There are a lot of private messages going around the circle at this point. Is this deliberate, to take difficult answers out of the circle? What follows is not an attack on anyone but merely a feeling that I would suggest we explore.
I cut my teeth on this kind of hostile stuff in the faculty club at Columbia University. They were not nice and highly competitive. That's where I learned to "speak white." The professional fraternities were even worse. But they were also private. Limited to those who had the ticket of admittance (being on the faculty). Of course, even in the club, there was polite stuff across professions with much derision behind the back about the prejudice of the other department. Gossip and nasty stuff but research was done and good work was also done. I have come to believe that the gossip and nastiness across cultures is a kind of claiming control of your turf. Border wars. But America and Europe are warlike peoples. Will we really get anything done if we don't seriously buck up? Have, (as my old Cherokee Elder used to say from her teacher), "the Courage to Be" who you are and a little pride too. I love New York because the Jews here are not afraid to be Jewish and combative. They glory in a "Jewish Hollywood" and are proud that they defeated Thomas Edison in Teaneck to become the industry center in Hollywood. Jewish media is not an insult but a bragging point. But if you have pride, you've got to give the other person the same right or it becomes censorship and oppression and in my experience they do just that; although the one billion Catholics and Muslims like to complain about any mere 14 million with such success. I love the Cherokees of Hollywood for the same reason. They've beaten us here in New York where we are now under the thumb of the Smithsonian and the federal Indian policy of Blut uber alles although we far outnumber them. But what are we doing here? Is there a map? Are problematic personalities more important than problematic issues? Can we really afford to lose anyone? Or is it good to slap someone around and require that they stop being derivative and predictable in searching for solutions. (I could have said clichéd and banal. All four of those are sins in my profession.) Perhaps, since predictability is a plus in science, we should have a discussion about the nature of realty and how science and art are polar opposites. Twins but not enemies. When you consider the issue of performance in anything then you enter the abstract system of Art. That is a flowering system and not a "diminution to a predictable singularity" system. When you consider classicism of anything, that is a "system's science" system even if you are speaking of Mozart. It is important that we not be fools simply because we can't speak each other's language correctly. The tendency to make each other "wrong" is more of a game and less of a search and I think that we can't sustain games here. At least I don't have the energy for it. I have the greatest admiration for our web leaders on this list. I have felt the same way for years. This is not meant as a complaint to anything that they do or have done. They don't get paid for this and they get a lot of credit in my mind. I am appreciative of this place. I simply wonder if this isn't a time for a clear set of list goals and rules that will allow us to express ourselves openly and with the greatest of freedom while acknowledging that Google makes anything we say here eternal and we have to live with that. That means that any competitor or enemy we might have in the world has access to information that could cost anyone of us our living. It also means that any potential employer could access a "less temperate person", than we would want to present, by reading this list and decide that although we are terrifically qualified we are not worth the potential hassle on an industry or educational team. No one deliberately hires trouble makers. When I was younger I was more blithe about that but now it is important for me and my wife. Otherwise if you wish to solve a problematic situation through discussion you have to break a few eggs and apply heat. The problem is always balance, the rules and each of us giving acknowledgement and power to the referees. REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Gurstein Sent: Monday, September 13, 2010 12:41 PM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: [Futurework] harley_davidson_contract http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100913/ap_on_bi_ge/us_harley_davidson_contract Signs of the (bad) time... M _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
