Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 09-09-04 03:09 PM: > You caught me in a slap-dash quip which I regretted the minute I started > reading your post. I have long been cranky with some of my associates who > have insisted, for instance, that using caps in an email message is > SHOUTING, or that it is bad manners to send messages in HTML.
Heh, well, I hardly even read e-mails that are typed in all caps. It hurts my eyes (actually it hurts somewhere behind my eyes). But it's easily remedied in emacs. [grin] And I've bumped up my spamassassin score for HTML-only e-mails so that I don't usually receive them. So, you wouldn't get an admonishment from me at all... in fact, you probably wouldn't get anything from me! (Hm, perhaps that's why my company doesn't get very many business leads. ;-) > But crankiness began to seem deeply trivial in the face of your fascism > list. What struck me is how closely your list corresponded to our current > political discourse on health care. In fact, it scared the wits out of me. > Have we come so far?? Who is Eco and where is that discussion taking > place? Thus spake Jochen Fromm circa 09-09-04 03:41 PM: > I guess he means the Italian author Umberto Eco. Yes. Sorry for the absence of refs: http://www.justicescholars.org/pegc/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf You'll find a lot of extremists cite the essay to argue that other extremists are fascists. But, if you read the essay, it's pretty clear that neither our Democrats nor Republicans are fascists in the least. So, the rhetoric is too hyperbolic to be useful for me. Still, though, it's interesting to consider. Eco's 14 points have been mostly useful to me to point out to whatever extremists I'm talking to that they're abusing the words and that we'd make more progress if they stopped using those words. It seems to me that our tendency toward fascism is systemic ... emergent [cough], as it were, rather than ascribable to any subset of the components (people, laws, corporations, etc.) within. It has something to do with precedent (static treatment of a dynamic system), the need to treat every circumstance with a rule (hyper generalization), and the tendency to avoid smearing blame (aka reductive causality). But I'm not skilled enough to study it effectively. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
