 'science' is that rigorous proof is required in the 'context of justification'. this claim is quite a distance from reality. pkf among others points out the political - the desires of the humans carrying out the justification - and theoretical - theory-laden'ness of facts - limitations of of this 'context of justification' claim. --ravi Doyle, We're talking about Neuro-networks not intuition. Whatever intuition is supposed to be in popular imagination it is pointless to go on about intuition when we have better ways to talk about what is going in someone's mind. Not that I will eschew saying the word intuition in this short essay, but that is we are going to be 'rigorous' we want to at least know that rigor requires using neuro-networks not poorly materially defined terms like intuition. Secondly let's consider rigorous proof as a form addressing the issue of memory recall. So if we want to know something we want to remember how to get there. That is part of the reason why a neuro-network is better than a linear sequential computing process. We assume the methods of pencil and paper mathematics (Erdos forgive us our transgressions against your mathematics!) in considering mathematics but the method of 'writing' mathematics can be quite un-like pencil and paper. Thirdly, it is necessary in my view to understand if we are going to refer to desires of human beings to understand how feelings are related to the neo-cortex. Hence why we might want to build computing networks that reflect context based files we exchange with each other. Hence why we want to remember something, and share the work of memory by talking to each other. This is simple to say. We walk around in the world, not sit in front of desktop computers, and when we are in the world such as Mother and children we want to see to it that the social structure insures we get our work done. That is a context based view of things. We use how we feel to tell us how to choose. Many a woman has argued that that sort of work is 'intuition' based because rigorous proof as a mathematical method of doing work is not and I repeat this as loudly as possible a practical means of implementing a relationship with a child. That techniques invented for mathematics in the world of pencil and paper is irrelevant to the complex immediate tasks for which neuro-networks have evolved to do work in. That describes the purpose of having augmented reality displays where we are in the world. We want something that comes up (from memory) when needed, not laboriously constructed by sequential rules of logic. That writing that context based information structure requires that all points have factorial structure to it in an n-dimensional way. Hence spintronics offers ways of addressing at once some powerful computational problems that can't be done logically and consistently otherwise. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Re: Columbus as prototype - after Guindon
Greetings Economists, Tom's comment is correct about attachments. However, that seems to me to point out another problem with email lists. Email is not designed to carry graphical content. Web pages are more efficient means of communicating collaborative graphical imagery. A portal based place for groups to share resources and archived forums, chats, lists etc. meets a lot of people's needs better. To my mind designing a left oriented environment that tries to build our sort of social relations is the direction that Ralph was trying to point at. We have a lot to work out with the web to build for the working class. The most important part it seems to me is collaborate work not just write notes back and forth. The depth is missing from individual efforts. A movie made for public consumption requires many hands, and so it is with a left web, many hands building something. Where the viruses create havoc it also stifles peoples efforts to express themselves. That isn't to say Tom's comment is right and how one ought to direct notes to this list, but I strongly advocate we build something more for the left. To focus more strongly upon the collaborative work that we can do. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Re: RE: Re: Re: Columbus as prototype - afterGuindon
Greetings Economists, Ralph, you can put a graphic through Image Ready part of Adobe's Photoshop and reduce the file size down to manageable levels. It will tell you how big the file will be once you have finished reducing the original to an 'optimized' size. There may be similar tools out there in other image manipulation programs but I don't know them. I would not send out a graphic larger than 50kb, and better to keep a graphic smaller than 25kb. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: What email lists are for
Greetings Economists, I think Lou's basic point is well taken. The depth of what Lou posts is very much the right way to go about posting to Pen-L. I don't think as Carrol does that posting is by any logic supposed to be a certain way to be read. I think that lists are the forward edge of new ways of understanding how to organize thought and brain work. In particular because the economy is likely to tank and people need some voice to frame and understand what is happening it is highly important an accessible resource like Pen-L be taken seriously. I might add to this that the left ought to think about more collaborative projects along the lines of what Lou aspires to in his depth pieces. The software exists to work on line on collaborative pieces. Net Meeting allows people to work in small groups on line to produce collaborative pieces. I think working together is a good organizing tool, encourages a depth that many hands bring to a project and so on. Thirdly, Web based tools allow one to exploit media. Web sites with simple graphics and other elaboration's on the multi-media themes are potentially alternate ways of approaching collaboration projects. Fourth, work like the above needs to consciously take on Accessibility for the disabled. Multimedia web based work (blogging sites are typical of this sort of direction) by people on the left needs be inclusive and aware of the disabled needs of the working class. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Re: Re: walkout
Greetings Economists, Bill Lear writes, Bill, Direct and spontaneous face-to-face human contact is the very best way to exchange information known to the universe. Put it through a video feed or conference call, and a lot gets lost. I don't know the details, but when you start placing workers in remote locations from other pieces of their work, the work will usually suffer, not to mention (perhaps) the workers (though the Indians employed to run the database might be better off). Doyle, Well this will be debated for quite awhile I am sure. Essentially this proposes to insert an interface in communications where the interface didn't exist before. The issue being geographic location for work and not. It is not clear that face to face is superior in all circumstances at all. For example Television news work is distributed across the planet. There are many ways that distributed work happen actually. Face to Face is a labor process producing a certain kind of product. Hybrid uses of interfaces in work is likely to grow. In particular the work from making interfaces is likely to grow substantially. I am thinking of memory work. Web Services where a person accesses business activity as one moves through the landscape requires that information about a physical location be available. Suppose we extrapolate video game activity into this area, there is a vast ocean of location to be filled with interface memory. As an illustration any city street has a wealth of history about it that would be nice to know in some circumstances. Who owned this house when, when was it painted? What are the plants in the yard? Etc. Etc. This sort of work will grow because it is the exchange of memory that is the foundation of social structure. The exchange process is lost if it is face to face. We can't even begin to consider the social ramifications of structure to that until we can build the interface of memory. I agree with the ILWU that work distributed ought to be unionized. Let it be defined by the 'human' rights of the work process not the profit motives of the bosses. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Personalities and the List
manufactured by the media. And we have to have television available for this to have a real impact upon how social structure is built. This points up the problem with relying upon words alone in media. Newspapers cannot compete with Television because the conduit or networked structure of human society is not adequately carried by words alone. Further more this network problem is about the pipeline characteristics of the system. A movie or tv show while not interactive like an avatar carries a formidable amount of information per second. If socialist are to address 'personality' we must address what is being manufactured and what the masses need in that product. That underlies the collapse of telecoms around the insane broadband build out of the ninties. The framework of personality being manufactured is the social network structure of human society. It is not just a legal right and wrong, but the literal sense of emotional connection of human society. It may seem peculiar to think of the smiling media face of 'big brother' as a necessary structure to social life, but the pejorative image masks the need to manufacture with media a structure of human society via media that supplants the weak processes face to face communications provide us with now. The literary concept of 'big brother' was aimed at criticizing communist personalities, but the economic system has a different lesson for us. P2P computing tells us that file sharing is very important. And Trust is a grave or serious issue in that world. The asinine entertainment figures pleading about piracy on television tell us how important 'trust' is to business. But society needs a framework that works well for human beings. This framework is very complex. A good example is disability rights movement in two areas, Autism, and Dyslexia. In California 90% of disabled students are being rejected from High School graduation for the High School test scores they produce because the test are deliberately made impossible for disabled people to use in their cognitive structure. Able brilliant Autistics, and Dyslexics are being singled out for gross discrimination and oppression because the framework being promulgated by the criminal anti disabled scum of the the California State government are designed to condemn the Disabled to a life in living hell. A framework of P2P computing with avatars (built to meet rigorous communal standards of social structure needs) is a key political direction for mass political social life. Personalities are not a moral issue but the outcome of media standards and practices which either serve the needs of the capitalist class or the working class. Just as the working class needs and requires national health care, so the working class needs and requires a personality and media structure commiserate with the loving world of socialism. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: McCloskey Post-Autism
brain to compensate for the loss. The evidence for this idea has been building for several decades. A 1975 pheumoencephalogram study found left hemispheric damage in 15 of 17 autistic patients; for of them had savant skills. (A pneumoencephalogram was an early and painful imaging technique during which a physician would inject air into a patient's spinal fluid and then x-ray the Brian to determine where the air traveled. It is no longer used.) ... In the late 1980s Norman Geschwind and Albert M. Galaburda of Harvard University offered an explanation for some causes of left hemispheric damage-and for the higher number of male savants. In their book Cerebral Laterialization, the two neurologists point out that the left hemisphere of the Brian normally completes its development later than the right and is therefore subject to prenatal influences-some of them detrimental for a longer period. In the male fetus, circulating testosterone can act as one of these detrimental influences by slowing growth and impairing neuronal function in the most vulnerable left hemisphere. As a result, the right brain often compensates, becoming larger and more dominant in males. The greater male-to-female ratio is seen not just in savant syndrome but in other forms of central nervous system dysfunction, such as dyslexia, delayed speech, stuttering, hyperactivity and autism. Doyle, The contemporary theory about the language related problems Autistic persons have with social interactions is pointed at. Specifically damage to the left hemisphere and why that damage happens more in males than females. Etc. though hypothetical this theory points at why someone might presume to use Autism as a metaphor for 'bad' economics. I.E. the incapacity of such thinking to respond to real peoples social condition. In other words the economic theory come hell or high water is right, and if people complain about the consequences they are the problem not the mathematics. Using mathematics in this manner seems somehow associated to math skills in Autistic Savants at the expense of social ability to not just communicate but engage in democratic dialogue. This desire to make a point using Autism then does not explain anything. I am describing a symptom as a doctor when the term is first invented. That perhaps is the purpose in Medicine to label a symptom, but once associated with a disability and then used for the purpose of stigmatizing something economic is a political tool to associate something with disability in order to negate that position. The disabled then always suffer the consequences of being used this way. thanks, Doyle Saylor http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant/ http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant/topics.cfm articles and topics on savant mental skills http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant/hyperlexia.cfm Hyperlexia, Reading Precociousness or Savant Skill? http://www.hyperlexia.org/hyperlexia.html detailed article about hyperlexia With regard to obsession; New Statesman, autistic is intended to imply an obsessive preoccupation with numbers The article from the New Statesman remarks that there is an element of 'cruelty' about it. So there is some minimal degree of awareness of bigotry in the term. Let's just review the formula, disabled means the lowest rung of society in most usage's, and if you imply your opponent is disabled that hurls them into the abyss. However, that sort of word policing doesn't reveal anything positive about the particular disability being 'cruelly' disparaged. Autism is not a product of obsession. Autism was not even identified as such until the second half of the twentieth century long after obsession had emerged in European thought about human behavior. The primary issue though in the labeling of economics as 'autistic' is to discern what would be a more realistic way of understanding the economy given the current theories about autism. In other words if one must for whatever reason use a disability metaphor about economics what would a more realistic way of thinking about the economy produce? Shared attention (Joint Attention theory) does not have the emotional frisson of the bigots cry autism, but it at least has some economic sense to it. For example shared attention shapes how teleconferencing is constructed. Producing information about human beings who share communications through teleconferencing has great deal to do with understanding what exactly it is that language does through these sorts of tools. The critical issue in using mathematics is again 'shared attention'. That is the language like sharing of attention and how mathematics either works that way or not is the most salient issue about the problem with too much mathematics in economics than is the concern about obsession or Autism.
Re: McCloskey Post-Autism
ces to evolutionary structure and in particular to the needs of language like Joint Attention structures. That question restated is ;what is the relationship between material structure and knowledge and contingency' that underlies work and information exchange. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Engels, homophobia and the left
Greetings Economists, Louis Proyect writes, Indeed, this goal remains unfilled to this day and it is up to socialists and gay liberation fighters to fulfill it. Doyle, This is just a short quote from a longer essay (by LP) on a brief history of attitudes toward homosexual activity on the part of Marx and Engels, and in particular, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. I think that the NA people in China have something to teach us about sexuality. They have no Fathers and no Husbands. We have a very limited understanding of what we are doing to produce social bonds with someone sexually. For the working class, we want abundance of bonds with however much contact with other human beings that serve our needs. How do we think about getting an abundance of social bonds that matter for workers? What sort of work (social bonds) is it that happens when people have sex? I know the physical act, rather what is the emotional/cognitive structure of the bond? Homosexuality seems to indicate that some assumptions about how to build bonds are currently shaped by religious and moral attitudes. What can we take of that to consider about class society? Were the wide spread religious scruples removed, what sort of bonding process would be possible to liberate the working class? thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Stiglitz interview
Greetings Economists, Lou Proyect wrote Pen-L his urging to listen to the Stiglitz interview on Henwood's radio broadcast. I listened and found it well worth the time spent. I don't know if I feel as favorably toward Stiglitz as LP. But it was interesting how fissures are showing up in the bourgeois camp. I agree though that Stiglitz's views on Cuba and China show some shifting going on with the ruling class. Of course we have the recent example of the Republican House leader, Dick Armey, saying he thought the embargo against Cuba was failed. So taking another look at Cuba isn't a no no like it once was. However, what does this mean in regard to current government thinking? I notice the well orchestrated press reports of various persons (Kissinger et al) being against the administration war on Iraq. I suspect that the Iraq war debate indicates a sort of decay in high Capitalism away from the Reagan world view. That is that the programs of Neo liberalism aren't working well and the global community of Capitalism is getting more muddled as the economic picture grows stormy. I also thought the piece by LP on Noam Chomsky was quite good. I appreciate the intelligence and seriousness that LP can bring to such efforts. thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Max Elbaum To Speak In Sacramento OnSocialMovement...
Greetings Economists, Well Melvin, I thought you had some interesting things to add about your history as well as your understanding of what sectarianism is. I picked up on one single little sentence to hang my thoughts on, Melvin Rather, I have encountered the group dynamic from the standpoint of an art form riveted to mediation. In this sense a moderator is one who have developed the art (and probably science) of mediation. ... Doyle Well a moderator can mediate between people, but I wouldn't say the same thing with online moderators as I would in flesh and blood moderators that I don't see online moderators mediating between disputants much. On the whole they seem to uphold rules about how to contribute to the lists and seldom enforce agreement. What I would tend to wonder is how online methods of organizing people really differs from how we do things face to face. When you organize on the shop floor in a factory, you have contact with other people in that space, but not with outside people. Organizing on line allows one to be in contact with people very far away (anyone anywhere). One could access information from all over the world which suggests we have the means to internationalize our workers social structures. We have the opportunity to add information like photographs to the flow of electronic information into our minds and perhaps adding other qualities like emotional content (though emotions are still quite speculative as content for communications tools). This shaping of information to enhance the meaning and content of what is being communicated tends to give advantages to online means of communicating that people can't produce by talking to each other. We then would become dependent upon online tools for communicating and creating social structure. At the same time organizing like this is not limited by space considerations. Over time people will get used to being never out of contact with whatever social group they are part of. That drastically alters the present atomized social framework. If we are never out of contact then it would be much more important that our social groups function better for us. I mean that the anonymity of cities will decline and so we would be compelled to have better solutions to the frictions of contact between human beings. I see this is as a left issue of arguing for the social structure and quality of what Information Technology can produce. I'll give as an example a big peace march we had in our area a few months back. The march was in April. Everyone assembled in a local park and listened to speakers from a platform. In essence the crowd member is an atom in a sea (20 to 30 thousand) of people. But I could imagine with suitable portable communications device that people might not tune in to the central platform but into their group via their portable communications tool. That the group could be coordinating itself internally to the crowd and acting as a group to interact with the whole crowd. This could be done by multiple groups facilitated by real contact and on line resources. This sort of choreographed interaction is not something I think anybody has attempted before. Social practices freely invented in such circumstances could have profound impact upon many people at once. There are obviously many ways to think about such means of organizing. thanks, Doyle
Re: Re: Max Elbaum To Speak In Sacramento On SocialMovement His...
Greetings Economists, Melvin P replies to my thoughts, Melvin, Welcome to the heat tank. Doyle, Sounds like the hot pot for fresh email posters. ;-) Melvin, His use of the words sectarianism and cult are in my estimate justifiable historically. And also Melvin writes, Suffice it to state that addiction involves ingesting a substance that has a biological impact on the human organism - molecular alteration, while obsession is not necessarily driven on the basis of the biological impact of injection. There is more than meets the eye to this proposition because human beings must ingest to live. What we ingest to live, emerged as a separate and distinct field of scientific inquiry in the early 20th century. Obsession appears in its mode of expression as addictive behavior, but they are not identical. My point is that sectarianism and cultism versus addiction may converge but are very distinct social processes. Adulation of the individual or the cult movement in society - from movie and rock stars to social leaders (Kings, Queens, Pope, Presidents, Militants and even Marilyn Monroe) is a somewhat different matter. As interesting as these subjects are, I have chosen to write about the economic structure of society in which this social intercourse plays itself out. (I of course have undying loyalty to Marilyn Monroe and am aware that everyone does not universally share this archetype. So much for that.) Doyle I think that an economic view of what makes sects work is called for. When I talk about managing emotions I am thinking about how using the internet one could reveal the structure of social groups in new ways. When for example I work in another place and work with you on some document on-line that concerns the working class movement it is important to know how you feel when we collaborate. Here on Pen-L we usually work individually, and reply to each other as individuals, but I could see working with people on the same document on-line (via content management software systems) for various reasons. Knowing how you feel might be as simple as a phone call, or it might be elaborated through some sort of emotion sensing device (lie detectors are the common example of some way to measure emotions). If we measure how I feel about something we have something to economically analyze in relation to the documents we produce together collaboratively. I have an on-line paper from MIT which discusses the concept of the economy of emotions in Information Technology. Analytical Models of Emotions, Learning and Relationships: Towards an Affect-sensitive Cognitive Machine, Barry Kort, Rob Reilly, MIT Media Laboratory, That paper proposes to analyze an Emotion-Learning-Spiritual Economy. In that sense (where we are discussing sectarianism from the 1970's and 1980's) and have a written text we also could produce some sort of record of the feelings that went with the text. I think it then possible to rationalize the structure of feelings that social networks create online, and from there reveal what sectarianism really is. A sect or group when it produces a dogma (literally) has such and such feeling structure to it, and when another group which is not dogmatic produces a text it has such and such feeling structure to it. Therapies promise psychological help for social problems. We still don't know what exactly to do about groups with sectarian tendencies. I.e. we can't definitively say an organizational structure is not going to be sectarian. There are many people I think who would defend sects and what they do, or who might contrarily organize non-sectarian groups. So we don't know if there is a social value to sects rather than a need for a blanket banning. We could ask how to manage the emotional structures that under lie how these human groups are formed if we could see the actual structure of emotions linked to communications (written text). We usually instead take a lot of time getting to know people and that personal experience is how we usually guess at the emotional structure in a social group. This guessing game works, but I think has very definite limits which having records of emotions and the ability to shape and direct the emotional system of a group would offer powerful new tools for building socialist groups. thanks, Doyle
